Grandma Ross
Black Water (Joyce Carol Oates Edition)Grandma Ross, Kelly Kelleher’s maternal grandmother, is remembered through acts of care and a compact, deeply personal faith: she tells Kelly that the love invested in a life is God, and sews her a strawberry-print dress that resurfaces in Kelly’s thoughts as she fights to live. Though she is not present during Kelly’s accident, her words and handiwork become part of the emotional inheritance Kelly draws on in the car filling with black water.
Identity and Family
Grandma Ross is Kelly’s maternal grandmother, Mommy’s mother. During Kelly’s childhood, she joins Kelly’s mother in favoring exercises and patience as a possible response to the child’s strabismus, while doctors disagree over whether an operation should be performed promptly. The episode places Grandma Ross among the family members concerned with Kelly’s well-being, although the account does not assign her the role of final decision-maker.
Her connection to Kelly is also marked by a particular name. As Grandma Ross lay dying, she knew Kelly not as Kelly but as Lizzie, her dearest grandchild among several. The private name and the superlative affection make their bond distinct within a larger family: Kelly is one of many grandchildren, yet she holds a singular place in her grandmother’s address.
Care Made Material
Grandma Ross’s care appears not only as remembered speech but as an object Kelly can picture and wear. She sews Kelly a white pucker-cotton dress printed with tiny strawberries. Kelly recalls the dress together with new black patent-leather shoes and white cotton anklet socks trimmed in pink, a vivid cluster of childhood details that gives her grandmother’s affection a tangible form.
A room at Buffy St. John’s family home on Derry Road evokes this same domestic world. Its floral wallpaper, predominantly strawberry-colored, reminds Kelly of Grandma Ross’s favorite room in the large old house in Greenwich. The resemblance lets an unfamiliar guest room briefly carry the warmth and visual texture of family memory; Grandma Ross is present there through the pattern, not through a new appearance in the scene.
Belief and Lasting Advice
The clearest account of Grandma Ross’s outlook comes from Kelly’s memory of her dying. Though her flesh had shrunk back from the bone, her eyes remained alert and kind, brimming with love. She confides to Kelly, as though passing on a troubling secret, “The way you make your life, the love you put into it—that's God.” The statement locates the sacred not in formal doctrine but in the making of a life and the love that shapes it.
That emphasis fits Kelly’s recollection that she does not believe in astrology or in the Anglican God in whom she was confirmed. Grandma Ross’s counsel offers a different kind of faith: intimate, practical, and grounded in loving action. The novel does not establish that Kelly adopts a settled religious belief; instead, it shows the grandmother’s words enduring as a source of meaning when conventional assurances are unavailable.
Memory During the Accident
As the Toyota sinks and Kelly remains trapped, her consciousness moves among immediate bodily danger, fear, and recollections of life beyond the car. The strawberry dress returns with unusual clarity: she sees what Grandma has sewn for her, and the remembered outfit opens onto the childhood self who once anticipated wearing it. The image is not a new event in the present but a fragment of family memory breaking into a struggle dominated by confinement and water.
Kelly also remembers the promise implicit in being loved by her family. She imagines Grandma, Mommy, and Daddy, and thinks, “Grandma, Mommy, Daddy—I love you.” She sees them watching her closely and tries to hide her tears so they will not be upset or know what she is experiencing. The memory turns attachment into a form of protection and restraint at once: Kelly reaches toward the people she loves even as she tries to spare them distress.
Grandma Ross’s importance therefore rests on two linked inheritances. Her sewn dress gives Kelly a concrete image of childhood care, while her words make love itself a way of understanding life. Both return when Kelly’s survival is uncertain, joining an ordinary family gift and a grandmother’s intimate counsel to Kelly’s fierce wish to remain alive.
