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“So, tell us a little bit more about that, Glendella – I'm nine and I pretty much have my life together, but when Pop-Pop and Grandma were divorced I never saw either them have three more candidates to step up around at the same time, so your grandparents still be married and your grandfather having three other grandma step-up candidates is wild, and how you stayed calm and got up out of there is amazing.”
Nine-year-old Vertran Stepforth was interviewing ten-year-old Glendella Ludlow, newest adoptee to the branch of the Ludlows living next door to the Trents and Stepforths. Glendella's new adopted siblings ten-year-old Andrew and eleven-year-old were hanging out and listening, and Vertran's 16-year-old brother Tom was quietly observing.
“I mean, Vertran is a natural,” he was saying to his editor at the Lofton County Free Voice. “I mean, this boy will have you telling everything about your life – he does this to adults! I'm trying to learn here!”
“It's like this, Vertran,” Glendella said. “My Sunday School teacher, Sis. Mosette Smith, always says God gives you the strength to get through what you have to get through. The other thing is, everybody isn't jealous like that. Bad Grandma is so tired of Grumps – if she gets out of the asylum first, she's going to go get me a step-grandma too. That house did not discriminate like that, and she was hoping one of Grumps's mistresses would take him off her hands.”
“OK,” Vertran said.
“By the time I left, they were all up in the house trying to manage the fact that Grumps got broken trying to mess with Upgrade Papa and my new siblings,” Glendella said, “and the mistresses are out doing whatever they want, having gotten all they could from Grumps, leaving Bad Grandma holding the bag, and probably out looking among Grumps's dumber friends to get another situation. I saw all that and said if they could be that bold doing bad, I could be that bold getting somewhere that I could do right, and God said I could go.
“The thing is, I know right from wrong, because I came to know the Lord Jesus at six years old. He showed me what I was living in wasn't it and that He was going to get me out of there. I just didn't know where I was going until Grumps called the one cousin he can't mess with – then I knew.
“The other thing is, we ain't gotta accept bad stuff happening to us – we can reject it and go to Jesus for help. People don't love children, but He really does.”
“We are witnesses to that, for real,” Andrew said. “We survived drug addicted parents and bad foster care situations – all seven of us – and Papa and Grandma kept praying, kept working, and kept fighting, and we saw things happen that we all asked for so all of us can be here together.”
“No one will ever tell us God ain't real and Jesus doesn't love the little children,” Eleanor said. “We're being raised right, so we may not laugh out loud at folks right now, and we might not when we get grown because we want to be kind and loving to people, but we definitely are going to think about laughing!”
“It will be something when all of you Ludlows are laughing in harmony with your grandfather,” Vertran said, “but yeah, kind and loving is good because it will probably end the world while y'all start laughing at folks in harmony.”
“Yeah, that's true because probably we aren't going to have any men higher than baritones in the Ludlow man-training unit,” Andrew said, “and then you gotta account for Edwina probably being a girl baritone and Grandma holding down alto and then Eleanor and Amanda and Glendella just flipping the script and going for the whole soprano section.”
“Taking the piano off the piano in all directions – I just start in alto and love going on up to the lower soprano as we do that,” Glendella said. “It wouldn't have to be scary, but people do need to get their lives together before talking nonsense around here. What went on in my old house would never work around here.”
“Look, the men around here don't play that cheating game – they know God will get them,” Vertran said. “Besides, in my family, the way we get on people's nerves we need to make sure we don't get on God's nerves because if He doesn't have our backs, we're done. I try to keep it chill, but Tom is out here with that voiceover on the Bayard Heights thing – he's a natural for that kind of thing – and has been heard by a million people and the ones in Lofton County want to kill the messenger, and he just survived blowing up our kitchen, and he's not even the member of the family that is running Deacons of Defense 2.0 or the Stepforth Study Hall or just being a billionaire in a county that just hates that in our color.”
“Now that's a lot to keep track of in a family,” Glendella said. “How do you keep it together, Vertran?”
“Oh, I don't expect things to be like everybody else's,” Vertran said. “Stepforths are just different kinds of people, and then my cousins are Jubilee and Stepforth as well as Trent, and all of them are different kinds of people. It's like you said: Jesus helps us work with what we got to work with.”
“Ludlows are definitely different kinds of people, too – both branches,” Eleanor said, “but over here we definitely want to be different the way the Lord makes people different.”
“Which is why He sent me here, because I want to be different like that, too,” Glendella said. “And, that's why Uncle Vanderbilt is hanging out here for a few days, because he's really different too.”
“Y'all really are different, adopting adults,” Vertran said, “but, the Lord Jesus adopts grown folks into His family just like He takes kids, so, it's cool!”