A short story about my grandmother
Who is my grandmother? The first time we met, I was twelve years old. She was from a large sharecropping family. Most of her siblings escaped that cruel system of zero-sum accounting for exploited labor. She was not so lucky.
My grandmother married a couple of times and had twelve children. Her life was a continuation of a hard life as a farmer and sharecropper. Most of her sons suffered a blood disease that, at the time, was not well-understood. One by one, she lost them to that scourge and other accidents.
I remember the never-ending grief and worry that clouded the present and the future. It wafted beyond her household and hovered over us all. It weighed on her as a matriarch in the making who was caught up – undoubtedly trapped – by circumstances beyond her control.
She had her own personal issues, not of her choosing, as a woman and wife in the south. She was mostly silent about the continually unfolding events that disrupted any momentum in her life and, poignantly, my mother’s.
A Bit of Inspiration
I discovered something about my grandmother before she died. She sold candy and soda out of her back door to her neighbors. It wasn’t much, but I believe it meant a great deal to her. I found out that quilting was something she did when she could but I am certain it was not a hobby. From very little, she made a little more. And she kept a clean house.
Though I was a young girl, it helped me to imagine that she longed for a way out. Without much schooling, she could not keep it going. Just think, if my grandmother had more formal education to learn about business and the freedom to do so, she would have been wealthy. Alas, she was wealthy in children… at least for a while.
You know, those few bits that I found out about my grandmother are disheartening. Her story was wretched and sad. It resonates beyond her generation and mine. How? The feeling of trust that I cultivated in my life was weak when I was a child. Instead of growing, it dwindled. The origin of this feeling, I realize, was planted in my DNA by ancestors who lived here just a handful of generations ago.
I got that from them.
Where is the rest of the story?
Everyday I realize I have to work hard to believe there is good in the world. Of course, I know about not giving up but the sequence of personal experiences and global events just isn’t “mathing” or adding up. Yes, the paltry faith I was born with has not grown and is barely intact.
What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmother’s time? In our great-grandmother’s day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.
– Alice Walker
The desire for personal freedom – the most important freedom of all – was within my grandmother and my ancestors who lived on this land before her. Freedom is a big word. Not having that means someone else has control of your existence. They may have control over your movements and when and where you work during the day. Likewise, they have authority over where you may rest or sleep, if you can. No one else, however, can control your mind and your thoughts. The desire is innate and never stops agitating the soul.
I got that from her.
She was my Grandmother
I only met her a few times. I don’t know who she was. She was quiet, soft-spoken and kind. Bit by bit, I puzzled out that the world was not kind to her. That is what I know.
Perhaps silence about the past protects people, but it surely keeps the rest of us ignorant. Who are we? Why… are we? I did not learn much about my family’s past – on both sides. Now, many of them are cosmic dust in the universe. I didn’t learn much from my mother nor from the grand woman herself. We never had a chance to talk, to laugh, or to hug. I know she was my grandmother. I was her grandchild. Her first.
When I met her, she was still mothering her own children. I never felt I had the right to call her grandmother. I never dared to call her… grandmother. She is my mother’s mother.
We – my grandmother and I – will remain strangers until we meet again in the dusty cosmic reaches of the universe.
🌹🌹
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
– Adrienne Rich
Baadaye
S ♥️
