Grandma’s Thursday.
“She said all the things you ask
You will know someday,
But you have got to live in a patient way…
God put us here by fate,
And by fate that means better days…
She said, child, we are all moons in the dark of night.
Ain't no morning gonna come 'til the time is right!
Can't get to better days lest you make it through the night.
You gotta make it through the night, yes you do…
—Dianne Reeves, “Better Days.”
Yesterday would have been my grandmother Elizabeth Bray’s 90th birthday.
In the summer of 2007, I wrote about Grandma as part of my second year exam (SYE). Candidacy in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education is earned through passing three milestones and successful defense of the dissertation prospectus. Our second year examination has been described as an "intellectual autobiography," in which one theorizes various experiences -- background, schooling, work, etc. -- through the literature. You describe the kind of scholar that you are becoming through where you've been.
In the second section of my SYE, I wrote about my family. A small bit of that draft made it into my dissertation.
On August 15, 2012, three days after she died, I posted this on Facebook. This week, I want to use my blog space to honor her, once again.
Almost 8 years later, I still miss seeing Grandma’s face and hearing her voice.
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I am Elizabeth Bray’s first namesake grandchild. I proudly carry her name, Elizabeth, as part and parcel of my professional identity. Her father named her, as he did most of her eight brothers and sisters, for characters in the Bible. The name Elizabeth means “dedicated to God”. Grandma’s father was a deeply religious man, an extremely strict Sanctified[1] deacon who at the behest of a traveling preacher gathered up all of the pictures and dolls in the house – and burned them. “Thou shalt not make any graven image,” said the preacher and my great-grandfather. My grandmother resented the austerity of her upbringing. She left formal schooling at the age of 14, and left her hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida when she was only 17 years old, in 1947, shaking the dust from her feet, never to return. I suspect that Florida is somewhere next to Purgatory in her mind. Michigan was a place where there were no hurricanes, no Bible belts (in either the literal or the figurative sense), no daily thunderstorms with torrential rains and lightning strikes, and no overbearing stern fathers. Best of all was Michigan’s wonderful-tasting water, and the vibrancy of Detroit’s postwar Black culture[2].
I learned generosity from Grandma. This generosity was of the spirit as well as that of the more practical kinds. Grandma showed me by example of how to give of my resources and time to those who were less fortunate. She tithes to her church, and at any given time is donating to a half dozen different charities. She has supported not only her children and grandchildren during certain periods of their adult lives, but also neighbors and church members. She was always the one cooking for funerals, and tending the grounds of the church and the city-owned island on her street, planting flowers. (As much as Grandma hated her Florida childhood, there are always flowers around her. She worked in her father’s commercial gardens, and as a result, is an expert gardener and landscaper. She can make anything grow, and I have inherited this knack.) Elizabeth Bray has a larger than life personality – no one who ever meets her forgets her. In certain settings, when I turn that part of myself on, there are those who say that about me.
Most importantly, my Grandma taught me the value of self-reliance[3]. I am not sure that I would have been able to live as comfortably as a single woman on my own terms without her. I’m also not sure that I am being truthful when I tell people that my grandmother taught me to do certain things. My grandmother never was much for pedagogy, and she was so incredibly competent that she didn’t need my help. Grandma did things, and I spent countless times during my 30 years around her as she did them. Cooking, cleaning, gardening, paying bills, balancing checkbooks, conducting business, purchasing cars and real estate, interior design seemed effortless for her. Before she met my grandfather when my mother was a small girl, she’d been a single mother for several years. (Her father hadn’t made any gender distinctions in the division of labor growing up when it came to his girls – Elizabeth was on the younger end, there were enough girls in the kitchen, so off to the gardens and the lumberyard she went.) When I wasn’t getting in Grandma’s way, I picked up a thing or two. I can swing a hammer, make a perfect bed, and bake an apple pie that will melt in your mouth. Like her, there isn’t very much practical I can’t do with my hands – and by this point, haven’t done.
[1] Pentecostal. Studying the works of James Baldwin during a Winter 2006 seminar in Michigan’s Program in American Culture helped me locate my nominally Christian family’s disquietude with “the church” in my grandmother’s formative experiences. Grandma is of the same generation as Baldwin, and his novels and essays were always treasured and discussed in our home.
[2] The classic text on Detroit history from the postwar era to the riots of 1967 is Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996). A more recent text, Suzanne Smith’s Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (1999) interestingly locates the most successful twentieth century Black owned entertainment company, Motown, within a strong postwar Black tradition of self-help, entrepreneurial capitalism, and community and racial uplift found uniquely in Detroit.
[3] Although I am grateful for the values of hard work and self-reliance that my grandparents instilled in me, Jones & Shorter-Gooden (2003) critique high-effort coping efforts (or “John Henryism”) as a form of masochism that many Black women have been socialized to enact. The “Sisterella” complex of self-denial and martyrdom that is valued by the community often masks depression in African American women. I am not characterizing my grandmother as masochistic or a martyr; rather, I am pointing to community norms that some Black psychologists have positioned as problematic for mental well-being.
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And although I'm all grown up
I still get confused
I stumble through the dark
Getting bumped and bruised
When night gets in my way
I can still hear my Grandma say
I can hear her say
I can hear her say…
What I Am Reading, What I Am Writing, and Being/Doing/Going are on hiatus this week.
Word(s) of the Week
Patience. ‘Cause you can’t get to no better days unless you make it through the night, baby. Dianne Reeves taught me that through her lyrics when I was a little girl, but long before she did? So did Grandma.