I entered this earth in the month of March during the mid 1960's and began coming into myself throughout the 1970's. A time when the Civil Rights Movement was being fueled, in part, by the deaths of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and President John F. Kennedy. This was the third part of my world. A world that included sitting on the front porch of my grandmother's house listening to my oldest cousins tell how they had been mistreated by the infamous man.
For all of the negativity that I was over hearing from the males in my family it was off set by the two main female matriarch's of my family; my mother and my grandmother.
My Grandmother Viola was born in 1895 a mere thirty two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued The Emancipation Proclamation. Since she was the first born of two children, she was required to help mother take care of her youngest brother and help with the up keep of their house work and whatever wash, and other household duties, that she was doing for other families. Her work load was added to whenever harvest season came whenever she was needed to help out in either the tobacco or cotton fields of North Carolina.
In 1908 at the age of thirteen she gave birth to her first child. A child who light complexion, my grandmother was the complexion of a lightened dark chocolate, left no doubt that his father was white. Whenever he would visit I often found myself silently wondering was he conceived out of unrequited love or enraged hatred and curiosity. But I never dared asked her which method of conception was the case. Because, although she only stood four feet nine, and weighed 120 pounds soaking wet, her hands held a whole lot of listen to me and follow the rules power.
She went on to give birth to six more children the youngest one being my mother. Which genetically made me her (Grandmother) youngest daughter's youngest daughter.
No comments:
Post a Comment