My Grandmother

(Her Mother’s Daughter)

She was an attentive daughter to her mother, a living saint to her friends, and a doting mother to her own children. To outsiders she appeared to be caring and selfless, but living with her, I knew that wasn’t the whole story.

My grandmother was born in 1937 in the North Carolina foothills. She was the oldest of 6 children. She was the big sister and “second mother” to five younger brothers, all of them living in a tiny white house on a sprawling farm with a long dirt driveway. It was so remote that the street didn’t have a name until the 1990s, just a route number, I think it was. The house consisted of a foyer (not in the grand way we think of them today, but more like a tiny room you step into from outside, perhaps more comparable to what we think of as a mud room now), a small living room which led into the kitchen which was also the dining room. Off one side of the living room was a bedroom for the adults, and from the other side was a larger bedroom that all of children shared. They had a handful of farm animals and grew most of their own food. I think they had an outhouse growing up, though there was running water from a well when I was a child. I don’t think she ever got heating other than the wood stove in the middle of the living room or air-conditioning. I do remember when my great-grandmother got a phone, but I couldn’t tell you what year it was other than sometime in the ‘80s.

My grandmother, on the weekends we didn’t visit, would call her mother on the weekends, or the Sunday after we’d been the previous day. And it was long-distance, back in the ancient times when that was a thing. I always knew by where my grandmother sat or stood how long the call was going to be. Standing by the corded phone meant a short call. Sitting at the kitchen table meant a little longer. If my grandmother sat in the recliner, it was going to be a while.

Even though my grandmother was born in 1937, toward the end of the Great Depression, and her family had never been and still weren’t well off, I’m not sure I’d call them poor, per se. They had a house and land for growing their own food and some livestock. My great-grandmother made their clothes and hand sewed blankets. I still have several of these blankets and think of her when I use them. I study her tiny, often uneven hand stitches that keep me warm. She also canned food and would send us home with preserved food from her garden. There was one summer I didn’t think I could eat another canned green bean.

My great-grandmother was born in 1919, which would have made her 10 when the Great Depression began. It must have had some impact because my great-grandmother was a “stuff” hoarder. She’d save every bread bag, scrap of tin foil, wire tie, and plastic container. This would later rub off on my grandmother as she got older.

My grandmother’s parents were religious, strict, and adhered to rigid gender roles. Her father and the boys would go “to town” and the women had to stay home. I don’t think they all went to church, but her father would preach sermons to them. Women were not to speak on religious matters, and that expectation of silent acquiescence from women applied to all aspects of life. I think her father was strict, expecting complete obedience, and when the kids disobeyed them, he would send them outside to choose their own switch from a tree. If they chose one that was too small, he would send them right back out there to find a larger one. I never knew him because he died when when I was 2.5 years old.

I spent much more time with my great-grandmother and knew more about my grandmother’s relationship with her. Though my great-grandmother lived 1.5 hours away, my grandmother would do her grocery shopping in Charlotte and then we would load up the car and drive them “up home” to her on the weekends. Once the groceries were put away, we would have lunch. When I was younger, my great-grandmother would cook homemade lunch, including biscuits and chocolate gravy. My favorites were what she called “funny biscuits” which were the little bits leftover from cutting the actual biscuits. As she got older and stopped cooking as much, we would stop by a fast food place closer to her house and pick up food for all of us. After lunch, when we were younger, my great-grandmother would give me, and my cousins if they were there too, kitchen spoons so we could go scratch around in that red dirt driveway. Once I was older, I liked sitting by her woodstove and listening to everyone talk. I still remember how her house smelled.

My great-grandmother had no interest in going to the grocery store or any store, I don’t think, though it’s possible that my grandmother never offered or pushed it as an opportunity for her to do her own shopping. My great-grandmother would decide she wanted the most impossible-to-find things, too. A very specific bra, socks with no seams, or a housedress that hadn’t been produced in 50 years. My grandmother, the dutiful eldest daughter, would spend time going from store to store, trying to find these items that would please her mother the following weekend. Her 5 brothers all lived closer to their mother, some even living on the same property, but it was always up to my grandmother to go on these scavenger hunts. I don’t think my grandmother ever once expressed any irritation to her mother, no matter how many times she rejected the things her daughter brought to her. Thinking back now, I feel a little bad for her because she was trying so hard to please her mother and never seeming to get it right.

But that was the great-grandmother I remember, which probably partially explains why my grandmother went to college to try to start her own very different life. She went so Appalachian State, which wasn’t too far away, but I’m sure for her in 1955, it was a complete shock. I think she may have majored in education, but she only went to college for a semester before getting married and moving to Georgia. She had her first and second child there in the late 1950s, then moved to a three bedroom one bathroom house on a dead-end street in Charlotte where she had a third child in 1961.