The woman I call Mama was named Dorothy, born in 1940 and brought into the world by a midwife. She entered life shadowed by a twin who did not survive, a baby given the name Shirley Temple who was stillborn with a distinct indentation on her forehead. That physical mark became a private wound for my great-grandmother Mary, who believed her own labor — the unrelenting chores, the heavy tub of water whose rim struck her abdomen — had caused the loss. That feeling of responsibility, the weight of blame tied to childbirth, shaped how the family remembered that arrival and absence.
Shirley was interred in a segregated plot beneath live oaks on a bayou, wrapped in the poverty of the time and placed in a shoebox. My great-grandmother’s despair was so severe that she assumed the surviving twin would not live; she withheld breastfeeding and set the infant in a drawer, convinced death would come again. But Dorothy lived. She grew into a strong-bodied woman who learned to sustain a family by pulling vegetables and picking cotton, by eating staples like beans and rice that stretched a household through hard seasons. By the time I was born in 1977, she had worked as a housekeeper, a health aide, a hairdresser, a seamstress, and a factory worker in a pharmaceutical bottling plant, each job a chapter in a life of relentless industry.
A life of labor and story
Work and narrative braided together in my grandmother’s life. She left school after eighth grade because the nearest Black secondary school was simply too far to walk to, and the chores of home demanded hands that could reap a field and sew dresses from feed sacks. She could heft a hog over her shoulders; she could coax a roomful of neighbors into laughter with a tale. Those stories included the small terrors and cunning survival of living in Jim Crow Mississippi: a father who was part white, visits to a white relative in a sundown town where the family hid in a car trunk to avoid being caught after dark. Those memories are history in miniature and were transmitted as living lessons about caution and resilience, encoded in family lore and public silence.
How sorrow and joy coexisted
My grandmother taught me to tell things plainly — the raw and the beautiful together. She narrated the stillborn twin’s arrival in the same breath as the sound of babies fisting their tiny hands and the children’s games of decorating graves with pine-needle flowers and oak crosses. She described wearing a dress she had sewn to a Tina and Ike Turner concert, spinning until dizzy, glass of iced whiskey in one hand and me in the other; she smelled of jasmine and confidence. In her voice, grief and celebration were not opposites but companions, and the act of naming both was a form of preservation. I learned that beauty could be coaxed from scarcity and that play could soften sorrow.
Food, dignity, and lessons learned at the stove
Food was a recurring lesson in thrift and dignity. The pot of red beans on her stove was not only sustenance; it was a statement of skill. She explained how to make a little feed a family, how a pinch of salt meat could flavor a pot, and how a golden pound cake or a pot of gumbo could announce that life held richness beyond hunger. Those culinary practices were resourcefulness embodied and a way to claim pleasure after years of scarcity. Cooking became a language in which my grandmother taught endurance, resourcefulness and the possibility of making something sumptuous out of what others would call nothing.
From oral history to written witness
The stories my grandmother offered were the foundation of my work as a writer. Her memories made me seek out other accounts — Richard Wright, Anne Moody, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and scholars like Sylviane Diouf — to situate our family’s experience within a broader American narrative. Those readings aligned with her tales of a murdered ancestor left in the pines, of children sent to desegregate schools, and of small, defiant acts of creativity. My decision to write toward hurt, to resist sanitizing the past, came from her insistence: tell it straight. Bearing witness in prose felt like an act of fidelity to her voice and to the memory of those she named.
The cost of forgetting and the urgency to record
Now that storyteller is losing her store of tales. Alzheimer’s has crept inward, eroding recent recollections first and then older ones: great-grandchildren, grandchildren, and then her own children. Her laugh and anecdotes have become rarer; the porch where she once spun stories — where beans bubbled and the night hummed thick with insects — feels quieter. The illness has taught me what it means to lose a self to time and how the disappearance of one memory can ripple into a whole family. Collecting these stories, writing them down, and committing to tell them again is a responsibility that feels equal parts grief and devotion. To witness another person in full complexity is, finally, an act of love.
