charles etta
erin threlkeld

She was born to the dirt roads of Memphis. She was raised in the “For Coloreds Only” half of Arkansas. The church she attended used washboards and wash bins as instruments as they sang out to the Lord on pitch-black Arkansas nights. As a teenager, her job was being a maid to a White family who discovered that they liked Soul Food after sampling her lunch of colored greens. 

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She was my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She met the love of her life near a jukebox in a small diner. He, my grandfather, Alexander Pride, came from a wealthy family with a lucrative undertaking business. They didn’t approve of this impoverished young woman, yet they married anyway. However, allegedly, her father-in-law refused to come into their marital home because he felt that the match was unequally yoked and the dwelling place beneath him.

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But she made feasts for her husband and nine daughters and one son out of cornbread, beans, rice and butter. Grandma counted pennies for bacon and often served collard greens without meat as an entrée. 

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However, she transformed her west-side apartment into a palace. Her daughters and son wore finely preserved hand-me-downs.  Come Christmas the gift of house shoes were as good as golden slippers as well as the baby dolls and cribs divided among her nine girls, oranges in stockings paired with new toothbrushes. 

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Her living room was a chapel for many aching souls in need of encounters with the divine. Her prayers packed a powerful punch that lifted their spirits to higher heights by the time she was done. 

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Her greatest treasures were found in her leatherbound Bible. Many an hour she spent on her knees praying for the guidance and protection of her children. She was received in many churches with great renowned for her piety. 

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When her husband left, she carried on looking to her faith. Her daughters grew, and she prayed even harder as they were no longer girls kept within small gates but young girls with the woman in them awakening. 

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Her only son was born special. He eventually had to live in a group home as an adult because he needed care beyond what my grandmother could provide. For most of my life, my Uncle Junior was merely a name. I’d never even seen a picture of him. He was a part of my Grandmother’s life that unfurled as I got older. It wouldn’t be until after she passed that I saw him in person as a teenager because he was being confirmed in a church, and my mother and I attended the ceremony to support him. 

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As her granddaughter I had never known the feasts of cornbread and beans, my family had full breakfasts with pancakes, eggs, and bacon. At dinner there was enough for me to have several helpings if I so desired. When Christmas came, no expense was spared for me or my older sisters.

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Upon one of the many Sunday visits my mother, sisters, and I took to Grandma Pride’s house, I brought chocolate chip cookie dough with me. I offered my grandmother a chocolate chip cookie, and she informed me that she had never had one. She grew up so poor that she had never had a doll. I was shocked. I thought that everyone in America had tried chocolate chip cookies at least once in their life. I proceeded to bake her some so she could try them.

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On a certain Mother’s Day, one of her older daughters, my Aunt Elaine, gifted her a Cabbage Patch doll. The only doll she’d owned in her eighty-something years of life and the only one she’d ever own. She named the doll Ms. Gerry. 

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Later, she offered to let me play with Ms. Gerry, and at other times, I would see my grandmother holding the doll as she sat in her bedroom during different Sunday visits. The inner child in her seemed content. 

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The night she transitioned from this world, I knew that she was going to. My mother and her sisters had been staying at the hospital on vigil. It was just my father and I in the house at the time, and I decided to go see the high school production of The Wiz being put on at my school.  

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When my father got the call that she’d passed, I was stunned, though she’d been sick for a while, and I knew deep inside myself that that would be the night. I wrote her a letter telling her all that I wished I could have said. I told her my life plans and how I would make her proud.

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She still exists in my writing, serving as inspiration again and again. My aunts and I are now the keepers of her memory. We will remain so for the rest of our lives.