Honoring Our Grandmothers

by Nancy Renee

It’s already starting: the ads for flowers and chocolate, jewelry for Mom, fabulous restaurant meals.

Mothers’ Day has taken its place as part of our holiday tradition, but I hope we can all take some time to remember our grandmothers. I’m not referring to the grandmother you know, the one who beckons with a broad smile or always asks about school.  I’m thinking about grandmothers several generations ago, grandmothers who lived in slavery.

These enslaved women only saw freedom from a distance. Their motherhood often began on the slave ships of the middle passage when they were violated by the sailors during that awful voyage.

The lives lived by our ancestors were truly brutal, their natural children sold as young as five or six, children who today would be getting ready for kindergarten would be sold off to another plantation, their mothers left to grieve as they continued their grueling work. Often these women were forced to breast-feed white babies with milk once used for their own infants

The pregnancies of our enslaved grandmothers were often the result of forced relations with the men who owned them, the pale babies sliding from their wombs to be used by their fathers to increase his labor force. Their mothers loved them, there was no one else.

Our grandmothers must have nursed their husbands and sons after their all-to-frequent beatings; they nursed their sisters too as women were probably not immune from the lash. After the Civil War, we thought things would improve but we went from the savagery of slavery to the noose of Jim Crow.

It is unspeakable, unimaginable.

The names of the mothers and their children are lost to history.  Occasionally a slave owner would list the people he owned in a will, bequeathing them to his children along with pigs, mules and acres of cotton.

To find these stories in our own families, we would have to be lucky.  Since people were thought of as farm animals, their names were not listed in formal documents. Occasionally you can find them in census records of 1870 or 1880. From that, the family researcher can find out where their ancestors were born but that’s it. These stories were not spoken, the questions too hard to answer, the memories too painful.

My own grandmother never mentioned her father, she told me of her childhood when her mother died and her sister took her to live in a Catholic boarding school. But I was captivated trying to imagine that life in long-ago Louisiana, I was a child myself and I certainly didn’t think to ask probing questions. She was my grandmother and I loved her, the rest didn’t really matter.

For every African American who escaped from the plantation, a mother was left behind. There was no way to send a postcard saying “we made it, crossing the rivers was hard but Canada is beautiful” Young people knew that leaving was their only choice, their mothers knew it too.

When Mothers’ Day rolls around, think of the strength of these African American woman, the ones who survived unimaginable horrors so that we could live to have our own families and enjoy some measure of freedom, the freedom they could only see from afar.