In Profile: My Grandmother

My grandmother is an intriguing spirit. She is an evolving soul who never ceases to amaze, who moves forward in the most subtle and wonderful ways. Her personality and her makeup all encompass who she is and her strength of will and her uncompromising dignity all come to bear upon the person that she is and the woman that she is known to be. My grandmother has an amazing strength. At 85-years of age my grandmother can lift and move a hundred pounds easier than a man a third of her age and has a force behind her that can knock a grown man to the ground. As my grandmother says, she "doesn't know how to hit light." She is possessive of great physical strength and mental capability, and has the most poetic and congenial soul that will ever come to bear. That said, my grandmother is rough around the edges, plays it very practical in all things, and carries a strong Calvinistic disdain that serves as a clamp on her creativity and her imaginative soul.

My grandmother once hit a woman, a fellow school teacher who one day decided that she would taunt my grandmother with a plum tree branch filled with worms, which she knew my grandmother was quite afraid of. As the woman repeatedly pushed the branch near my grandmother's person, in a reflex my grandmother picked up a log and swiped the woman sidewise across her face, leaving a scar and pulling the earring out of the woman's ear. With that the woman decided to continue, telling my grandmother "Oh Thelma, you know I wasn't gonna put that on you! Just for that, I'm really gonna do it!" My grandmother's reply was, "Woman, I'll kill you today if you put those worms on me." The woman decided then it was time to leave that alone.

My grandmother bears a poetic soul. English, as she says, was her pet subject. Her passion and hobby was and is memorizing and reciting poetry. Today, she recites several poems from memory that she learned in her youth, among them "She's Somebody's Mother," "House by the Side of the Road," and "Sir Patrick Spens." My grandmother writes plays--starting when she was in grade school and continuing on to her involvement with the aging center where they staged several plays every year, and even today as she will write Christmas and Easter programs for the church. She also loves to sing. She has always considered writing and poetry her "hobbies," not to take the place of "real work." When she was a teacher, she taught and now, she must busy herself with taking care of her house--mopping floors, making beds, gardening,etc.

My grandmother, the third oldest (fifth counting the children who died in their infancy)of eight, recieved her education in central Alabama, a pupil of Fess MacDavid(I have just thought recently --Fess was her teacher and principal when she was in school, her principal when she taught under him, and her brother-in-law), from whom she recieved the best education around, and then attended what is now Alabama State University, where she recieved her bachelor's degree in the early forties. She started teaching in 1941, taught in Alabama and helped to integrate the north side of Chicago. She retired in 1981. She is definitely an interesting woman.