Every now and then when I’m at auction, I see a piece of furniture or some other item that reminds me of my grandmother. Things that belonged to her and represented who she was to me.
Annie Lee didn’t have a lot of material things, but she had a lot of children. She lived at a time when families were large, and women kept the house, birthed the babies, fed them, clothed them and raised them, and tended to their men. My grandfather worked the farm with his older children. I grew up there, but by the time I was older it was no longer a working farm, so I escaped that drudgery. I don’t think farming is a pleasant memory for my mother and her siblings.
I don’t recall hearing my grandmother complain about her life, because most women just didn’t expect much more – black women in particular. She did have her church and her faith, which sustained her. And I can’t forget her church hats.
My memory is of a fair-skinned woman in cotton print dresses and what we called slides (comfortable worn flat shoes she could just slide her feet into) who was one of the best cooks in the world (just like your grandmother, I’m sure). Here are auction items from the past that remind me of her:
The metal porch chairs. Hers were red with white square centers in a design with holes in the back and seat to keep your backsides cool. I spent many a summer on the front porch sliding back and forth in the long glider chair (I came across a restored one on the web selling for $1,000. Wow!). I found two metal chairs at auction once: One was painted brown and the other one white.
The chifforobe in her bedroom that she kept her clothes in. It was a wooden piece of furniture, with one long door with mirror, a short door and drawers (at least that’s what my sister remembered. I just remembered that she had one).
Her cast-iron skillet, the best way in the world to fry the chickens she raised and the corn bread we couldn’t resist. I have one of those skillets in my kitchen (any good Southern cook does), but don’t use it often, though.
The Ball mason jars for canning figs, peaches, blackberries, pears. We picked blackberries in the wild, and to this day, they are one of my most favorite fruits. I have vivid memories of being pricked by thorns on the blackberry bushes and being stung once by a wasp. Those creatures seemed to live around blackberries and fought with us for the juicy treats.
The aprons she wore (and likely made). Today, they’d be called vintage. I recall seeing a box of aprons on the outside table at an auction recently, and they were readily snapped up. Fatimah Ali, who writes the Healthy Southern Comfort blog, wrote about inheriting aprons from her “cousin” Sis.
And her clip-on earbobs. That’s what we used to call them. The brass clips on the back would eat into your flesh after an hour or so of wearing them. Hers were usually simple, nothing fancy. They were the only type she wore, along with the nut brown face powder that she loved.
What things remind you of your grandmother?
