Chile, I thought my grandma was perfect

“Guess where I been today?” she asked me when I walked in from school one day, grinning so hard her cheekbones nearly closed her eyes.

I shrugged. “Mississippi?”

She was so excited (and I was so surprised) that I was right. Like me, she loved to travel. Like her, I bite the inside of my cheeks ’cause “my nerves bad,” and I too went through my “fast” phase. According to my mama, soon as I say bye on the phone, I hang up…just like my grandma used to.

I’m hella proud of being so much like my untamed fireball of a grandmother who once stood up and called out the pastor for lying in the middle of his sermon.

She partially raised me in Monroe, Louisiana when my mother joined the Army. My memories of her include sitting on the couch watching Bobby Jones Gospel, the westerns, the stories, and Scooby Doo. I’d help her shell peas that we gathered from the farm her brother sharecropped in Rayville. She bought me anything I wanted, including a too-expensive Liz Claiborne purse with a disposable camera attached. And when cousins came over, she told me to hide my good snacks and juices.

See why I believed (and still believe) I was her favorite?

I moved back to Louisiana at the top of this year and linked up with one of my first cousins the first week I got here. We talked for a couple of hours about some of everything, particularly our childhoods and backintheday memories of family. I realized in my cousin’s storytelling that I was operating from a very limited view of who my grandmother was.

That’s natural though, right? We formulate these ideas of who people are based on our personal experiences and what we’ve been told about them.

After talking to my cousin, though, I asked more family about my grandmother and learned that she wasn’t always present for her children or warm with them, and she wasn’t always honest. This doesn’t take away from the glory of who she was to me at all, but it gives more context, ‘cause…

I thought my grandma was perfect.

Not perfect as in without mistakes but that those mistakes ain’t really hurt nobody. Then I learned about her beyond the surface or just that one angle that was I so mesmorized with. And understanding her more intimately helps me to also understand myself and my mother and our ways more deeply too.

“You travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I want to know more about my grandma and my grandfather and as much about their upbringings that I can. They aren’t here anymore, but five of the seven children are, as well as grands, especially those older than me.

I’m asking family the questions that I can’t ask my grandparents. Not just relying on whatever comes out whenever it comes out, but asking specifically what I want to know — with the understanding that they won’t always have the answers or care to share ’em and that I might get even more info that I ain’t hardly see coming. But I want it all.

Because Mama Jessie’s story frees me up to own my magic and my mistakes, and my mama’s, sisters’s, and daughter’s too. In true Sankofa fashion, our backintheday stories equip us to sort through our family’s history — keeping the goods and addressing/stopping the hurt.