The History of Grandmothers in the African‐American Community - Jillian Jimenez

The History of Grandmothers in the African‐American CommunityAuthor(s): Jillian JimenezReviewed work(s):Source: Social Service Review, Vol. 76, No. 4 (December 2002), pp. 523-551Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/342994 .Accessed: 07/02/2012 23:21

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The History of Grandmothersin the African-AmericanCommunity

Jillian JimenezCalifornia State University, Long Beach

This article examines the role of grandmothers in the African-American community fromReconstruction through the New Deal. It suggests that grandmothers were central to theeconomic survival of their families and worked as long as they lived, in paid labor andhousehold labor, to help provide for their families. Grandmothers had many roles in theircommunities: they were midwives, purveyors of domestic medicine, and caretakers ofchildren. Grandmothers were the source of oral histories and narratives that helped theirgrandchildren resist the oppression of the larger society. This early role is linked to therole of grandmothers since World War II.

In the last 30 years, grandparents raising grandchildren have becomea matter of intense policy interest and research in United States, andin the last decade, public child welfare with these families has grown.The number of children raised in grandparent-headed families has al-most doubled, from 2.2 million in 1970 to 4.5 million in 2000 (Bryson2001). These families are more likely to be African American than fromother ethnic groups. In 1994, 13 percent of African-American children,5.7 percent of Latino children, and 3.9 percent of white children werebeing raised in grandparent-headed households (Saluter 1996). In the1990s the biggest increase in grandparent-headed families has beenamong families with no parent present (Bryson and Casper 1999).Grandmothers outnumber grandfathers as caregivers by a ratio of fiveto three (Bryson 2001).

Although the number of Americans living long enough to be grand-parents has increased substantially since the beginning of the twentieth

524 Social Service Review

century, an ethnic gap has existed since the 1940s between the pro-portion of African-American children living with a grandmother in thehome and the proportion of white families living with a grandmother(Uhlenberg and Kirby 1998). One recent study comparing 400 whitegrandmothers with 300 African-American grandmothers raising chil-dren finds that African-American grandmothers are more likely thanwhite grandmothers to have peers who also live with their grandchildren.African-American grandmothers are also more likely to come from fam-ilies where multiple generations live together and to experience lessburden than white grandmothers (Pruchno 1999). For some African-American women who do not have a stable source of partner support,their mothers continue to provide child care and financial support. Bothin residence and as extraresidential kin, grandmothers are importantmembers in impoverished households headed by single mothers (Jarrett1994).

Considerable research compares African-American grandmotherswith grandmothers from other ethnic groups and examines their roleas caretakers in extended families; their expectations for assistance andexchange of help with younger members of their families; the impactof age, health, education, and income on parenting and grandparentingroles; and the quality of their interactions with their grandchildren.1

In this article I explore the history of grandmothers in the African-American community in an effort to illuminate the origins and evolutionof the grandmother in African-American life. I use primary documentsfrom historical repositories of African-American family papers at theLibrary of Congress, Manuscript Division; manuscripts from the Libraryof Congress American Folklife Center, Archive of Folk Culture; familypapers from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard Uni-versity; and oral histories of African Americans collected under the“American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project,1936–1940” series. Former slaves were not interviewed for the FederalWriters’ Project (FWP) narratives; instead these are stories of so-calledordinary Americans, white and African American.2 Published primarysources used here include the oral histories of prominent African-American women from the Black Women Oral History Project of theSchlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, collected in the 1970s, andbiographies and autobiographies of African Americans from the nine-teenth century to the present. Crucial to this research were over twothousand former slave testimonies collected under the auspices of theFWP from 1936 to 1938.3

In this article, I argue that, although the role of grandmother inAfrican-American communities was mediated by class differences, re-gional differences, and wider historical changes, there was commonalityin the lives of African-American grandmothers in the latter half of thenineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries and, to some extent,

African-American Grandmothers 525

today. The grandmother role that characterizes majority culture in con-temporary America, a role conducted with clear expectations of its limitsand demands, did not exist for most African-American women, whostruggled to provide for their families as long as they lived. Work wasthe central theme of life for older African-American women in eco-nomically marginalized communities; their role as grandmother was notparamount. Their relationship with their grandchildren was often as amother, not a more distant relative to whom access is regulated by theparent. It was only in middle-class African-American families that thespecial privileges of the grandmother role shaped the lives of olderwomen, just as it did for middle-class white women.

Historically, African-American women who had biological grandchil-dren were workers providing for their families’ needs; they cared foradult children as well as for their grandchildren and the children ofothers. Grandmothers worked in fields in the rural areas of the South,engaged in household production and maintenance, and performed asmidwives and purveyors of domestic medicine. The biological relation-ship of grandparent to grandchild did not define the form or functionof the grandmother role. For many African Americans, in fact, therewas no constituted role of grandmother. Instead, the grandmother wasanother woman shouldering responsibility for the family’s survival andcommunity well-being. As this history suggests, grandmother is a proteanrole; the middle-class white ideal of the grandmother is socially con-structed and depends not only on longevity but also more significantlyon a measure of affluence. In the African-American community, thedesignation “grandmother” was a fluid one, often used interchangeablywith “mama,” and freely given by family members and others to womenwho may not have been biological grandmothers (Close 1997).

Grandmothers after Reconstruction

The richest source of documents about the lives of elderly African-American women in the decades after slavery is found in the FWP formerslave narratives. These documents, featuring reminiscences of over twothousand former slaves in 17 southern and border states, are limited inseveral ways. Only about 2 percent of living slaves were interviewed, andparticipants were not randomly selected. Most interviewers were white,and former slaves in the 1930s were likely to have been less than candidwith white interviewers. African-American interviewers appeared to elicitmore honest responses about the conditions of slavery. The vast majorityof participants would have been children or adolescents during slavery.In addition to the shadows time casts over personal recollections, thisfact has led historians to question the reliability of the interviews. Nev-ertheless, these narratives offer a vivid picture of African-American fam-ily life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 The


recollections of participants are consistent in the descriptions of familylife in the slave quarters, but the accuracy of the descriptions of theslaves’ treatment by white owners is questioned, since individuals inter-viewed by whites were more positive than those interviewed by AfricanAmericans.5

These narratives offer the most fully realized look at life in African-American families two generations earlier. Those interviewing the for-mer slaves also describe the lives of the respondents at the time of theinterview, offering a window into the lives of elderly black folk in the1930s and under slavery. These documents reveal much about the livesof grandmothers under slavery. Common themes emerge from the sto-ries of the ex-slaves, themes that capture the outlines of the lives livedby older women, the vast majority of them grandmothers.

Grandmothers and older women played a central role in communitylife under slavery and during the decades after Reconstruction. Theycared for children, schooled them in their own homes, birthed babies,and provided domestic medicine for both African-American and whitefamilies. The naked state of freedom after slavery, without economic orpolitical resources, continued to promote the importance of kinshipamong African Americans. The story of African-American communitylife in the South in the latter part of the nineteenth century is largelya story of kinship and survival.

Caretakers of All the Children

Under slavery, all women in the slave quarters were expected to beresponsible for all the children living there (Lowenberg and Bogin1976). This collective responsibility for the community’s children, com-bined with a broad kinship and caretaking culture brought from Africa,was experienced as an inevitable way of life in the South for decadesafter slavery. African culture emphasized the importance of identifica-tion with the larger kinship group outside the immediate family, as wellas the assumption of kinship obligations to symbolic kin and a willing-ness by families to absorb children of kin and nonkin (Foster 1983;Woods 1996).

Older African Americans were crucial to the “creation and perpetu-ation of the unique African-American culture and antebellum plantationsociety in the South,” especially by transmitting African cultural forms(Pollard 1981, p. 228). In Africa, older men and women were the re-ligious leaders of their communities. There is evidence that elders, es-pecially grandparents, had the important function of naming childrenin West Africa, a tradition that continued under slavery (Genovese 1976).Elders were the “storytellers, the advisors, the links between the pastand the present” (Pollard 1981, p. 228). This culturally embedded ven-eration of the elderly would play an important role in the respect given


to the grandmother in the postslavery life of African Americans (Close1997). During slavery, some grandmothers were picked to work in thehouse, caring for the children of the white owners. Older women wereallowed to stop working in the fields and assigned lighter work aroundthe house and garden. Along with this work, grandmothers usually wereput in charge of caring for all the children on the plantation, sincemothers were forced to work in the fields along with men (Rawick 1972).The collective responsibility for children under slavery reemphasizedthe role of fictive kin; older women assumed the role of mother ormama to all the children under their care, biologically related or not(Gutman 1976). After slavery, fictive kin remained an important way ofbinding small rural communities together in the cooperation of childrearing, food production, and other essential activities. Grandmothersplayed an important role in this necklace of responsibility and caring.Grandmothers fiercely resisted the practice of local authorities bindingout orphaned African-American children to their former white owners;they would travel across state lines to rescue their grandchildren fromsuch situations, which they felt were akin to re-enslaving them, muchto the puzzlement of white authorities.6

Grandmothers Educating for Resistance

Grandmothers socialized all the children in their care into the workand survival techniques necessary for the brutal life of chattel slavery.Stacey Close (1997) describes the necessity during slavery of grand-mothers offering a counternarrative to their grandchildren, one inwhich the owners had less power. Long after slavery ended, grand-mothers maintained their status through storytelling, continuing thesenarratives of resisting oppression, and turning whites’ power againstthem in family histories, folktales, and songs (Family Folklore). Storiespraising the courage of slave ancestors and reviling the cruelty of whiteswere often immediately followed by stories about the cleverness of bothslaves and free persons after the war. “Putting one over on the whiteman” was a sign of particular skill and interpreted as a conquest, whetherthe victim knew about it or not (Family Folklore).

After Reconstruction, elderly black women conducted private schoolsin their homes, for a small fee, for African-American children in theSouth (Clark 1962; Hill 1991; Holt 1994). Many of these schools werechurch related; Baptists and Methodists often helped sponsor theseschools, since public education for African Americans was inadequatefor most of the nineteenth century (Lowenberg and Bogin 1976).

Working Grandmothers

Work was the central theme in the lives of African-American womenthroughout their adult lives. During slavery and in the decades following,


grandmothers were the family and community healers, offering home-made potions and herbs, along with other folk practices, such as castingspells, to cure anyone in the slave quarters or local community who wasill. Grandmothers were midwives to the entire plantation and to nearbyplantations where there were no grandmothers, delivering white as wellas African-American babies (Rawick 1972).

In North Carolina and in other tobacco-economy states in the 1880sand 1890s, African-American tenant farmers participated in a vasthousehold economy, sustaining themselves outside the white-domi-nated market economy through gardening and home manufacturing.7

Older African-American women who did not work directly in tenantfarming produced baskets, shoes, hats, and clothing for home use andfor sale, in order to generate extra family income and to contributeresources for the establishment of community-controlled churches andschools. They kept the home and supervised the household produc-tion, while younger adults worked in the fields or sought manufac-turing jobs. Many tenant farmers’ homes held three generations, butwhen grandparents lived nearby, grandchildren often visited for longperiods, staying for months and helping the grandmother with quiltingand sewing and household chores. In this way, grandchildren providedextra hands for their grandparents, and parents were spared the ex-pense of feeding children while at the same time assured of the chil-dren’s safety.

The synergy of African cultural patterns and survival strategies fash-ioned during slavery empowered African-American women in the earlytwentieth century to make a critical difference to their families. Theirlives were not bound by either the strictures or the privileges of genderor age. Forced to work to help their families survive, they were thepurveyors of domestic medicine and midwifery, preservers of familytraditions, caretakers and educators of the community’s children, andexemplars of pride in their African-American heritage. Buffering theterrible effects of racism and inequality felt by most African-Americanchildren in this period, especially in the South, grandmothers offereda distinct, empowered interpretation of the lives experienced by theirgrandchildren.

Grandmothers during the Great Depression

The richest source of information about the lives of African-Americanolder women in the Depression also is found in the FWP former slavenarrative collection. Combined with interviews of elderly African Amer-icans conducted under the American Life Histories series, these doc-uments offer a glimpse into the life of the grandmother in the South.The themes that characterized lives of African-American grandmothers


in the decades after Reconstruction shaped the experiences of African-American women who were grandmothers during the 1930s.

Poverty is a central theme in all the FWP interviews—both the formerslave narratives and the American Life Histories series. Several of thoseinterviewed between 1936 and 1940 asked whether the interviewer was“one of those pension ladies” or if the interviewer knew when they wouldreceive their government pension (Rawick 1972, vol. 11, p. 16, vol. 13,pp. 11, 98). Grandmothers often outlived their children. They weresurvivors of poverty and racism, but their life force continued to beremarkably strong. Under slavery, grandmothers offered a counter-narrative for the community’s children, one in which masters were lesspowerful. Grandmothers interviewed in the 1930s continued to do this,offering their family histories, their pride in their grandchildren, theirherbal medicine, and their conjuring skills as part of the cultural re-sources African Americans needed to cope with the oppressive whiteworld. As was the case under slavery, older women seemed to have ahigher status in communities across the Depression-era South than didolder men, perhaps because their roles were so flexible, diverse, andnecessary to the strength and endurance of the African-American family.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African-Americanelder women, mostly grandmothers, opened boarding houses, sold foodat urban markets, and owned grocery stores in the South, unlike elderAfrican-American men, who mainly worked as long as they were able(Rawick 1972; Lowenberg and Bogin 1976; Sterling 1984).

Family and Community Child Care

African-American grandmothers continued to play a significant role inthe care of their grandchildren during the 1930s. In the early 1930s,Charles Johnson, a prominent African-American sociologist from theUniversity of Chicago, studied 600 families from Macon County, Ala-bama (1934; 1941). He found that over 50 percent of the families in-terviewed had other relatives, mostly grandmothers, living with mothersand children in a household. He also noted a large number of house-holds with older women as heads, caring for many children; mothershad left children with their own mothers in order to seek work at otherplantations. He noted that the mother-daughter bond was the strongestone in the families, allowing grandmothers and mothers to share childrearing easily. These arrangements, which grandmothers accepted will-ingly, were meant to be temporary but often became permanent, ac-cording to Johnson.

Some grandmothers were caring for children whose parents had died(Rawick 1972). In 1931 Ruth Allen found older women in the cottonfarms of Texas keeping house for family members who picked cottonduring the day (1931). These households were large; one included 19


people and most had more than 10 people. Allen found that womenwho had no children often reared large families of adopted children.

One North Carolina grandmother told the FWP interviewer that shehad raised her two grandsons after their mother married because “Ididn’t know how that new man would treat the child” (FWP 1939, p.46). Caring for her two grandsons and her four children still living athome meant that nine people slept in their two-room house. Anotherwoman, Mary Matthews, was caring for nine grandchildren even thoughshe and her husband Aaron were in their 70s and working as tenantfarmers. “Their mother and father died and they had no place to go,”she told the interviewer about her grandchildren (Terrell and Hirsch1978, p. 87). Having spent all of her adult life caring for her 15 children,nine grandchildren, and two daughters-in-law whose husbands had died,Mary said, “I never had a child or a grandchild I felt like I could dowithout. I never had nary a one I was willing to spare” (Terrell andHirsch 1978, p. 86). The Matthews family lived in four rooms, with threepeople to a bed.

E. J. and Mattie Marshall were in their 80s and lived in Florida. Theywere overseeing strawberry picking on the land they were tenant farmingand raising their granddaughter, whose mother was working out of state(Terrell and Hirsch 1978). Women who moved from rural to urbanareas to find work often left their children with their own mothers. JohnWesley Dobbs and his sister went to live with their grandmother inGeorgia when their parents separated. Dobbs recalled that he and hissister lived with his grandmother for 7 years in a three-room log cabineven though she was caring for 14 other children during this time, someher own and some not her own. Their mother came back twice a yearto see the children and bring them clothes from the city (Powdermaker1969).

When a grandmother headed a household, she was the main authorityfigure for the children. Even when the mother lived at home, the grand-mother’s time with the children was more extensive, since the motherleft for work during the day. This was true through the 1930s in theSouth, as older women willingly took responsibility for their grandchil-dren’s behavior and welfare (FWP 1940; Powdermaker 1969) Likewise,it was not uncommon for a grandmother to take in her grandchildrenand raise them as her own. These arrangements were not formalized;rather, they were seen as a means of meeting several family members’needs: the child would be cared for, the parent would be free to leaveto find work, and the grandmother would have a child to raise and lovewho would sometimes help take care of her. Children were taken “forthe joy of having them, the assistance they may bring, or merely becausethey need a good home” (Powdermaker 1969, p. 202).

Many grandmothers also offered child care for their neighbor chil-dren, whose parents would drop them off at the grandmothers’ homes


on the way to pick cotton. Grandmothers took care of white childrentoo, in the children’s homes, usually returning to their own homes inthe evenings.8 One grandmother was described by her niece as the“colored mammy nurse of all the children” in the white homes in thecommunity (Perdue, Barden, and Phillips 1976, p. 205).

Reciprocal Care: Grandmothers and Grandchildren

These sources suggest that during the brutal days of the Depression inthe South more grandparents were caring for their grandchildren thanwere being cared for by them. Yet grandchildren helped their grand-parents when they could. Some grandmothers who lived alone describedreceiving food and cleaning help from their children and grandchildren(Rawick 1972). Grandmothers who lived with grandchildren often ex-plained the situation as their grandchildren living with them, ratherthan the other way around (Rawick 1972).

Lettice Boyer was 110 when she was interviewed in Seabord, NorthCarolina, in 1936 by an FWP representative. She needed a stick to getaround but continued to do the washing for her family. Lettice hadmoved in with her granddaughter Hattie only 2 months earlier. Hattiehad brought her grandmother to her home because she felt that Lettice“mustn’t stay by herself” any longer. All Lettice’s children were dead,as were all her great-great-grandchildren. Lettice was bothered that shewas living with her granddaughter’s husband, Will, and eating his food,when he had “never even eat a meal’s vittles at my house.” The wholefamily, including Hattie and Will’s two children, lived off the one baleof cotton the plantation owner had allowed Will, a tenant farmer, tokeep for himself. Yet Will did not begrudge his wife’s grandmotheranything, telling her “as long as I got bread you has too” (Terrell andHirsch 1978, pp. 29–30).

Thomas Doyle, born in 1889 in Tennessee, was left as an infant withhis grandparents when his mother went North. His grandparents weretenant farmers, and they took good care of him until his “gran’daddy”died when Doyle was 14. His care then fell to his “step-mammy,” thename he called his “gran’mammy.” When he was 16, his grandmotherwent to live with her sister, and Thomas went to work in the fields to“make enough to keep her up.” Thomas cared for his grandmotheruntil she died (FWP 1939, p. 47).

Still, not all grandmothers were well cared for. One Alabama grand-mother in her 90s was found confined to her sick bed with only her12-year-old grandson to care for her (Rawick 1972). Another who hadsuffered a stroke had no family to help her but her granddaughter, whocame to her house “a few times a week when she has time” (Rawick1972, vol. 9, p. 219). Most grandmothers were valued; one woman de-scribed how her mother spent 10 years looking for her own mother,


who had been sold during slavery, so that the older woman could be amother to her daughter and a grandmother to her grandchildren (Raw-ick 1972). The cycle of grandmother care paralleled the life cycle. Re-spondents recounted being raised by their grandmothers and then car-ing for their own grandchildren (Rawick 1972).

Education and Tradition

Some of the women who were grandmothers at the time of the FWPinterviews remembered their own grandmothers telling them stories whenthey were children living in slavery. These narratives wove a tapestry offamily history, sometimes as far back as Africa. The FWP respondentspassed these stories down to their own children and grandchildren. Storiesof their ancestors’ capture in Africa and of the deceit and trickery bywhich they were abducted by slave traders, along with their resistance,were the most common (Moton 1920; Rawick 1972; Taylor 1988).

These women were especially impressed with their grandmothers’stories of conjuring spirits or seeing “haunts.” These stories were mostpopular in the rural South (Rawick 1972). Many of those intervieweddescribed seeing ghosts that white people could not see. Other reportstell of grandmothers who cured neighbors from spells cast by others,both living and dead (Cooley 1926). These cultural practices were pre-served by African Americans from their days as slaves—when whiteswould threaten slaves with harm from spirits and ghosts—as well as fromtheir African heritage. Over time it was impossible to determine theroots of these practices, since they had fused in African-American culture(Escott 1979; Coggeshall 1996).

Grandmothers were also repositories of family stories and culturaltraditions that gave meaning to hard work on the land and that fedcultural roots. Their storytelling is a powerful theme in autobiographiesof African Americans. Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and MayaAngelou all write of their grandmothers as central to their development,offering them hope for a better future and strength to endure oppression.

Grandmothers encouraged their grandchildren to leave the rural ar-eas of the South to find work or obtain education. Leola Prentice was20 years old, a housemaid and cook with a family in Tennessee, whena representative of the American Life Histories project interviewed herin 1939. She left the cotton fields of Mississippi, where she was born,to work in Tennessee. She recalled that her grandmother “put it intomy head to quit that cotton pickin’ and come to Tennessee and get agood job” (FWP 1939, p. 47). Leola kept her grandmother’s picture onher bedroom wall in the white folks’ home she lived and worked in.Leola described her grandmother:

Granny Carolina, she read the Bible to all of us too. She was an awful good


woman. But let one of us younguns sass her or pay her no mind when she calledus, and she’d take and wash our mouths out with lye soap and whoop us witha willow switch. Didn’t hurt. . . . Granny, she kept an ol’ cow bell by her chairon the floor. When she want something or somebody to come, she take andrang that bell. . . . When she do that and out in the field we’d hear three rings,most generally meant she want me to come to the house. . . . Then when I getto the house, she say to me, “Come on in the house out of the hot sun, chile.Time for you to rest. . . .” Another reason my grandma would call me back tothe house was cause she was ’fraid I’d get a snakebite. You know them ol cotton-mouth moccasins is poison. (FWP 1939, p. 48)

Many of the elderly African Americans interviewed remembered theirown grandmothers fondly and gave them much credit for the adultsthey became. Of those who spoke of their grandparents in the FWPdocuments, over half were raised for part of their childhood by one oftheir grandparents, usually their grandmother. Typical was Kelsey Pharr,an undertaker in Florida, who was raised by his grandmother throughhard economic times and who supported his grandmother and himselfby driving a taxi from the age of 15. He eventually finished college withhis grandmother’s help: “She lived to see me a man and had helpedme to a place where I could take care of myself. She was a good Christianwoman and it pleased her to see her grandson making good. I becamesuperintendent of the AME Sunday school when I was 16 years old. . . .That was a pleasure and a comfort to my Grandmother” (FWP 1936–40,p. 31).

Working to Survive

In addition to providing child care and all that rearing children entails,elderly African-American women at this time also labored to supportthemselves and their families. About half of the older women inter-viewed by the FWP lived alone, about one-fourth lived with a spouse,and the rest lived with children or grandchildren (Rawick 1972). Duringthe hard times of the Depression-era South, grandmothers in their 80sand 90s were working in the fields picking cotton as day laborers, doinglaundry for white families, cooking and washing for their own families,caring for ill children, looking after children of white and African-American families (Rawick 1972), and rearing their own grandchildrenand the children of others. The strength and resilience of these olderwomen jump out from the pages of these narratives. Sixty years afterthe end of slavery, there was little gender segregation in the workAfrican-American women did in the rural South (Escott 1979). One 73-year-old grandmother in Georgia boasted that she could “work like aman and could do any work a man could do” (Rawick 1972, vol. 13, p.139). Rosa Hardy was “still working in the cotton fields of Alabama atage 88” (Rawick 1972, vol. 9, p. 163). Grandmothers also did home-


based work—cloth weaving, cleaning, laundry, and ironing—into their90s (Rawick 1972).

Grandmothers were proud of being herb doctors for the neighbor-hood, a skill they had learned from their own grandmothers. One elderlygrandmother in South Carolina rode around on her horse, laying handson people in distress. She noted, “Jesus gave me the power to heal”(Rawick 1972, vol. 2, p. 62). Another grandmother from Arkansas saidshe could “cure burns by blowing on them”; she offered her services toanyone who needed them (Rawick 1972, vol. 11, p. 289). Dellie Lewis,an 88-year-old grandmother from Alabama, was renowned for her folkmedicine skills; blacks and whites alike sought her care (Rawick 1972).One woman, currently living with her granddaughter, had been thenurse to “all the white children” for the last 20 years. Then 89, EllaPines described how white families paid her to come to their homesand care for their sick children (Rawick 1972, vol. 1, p. 8).

Grandmothers continued to deliver babies in the 1930s, acting asmidwives for both African-American and white women (Rawick 1972).In Texas, Missouri Boardes, an 83-year-old grandmother, was still a prac-ticing midwife for local families when visited by an interviewer from theFWP in 1936. She had worked informally as a midwife all her life andtook it up full-time when her children moved away from the familyhome (Rawick 1972). African-American midwives were called “Granny”all over the South, suggesting the powerful connection between grand-mothers and midwifery. The practice was declining in the South duringthis period, as physicians persuaded state officials to eliminate the mid-wife, most of whom were African-American women, in favor of licensedmedical doctors. Midwifery was a time-honored means of ensuring thatpoor women received adequate prenatal care. Midwives were involvedwith their patients from the early stages of their pregnancies, offeringthem nutritional advice and preparing them for childbirth. Midwivesoften stayed in the home after the birth for a week to help the motherwith infant care and domestic work. They learned their skills througha long apprenticeship with established midwives, assisting in births untilthe older midwife retired and then taking over her practice. In NorthCarolina, the percentage of births attended by midwives declined from1917 to 1980. In 1917 there had been 9,000 midwives, 80 percent ofthem African American; by 1980 there were 10. This delegitimizationof midwifery left many rural poor without prenatal and obstetrical ser-vices (Matthews 1992).

Migration Northward

The great northern migration of African Americans from the ruralSouth to the cities of the North and Midwest began in 1900 and swelledfrom 1916 to 1930. While many grandmothers reared their grandchil-


dren in the South, the parents of these children went north looking forwork after the near collapse of southern agriculture. Migration was seenas a means for the whole family, not just those who left, to survive. Wageshelped support the kinship network at home, and kin already in theNorth aided the new migrants (Clark-Lewis 1987). Around 1900, therate of employment for African-American women, most of whom workedin domestic work or laundry, was “four to five times higher than forimmigrant wives.” One reason for this was the availability of the grand-mother as a child caretaker (Pleck 1979, p. 368). The migration after1900 initially changed the family constellation; younger men and womenset off first, to find work in the industrial North and establish themselves,before they sent for their families.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, women were more likelyto be employed than men, since racism prevented African-Americanmen from filling industrial jobs.9 African-American women worked asdomestics or laundry workers; for example, women migrated to Wash-ington, D.C., from bordering southern states because there were do-mestic and laundry jobs there. Although some women found jobs infederal government offices in the early years of the twentieth century,by the 1920s and 1930s, racism was pushing African-American womenout of clerical jobs and back into domestic labor (Harley 1988).

By the mid-1920s, more than half of married African-American womenworked to help support their families. In these cases, the grandmothers,many of whom had subsequently migrated from the South, were asimportant to families as they had ever been, performing essential tasksof child care, housework, cooking, and laundry. Working women recip-rocated in the time-honored custom of their communities by dedicatingtheir wages to the maintenance and care of their kin, both in the citiesof the North and Midwest and in the South (Hembold 1990). African-American women found the burgeoning world of clerical work closedto them in cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York (Gutman1976; Gottlieb 1987). In Washington, D.C., where women from theneighboring states of Maryland and Virginia continued to migrate forbetter-paying jobs during the 1920s, the number of African-Americanwomen in domestic and laundry work in private homes and in privatelaundries increased substantially. Another draw was the large publicschool system in the District that employed a substantial number ofAfrican-American professionals (Harley 1988).

Grandmothers have traditionally played a more important role inrural areas than in urban centers (King, Russell, and Elder 1998); yetAfrican-American women frequently followed their children and grand-children north to help care for grandchildren. Many families kept board-ers in the northern cities to help make ends meet. Grandmothers helpedwith all the domestic work, including meeting the boarders’ needs (Dun-can and Duncan 1957; Speer 1967; Gottlieb 1987).


Families migrated in steps, but for those families whose kin were leftat home, fictive kin or community networks replaced blood kin. Thoserelatives who did make it north stayed with the family already there untilthey could afford to rent their own places, increasing the workload ofthe older women doing the household work and socializing the young(Gottlieb 1987). When “Mamma” (as grandmothers were often called)became ill, more problems were created for the young mother. In 1895,Laura Murray’s grandmother came to stay with her in Washington,D.C., during the last months of Laura’s pregnancy. In her diary, Lauranotes that she had to do all the work because “Mamma was sick.” WhenMamma recovered, she began to help her granddaughter in earnest,doing the laundry, cooking, and cleaning. She was happy to celebrateher seventy-fifth birthday with Laura; they took the train downtown tosee a play. She stayed with Laura for 3 months after the baby was bornand then returned home (Sterling 1984, p. 464).

During the economic stress that characterized the decade from 1930to 1940, white women’s share of the female labor force increased by 28percent, while African-American women’s share of the female laborforce declined by 22 percent nationally. According to Lois Rita Helm-bold, “white women replaced black women by moving down the oc-cupational ladder of desirability. For black women already on the bottomrung, there was no lower step, and they were effectively pushed out ofthe labor force” (Hembold 1990, p. 636). Kinship networks in majorurban areas were strained for African-American families. Some olderwomen were forced to apply for relief because they could not find workand their children could not help them. Recent migrants were the mostseriously affected. Some women sent their children home to their moth-ers in the South, where they could be cared for temporarily (Hembold1990).

In When I Was Coming Up: An Oral History of Aged Blacks, elderly AfricanAmericans who had made the trip from the South to New Jersey between1915 and 1970 recount their early experiences and describe their livessince their migration northward (Faulkner et al. 1982). According tothese reminiscences, grandmothers made frequent visits from the DeepSouth to their children’s homes in New Jersey to help out in a crisis orassist with childcare. Raising their children’s children, at least tempo-rarily, was routine in these narratives. Some of these grandmothersstayed permanently; others returned to their homes in the South. Onewoman who had been raised by her grandmother after her mother diedremembered, “I couldn’t tell no difference; I just switched from onemother to another” (Faulkner et al. 1982, p. 45). One woman fromGeorgia who had moved up north to care for her grandchildren whentheir mother died was proud of the fact that she “raised my grandchil-


dren the old fashioned way. They were never out of sight and I usedstrict discipline on them” (Faulkner et al. 1982, p. 138).

Another grandmother reflected on the difference between raisingchildren in the South and raising her grandchildren in New Jersey:

I had difficulty with my own children sometime. They do aggravate you a bit,but not nothing too bad. And that’s the same type of life I’m raising up my kidsin now, my grandchildren. But you know, the time is not like it was when Igrowed up. It’s a little more complicated. The reason it’s like it is because there’sso many things happening. And it keep you alert to thinking about would happenand what could happen here. You wouldn’t even think about the children ‘causeyou’d know where they was, and want nothing to be bothered. But, now, onecome to you and you tell him he come in at 9:00. He don’t be there. You startthinking, start thinking. You figure then that might something done happenedto him. Somebody’s done kidnapped him or something done happened to him.That’s the difference as far as I can see in life with these kids, you differentfrom the world when I was coming up. Not like when we was coming up. A lotof things you have to think about here, you didn’t have to think about backthere. Not as much temptation down there as it is here. (Faulkner et al. 1982,p. 139)

The strength a grandmother could bring to a family is illustrated bythe story of Malissa Dalton. Malissa, born in 1867, was the mother ofnine children and survived two husbands. In spite of her large family,Malissa worked all her life. Her longest job, which she took in 1917 atthe age of 50, was as a night cleaner at Union Station in Indianapolis.Mary Helen Washington (1998) remembered Malissa, her grandmother,living with Washington’s family from the 1920s to the 1940s, helpingWashington’s mother (Malissa’s daughter) raise 10 children. The themeof hard, sometimes brutal work was the dominant one of Malissa’s life.Malissa and her husband were tenant farmers in Kentucky in the lastdecades of the nineteenth century. She moved to Indianapolis in 1910.When her husband became ill, she convinced the manager of UnionStation that she could take over his cleaning job at night. She collectedcoal from the railroad station and sold it to make ends meet, along withmaking and selling ice cream. After moving with her second husbandand family to Cleveland in 1927, she began to work, cleaning and cook-ing for wealthy whites. She lived close to her grandchildren and cameevery day to help care for them. At age 83, Malissa quit her job in thefashionable white district and came to live with her daughter and her10 children, to help care for them. Years later, Mary Helen Washingtonwrote of her grandmother: “She lived to be 93 and was never once ina hospital. I never saw her cry. I never saw her afraid. For a black woman,born in 1867, the daughter of an ex-slave, it doesn’t seem like a badlife” (Washington 1998, p. 162 ).


Grandmothers in Middle- and Upper-Class African-American Families

Reflecting on her grandmother, Washington points out the unique po-sition of African-American women who remained in the South or whomigrated north in search of better economic circumstances. Thesewomen, forced to survive in a world indifferent to the socially con-structed qualities of true womanhood, were not bound by the stricturesof middle-class expectations for femininity. They had to be as strongand tough as men, and, in that way, lived free of traditional white genderroles and outside of the expectations of age, its comforts, and many ofits limitations. On the other hand, many grandmothers in more affluentAfrican-American families shared characteristics with many of theirwhite counterparts: they had special relationships with their grandchil-dren that were mediated by their parents.10 Most who spoke of theirgrandmothers in these interviews noted that their grandmothers hadpassed on their families’ ethnic history. The necessity for hard physicallabor that characterized poorer grandmothers was absent from theirstories.11

Many of these older women joined women’s clubs, which proliferatedamong middle-class African-American communities in the latter part ofthe nineteenth century and continued to be an important social andpolitical outlet in the twentieth century. Caroline Bond Day conductedan “anthropological field study” of African-American women ages 68–94in Georgia from 1928 to 1930. She found that the majority of womenin Atlanta in this category belonged to a women’s club. All were livingin their own homes or their children’s homes. Day was impressed withthe “great cleanliness in food production” and “natural motherly in-stincts” in the women she interviewed. She noted that “great care wastaken of all the children in the home” (Day 1932, p. 26). A white observerin the 1940s and 1950s was struck by the “marked filial respect andobedience among the younger people in the small towns and rural areasof the South.” He attributed this to the fact that “many old people arestill active as workers, and many still provide support and care for chil-dren and grandchildren,” implying that the strong contribution African-American elders made to their communities elicited the devotion andrespect of younger folk (Lewis 1955, p. 23).

Wives and mothers continued to work outside the home in manymiddle-class families, but elder African-American women did not. In thelate nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, the fact thatmany African-American mothers needed to work, often was viewed aslamentable by their husbands. The luxury of being solely a homemakerand mother was a source of pride (Harley 1988).


Relationships with Grandchildren

The grandmothers in affluent African-American families had more dis-tant relationships with their grandchildren than the grandmothers dis-cussed earlier in this article. Charles Houston attended Harvard LawSchool and taught at Howard University, where he became dean of thelaw school. His only child, William Houston, while a student at Harvard,regularly received letters from both his mother and father, asking himto write his grandmother more frequently. The elder Houston wrote in1914 that William’s “grandmother was very upset that you have notwritten her in over a week. She constantly carries you in her mind andheart” (William LePre Houston Family Papers, box 19). This sentimentalattachment to the grandmother seems characteristic of affluent African-American families. William LePre Houston, Anna Julia Cooper, RobertRussa Moton, Lorenzo Greene, Frances Cardozo, and Carter Woodsonwere all prominent African-American leaders in education or law at theend of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries whosefamily papers suggest that their grandmothers were important to thefamilies’ emotional life. Both the mothers and grandmothers in thesefamilies were social leaders in their communities.12 Their families didnot rely on their grandmothers (who outlived grandfathers at a consis-tent rate in these families) for economic survival or even for contri-butions to the family economy. In fact, families often provided care fortheir grandmothers, as in the case of the Houston, Moton, and Mont-gomery families.13 Mary Montgomery, whose family had been slaves ofJefferson Davis and were freed upon his death, made daily visits onhorseback to her grandmother, who lived on another Montgomery fam-ily plantation from 1872 to 1874. Montgomery gladly assumed the re-sponsibility of caring for her grandmother, writing that “She is improvingand I am so happy for I cannot imagine life without her” (MontgomeryFamily Papers, box 2).

Encouraging the education of their grandchildren was important forgrandmothers in these families, just as in families that were strugglingeconomically. Howard Thurman’s grandmother “insisted that he mustget an education somehow,” even though his father had died and thefamily “had a hard struggle to live” (Jennes 1936, p. 148). As Thurmanrecounts, “Grandmother held it all the more compellingly before me,because she herself had been born a slave and could neither read norwrite” (Jennes 1936, p. 149). Thurman struggled to obtain a high schooleducation and became a leader in the Florida Baptist church in theearly decades of the twentieth century.

Anna Julia Cooper graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and thenwent on to the Sorbonne and received her Ph.D. in Latin. She creditsher mother and grandmother, both former slaves, for giving her the


determination to finish her education. Cooper was president of Fre-linghuysen University in Washington, D.C., from 1930 to 1941 and animportant author and educational leader. Widowed at a young age,Cooper became guardian to five great-nephews and nieces in 1906, whenshe was in her late 50s, taking on a role frequently assumed by grand-mothers (Anna Julia Cooper Papers).

Myra Colson Callis, born in 1892, became a prominent social workerin Philadelphia with a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago.Every year, she and the rest of her family traveled to Virginia for a familyreunion to visit her grandmother, Ella Gertrude Colson Jackson, theemotional center of the family’s life. In a handwritten autobiography,Myra described how “the problems of the world were solved aroundgrandma’s kitchen table.” Myra thought her grandmother, who livedwith Callis’s family while the girl was growing up, “the wisest woman inall the world” and wrote to her frequently during her adolescence andyoung adulthood. Her grandmother was always on the side of her grand-children; if a teacher scolded or mistreated them, her grandmotherwould stand up for them. She would call the teacher in question “theold Ewe.” Myra lived with her grandmother and nine others when shewas growing up, including her aunt, mother and father, two orphannephews, and three siblings (Myra Colson Callis Papers, box 193, no.6).

Alain Locke, born in Philadelphia in 1886, was an educator, philos-opher, author, and critic. He graduated from Harvard University in 1918with a Ph.D. in philosophy and was one of the first African-AmericanRhodes Scholars. He taught philosophy at Howard University for muchof his career. When Locke was young, his father bathed, fed, and gen-erally cared for him, insisting that neither grandmother have too muchdirect contact with him because “he distrusted their old fashioned ways,”according to Locke. Both grandmothers were “strictly forbidden to dis-cipline him, much to their annoyance.” Locke’s father was afraid hisown mother or mother-in-law would “discipline him too severely.” WhileLocke was at Harvard, his mother wrote him frequently, asking him towrite his grandmother. His grandmother continued to be a strong in-fluence on Locke for the rest of her life, encouraging him to continuehis education and attending his graduation from Harvard (Alain LockeFamily Papers, box 164, no. 47).14

Henry Turner, a minister who was known throughout South Carolinafor his oratory in the 1880s, was raised by his grandmother after hismother died. Turner’s grandmother “was not so notable for goodnessand female modesty, but was regarded as a woman of great physicalresources. She was tall and proportionately built and had a fearful tem-per. No one in the neighborhood ever dared to interfere with her chil-dren, animals, fences or anything that she owned, for the risk of being


fearfully handled if she got in reach of them. She lived to be ninetyyears old” (Carter 1888, p. 185).

Fanny Jackson-Cooper, an educator from Philadelphia who spent sum-mers with her grandmother, wrote about her in her autobiography,published in 1913: “We used to call our grandmother ‘mammy’ and oneof my earliest recollections is I was sent to keep my mammy company.It was in a little one-room cabin. We used to go up a ladder to the loftwhere we slept. Mammy used to make a long prayer every night beforegoing to bed. She would ask God to bless her offspring. This wordremained with me, for I wondered what offspring meant” (Jackson-Cooper 1913, p. 9).

Grandmothers and Attitudes toward Whites

It was through their grandmothers that many African Americans forgedtheir first attitudes toward their own ethnic group and toward whites.Some grandmothers disliked whites; these grandmothers would protecttheir grandchildren from neighborhood white kids. One grandmotherin Georgia shooed the taunting kids away by commanding them to “git,you white trash, git” (Barton 1948, p. 208). Other grandmothers leanedtoward “bourgeois” values and schooled their grandchildren in “whiteways.” These grandmothers had “white middle class attitudes” and be-lieved “the whiter the better” (Barton 1948, p. 208).

Richard Wright and Langston Hughes had grandmothers who epi-tomized different attitudes toward whites. Wright lived with his maternalgrandmother during some of his childhood because his mother’s lifeas a sharecropper broke her health. His grandmother attempted to raiseWright as a Seventh Day Adventist, away from other African-Americanchildren, in order to emphasize her distance from the poorer status inwhich she herself had been raised. Wright rebelled when he was thirteenand refused to go to church anymore. He later wrote that his grand-mother raised him as in an “upper class Negro family,” making him“deeply sensitive to the tradition of ridicule and inferiority attaching tocolor, hating the tradition and yet inevitably absorbing it” (Barton 1948,p. 240).

Langston Hughes, like Wright, was also deeply influenced by hisgrandmother, Mary Patterson, with whom he lived in Kansas until hewas 12. His grandmother impressed on him the idea of freedom; shehad gone to college at Oberlin, and her first husband had been killedin John Brown’s raid. She told him the story of the raid at Harper’sFerry many times. Hughes told the story of his childhood and his grand-mother in his autobiography, The Big Sea. He remembered that he andhis grandmother struggled to manage in Kansas. His grandmother

didn’t take in washing or go out to cook, for she had never worked for anyone.


But she tried to make a living by renting rooms to college students from KansasUniversity . . . sometimes we would move out entirely and go to live with afriend, while she rented the whole little house for ten or twelve dollars a month,to make a payment on the mortgage. But we were never quite sure the whitemortgage man was not going to take the house. And sometimes, on that account,we would have very little to eat, saving to pay the interest. You see my grand-mother was very proud and she would never beg or borrow anything fromanybody. She sat . . . held me on her lap and told me long, beautiful storiesabout people who wanted to make the Negroes free. . . . Through my grand-mother’s stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobodyever cried in my grandmother’s stories. . . . She was a proud women—gentle,but Indian and proud. (Hughes 1986, p. 116)

Grandmothers after World War II

Grandmothers continued to play an important child caring and rearingrole in African-American families in the South after World War II. Asyoung mothers worked as live-in domestics, their mothers cared for theirchildren (Carson 1969). Rohrer and Edmonson interviewed more thanone hundred African-American families in New Orleans from 1953 to1956 and observed that the bond between mother and daughter wasmore sacred than any other. This was the reason, the researchersthought, that almost all the mothers who worked had their mothersliving with them, caring for the grandchildren (Rohrer and Edmonson1960).

E. Franklin Frazier, a well-known African-American sociologist in thepostwar era, valorized the African-American grandmother in The NegroFamily in the United States (1951). Frazier linked the power of the grand-mother in the family to her role as the head of the family in Africanculture (“the oldest woman is regarded as the head of the family”), aswell as to the central role she played in preserving the family duringslavery (1951, p. 117). Since grandmothers were the midwives for ruralAfrican Americans (and whites) in the South, they became, accordingto Frazier, grandmother to all children they delivered. Another enco-mium to the grandmother appeared in Crisis in 1973. Faustine Jones,in “The Lofty Role of the Black Grandmother,” wrote that “neitherretirement communities nor nursing and ‘old folks homes’ are popu-lated by black grandmothers. They remain active participants in familyactivities and struggles as long as life exists” (p. 19). The respect ofyoung African Americans for their elders was a point of pride in thecommunity.15

The grandmothers in Kathryn Morgan’s history of her family exem-plify the storytelling tradition continued by grandmothers (Morgan1980). Morgan’s maternal great-grandmother, Caddy, was a “storytellerwho exerted a powerful influence on grandchildren’s and great grand-


children’s lives. She told stories of slavery passed down to her by hermother.” According to Morgan, “Grandma Caddy whipped her greatgrandchildren and gave them moral instruction while she did it” (1980,p. 14). These stories were buffers against the racism of the white world.Each had a strong moral point and was populated by family members,dead and alive.

Many African-American families continued to live within powerfuland extensive kinship networks, where the grandmother played a ma-jor role. The pattern of grandmothers living with families and caringfor children continued in the 1970s, according to Joyce Aschenbrenner(1975). She finds that grandmothers frequently lived with their chil-dren and grandchildren and that the mother-daughter bond contin-ued to be the most powerful one in the family. Even when sons anddaughters live independently of their parents, “they often remain inthe same neighborhood as their parents and form closely-knit groups.. . . These localized family groups are the focus of childrearing; theyare an economic boon to working parents and are the agents of so-cialization.” Nonrelatives were considered kin, while relatives some-times were not. Adults often took the roles of “play mother” whenthey were childless. Children would help out the “play mother” andspend the night with them, and the “play mother” would buy themgifts and give them counsel (Aschenbrenner 1975, pp. 13–14).

In the early 1970s, Carol Stack studied an economically marginalizedAfrican-American community in a midwestern city (1974). Grandmoth-ers, aunts, and great-aunts (who were also considered grandmothers)had full rights of discipline when they raised a child, even when themother was present in the home. Many children saw a number of womenas their mother. Stack argues that child care was flexible in order tocorrespond with the fluxes in the composition of the household. Intimes of need, children in the homes of related adults could count onthe adults to care for them; one member of the kinship group usuallywas self-identified as the substitute parent. The kinship group under-stood who was taking major responsibility for the child; arrangementswere not made by happenstance. Stack notes that grandmothers oftenraised the children born to teenage girls, while the young motherscontinued to live in the home and renew their lives as adolescents.

Mothers viewed their kin as a source of shared responsibility for childrearing; most mothers worked and had no choice but to enlist kinsupport. Sometimes kin stepped in when the mother already had severalchildren, “to help the mother out,” and took a child to raise. Stack offersthe narrative of one resident of the community as an example:

My mother already had three children when I was born. Her maternal great-aunt had raised her. After I was born my mother’s great–aunt insisted on taking


me to help my mother out. I stayed there after my mother got married andmoved to The Flats. I wanted to move there too, but my “mama” didn’t wantto give me up and my mother didn’t want to fight with her. When I was fourteenI left anyway and my mother took me in. When my youngest daughter got poliomy mother insisted on taking her. I got a job and lived nearby with my son. Mymother raised my little girl until my girl died. (Stack 1974, p. 67)

Stack notes that the roles of both parent and grandparent couldinclude close kin and friends, who might take over child rearing for atime. The inclusion of friends in a loose kinship structure was not re-ported as often in the rural South. It is likely that urban life left somefamilies shorn of the complete extended families that they had enjoyedin the rural South; friends could fill this gap.

These child-sharing arrangements demonstrate the value of childrenin this community: family members and sometimes friends were eagerto take responsibility to raise someone else’s child. Raising childrenwas seen as a privilege; outside interference, especially from childwelfare agencies, was deeply resented. It was something to be avoidedat all costs.

Martin and Martin (1978) observed over two thousand extended fam-ily members in Missouri over a period of 8 years in the 1970s. They findthat in households where generations lived together, economic survivaland support were the paramount reasons. Families frequently consistedof four generations living under the same roof. In cases where familiesdid not live together—for example, when a daughter married and hada child—this “sub extended family” would live close by and considerthemselves part of the family. The authors describe a mutual aid systemthrough these extended subfamilies, as members felt obligations towardaunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces. The most respected person in thefamily was, without exception, the eldest person, who was usually a great-grandmother between ages 60 and 85 who had outlived her husband.It was to her that family members came when they were unemployedand needed short-term economic help. She had resources because fam-ily members gave money to “Momma” every month.

Grandmothers had other important roles in these families: they usedfolk remedies to cure ailing members and felt “a deep sense of worth asheads of their families,” the authors observed (Martin and Martin, p. 20).Several women remarked that there was no time to grow old; many werecontinuing to raise their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Thesewomen imparted traditional values to their children and grandchildrenand raised them “the old fashioned way,” which the authors describedas characterized by “strong religious beliefs, strict discipline, respect forparental authority and reliance on experience.” Grandmothers hadmore authority than mothers over children: “When a child feels hisnatural mother has been unjust, he may plead his case before his grand-


mother, whose word is generally law.” Most children in the family re-ferred to their grandmother as “Momma” and their biological motheras “Mother Mary,” according to the name of the mother. Sometimes themother was called “Little Momma,” while the grandmother was called“Big Momma” (Martin and Martin 1978, pp. 45, 47).

Conclusion

Well into the 1980s, work, whether for wages or as unpaid householdlabor and child care, continued to be a central theme in the lives ofAfrican-American grandmothers. For many African-American grand-mothers, old age has taken on a distinctly different shape and texturethan it has for white women, particularly in the twentieth century.16 Inspite of increased longevity, most African Americans have not experi-enced retirement unconnected to health problems, even in the twen-tieth century when retirement became a reality for most white Ameri-cans.17 As in the past, today older African-American women are morelikely to work than are older African-American men (Coleman 1993).

African-American women cannot be studied apart from the contextof family life. In many families the grandmother fulfilled the maternalrole and played a direct role in children’s lives. Can African-Americangrandmothers be studied as a group? Like all people bound by genderand ethnicity, the African-American grandmother is “malleable, contin-gent and varied” (Hunter and Taylor 1998, p. 255). Yet important com-monalities exist that underlie the unique role shaped by these grand-mothers. Some of the exceptional qualities of African-Americangrandmothers were forged in response to hard times, others were man-ifestations of cultural traditions of respect for the elderly, kin-based childrearing, skills in domestic medicine and midwifery, an emphasis oneducation and belief in the potential of children and grandchildren,and grandmothers’ emphasis on family history and narratives as a meansof resisting oppression. While grandmothers in middle-class African-American families had roles similar to those of white grandmothers,they have been more central to their families than have white grand-mothers over the last century.18

Today, grandparents from all ethnic groups are “assuming care understressful circumstances—drug abuse, serious mental and emotionalproblems” (Pearlin 1993, p. 314). Recently, grandmothers in African-American families have been the subject of research that depicts themas responding to crises and social problems among their family mem-bers.19 Yet historically, African-American grandmothers have routinelyassumed care of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren to enablethe family unit to survive economically. Within African-American fam-ilies, grandmother care should not be viewed as anomalous or arisingfrom a family deficit; instead it is a tradition inherited from the strong


emphasis on kinship solidarity in Africa, in the slave quarters, and inthe lived struggles of African Americans in the United States. An im-portant strength of African-American families today lies in the culturalheritage that encouraged them to rely on their grandmothers.

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Notes

This research was partially supported by a grant from the Lois and Samuel SilbermanFund. The author wishes to thank Catherine Goodman, D.S.W., for her contributions tothis article.

1. For a discussion of grandmothers’ caretaking roles and the economic implicationsfor families, see Presser (1989) and Winston (1999). For a discussion of the impact of ageon grandparenting, see Burton (1996). For ethnic comparisons, see Kivett (1993) andPruchno (1999). For grandmothers as social support for mothers, see Jackson (1998). Forquality of grandparenting interaction, see Wilson et al. (1990); Burton (1992); Burtonand Merriwether-deVries (1992); Timberlake (1992); Chase-Landsdale, Brooks-Gunn, andZamsky (1994); Soloman and Marx (1995); Gordon et al. (1997); Hunter (1997); andCaputo (1999).

2. Many of these oral histories and interviews are available in manuscript form at theLibrary of Congress; others are disseminated through the Library of Congress Web site,which includes more than 2,900 documents. Additionally, under the American MemoryCollection of the Library of Congress, available on the World Wide Web, I searched the“First Person Narratives of the American South, 1860–1920” and the “African AmericanPamphlets, 1824–1909.”

3. These were published in three separate sources: Rawick (1972); Federal Writers’Project (1940); and Perdue, Barden, and Phillips (1976). Other material from the Amer-ican Life Histories Project, collected under the auspices of the Federal Writer’s Project,1936–1940, has been published in three separate volumes: Federal Writers’ Project (1939);Tom Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch (1978); and Botkin (1989).

4. Some historians criticize the accuracy of the documents as primary sources offeringan accurate depiction of slave life, arguing, for example, that slavery was romanticized inthe collection and that its brutality was deemphasized when the interviewers were white


(four-fifths of the time) and not eager to elicit or record the atrocities of the system. Seeespecially Berlin, Favreau, and Miller (1998, pp. ix–xlix).

5. Paul Escott (1979) discusses some of these limitations along with the usefulness ofthe documents.

6. Some argue that the end of slavery necessitated a stronger kinship system than before,as extended families came together to care for aged relatives and orphaned children whowould formerly have been provided for by the plantation owner. See Berlin, Miller, andRowland (1988, pp. 89–97).

7. Tenant farmers contracted with planters to work the land; in return the planters tookthe proceeds, giving the tenant farmers a small share of the profits and some rations.Since this generally was not enough to sustain families, farm families engaged in householdmanufacturing and gardening to generate adequate resources. See Holt (1994, pp.231–62).

8. This was particularly grueling work, as mothers who cared for white children rarelygot to see their own; most went to their own homes only once in 2 weeks. See Hines(1990, pp. 37–54).

9. Gutman (1976) makes this point, as do Franklin (1997) and Speer (1967). For ageneral treatment of the northern migration, see Henri (1975).

10. See Edelman (1999) and Cherlin and Furstenberg (1992) for recent discussion ofthe grandparent-grandchild relationship in white families.

11. In the 1970s, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College began the Black Women’sOral History Project, with the goal of collecting the oral memories of a selected group ofolder African-American women. The 72 women interviewed were over 70 years old at thetime of the interviews. Interviewers routinely asked the respondents about their familybackground. Out of the 72 women interviewed, 15 were raised at one time in their child-hood by the grandmothers. The majority knew and all spoke of their grandmothers whenasked about their family history. See Hill (1991).

12. See Montgomery Family Papers, Moton Family Papers, Carter Woodson Papers,William LePre Houston Family Papers, and Frances Cardozo Family Papers, all in theManuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress.

13. See family papers for all three families in the Manuscript Reading Room, Libraryof Congress.

14. Other prominent African-American women who credited their grandmothers withinfluence on their lives include Ophelia Egypt, an educator at Howard University Schoolof Social Work from the 1920s to the 1970s. Her maternal grandmother, whom Egyptdescribed as having a less formal education but more real wisdom than any of us, raisedEgypt after her mother died and told stories of her own family during and after slavery;Egypt preserved these stories in the Unwritten History of Slavery (1968). In 1978, her wholefamily journeyed to Texas for a family reunion with her grandmother. When OpheliaEgypt herself became a grandmother in the 1960s, she joined “the grandmothers’ club,”an informal group of African-American grandmothers in Washington, D.C. (Ophelia EgyptPapers, Moorland-Spingarn Center, Howard University, MS box 140, no. 5). Similarly, WileyBranton, Dean of the Law School at Howard University, continued to worry about hisgrandmother, who lived in Mississippi; he implored her to come live with him (Wiley A.Branton Papers, Moorland-Springarn Center, Howard University, MS box 187, no. 3).Prominent educators Flemmie Kittrell, Emanuel McDuffie, Willliam Thomas Singeleton,and Kelly Miller are among others who cited the importance of their grandmothers intheir lives, as role models and as mother figures (Flemmie Kittrell Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Center, Howard University, MS box 104, no. 1; Caldwell 1919).

15. For a discussion of this, see Ladner (1971), esp. pp. 61–63.16. Historically, relatively few elderly African Americans have lived in nursing homes or

other institutionalized settings. In 1890, 80 percent of African Americans lived in ruralareas of the South, where very few homes for the aged existed. In contrast, northern andmidwestern cities saw a considerable increase in homes for African-American elders be-tween 1880 and 1910, during which time over a dozen homes were opened. Families inthe rural South, who wanted to care for their family members themselves, resisted homesfor African-American elderly. Some of the homes in rural areas were empty, as “few evergo out to be cared for.” Others had only one or two residents. Most of these places were“poorly provided for” and located in isolated areas, perhaps decreasing their alreadylimited appeal. See Pollard (1996, pp. 69–70). An indication that this reluctance continued


until the 1980s is found in a survey conducted in the mid-1980s, of 501 elderly AfricanAmericans living in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. The vast majority of respondentssurveyed lived alone or with one other person. A large majority believed it was veryimportant to live near family members. Less than 1 percent of the respondents had everconsidered going to a nursing home. See Parks (1988).

17. See Fischer (1978), as well as Uhlenberg and Kirby (1998, pp. 23–39) for a discussionof the changing demographics of old age and the emergence of the concept of retirement.Rather than retiring outright, many elder African Americans are part of a group that oneresearcher in 1985 called the “unretired-retired.” See Gibson (1993, pp. 277–301). Somemembers of this group continue to work at least part-time at low-status, low-paying jobsin which they have worked all their lives. When interviewed, they consider themselvesdisabled rather than retired; that is, they would like to work more, but their health doesnot allow them. These black elderly are more disadvantaged economically and sociallythan those who consider themselves fully retired and who live on retirement income.Findings of lower morale among those who did not consider themselves retired, comparedto those who did, suggest that working after retirement age is out of necessity rather thanchoice. As Coleman (1993, p. 255) noted, “black elderly may work because of economicnecessity or for survival rather than for fulfillment, recognition, or status.” Contrastingresults were found in Coleman’s study among African-American elderly over age 65 (asopposed to those over age 55). Large numbers of this subset said they would continue towork even if they were financially secure, suggesting that the strong work ethic endorsedby African Americans in the nineteenth century continues to characterize the oldestAfrican Americans. Whatever the reason, retirement has not been seen as an option bymost African-American women.

18. According to Uhlenberg and Kirby (1998), the medicalization and psychologicaltreatment of old age has led to a view that older people are obsolete. Under this view,the authors argued, there emerged a negative perception of grandparents as persons likelyto interfere with the parents’ control. Kornhaber (1996, p. 18) argued that, today, “grand-parents have relatively low status. . . .” This does not seem to be the case with African-American families, who continued to revere their grandparents, especially grandmothers.

19. This is point is made by Hunter and Taylor (1998, pp. 70–86).

Documents

The History of Grandmothers in the African‐American Community - Jillian Jimenez