Celebrating 92 years with my grandmother

In the past few years, I have become more intentional about recording these conversations on my digital recorder, so that I have a permanent record. This is not something it takes a lot of resources to do. Most phones have recording capabilities and everyone has access to pen and paper to write down their elders’ […]

In the past few years, I have become more intentional about recording these conversations on my digital recorder, so that I have a permanent record. This is not something it takes a lot of resources to do. Most phones have recording capabilities and everyone has access to pen and paper to write down their elders’ stories about their lives. (Sunday Trust has been doing an excellent series of interviews with older Nigerians that is a great model to follow). I would love to hear from readers stories of their own family history. Send me your stories.
Last week, my other grandmother, my mother’s mother, celebrated her 92nd birthday. She is an independent old lady, who has travelled the world since my grandfather died 14 years ago. She still drives and maintains the family home where my family stay when we visit the U.S. On her birthday, I sat down with her for two hours of conversation about her life. I have heard most of the stories before, but I never tire of hearing them, and every time she tells them, she usually adds a new detail or memory.
My grandmother’s father met her mother in England where he was posted during World War I. He was an American army cook. She was an English chamber maid at a posh girl’s school in Salisbury. When the war ended and he was scheduled to be sent back to America, they had to get the bishop’s permission to marry immediately without the customary waiting period. They were married in Salisbury Cathedral. After they took the army ship to America, he built them a log house homestead in rural Fort Meade, Florida, where he raised honey bees.
My grandmother, Louise, was born on a cold morning in January 1922. Some of her earliest memories are playing with her older brother among the pawpaw trees and her own great grandmother feeding her grape fruit. In addition to his honey business, her father had a large garden. “We were pesticides,” she tells me, eyes twinkling. She and her three siblings were responsible for picking the bugs off the plants. She was a young girl when the stock market crashed and the great economic depression began in America, but her family didn’t suffer for food as her father raised most of what they needed.
She did most of her early schooling to a two-room schoolhouse, which usually had only one teacher to teach all grade levels. When she was in 7th grade, the school district began to provide buses to take the children into the school in town. A few months before she graduated from high school, a tornado, a powerful cyclone wind, hit their house and ripped the roof off. She remembers sleeping in the front room with her sister Benny when they heard a sound like a train and the rain began to pour in on them. With the roof went her dreams of going to college, as she didn’t want to ask her father for the money for higher education when he had to worry about repairing the house. Instead, she went to work with her aunt in a commissary for a mine. Not long after, the principle of her high school recommended her for a scholarship to business school, so she went to live with another aunt and went to school while working several jobs, one as a bookkeeper for Firestone Tires. During this time, the American naval fleet at Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan and the United States entered World War II.
World War II changed life for everyone. My grandmother’s brother and the other boys in her community went to war. There were government rations on food and materials. People were issued with ration tickets and if the tickets ran out, they would go hungry. At night, when the alarms sounded, there were blackouts, and there were rumours of German submarines close by, off the coast. Everyone had to buy heavy blackout curtains so that no lights would escape out of a house at night. Cars painted over their headlamps so that only a small point of light would illuminate the road. In training exercises for civilians, planes would drop flour from the air. If you were hit by the flour, you were told you were a “casualty.” It was meant to teach people the seriousness of obeying the alarms, but my grandmother remembers that “we would sit out on the front porch” in the dark and “watch and laugh.”
It was during the war that she met my grandfather, Thurman, a tall handsome young Army lieutenant, who brought a contingent of ten or twelve other officers to the church Louise attended. When the girls saw such a large contingent of young men, they quickly organized a “social” in the church basement. My grandmother climbed on a chair to announce a game they should play but slipped and fell off the chair. My grandfather was the first to reach her. Helping her up, he asked, “Honey, are you hurt?”
Nothing but her pride was wounded. While the others sang songs and drank hot chocolate, she was so humiliated that she slipped away at the first opportunity. A few days later, there was a New Year’s party, but she had overheard the college girls saying, “We don’t want those older girls to come.” Her pride was hurt again. “I didn’t want to go,” she told me. “I was late. I missed the trolley. I walked and was late getting in.” But when she got there all the officers were there, and they called, “Louise, Louise, come teach us this game.” My grandfather rushed over to her and said, “Will you be my partner tonight?” Now in 2014, she looks at me and smiles, “We were partners for sixty-five years.”
Three months later, he was deployed to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. She would not see him again until the end of the war. But they exchanged letters, light airmail forms called “e-mail” that could be folded over and sealed, which were always read by government censors. In one of the letters he sent her some money and told her to go pick out an engagement ring. When he returned in 1945, they married and moved to the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia where he had grown up. They lost their first child Joanie to illness when she was three but raised four other children together. My grandmother helped my grandfather run his furniture store, which he later turned into a health food store.
My grandparents had an open house. Ever since I can remember, they had non-related people living with them, including, in the1980s, a man dying of a mysterious new illness, AIDS. My grandmother says they didn’t know how it passed then, and she thought they might get it too. This fear did not stop her from taking care of the man, whom they had known since he was a young boy. My grandparents also loved to travel, and they came to visit my family in 1989 only a year after we moved to Port Harcourt. They returned again in 1997 when we were in Jos. After my grandfather died in 2000, my grandmother has returned to Nigeria twice. She was visiting my parents in Jos during the first Jos crisis in September 2001. Her planned return to the U.S. was delayed when the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York shut down American airports for several days. The crisis didn’t scare her off, though. She returned with her sister and brother-in-law a few years later for another visit, and in the past decade she has also travelled to Europe with other family members and taken a pilgrimage to Israel.
When I asked her if she had any advice to give after 92 years on earth, she said she has learned to keep “doing the best you can. Love the Lord and serve Him. Keep doing what is right. Help others, take as many opportunities as you can to go on a trip.” Finally, she said, “Keep right on going. Don’t give up.”