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

The History of Grandmothers in the AfricanAmerican Community Author(s): Jillian Jimenez Reviewed work(s): Source: Social Service Review,
Vol. 76, No. 4 (December 2002), pp. 523-551 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/342994 . Accessed: 07/02/2012 23:21
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Service Review.
http://www.jstor.org
The History of Grandmothers in the African-American Community

Jillian Jimenez
California State University, Long Beach
This article examines the role of grandmothers in the African-American community from Reconstruction through the New Deal. It suggests that grandmothers were central to the economic survival of their families and worked as long as they lived, in paid labor and household labor, to help provide for their families. Grandmothers had many roles in their communities: they were midwives, purveyors of domestic medicine, and caretakers of children. Grandmothers were the source of oral histories and narratives that helped their grandchildren resist the oppression of the larger society. This early role is linked to the role of grandmothers since World War II.
In the last 30 years, grandparents raising grandchildren have become a matter of intense policy interest and research in United States, and in the last decade, public child welfare with these families has grown. The number of children raised in grandparent-headed families has almost doubled, from 2.2 million in 1970 to 4.5 million in 2000 (Bryson 2001). These families are more likely to be African American than from other ethnic groups. In 1994, 13 percent of African-American children, 5.7 percent of Latino children, and 3.9 percent of white children were being raised in grandparent-headed households (Saluter 1996). In the 1990s the biggest increase in grandparent-headed families has been among families with no parent present (Bryson and Casper 1999). Grandmothers outnumber grandfathers as caregivers by a ratio of ve to three (Bryson 2001). Although the number of Americans living long enough to be grandparents has increased substantially since the beginning of the twentieth
Social Service Review (December 2002). 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0037-7961/2002/7604-0001$10.00
524
Social Service Review
century, an ethnic gap has existed since the 1940s between the proportion of African-American children living with a grandmother in the home and the proportion of white families living with a grandmother (Uhlenberg and Kirby 1998). One recent study comparing 400 white grandmothers with 300 African-American grandmothers raising children nds that African-American grandmothers are more likely than white grandmothers to have peers who also live with their grandchildren. African-American grandmothers are also more likely to come from families where multiple generations live together and to experience less burden than white grandmothers (Pruchno 1999). For some AfricanAmerican women who do not have a stable source of partner support, their mothers continue to provide child care and nancial support. Both in residence and as extraresidential kin, grandmothers are important members in impoverished households headed by single mothers (Jarrett 1994). Considerable research compares African-American grandmothers with grandmothers from other ethnic groups and examines their role as caretakers in extended families; their expectations for assistance and exchange of help with younger members of their families; the impact of age, health, education, and income on parenting and grandparenting roles; and the quality of their interactions with their grandchildren.1 In this article I explore the history of grandmothers in the AfricanAmerican community in an effort to illuminate the origins and evolution of the grandmother in African-American life. I use primary documents from historical repositories of African-American family papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division; manuscripts from the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, Archive of Folk Culture; family papers from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; and oral histories of African Americans collected under the American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers Project, 19361940 series. Former slaves were not interviewed for the Federal Writers Project (FWP) narratives; instead these are stories of so-called ordinary Americans, white and African American.2 Published primary sources used here include the oral histories of prominent AfricanAmerican women from the Black Women Oral History Project of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, collected in the 1970s, and biographies and autobiographies of African Americans from the nineteenth century to the present. Crucial to this research were over two thousand former slave testimonies collected under the auspices of the FWP from 1936 to 1938.3 In this article, I argue that, although the role of grandmother in African-American communities was mediated by class differences, regional differences, and wider historical changes, there was commonality in the lives of African-American grandmothers in the latter half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries and, to some extent,
African-American Grandmothers
525
today. The grandmother role that characterizes majority culture in contemporary America, a role conducted with clear expectations of its limits and demands, did not exist for most African-American women, who struggled to provide for their families as long as they lived. Work was the central theme of life for older African-American women in economically marginalized communities; their role as grandmother was not paramount. Their relationship with their grandchildren was often as a mother, not a more distant relative to whom access is regulated by the parent. It was only in middle-class African-American families that the special privileges of the grandmother role shaped the lives of older women, just as it did for middle-class white women. Historically, African-American women who had biological grandchildren were workers providing for their families needs; they cared for adult children as well as for their grandchildren and the children of others. Grandmothers worked in elds in the rural areas of the South, engaged in household production and maintenance, and performed as midwives and purveyors of domestic medicine. The biological relationship of grandparent to grandchild did not dene the form or function of the grandmother role. For many African Americans, in fact, there was no constituted role of grandmother. Instead, the grandmother was another woman shouldering responsibility for the familys survival and community well-being. As this history suggests, grandmother is a protean role; the middle-class white ideal of the grandmother is socially constructed and depends not only on longevity but also more signicantly on a measure of afuence. In the African-American community, the designation grandmother was a uid one, often used interchangeably with mama, and freely given by family members and others to women who may not have been biological grandmothers (Close 1997).
Grandmothers after Reconstruction

The richest source of documents about the lives of elderly AfricanAmerican women in the decades after slavery is found in the FWP former slave narratives. These documents, featuring reminiscences of over two thousand former slaves in 17 southern and border states, are limited in several ways. Only about 2 percent of living slaves were interviewed, and participants were not randomly selected. Most interviewers were white, and former slaves in the 1930s were likely to have been less than candid with white interviewers. African-American interviewers appeared to elicit more honest responses about the conditions of slavery. The vast majority of participants would have been children or adolescents during slavery. In addition to the shadows time casts over personal recollections, this fact has led historians to question the reliability of the interviews. Nevertheless, these narratives offer a vivid picture of African-American family life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 The
526
recollections of participants are consistent in the descriptions of family life in the slave quarters, but the accuracy of the descriptions of the slaves treatment by white owners is questioned, since individuals interviewed by whites were more positive than those interviewed by African Americans.5 These narratives offer the most fully realized look at life in AfricanAmerican families two generations earlier. Those interviewing the former slaves also describe the lives of the respondents at the time of the interview, offering a window into the lives of elderly black folk in the 1930s and under slavery. These documents reveal much about the lives of grandmothers under slavery. Common themes emerge from the stories of the ex-slaves, themes that capture the outlines of the lives lived by older women, the vast majority of them grandmothers. Grandmothers and older women played a central role in community life under slavery and during the decades after Reconstruction. They cared for children, schooled them in their own homes, birthed babies, and provided domestic medicine for both African-American and white families. The naked state of freedom after slavery, without economic or political resources, continued to promote the importance of kinship among African Americans. The story of African-American community life in the South in the latter part of the nineteenth century is largely a story of kinship and survival. Caretakers of All the Children Under slavery, all women in the slave quarters were expected to be responsible for all the children living there (Lowenberg and Bogin 1976). This collective responsibility for the communitys children, combined with a broad kinship and caretaking culture brought from Africa, was experienced as an inevitable way of life in the South for decades after slavery. African culture emphasized the importance of identication with the larger kinship group outside the immediate family, as well as the assumption of kinship obligations to symbolic kin and a willingness by families to absorb children of kin and nonkin (Foster 1983; Woods 1996). Older African Americans were crucial to the creation and perpetuation of the unique African-American culture and antebellum plantation society in the South, especially by transmitting African cultural forms (Pollard 1981, p. 228). In Africa, older men and women were the religious leaders of their communities. There is evidence that elders, especially grandparents, had the important function of naming children in West Africa, a tradition that continued under slavery (Genovese 1976). Elders were the storytellers, the advisors, the links between the past and the present (Pollard 1981, p. 228). This culturally embedded veneration of the elderly would play an important role in the respect given
527
to the grandmother in the postslavery life of African Americans (Close 1997). During slavery, some grandmothers were picked to work in the house, caring for the children of the white owners. Older women were allowed to stop working in the elds and assigned lighter work around the house and garden. Along with this work, grandmothers usually were put in charge of caring for all the children on the plantation, since mothers were forced to work in the elds along with men (Rawick 1972). The collective responsibility for children under slavery reemphasized the role of ctive kin; older women assumed the role of mother or mama to all the children under their care, biologically related or not (Gutman 1976). After slavery, ctive kin remained an important way of binding small rural communities together in the cooperation of child rearing, food production, and other essential activities. Grandmothers played an important role in this necklace of responsibility and caring. Grandmothers ercely resisted the practice of local authorities binding out orphaned African-American children to their former white owners; they would travel across state lines to rescue their grandchildren from such situations, which they felt were akin to re-enslaving them, much to the puzzlement of white authorities.6 Grandmothers Educating for Resistance Grandmothers socialized all the children in their care into the work and survival techniques necessary for the brutal life of chattel slavery. Stacey Close (1997) describes the necessity during slavery of grandmothers offering a counternarrative to their grandchildren, one in which the owners had less power. Long after slavery ended, grandmothers maintained their status through storytelling, continuing these narratives of resisting oppression, and turning whites power against them in family histories, folktales, and songs (Family Folklore). Stories praising the courage of slave ancestors and reviling the cruelty of whites were often immediately followed by stories about the cleverness of both slaves and free persons after the war. Putting one over on the white man was a sign of particular skill and interpreted as a conquest, whether the victim knew about it or not (Family Folklore). After Reconstruction, elderly black women conducted private schools in their homes, for a small fee, for African-American children in the South (Clark 1962; Hill 1991; Holt 1994). Many of these schools were church related; Baptists and Methodists often helped sponsor these schools, since public education for African Americans was inadequate for most of the nineteenth century (Lowenberg and Bogin 1976). Working Grandmothers Work was the central theme in the lives of African-American women throughout their adult lives. During slavery and in the decades following,
528
grandmothers were the family and community healers, offering homemade potions and herbs, along with other folk practices, such as casting spells, to cure anyone in the slave quarters or local community who was ill. Grandmothers were midwives to the entire plantation and to nearby plantations where there were no grandmothers, delivering white as well as African-American babies (Rawick 1972). In North Carolina and in other tobacco-economy states in the 1880s and 1890s, African-American tenant farmers participated in a vast household economy, sustaining themselves outside the white-dominated market economy through gardening and home manufacturing.7 Older African-American women who did not work directly in tenant farming produced baskets, shoes, hats, and clothing for home use and for sale, in order to generate extra family income and to contribute resources for the establishment of community-controlled churches and schools. They kept the home and supervised the household production, while younger adults worked in the elds or sought manufacturing jobs. Many tenant farmers homes held three generations, but when grandparents lived nearby, grandchildren often visited for long periods, staying for months and helping the grandmother with quilting and sewing and household chores. In this way, grandchildren provided extra hands for their grandparents, and parents were spared the expense of feeding children while at the same time assured of the childrens safety. The synergy of African cultural patterns and survival strategies fashioned during slavery empowered African-American women in the early twentieth century to make a critical difference to their families. Their lives were not bound by either the strictures or the privileges of gender or age. Forced to work to help their families survive, they were the purveyors of domestic medicine and midwifery, preservers of family traditions, caretakers and educators of the communitys children, and exemplars of pride in their African-American heritage. Buffering the terrible effects of racism and inequality felt by most African-American children in this period, especially in the South, grandmothers offered a distinct, empowered interpretation of the lives experienced by their grandchildren. Grandmothers during the Great Depression The richest source of information about the lives of African-American older women in the Depression also is found in the FWP former slave narrative collection. Combined with interviews of elderly African Americans conducted under the American Life Histories series, these documents offer a glimpse into the life of the grandmother in the South. The themes that characterized lives of African-American grandmothers
529
in the decades after Reconstruction shaped the experiences of AfricanAmerican women who were grandmothers during the 1930s. Poverty is a central theme in all the FWP interviewsboth the former slave narratives and the American Life Histories series. Several of those interviewed between 1936 and 1940 asked whether the interviewer was one of those pension ladies or if the interviewer knew when they would receive their government pension (Rawick 1972, vol. 11, p. 16, vol. 13, pp. 11, 98). Grandmothers often outlived their children. They were survivors of poverty and racism, but their life force continued to be remarkably strong. Under slavery, grandmothers offered a counternarrative for the communitys children, one in which masters were less powerful. Grandmothers interviewed in the 1930s continued to do this, offering their family histories, their pride in their grandchildren, their herbal medicine, and their conjuring skills as part of the cultural resources African Americans needed to cope with the oppressive white world. As was the case under slavery, older women seemed to have a higher status in communities across the Depression-era South than did older men, perhaps because their roles were so exible, diverse, and necessary to the strength and endurance of the African-American family. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African-American elder women, mostly grandmothers, opened boarding houses, sold food at urban markets, and owned grocery stores in the South, unlike elder African-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 signicant role in the care of their grandchildren during the 1930s. In the early 1930s, Charles Johnson, a prominent African-American sociologist from the University of Chicago, studied 600 families from Macon County, Alabama (1934; 1941). He found that over 50 percent of the families interviewed had other relatives, mostly grandmothers, living with mothers and children in a household. He also noted a large number of households with older women as heads, caring for many children; mothers had left children with their own mothers in order to seek work at other plantations. He noted that the mother-daughter bond was the strongest one in the families, allowing grandmothers and mothers to share child rearing easily. These arrangements, which grandmothers accepted willingly, were meant to be temporary but often became permanent, according to Johnson. Some grandmothers were caring for children whose parents had died (Rawick 1972). In 1931 Ruth Allen found older women in the cotton farms of Texas keeping house for family members who picked cotton during the day (1931). These households were large; one included 19
530
people and most had more than 10 people. Allen found that women who had no children often reared large families of adopted children. One North Carolina grandmother told the FWP interviewer that she had raised her two grandsons after their mother married because I didnt know how that new man would treat the child (FWP 1939, p. 46). Caring for her two grandsons and her four children still living at home meant that nine people slept in their two-room house. Another woman, Mary Matthews, was caring for nine grandchildren even though she and her husband Aaron were in their 70s and working as tenant farmers. Their mother and father died and they had no place to go, she told the interviewer about her grandchildren (Terrell and Hirsch 1978, 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 do without. I never had nary a one I was willing to spare (Terrell and Hirsch 1978, p. 86). The Matthews family lived in four rooms, with three people to a bed. E. J. and Mattie Marshall were in their 80s and lived in Florida. They were overseeing strawberry picking on the land they were tenant farming and raising their granddaughter, whose mother was working out of state (Terrell and Hirsch 1978). Women who moved from rural to urban areas to nd work often left their children with their own mothers. John Wesley Dobbs and his sister went to live with their grandmother in Georgia when their parents separated. Dobbs recalled that he and his sister lived with his grandmother for 7 years in a three-room log cabin even though she was caring for 14 other children during this time, some her own and some not her own. Their mother came back twice a year to see the children and bring them clothes from the city (Powdermaker 1969). When a grandmother headed a household, she was the main authority gure for the children. Even when the mother lived at home, the grandmothers time with the children was more extensive, since the mother left for work during the day. This was true through the 1930s in the South, as older women willingly took responsibility for their grandchildrens behavior and welfare (FWP 1940; Powdermaker 1969) Likewise, it was not uncommon for a grandmother to take in her grandchildren and 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 leave to nd work, and the grandmother would have a child to raise and love who would sometimes help take care of her. Children were taken for the joy of having them, the assistance they may bring, or merely because they need a good home (Powdermaker 1969, p. 202). Many grandmothers also offered child care for their neighbor children, whose parents would drop them off at the grandmothers homes
531
on the way to pick cotton. Grandmothers took care of white children too, in the childrens homes, usually returning to their own homes in the evenings.8 One grandmother was described by her niece as the colored mammy nurse of all the children in the white homes in the community (Perdue, Barden, and Phillips 1976, p. 205). Reciprocal Care: Grandmothers and Grandchildren These sources suggest that during the brutal days of the Depression in the South more grandparents were caring for their grandchildren than were being cared for by them. Yet grandchildren helped their grandparents when they could. Some grandmothers who lived alone described receiving food and cleaning help from their children and grandchildren (Rawick 1972). Grandmothers who lived with grandchildren often explained the situation as their grandchildren living with them, rather than the other way around (Rawick 1972). Lettice Boyer was 110 when she was interviewed in Seabord, North Carolina, in 1936 by an FWP representative. She needed a stick to get around but continued to do the washing for her family. Lettice had moved in with her granddaughter Hattie only 2 months earlier. Hattie had brought her grandmother to her home because she felt that Lettice mustnt stay by herself any longer. All Lettices children were dead, as were all her great-great-grandchildren. Lettice was bothered that she was living with her granddaughters husband, Will, and eating his food, when he had never even eat a meals vittles at my house. The whole family, including Hattie and Wills two children, lived off the one bale of cotton the plantation owner had allowed Will, a tenant farmer, to keep for himself. Yet Will did not begrudge his wifes grandmother anything, telling her as long as I got bread you has too (Terrell and Hirsch 1978, pp. 2930). Thomas Doyle, born in 1889 in Tennessee, was left as an infant with his grandparents when his mother went North. His grandparents were tenant farmers, and they took good care of him until his grandaddy died when Doyle was 14. His care then fell to his step-mammy, the name he called his granmammy. When he was 16, his grandmother went to live with her sister, and Thomas went to work in the elds to make enough to keep her up. Thomas cared for his grandmother until she died (FWP 1939, p. 47). Still, not all grandmothers were well cared for. One Alabama grandmother in her 90s was found conned to her sick bed with only her 12-year-old grandson to care for her (Rawick 1972). Another who had suffered a stroke had no family to help her but her granddaughter, who came to her house a few times a week when she has time (Rawick 1972, vol. 9, p. 219). Most grandmothers were valued; one woman described how her mother spent 10 years looking for her own mother,
532
who had been sold during slavery, so that the older woman could be a mother to her daughter and a grandmother to her grandchildren (Rawick 1972). The cycle of grandmother care paralleled the life cycle. Respondents recounted being raised by their grandmothers and then caring for their own grandchildren (Rawick 1972). Education and Tradition Some of the women who were grandmothers at the time of the FWP interviews remembered their own grandmothers telling them stories when they were children living in slavery. These narratives wove a tapestry of family history, sometimes as far back as Africa. The FWP respondents passed these stories down to their own children and grandchildren. Stories of their ancestors capture in Africa and of the deceit and trickery by which 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 most popular in the rural South (Rawick 1972). Many of those interviewed described seeing ghosts that white people could not see. Other reports tell of grandmothers who cured neighbors from spells cast by others, both living and dead (Cooley 1926). These cultural practices were preserved by African Americans from their days as slaveswhen whites would threaten slaves with harm from spirits and ghostsas well as from their African heritage. Over time it was impossible to determine the roots of these practices, since they had fused in African-American culture (Escott 1979; Coggeshall 1996). Grandmothers were also repositories of family stories and cultural traditions that gave meaning to hard work on the land and that fed cultural roots. Their storytelling is a powerful theme in autobiographies of African Americans. Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and Maya Angelou 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 areas of the South to nd work or obtain education. Leola Prentice was 20 years old, a housemaid and cook with a family in Tennessee, when a representative of the American Life Histories project interviewed her in 1939. She left the cotton elds of Mississippi, where she was born, to work in Tennessee. She recalled that her grandmother put it into my head to quit that cotton pickin and come to Tennessee and get a good job (FWP 1939, p. 47). Leola kept her grandmothers picture on her 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
533
woman. But let one of us younguns sass her or pay her no mind when she called us, and shed take and wash our mouths out with lye soap and whoop us with a willow switch. Didnt hurt. . . . Granny, she kept an ol cow bell by her chair on the oor. When she want something or somebody to come, she take and rang that bell. . . . When she do that and out in the eld wed hear three rings, most generally meant she want me to come to the house. . . . Then when I get to 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 to the house was cause she was fraid Id get a snakebite. You know them ol cottonmouth moccasins is poison. (FWP 1939, p. 48)
Many of the elderly African Americans interviewed remembered their own grandmothers fondly and gave them much credit for the adults they became. Of those who spoke of their grandparents in the FWP documents, over half were raised for part of their childhood by one of their grandparents, usually their grandmother. Typical was Kelsey Pharr, an undertaker in Florida, who was raised by his grandmother through hard economic times and who supported his grandmother and himself by driving a taxi from the age of 15. He eventually nished college with his grandmothers help: She lived to see me a man and had helped me to a place where I could take care of myself. She was a good Christian woman and it pleased her to see her grandson making good. I became superintendent of the AME Sunday school when I was 16 years old. . . . That was a pleasure and a comfort to my Grandmother (FWP 193640, 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 support themselves and their families. About half of the older women interviewed by the FWP lived alone, about one-fourth lived with a spouse, and the rest lived with children or grandchildren (Rawick 1972). During the hard times of the Depression-era South, grandmothers in their 80s and 90s were working in the elds picking cotton as day laborers, doing laundry for white families, cooking and washing for their own families, caring for ill children, looking after children of white and AfricanAmerican families (Rawick 1972), and rearing their own grandchildren and the children of others. The strength and resilience of these older women jump out from the pages of these narratives. Sixty years after the end of slavery, there was little gender segregation in the work African-American women did in the rural South (Escott 1979). One 73year-old grandmother in Georgia boasted that she could work like a man and could do any work a man could do (Rawick 1972, vol. 13, p. 139). Rosa Hardy was still working in the cotton elds of Alabama at age 88 (Rawick 1972, vol. 9, p. 163). Grandmothers also did home-
534
based workcloth weaving, cleaning, laundry, and ironinginto their 90s (Rawick 1972). Grandmothers were proud of being herb doctors for the neighborhood, a skill they had learned from their own grandmothers. One elderly grandmother in South Carolina rode around on her horse, laying hands on people in distress. She noted, Jesus gave me the power to heal (Rawick 1972, vol. 2, p. 62). Another grandmother from Arkansas said she could cure burns by blowing on them; she offered her services to anyone who needed them (Rawick 1972, vol. 11, p. 289). Dellie Lewis, an 88-year-old grandmother from Alabama, was renowned for her folk medicine skills; blacks and whites alike sought her care (Rawick 1972). One woman, currently living with her granddaughter, had been the nurse to all the white children for the last 20 years. Then 89, Ella Pines described how white families paid her to come to their homes and care for their sick children (Rawick 1972, vol. 1, p. 8). Grandmothers continued to deliver babies in the 1930s, acting as midwives for both African-American and white women (Rawick 1972). In Texas, Missouri Boardes, an 83-year-old grandmother, was still a practicing midwife for local families when visited by an interviewer from the FWP in 1936. She had worked informally as a midwife all her life and took it up full-time when her children moved away from the family home (Rawick 1972). African-American midwives were called Granny all over the South, suggesting the powerful connection between grandmothers and midwifery. The practice was declining in the South during this period, as physicians persuaded state ofcials to eliminate the midwife, most of whom were African-American women, in favor of licensed medical doctors. Midwifery was a time-honored means of ensuring that poor women received adequate prenatal care. Midwives were involved with their patients from the early stages of their pregnancies, offering them nutritional advice and preparing them for childbirth. Midwives often stayed in the home after the birth for a week to help the mother with infant care and domestic work. They learned their skills through a long apprenticeship with established midwives, assisting in births until the older midwife retired and then taking over her practice. In North Carolina, the percentage of births attended by midwives declined from 1917 to 1980. In 1917 there had been 9,000 midwives, 80 percent of them African American; by 1980 there were 10. This delegitimization of midwifery left many rural poor without prenatal and obstetrical services (Matthews 1992).
Migration Northward
The great northern migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North and Midwest began in 1900 and swelled from 1916 to 1930. While many grandmothers reared their grandchil-
535
dren in the South, the parents of these children went north looking for work after the near collapse of southern agriculture. Migration was seen as a means for the whole family, not just those who left, to survive. Wages helped support the kinship network at home, and kin already in the North aided the new migrants (Clark-Lewis 1987). Around 1900, the rate of employment for African-American women, most of whom worked in domestic work or laundry, was four to ve times higher than for immigrant wives. One reason for this was the availability of the grandmother as a child caretaker (Pleck 1979, p. 368). The migration after 1900 initially changed the family constellation; younger men and women set off rst, to nd 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 likely to be employed than men, since racism prevented African-American men from lling industrial jobs.9 African-American women worked as domestics or laundry workers; for example, women migrated to Washington, D.C., from bordering southern states because there were domestic and laundry jobs there. Although some women found jobs in federal government ofces in the early years of the twentieth century, by the 1920s and 1930s, racism was pushing African-American women out of clerical jobs and back into domestic labor (Harley 1988). By the mid-1920s, more than half of married African-American women worked to help support their families. In these cases, the grandmothers, many of whom had subsequently migrated from the South, were as important to families as they had ever been, performing essential tasks of child care, housework, cooking, and laundry. Working women reciprocated in the time-honored custom of their communities by dedicating their wages to the maintenance and care of their kin, both in the cities of the North and Midwest and in the South (Hembold 1990). AfricanAmerican women found the burgeoning world of clerical work closed to them in cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York (Gutman 1976; Gottlieb 1987). In Washington, D.C., where women from the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia continued to migrate for better-paying jobs during the 1920s, the number of African-American women in domestic and laundry work in private homes and in private laundries increased substantially. Another draw was the large public school system in the District that employed a substantial number of African-American professionals (Harley 1988). Grandmothers have traditionally played a more important role in rural areas than in urban centers (King, Russell, and Elder 1998); yet African-American women frequently followed their children and grandchildren north to help care for grandchildren. Many families kept boarders in the northern cities to help make ends meet. Grandmothers helped with all the domestic work, including meeting the boarders needs (Duncan and Duncan 1957; Speer 1967; Gottlieb 1987).
536
Families migrated in steps, but for those families whose kin were left at home, ctive kin or community networks replaced blood kin. Those relatives who did make it north stayed with the family already there until they could afford to rent their own places, increasing the workload of the 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 Murrays grandmother came to stay with her in Washington, D.C., during the last months of Lauras pregnancy. In her diary, Laura notes that she had to do all the work because Mamma was sick. When Mamma recovered, she began to help her granddaughter in earnest, doing the laundry, cooking, and cleaning. She was happy to celebrate her seventy-fth birthday with Laura; they took the train downtown to see a play. She stayed with Laura for 3 months after the baby was born and then returned home (Sterling 1984, p. 464). During the economic stress that characterized the decade from 1930 to 1940, white womens share of the female labor force increased by 28 percent, while African-American womens share of the female labor force declined by 22 percent nationally. According to Lois Rita Helmbold, white women replaced black women by moving down the occupational ladder of desirability. For black women already on the bottom rung, there was no lower step, and they were effectively pushed out of the labor force (Hembold 1990, p. 636). Kinship networks in major urban areas were strained for African-American families. Some older women were forced to apply for relief because they could not nd work and their children could not help them. Recent migrants were the most seriously affected. Some women sent their children home to their mothers in the South, where they could be cared for temporarily (Hembold 1990). In When I Was Coming Up: An Oral History of Aged Blacks, elderly African Americans who had made the trip from the South to New Jersey between 1915 and 1970 recount their early experiences and describe their lives since their migration northward (Faulkner et al. 1982). According to these reminiscences, grandmothers made frequent visits from the Deep South to their childrens homes in New Jersey to help out in a crisis or assist with childcare. Raising their childrens children, at least temporarily, was routine in these narratives. Some of these grandmothers stayed permanently; others returned to their homes in the South. One woman who had been raised by her grandmother after her mother died remembered, I couldnt tell no difference; I just switched from one mother to another (Faulkner et al. 1982, p. 45). One woman from Georgia who had moved up north to care for her grandchildren when their mother died was proud of the fact that she raised my grandchil-
537
dren the old fashioned way. They were never out of sight and I used strict discipline on them (Faulkner et al. 1982, p. 138). Another grandmother reected on the difference between raising children in the South and raising her grandchildren in New Jersey:
I had difculty with my own children sometime. They do aggravate you a bit, but not nothing too bad. And thats the same type of life Im raising up my kids in now, my grandchildren. But you know, the time is not like it was when I growed up. Its a little more complicated. The reason its like it is because theres so many things happening. And it keep you alert to thinking about would happen and what could happen here. You wouldnt even think about the children cause youd know where they was, and want nothing to be bothered. But, now, one come to you and you tell him he come in at 9:00. He dont be there. You start thinking, start thinking. You gure then that might something done happened to him. Somebodys done kidnapped him or something done happened to him. Thats the difference as far as I can see in life with these kids, you different from the world when I was coming up. Not like when we was coming up. A lot of things you have to think about here, you didnt have to think about back there. 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 by the story of Malissa Dalton. Malissa, born in 1867, was the mother of nine children and survived two husbands. In spite of her large family, Malissa worked all her life. Her longest job, which she took in 1917 at the age of 50, was as a night cleaner at Union Station in Indianapolis. Mary Helen Washington (1998) remembered Malissa, her grandmother, living with Washingtons family from the 1920s to the 1940s, helping Washingtons mother (Malissas daughter) raise 10 children. The theme of hard, sometimes brutal work was the dominant one of Malissas life. Malissa and her husband were tenant farmers in Kentucky in the last decades of the nineteenth century. She moved to Indianapolis in 1910. When her husband became ill, she convinced the manager of Union Station that she could take over his cleaning job at night. She collected coal from the railroad station and sold it to make ends meet, along with making and selling ice cream. After moving with her second husband and family to Cleveland in 1927, she began to work, cleaning and cooking for wealthy whites. She lived close to her grandchildren and came every day to help care for them. At age 83, Malissa quit her job in the fashionable white district and came to live with her daughter and her 10 children, to help care for them. Years later, Mary Helen Washington wrote of her grandmother: She lived to be 93 and was never once in a 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 doesnt seem like a bad life (Washington 1998, p. 162 ).
538
Grandmothers in Middle- and Upper-Class African-American Families Reecting on her grandmother, Washington points out the unique position of African-American women who remained in the South or who migrated north in search of better economic circumstances. These women, forced to survive in a world indifferent to the socially constructed qualities of true womanhood, were not bound by the strictures of middle-class expectations for femininity. They had to be as strong and tough as men, and, in that way, lived free of traditional white gender roles and outside of the expectations of age, its comforts, and many of its limitations. On the other hand, many grandmothers in more afuent African-American families shared characteristics with many of their white counterparts: they had special relationships with their grandchildren that were mediated by their parents.10 Most who spoke of their grandmothers in these interviews noted that their grandmothers had passed on their families ethnic history. The necessity for hard physical labor that characterized poorer grandmothers was absent from their stories.11 Many of these older women joined womens clubs, which proliferated among middle-class African-American communities in the latter part of the nineteenth century and continued to be an important social and political outlet in the twentieth century. Caroline Bond Day conducted an anthropological eld study of African-American women ages 6894 in Georgia from 1928 to 1930. She found that the majority of women in Atlanta in this category belonged to a womens club. All were living in their own homes or their childrens homes. Day was impressed with the great cleanliness in food production and natural motherly instincts in the women she interviewed. She noted that great care was taken of all the children in the home (Day 1932, p. 26). A white observer in the 1940s and 1950s was struck by the marked lial respect and obedience among the younger people in the small towns and rural areas of the South. He attributed this to the fact that many old people are still active as workers, and many still provide support and care for children and grandchildren, implying that the strong contribution AfricanAmerican elders made to their communities elicited the devotion and respect of younger folk (Lewis 1955, p. 23). Wives and mothers continued to work outside the home in many middle-class families, but elder African-American women did not. In the late nineteenth and rst half of the twentieth centuries, the fact that many African-American mothers needed to work, often was viewed as lamentable by their husbands. The luxury of being solely a homemaker and mother was a source of pride (Harley 1988).
African-American Grandmothers Relationships with Grandchildren
539
The grandmothers in afuent African-American families had more distant relationships with their grandchildren than the grandmothers discussed earlier in this article. Charles Houston attended Harvard Law School and taught at Howard University, where he became dean of the law school. His only child, William Houston, while a student at Harvard, regularly received letters from both his mother and father, asking him to write his grandmother more frequently. The elder Houston wrote in 1914 that Williams grandmother was very upset that you have not written her in over a week. She constantly carries you in her mind and heart (William LePre Houston Family Papers, box 19). This sentimental attachment to the grandmother seems characteristic of afuent AfricanAmerican families. William LePre Houston, Anna Julia Cooper, Robert Russa Moton, Lorenzo Greene, Frances Cardozo, and Carter Woodson were all prominent African-American leaders in education or law at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries whose family papers suggest that their grandmothers were important to the families emotional life. Both the mothers and grandmothers in these families were social leaders in their communities.12 Their families did not rely on their grandmothers (who outlived grandfathers at a consistent rate in these families) for economic survival or even for contributions to the family economy. In fact, families often provided care for their grandmothers, as in the case of the Houston, Moton, and Montgomery families.13 Mary Montgomery, whose family had been slaves of Jefferson Davis and were freed upon his death, made daily visits on horseback to her grandmother, who lived on another Montgomery family plantation from 1872 to 1874. Montgomery gladly assumed the responsibility of caring for her grandmother, writing that She is improving and I am so happy for I cannot imagine life without her (Montgomery Family Papers, box 2). Encouraging the education of their grandchildren was important for grandmothers in these families, just as in families that were struggling economically. Howard Thurmans grandmother insisted that he must get an education somehow, even though his father had died and the family had a hard struggle to live (Jennes 1936, p. 148). As Thurman recounts, Grandmother held it all the more compellingly before me, because she herself had been born a slave and could neither read nor write (Jennes 1936, p. 149). Thurman struggled to obtain a high school education and became a leader in the Florida Baptist church in the early decades of the twentieth century. Anna Julia Cooper graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and then went on to the Sorbonne and received her Ph.D. in Latin. She credits her mother and grandmother, both former slaves, for giving her the
540
determination to nish her education. Cooper was president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C., from 1930 to 1941 and an important author and educational leader. Widowed at a young age, Cooper became guardian to ve great-nephews and nieces in 1906, when she was in her late 50s, taking on a role frequently assumed by grandmothers (Anna Julia Cooper Papers). Myra Colson Callis, born in 1892, became a prominent social worker in Philadelphia with a Masters degree from the University of Chicago. Every year, she and the rest of her family traveled to Virginia for a family reunion to visit her grandmother, Ella Gertrude Colson Jackson, the emotional center of the familys life. In a handwritten autobiography, Myra described how the problems of the world were solved around grandmas kitchen table. Myra thought her grandmother, who lived with Calliss family while the girl was growing up, the wisest woman in all the world and wrote to her frequently during her adolescence and young adulthood. Her grandmother was always on the side of her grandchildren; if a teacher scolded or mistreated them, her grandmother would stand up for them. She would call the teacher in question the old Ewe. Myra lived with her grandmother and nine others when she was growing up, including her aunt, mother and father, two orphan nephews, and three siblings (Myra Colson Callis Papers, box 193, no. 6). Alain Locke, born in Philadelphia in 1886, was an educator, philosopher, author, and critic. He graduated from Harvard University in 1918 with a Ph.D. in philosophy and was one of the rst African-American Rhodes Scholars. He taught philosophy at Howard University for much of his career. When Locke was young, his father bathed, fed, and generally cared for him, insisting that neither grandmother have too much direct contact with him because he distrusted their old fashioned ways, according to Locke. Both grandmothers were strictly forbidden to discipline him, much to their annoyance. Lockes father was afraid his own mother or mother-in-law would discipline him too severely. While Locke was at Harvard, his mother wrote him frequently, asking him to write his grandmother. His grandmother continued to be a strong inuence on Locke for the rest of her life, encouraging him to continue his education and attending his graduation from Harvard (Alain Locke Family Papers, box 164, no. 47).14 Henry Turner, a minister who was known throughout South Carolina for his oratory in the 1880s, was raised by his grandmother after his mother died. Turners grandmother was not so notable for goodness and female modesty, but was regarded as a woman of great physical resources. She was tall and proportionately built and had a fearful temper. No one in the neighborhood ever dared to interfere with her children, animals, fences or anything that she owned, for the risk of being
541
fearfully handled if she got in reach of them. She lived to be ninety years old (Carter 1888, p. 185). Fanny Jackson-Cooper, an educator from Philadelphia who spent summers with her grandmother, wrote about her in her autobiography, published in 1913: We used to call our grandmother mammy and one of 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 loft where we slept. Mammy used to make a long prayer every night before going to bed. She would ask God to bless her offspring. This word remained with me, for I wondered what offspring meant (JacksonCooper 1913, p. 9). Grandmothers and Attitudes toward Whites It was through their grandmothers that many African Americans forged their rst attitudes toward their own ethnic group and toward whites. Some grandmothers disliked whites; these grandmothers would protect their grandchildren from neighborhood white kids. One grandmother in Georgia shooed the taunting kids away by commanding them to git, you white trash, git (Barton 1948, p. 208). Other grandmothers leaned toward bourgeois values and schooled their grandchildren in white ways. These grandmothers had white middle class attitudes and believed the whiter the better (Barton 1948, p. 208). Richard Wright and Langston Hughes had grandmothers who epitomized different attitudes toward whites. Wright lived with his maternal grandmother during some of his childhood because his mothers life as a sharecropper broke her health. His grandmother attempted to raise Wright as a Seventh Day Adventist, away from other African-American children, in order to emphasize her distance from the poorer status in which she herself had been raised. Wright rebelled when he was thirteen and refused to go to church anymore. He later wrote that his grandmother raised him as in an upper class Negro family, making him deeply sensitive to the tradition of ridicule and inferiority attaching to color, hating the tradition and yet inevitably absorbing it (Barton 1948, p. 240). Langston Hughes, like Wright, was also deeply inuenced by his grandmother, Mary Patterson, with whom he lived in Kansas until he was 12. His grandmother impressed on him the idea of freedom; she had gone to college at Oberlin, and her rst husband had been killed in John Browns raid. She told him the story of the raid at Harpers Ferry many times. Hughes told the story of his childhood and his grandmother in his autobiography, The Big Sea. He remembered that he and his grandmother struggled to manage in Kansas. His grandmother
didnt take in washing or go out to cook, for she had never worked for anyone.
542
But she tried to make a living by renting rooms to college students from Kansas University . . . sometimes we would move out entirely and go to live with a friend, 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 white mortgage 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 grandmother was very proud and she would never beg or borrow anything from anybody. She sat . . . held me on her lap and told me long, beautiful stories about people who wanted to make the Negroes free. . . . Through my grandmothers stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmothers stories. . . . She was a proud womengentle, but Indian and proud. (Hughes 1986, p. 116)
Grandmothers after World War II

Grandmothers continued to play an important child caring and rearing role in African-American families in the South after World War II. As young mothers worked as live-in domestics, their mothers cared for their children (Carson 1969). Rohrer and Edmonson interviewed more than one hundred African-American families in New Orleans from 1953 to 1956 and observed that the bond between mother and daughter was more sacred than any other. This was the reason, the researchers thought, that almost all the mothers who worked had their mothers living with them, caring for the grandchildren (Rohrer and Edmonson 1960). E. Franklin Frazier, a well-known African-American sociologist in the postwar era, valorized the African-American grandmother in The Negro Family in the United States (1951). Frazier linked the power of the grandmother in the family to her role as the head of the family in African culture (the oldest woman is regarded as the head of the family), as well as to the central role she played in preserving the family during slavery (1951, p. 117). Since grandmothers were the midwives for rural African Americans (and whites) in the South, they became, according to Frazier, grandmother to all children they delivered. Another encomium to the grandmother appeared in Crisis in 1973. Faustine Jones, in The Lofty Role of the Black Grandmother, wrote that neither retirement communities nor nursing and old folks homes are populated by black grandmothers. They remain active participants in family activities and struggles as long as life exists (p. 19). The respect of young African Americans for their elders was a point of pride in the community.15 The grandmothers in Kathryn Morgans history of her family exemplify the storytelling tradition continued by grandmothers (Morgan 1980). Morgans maternal great-grandmother, Caddy, was a storyteller who exerted a powerful inuence on grandchildrens and great grand-
543
childrens lives. She told stories of slavery passed down to her by her mother. According to Morgan, Grandma Caddy whipped her great grandchildren 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 powerful and extensive kinship networks, where the grandmother played a major role. The pattern of grandmothers living with families and caring for children continued in the 1970s, according to Joyce Aschenbrenner (1975). She nds that grandmothers frequently lived with their children and grandchildren and that the mother-daughter bond continued to be the most powerful one in the family. Even when sons and daughters live independently of their parents, they often remain in the same neighborhood as their parents and form closely-knit groups. . . . These localized family groups are the focus of childrearing; they are an economic boon to working parents and are the agents of socialization. Nonrelatives were considered kin, while relatives sometimes were not. Adults often took the roles of play mother when they were childless. Children would help out the play mother and spend the night with them, and the play mother would buy them gifts and give them counsel (Aschenbrenner 1975, pp. 1314). In the early 1970s, Carol Stack studied an economically marginalized African-American community in a midwestern city (1974). Grandmothers, aunts, and great-aunts (who were also considered grandmothers) had full rights of discipline when they raised a child, even when the mother was present in the home. Many children saw a number of women as their mother. Stack argues that child care was exible in order to correspond with the uxes in the composition of the household. In times of need, children in the homes of related adults could count on the adults to care for them; one member of the kinship group usually was self-identied as the substitute parent. The kinship group understood who was taking major responsibility for the child; arrangements were not made by happenstance. Stack notes that grandmothers often raised the children born to teenage girls, while the young mothers continued to live in the home and renew their lives as adolescents. Mothers viewed their kin as a source of shared responsibility for child rearing; most mothers worked and had no choice but to enlist kin support. Sometimes kin stepped in when the mother already had several children, to help the mother out, and took a child to raise. Stack offers the narrative of one resident of the community as an example:
My mother already had three children when I was born. Her maternal greataunt had raised her. After I was born my mothers greataunt insisted on taking
544
me to help my mother out. I stayed there after my mother got married and moved to The Flats. I wanted to move there too, but my mama didnt want to give me up and my mother didnt want to ght with her. When I was fourteen I left anyway and my mother took me in. When my youngest daughter got polio my mother insisted on taking her. I got a job and lived nearby with my son. My mother raised my little girl until my girl died. (Stack 1974, p. 67)
Stack notes that the roles of both parent and grandparent could include close kin and friends, who might take over child rearing for a time. The inclusion of friends in a loose kinship structure was not reported as often in the rural South. It is likely that urban life left some families shorn of the complete extended families that they had enjoyed in the rural South; friends could ll this gap. These child-sharing arrangements demonstrate the value of children in this community: family members and sometimes friends were eager to take responsibility to raise someone elses child. Raising children was seen as a privilege; outside interference, especially from child welfare agencies, was deeply resented. It was something to be avoided at all costs. Martin and Martin (1978) observed over two thousand extended family members in Missouri over a period of 8 years in the 1970s. They nd that in households where generations lived together, economic survival and support were the paramount reasons. Families frequently consisted of four generations living under the same roof. In cases where families did not live togetherfor example, when a daughter married and had a childthis sub extended family would live close by and consider themselves part of the family. The authors describe a mutual aid system through these extended subfamilies, as members felt obligations toward aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces. The most respected person in the family was, without exception, the eldest person, who was usually a greatgrandmother between ages 60 and 85 who had outlived her husband. It was to her that family members came when they were unemployed and needed short-term economic help. She had resources because family members gave money to Momma every month. Grandmothers had other important roles in these families: they used folk remedies to cure ailing members and felt a deep sense of worth as heads of their families, the authors observed (Martin and Martin, p. 20). Several women remarked that there was no time to grow old; many were continuing to raise their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. These women imparted traditional values to their children and grandchildren and raised them the old fashioned way, which the authors described as characterized by strong religious beliefs, strict discipline, respect for parental authority and reliance on experience. Grandmothers had more authority than mothers over children: When a child feels his natural mother has been unjust, he may plead his case before his grand-
545
mother, whose word is generally law. Most children in the family referred to their grandmother as Momma and their biological mother as Mother Mary, according to the name of the mother. Sometimes the mother 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 household labor and child care, continued to be a central theme in the lives of African-American grandmothers. For many African-American grandmothers, old age has taken on a distinctly different shape and texture than it has for white women, particularly in the twentieth century.16 In spite of increased longevity, most African Americans have not experienced retirement unconnected to health problems, even in the twentieth century when retirement became a reality for most white Americans.17 As in the past, today older African-American women are more likely to work than are older African-American men (Coleman 1993). African-American women cannot be studied apart from the context of family life. In many families the grandmother fullled the maternal role and played a direct role in childrens lives. Can African-American grandmothers be studied as a group? Like all people bound by gender and ethnicity, the African-American grandmother is malleable, contingent and varied (Hunter and Taylor 1998, p. 255). Yet important commonalities exist that underlie the unique role shaped by these grandmothers. Some of the exceptional qualities of African-American grandmothers were forged in response to hard times, others were manifestations of cultural traditions of respect for the elderly, kin-based child rearing, skills in domestic medicine and midwifery, an emphasis on education and belief in the potential of children and grandchildren, and grandmothers emphasis on family history and narratives as a means of resisting oppression. While grandmothers in middle-class AfricanAmerican families had roles similar to those of white grandmothers, they have been more central to their families than have white grandmothers over the last century.18 Today, grandparents from all ethnic groups are assuming care under stressful circumstancesdrug abuse, serious mental and emotional problems (Pearlin 1993, p. 314). Recently, grandmothers in AfricanAmerican families have been the subject of research that depicts them as responding to crises and social problems among their family members.19 Yet historically, African-American grandmothers have routinely assumed care of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren to enable the family unit to survive economically. Within African-American families, grandmother care should not be viewed as anomalous or arising from a family decit; instead it is a tradition inherited from the strong
546
emphasis on kinship solidarity in Africa, in the slave quarters, and in the lived struggles of African Americans in the United States. An important strength of African-American families today lies in the cultural heritage that encouraged them to rely on their grandmothers.
References
Alain Locke Family Papers. MS box 164, Moorland-Spingarn Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. Allen, Ruth. 1931. The Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anna Julia Cooper Papers. MS box 38, Moorland-Spingarn Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. Aschenbrenner, Joyce. 1975. Lifelines: Black Families in Chicago. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press. Barton, Rebecca Chalmers. 1948. Witnesses for Freedom. New York: Harper. Berlin, Ira, Marc Favreau, and Steven Miller, eds. 1998. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. New York: New Press. Berlin, Ira, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie Rowland. 1988. Afro-American Families in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom. Radical History Review 42 (May): 8997. Botkin, B. A., ed. 1989. Lay My Burden Down. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bryson, Kenneth. 2001. New Census Data on Grandparents Raising Grandchildren. United States Census Bureau. Presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, Chicago. Bryson, Kenneth, and Lester Casper. 1999. Current Population Reports: Coresident Grandparents and Grandchildren. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofce. Burton, Linda. 1992. Black Grandparents Rearing Grandchildren of Drug-Addicted Parents: Stressors, Outcomes and Social Service Needs. Gerontologist 32 (January): 74451. . 1996. Age Norms, the Timing of Family Role Transitions, and Intergenerational Caregiving among Aging African American Women. Gerontologist 36 (April): 199208. Burton, Linda, and C. Merriwether-deVries. 1992. Challenges and Rewards: African American Grandparents as Surrogate Parents. Generations 17 (May): 554. Caldwell, E. R. 1919. History of the American Negro. 8 vols. Atlanta: A. B. Caldwell. Caputo, Richard. 1999. Grandmothers and Coresident Grandchildren. Journal of Contemporary Human Services 80 (MarchApril): 12026. Carson, Josephine. 1969. Silent Voices: The Southern Negro Woman Today. New York: Delacourte. Carter, E. R. 1888. Biographical Sketches of Our Pulpit. Atlanta: E. R. Carter. Carter Woodson Papers. Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Chase-Landsdale, P. Lindsay, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and E. S. Zamsky. 1994. Young AfricanAmerican Multigenerational Families in Poverty: Quality of Mothering and Grandmothering. Child Development 65 (April): 37393. Cherlin, Andrew, and Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr. 1992. The New American Grandparent. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Clark, Septima. 1962. Echo in My Soul. New York: E. P. Dutton. Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth. 1987. This Work Had an End: African American Domestic Workers in Washington, D.C., 19101940. Pp. 23149 in To Toil the Livelong Day: American Women at Work, 1780-1980, edited by Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Close, Stacey. 1997. Elderly Slaves of the Plantation South. New York: Garland. Coggeshall, John. 1996. Carolina Piedmont Country. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Coleman, Lerita. 1993. The Black Americans Who Keep Working. Pp. 25376 in Aging in Black America, edited by James Jackson, Linda Chatters, and Robert Taylor. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. Cooley, Rossa. 1926. Homes of the Freed. New York: Negro University Press.
547
Day, Caroline Bond. 1932. A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Duncan, Otis, and Beverly Duncan. 1957. The Negro Population of Chicago: A Study of Residential Succession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edelman, Hope. 1999. Mother of My Mother: The Intricate Bond between Generations. New York: Dial. Egypt, Ophelia. 1968. Unwritten History of Slavery. Washington, D.C.: Fisk University Press. Escott, Paul. 1979. Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Family Folklore. MS Archive of Folk Culture, fols. 12. Folklife Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Faulkner, Audrey, Marsel Heisel, Wendell Holbrook, and Shirely Geismar. 1982. When I Was Coming Up: An Oral History of Aged Blacks. New York: Archon Books. Federal Writers Project. 1939. These Are Our Lives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Federal Writers Project. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers Project. 19361940 series. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Federal Writers Project. 1940. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Fischer, David Hackett. 1978. Growing Old in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Foster, Herbert. 1983. African Patterns in the Afro-American Family. Journal of Black Studies. 14 (2): 20132. Frances Cardozo Family Papers. Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Franklin, Donna. 1997. Ensuring Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African American Family. New York: Oxford University Press. Frazier, E. Franklin. 1951. The Negro Family in the United States. New York: Dryden. Genovese, Eugene. 1976. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage. Gibson, Robert. 1993. The Black American Retirement Experience. Pp. 277301 in Aging in Black America, edited by James Jackson, Linda Chatters, and Robert Taylor. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. Gordon, Rachel, P. Lindsay Chase-Landsdale, Jennifer Matjaski, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. 1997. Young Mothers Living with Grandmothers and Living Apart: How Neighborhood and Household Contexts Relate to Multigenerational Coresidence in African American Families. Applied Developmental Science 1 (April): 89106. Gottlieb, Peter. 1987. Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks Migration to Pittsburgh, 19161930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gutman, Herbert. 1976. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 17501925. New York: Pantheon Books. Harley, Sharon. 1988. For the Good of Family and Race: Gender Work and Domestic Roles in the Black Community, 18801930. Pp. 15972 in Black Women in America, edited by Michelin Malson, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Jean OBarr, and Mary Wyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hembold, Lois Rita. 1990. Beyond the Family Economy: Black and White Working-Class Women during the Great Depression. Pp. 63045 inWomen and Minorities during the Great Depression, edited by Melvin Dubofsky and Stephen Burwood. New York: Garland. Henri, Florette. 1975. Black Migration: Movement North, 19001920. New York: Doubleday. Hill, Ruth Edmonds, ed. 1991. The Black Women Oral History Project, 10 vols. Westport, Conn.: Meckler. Hines, Darlene Clark. 1990. Sinner or Saint: Antithetical Views concerning Black Women and the Private Sphere. Pp. 3754 in Black Women in United States History, edited by Darlene Clark Hines. New York: Carlson. Holt, Sharon. 1994. Making Freedom Pay: Free People Working for Themselves, North Carolina, 18651900. Journal of Southern History 60 (2): 231-62. Hughes, Langston. 1986. The Big Sea. New York: Thunder Mouth. Hunter, Andrea. 1997. Counting on Grandmothers. Journal of Family Issues 18 (May): 25170. Hunter, Andrea, and Robert Taylor. 1998. Grandparenthood in African American Families. Pp. 7086 in Handbook on Grandparenthood, edited by Maximiliane Szinovacz. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.
548
Jackson, Aurora P. 1998. The Role of Social Support in Parenting for Low-Income, Single, Black Mothers. Social Service Review 72 (September): 36578. Jackson-Cooper, Fanny. 1913. Reminiscences of School Life and Hints on Teaching. Philadelphia: AME Book Concern. Jarrett, Robin. 1994. African American Mothers and Grandmothers in Poverty: An Adaptational Perspective. Journal of Contemporary Family Studies 29 (3): 38795. Jennes, Mary. 1936. Twelve Negro Americans. New York: Friendship Press. Johnson, Charles. 1934. Shadow of the Plantation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1941. Growing Up in the Black Belt. New York: Schocken Books. Jones, Faustine. 1973. The Lofty Role of the Black Grandmother. Crisis 80 (January): 1921. King, Valerie, Stephen Russell, and Glen Elder. 1998. Grandparenting in Family Systems: An Ecological Perspective. Pp. 5369 in Handbook on Grandparenthood, edited by Maximiliane E. Szinovacz. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. Kivett, Vira. 1993. Racial Comparisons of the Grandmother Role. Family Relations 42 (April): 16572. Kornhaber, Arthur. 1996. Contemporary Grandparenting. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. Ladner, Joyce. 1971. Tomorrows Tomorrow. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday. Lewis, Hylan. 1955. Blackways of Kent. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lowenberg, Bert, and Ruth Bogin. 1976. Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Martin, Elmer, and Joanne Mitchell Martin. 1978. The Black Extended Family. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matthews, Holly. 1992. Killing the Self-Help Tradition among African Americans: The Case of Lay Midwifery in North Carolina, 19121983. Pp. 6179 in African Americans in the South: Issues of Race, Class and Gender, edited by Hans Baer and Yvonne Jones. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Montgomery Family Papers. MS box 2, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Morgan, Kathyrn. 1980. Children of Strangers: The Stories of a Black Family. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Moton Family Papers. Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Moton, Robert Russa. 1920. Finding a Way Out: An Autobiography. College Park, Md.: McGrath. Myra Colson Collis Papers. MS box 193, Moorland-Spingarn Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. Parks, Arnold. 1988. Black Elderly in Rural America. New York: Wyndham Hall. Pearlin, Leonard. 1993. Environmental and Social Sources: The Social Context of Stress. Pp. 30514 in Handbook of Stress: Theoretical Aspects, edited by Leo Goldberger and Shlomo Breznitz. 2d ed. New York: Free Press. Perdue, Charles, Thomas Barden, and Robert Phillips. 1976. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Pleck, Elizabeth. 1979. Income Earning among Married Italian and Black Women, 18961911. Pp. 36790 in A Heritage of Her Own: A New Social History of American Women, edited by Nancy Cott and Elizabeth Pleck. New York: Simon & Schuster. Pollard. Leslie. 1981. Aging and Slavery: A Gerontological Perspective. Journal of Negro History 66 (3): 22835. Pollard, Leslie. 1996. Complaint to the Lord: Historical Perspectives on the African American Elderly. Selingsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1969. After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. New York: Atheneum. Presser, Harriet. 1989. Some Economic Complexities of Child Care Provided by Grandmothers. Journal of Marriage and the Family 51 (August): 58191. Pruchno, Rachel. 1999. Raising Grandchildren: The Experiences of Black and White Grandmothers. Gerontologist 39 (3): 20921. Rawick, George, ed. 1972. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. 19 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. Rohrer, John, and Muro Edmonson. 1960. The Eighth Generation: Culture and Personalities of New Orleans Negroes. New York: Harper.
549
Saluter, A. F. 1996. Marital Status and Living Arrangements. Current Population Reports. Series P20-484 . Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofce. Soloman, J., and J. Marx. 1995. To Grandmothers House We Go: Health and School Adjustment of Children Raised Solely by their Grandparents. Gerontologist 35 (September): 38694. Speer, Arnold. 1967. Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 18901920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stack, Carol. 1974. All Our Kin. New York: Harper & Row. Sterling, Dorothy. 1984. We Are Your Sisters. New York: Norton. Taylor, Susie King. 1988. Reminiscences of My Life in Camp. Pp. 2339 in Collected Black Womens Narratives, edited by Anthony Barthelmy. New York: Oxford University Press. Terrell, Tom, and Jerrold Hirsch, eds. 1978. Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Timberlake, Elizabeth. 1992. Grandmotherhood: Contemporary Meaning among African American Middle-Class Grandmothers. Social Work 37 (May): 21622. Uhlenberg, P., and James Kirby. 1998. Grandparenthood over Time: Historical and Demographic Trends. In Handbook on Grandparenthood, edited by Maximiliane Szinovacz. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. Washington, Mary Helen. 1998. The Four Lives of Malissa Dalton. Pp. 16172 in Grandmothers: Granddaughters Remember, edited by Marguerite Buzman Bouvard. New York: Syracuse University Press. William LePre Houston Family Papers. MS box 19, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Wilson, Melvin, Timothy Tolson, Ivora Hinton, and Michael Kiernan. 1990. Flexibility and Sharing of Childcare Duties in Black Families. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 22 (April): 40926. Winston, C. A. 1999. Self Help for Grandmothers Parenting Again. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 8 (July): 15765. Woods, Ruth. 1996. Grandmother Roles: A Cross Cultural View. Journal of Instructional Psychology 23 (December): 20132.
Notes
This research was partially supported by a grant from the Lois and Samuel Silberman Fund. The author wishes to thank Catherine Goodman, D.S.W., for her contributions to this article. 1. For a discussion of grandmothers caretaking roles and the economic implications for families, see Presser (1989) and Winston (1999). For a discussion of the impact of age on grandparenting, see Burton (1996). For ethnic comparisons, see Kivett (1993) and Pruchno (1999). For grandmothers as social support for mothers, see Jackson (1998). For quality of grandparenting interaction, see Wilson et al. (1990); Burton (1992); Burton and Merriwether-deVries (1992); Timberlake (1992); Chase-Landsdale, Brooks-Gunn, and Zamsky (1994); Soloman and Marx (1995); Gordon et al. (1997); Hunter (1997); and Caputo (1999). 2. Many of these oral histories and interviews are available in manuscript form at the Library of Congress; others are disseminated through the Library of Congress Web site, which includes more than 2,900 documents. Additionally, under the American Memory Collection of the Library of Congress, available on the World Wide Web, I searched the First Person Narratives of the American South, 18601920 and the African American Pamphlets, 18241909. 3. These were published in three separate sources: Rawick (1972); Federal Writers Project (1940); and Perdue, Barden, and Phillips (1976). Other material from the American Life Histories Project, collected under the auspices of the Federal Writers Project, 19361940, 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 offering an accurate depiction of slave life, arguing, for example, that slavery was romanticized in the collection and that its brutality was deemphasized when the interviewers were white
550
(four-fths of the time) and not eager to elicit or record the atrocities of the system. See especially Berlin, Favreau, and Miller (1998, pp. ixxlix). 5. Paul Escott (1979) discusses some of these limitations along with the usefulness of the 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 who would formerly have been provided for by the plantation owner. See Berlin, Miller, and Rowland (1988, pp. 8997). 7. Tenant farmers contracted with planters to work the land; in return the planters took the proceeds, giving the tenant farmers a small share of the prots and some rations. Since this generally was not enough to sustain families, farm families engaged in household manufacturing and gardening to generate adequate resources. See Holt (1994, pp. 23162). 8. This was particularly grueling work, as mothers who cared for white children rarely got to see their own; most went to their own homes only once in 2 weeks. See Hines (1990, pp. 3754). 9. Gutman (1976) makes this point, as do Franklin (1997) and Speer (1967). For a general treatment of the northern migration, see Henri (1975). 10. See Edelman (1999) and Cherlin and Furstenberg (1992) for recent discussion of the grandparent-grandchild relationship in white families. 11. In the 1970s, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College began the Black Womens Oral History Project, with the goal of collecting the oral memories of a selected group of older African-American women. The 72 women interviewed were over 70 years old at the time of the interviews. Interviewers routinely asked the respondents about their family background. Out of the 72 women interviewed, 15 were raised at one time in their childhood by the grandmothers. The majority knew and all spoke of their grandmothers when asked 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 the Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress. 13. See family papers for all three families in the Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress. 14. Other prominent African-American women who credited their grandmothers with inuence on their lives include Ophelia Egypt, an educator at Howard University School of Social Work from the 1920s to the 1970s. Her maternal grandmother, whom Egypt described as having a less formal education but more real wisdom than any of us, raised Egypt 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 whole family journeyed to Texas for a family reunion with her grandmother. When Ophelia Egypt herself became a grandmother in the 1960s, she joined the grandmothers club, an informal group of African-American grandmothers in Washington, D.C. (Ophelia Egypt Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Center, Howard University, MS box 140, no. 5). Similarly, Wiley Branton, Dean of the Law School at Howard University, continued to worry about his grandmother, 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 McDufe, Willliam Thomas Singeleton, and Kelly Miller are among others who cited the importance of their grandmothers in their lives, as role models and as mother gures (Flemmie Kittrell Papers, MoorlandSpingarn Center, Howard University, MS box 104, no. 1; Caldwell 1919). 15. For a discussion of this, see Ladner (1971), esp. pp. 6163. 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 rural areas of the South, where very few homes for the aged existed. In contrast, northern and midwestern cities saw a considerable increase in homes for African-American elders between 1880 and 1910, during which time over a dozen homes were opened. Families in the rural South, who wanted to care for their family members themselves, resisted homes for African-American elderly. Some of the homes in rural areas were empty, as few ever go 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 already limited appeal. See Pollard (1996, pp. 6970). An indication that this reluctance continued
551
until the 1980s is found in a survey conducted in the mid-1980s, of 501 elderly African Americans living in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. The vast majority of respondents surveyed lived alone or with one other person. A large majority believed it was very important to live near family members. Less than 1 percent of the respondents had ever considered going to a nursing home. See Parks (1988). 17. See Fischer (1978), as well as Uhlenberg and Kirby (1998, pp. 2339) for a discussion of 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 one researcher in 1985 called the unretired-retired. See Gibson (1993, pp. 277301). Some members of this group continue to work at least part-time at low-status, low-paying jobs in which they have worked all their lives. When interviewed, they consider themselves disabled rather than retired; that is, they would like to work more, but their health does not allow them. These black elderly are more disadvantaged economically and socially than those who consider themselves fully retired and who live on retirement income. Findings of lower morale among those who did not consider themselves retired, compared to those who did, suggest that working after retirement age is out of necessity rather than choice. As Coleman (1993, p. 255) noted, black elderly may work because of economic necessity or for survival rather than for fulllment, recognition, or status. Contrasting results were found in Colemans study among African-American elderly over age 65 (as opposed to those over age 55). Large numbers of this subset said they would continue to work even if they were nancially secure, suggesting that the strong work ethic endorsed by African Americans in the nineteenth century continues to characterize the oldest African Americans. Whatever the reason, retirement has not been seen as an option by most African-American women. 18. According to Uhlenberg and Kirby (1998), the medicalization and psychological treatment 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 likely to interfere with the parents control. Kornhaber (1996, p. 18) argued that, today, grandparents have relatively low status. . . . This does not seem to be the case with AfricanAmerican families, who continued to revere their grandparents, especially grandmothers. 19. This is point is made by Hunter and Taylor (1998, pp. 7086).

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

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

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

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The History of Grandmothers in the AfricanAmerican Community Author(s): Jillian Jimenez Reviewed work(s): Source: Social Service Review,

The History of Grandmothers in the African-American Community

Social Service Review

Grandmothers after Reconstruction

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

African-American Grandmothers Relationships with Grandchildren

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

Grandmothers after World War II

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

Social Service Review

You might also like