She Was Strong, This Woman

She was born in 1889 and died in 1985. Her life spanned horse-and-buggies and space shuttles. She was married at 15 to a man 10 years older than she was; she had five children and buried one.

She was strong, this woman.

I met her when she was 62, but I wouldn’t remember her until I was about three. My earliest memories of her were warm, embracing and musical. She played piano by ear; she never learned to read music. She sang with her church choir and she sang solos, including one she did for her 90th birthday.

For several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I spent a week each summer with her at her house in Shreveport. It was a magical place for me. My aunt and uncle lived across the street; my half-sister less than 10 minutes away; and there was a boy exactly my age who lived next door. And for each visit, I flew Delta Airlines by myself – a huge deal for an 8-year-old in 1960.

She drove an old black Ford, a sedan from the early 1940s. We’d tool around Shreveport – shopping, visiting downtown, stopping by the Louisiana State Museum at the state fairgrounds so I could see the cool dioramas. And it was inevitable that she would take a short cut through a poor part of town and equally inevitable that the Ford would break down somewhere along the way. She’d tell me to stay in the car, and she would go to the nearest house to ask to use the phone.

My grandfather had died when I was nine months old. She talked about him like he was still there in the house with us. She wanted me to know him, but I think she did it as much for herself as for me. They had met when he had stayed at the boarding house in Jena, Louisiana, owned by her mother. He was a land surveyor, working for the railroad. He married her in spite of her tobacco-chewing mother, and in spite of the rumors that her mother had killed a man.

When my grandmother was 5, her mother had put her to work in the cotton mills. She had no formal education, but she was fully literate and read her Bible every day. (I have this image in my head of her reading her Bible while her mother pinged the spittoon with used tobacco.) She taught a ladies Sunday School class for decades and I can remember her writing out her lesson on Friday and Saturday in a small, black two-ringed binder.

She was strong, this woman.

She endured the loss of her youngest, a little girl who got sick and didn’t get well. Two of her children (my father and his youngest sister) didn’t speak to each other for more than 40 years; how that must have grieved her. I can remember being in her living room one summer when the door opened and in walked the aunt I had never met, who looked like a younger version of my aunt across the street. We stared at each other. She was as shocked as I was – she didn’t expect to see what looked like her brother as a child standing in the living room.

My grandmother made all of her grandchildren feel like she loved them the most (although I knew I was really her favorite). She sent her only son off to the war in the Pacific. She stifled herself (mostly) when her son decided to raise her grandson in that den of iniquity called New Orleans, yet she loved to visit. I know she prayed for me from the day I was born until the day she died. Raised by a mother who was likely her polar opposite, she was strong in her faith and strong in her love for her Lord.

She was strong, this woman.


To read more posts on strength, visit the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Bridget Chumbley.