San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Writer pays tribute to his grandparents for guidance
RONALD W. POWELL: GRANDPARENTS WHO DID NOT COMPLETE GRADE SCHOOL MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR ME TO TELEWORK DURING A PANDEMIC
As children, my grandparents had to permanently withdraw from grade school to help their families work the blazing-hot Texas cotton fields. The tough stoop labor was necessary for family survival. Education could wait.
I came to the Lone Star State to live with my grandparents in the late 1950s after my parents divorced in Cleveland. I can still hear my grandmother’s voice doling out a lesson that she would repeat often over the years: “Boy, in this life, you’ve got to work!”
Even though they missed out themselves, my grandparents were all-in on the value of education. They would tell me that one day I would go to college — even when I had no idea what college was.
I think of them often these days as I telework during the COVID-19 pandemic. I count myself among the fortunate third of African American employees who, according to the Pew Research Center, are able to continue drawing a check during the health crisis while working from home.
I owe it all to my grandparents, John Wesley and Minnie Etta Powell — people my family members and I called Daddy Buck and Mammaw — the latter reflecting my early failed attempts to pronounce grandma.
I grew up in their modest woodframe house in a part of East Austin known as Black Land, so named, according to community lore, for “the blackest soil and the darkest people.”
The working-class neighborhood was located less than 2 miles from the University of Texas campus, a state-supported school that barred Black students when my mother, my aunt and my two uncles were of college age in the 1940s and early 1950s. In 1977, I would make good on my grandparents’ prediction of college attendance by becoming the first person in my family to graduate from U-T. My grandparents attended the graduation ceremony, and it was one of the happiest days of my life.
While growing up under their roof, I viewed my grandparents as profiles in hard work.
Daddy Buck started each workday at the kitchen table reading the local newspaper while eating a hearty breakfast of grits, scrambled eggs, toast, bacon or sausage — all washed down with instant coffee. It was the standard breakfast that my grandmother would prepare each day with few variations.
Paper read and breakfast finished, my grandfather would gather his tools in a burlap sack, grasping the neck of it slinging it over his right shoulder. His left hand steered the handle of a gas-powered lawn mower that he would push out of our back gate, a King Edward cigar clenched in his teeth, heading the eight blocks to Oakwood Cemetery where he dug graves and tended the wooded grounds for decades.
Oakwood, a city cemetery founded in 1839, was a relic of slavery and Jim Crow when I was growing up in the 1960s. The segregation imposed by White Texans was rigidly enforced for the living and the dead. My grandfather worked the cemetery’s White section and the so-called “colored grounds,” indifferent to the hue of the body being lowered into the grave. He had a favorite saying: “Every day above ground is a good day.”
While my grandfather toiled in the cemetery, my grandmother had her own work to do.
Before my arrival, Mammaw worked in the kitchens of wealthy White people across town in West Austin. That ended when I joined the household, and she stayed home to look after me.
In addition to cooking three hot meals a day, Mammaw took in laundry from White doctors and matrons who would drop off their dress shirts and blouses several times a month. She cleaned those items by stirring them with a stick in a wash pot heated by a wood fire in our backyard.
Once they cooled, she would wring out each garment by hand, then dry them on a clothesline. After gathering the shirts, she would take them inside to her ironing board, apply heavy starch from a sprinkler bottle, and iron them until they were smooth and stiff. When she finished, my relatives used to joke, those shirts could stand up on their own.
I worked side by side with my grandparents in our backyard garden — planting, watering and harvesting fresh fruits and vegetables year-round. String beans, onions, black-eyed peas, beets, tomatoes, corn, collard greens, squash, spinach, Swiss chard, watermelon, peppers, figs, pecans, pomegranates and peaches were all part of our yard-to-table seasonal foods.
My grandparents were solidly in the “spare the rod and spoil the child” school of child-rearing. My punishment for various misdeeds came at the business end of a weltraising switch, usually wielded by Mammaw.
But I never felt that my grandparents were unfair or mean. They simply wanted me to do the right thing, to thrive.
I often think about the great changes they witnessed during the course of their lives. They grew up in a horse-and-buggy world that gave way to automobiles, to planes and to moon travel.
They survived the brutality and insults of Jim Crow and they always paid their poll taxes, a fee imposed on Black Americans to obtain a ballot in Southern states, and never missed an opportunity to vote. They supported Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. They celebrated when Texas Hill Country legend and President Lyndon Baines Johnson successfully championed approval of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s. If they were alive today, I am certain they would support Black Lives Matter.
So I think of Mammaw and Daddy Buck, front-line workers before there was such a term, each workday when I log on to my computer and fire up my cellphone in preparation for hours of teleconferences, emails, texts and phone calls — all from my home office.
I still hear Mammaw’s admonition to work. And I am filled with gratitude.
Powell
is a program manager at the Port of San Diego and a former newspaper reporter for more than 30 years in Texas, Washington state and California, including the Union-tribune.
I count myself among the fortunate third of African American employees who ... are able to continue drawing a check during the health crisis while working from home.