I Found My Black History In Grandma’s Hands
Hands. Years ago, when my nearly 30-year-old daughter was closer to single-digit ages, I wanted to capture photographs of hands making and doing tasks. So I did. I created a sepia-toned set of photographs to display in my basement’s “play area.” My recently deceased grandmother’s hands lifting the lid on a pot of greens, my hands crafting a scrapbook, my daughter’s hands practicing for piano class—these photographs now reside on the wall of my condo along with one of those staged photographs that includes my even-longer-deceased mother. Four generations together.
These hands represent creativity. The ability to create, to “make a dollar out of 15 cents,” has long been associated with the history of Black women. What we now call “Black girl magic” is how we learned to survive 400 years of oppression. When I think of what those hands had to do in order to survive, I am inspired. I am humbled.
Those hands had to pick cotton even when blisters made them painful and raw. Those hands had to care for the master’s children even when they were needed to nurse the sick persons at their own living quarters. Those hands had to guide and point out a future even when the way initially seemed dark, just as Harriet Tubman led the enslaved from Maryland farmlands to the Canadian North. Those hands that traced letters by the light of a candle, under threat of…
