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I Took Up a Craft for My Grandmother Who Couldn’t
She was unable to learn to sew due to colorism, so I began to create in her honor
The crooked stitches ride across the fabric, their wavering lines like rivers on a map. My hands hold the material steady, but I still can’t seem to master straight lines just yet. Practice, I tell myself. Practice and patience, which is funny when I think about it. I have little patience to regularly do the first and so little practice with the second. So I can’t figure out why I want this so badly. And then I remember: I’m sewing for Hennie.
On my late grandmother’s birth certificate, her name was written as Hennie, although all her life, people called her Henrietta. In the small South Carolina county where she was born in 1925, the person recording the information didn’t know how to spell Henrietta, so Hennie it was. She was a brown-skinned woman of the sort of rich color that inspires chocolate metaphors. While I found plenty of love in those deeply shaded arms over the years, she — especially as a youngster — suffered for her complexion. There was one thing she always wanted to learn, but it was her own skin, a beautiful shade some viewed as less than, that stood in the way of it.
As was her way, she didn’t tell me this story. I heard it from one of her daughters. My aunts navigated their teen years in the late 1960s and ‘70s when domestic arts were in decline. Caught up in second-wave feminism, they didn’t want to sew, despite my grandmother’s hopes.
My hand-sewing is even worse than machine sewing, but I’m still grateful for seventh-grade home economics, where my sloppily constructed pin cushion was the product of weeks of diligent hand stitching. Cotton would have been a much better fabric selection, but have you ever tried to convince a 12-year-old to choose practicality over flash? Nothing less than garish, sky blue satin would do, with edges that frayed oh so easily and didn’t neatly tuck at the command of a needle. And yet, I was proud of that lumpy little cushion, with the run in the cheap fabric like a stocking that’s been snagged by a rough fingernail. My love of handcrafts was born there, I think, although it would take decades before I truly chased it.
