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…
