Silence. The muted Hallmark special was the only indication of time passing. Silence. I wanted her to speak so badly. Silence. Leaning back in the nursing home recliner, she tried explaining what it was like to pick cotton. Unfortunately, between her dementia and pain medications, she could hardly speak. Although my grandmother passed away when I was fifteen, she was really gone since before I can recall. That was the shell of a person I fondly remember, but that was hardly the woman who began my story. 

Eventually, my father assumed the storytelling duty. Sitting on the couch beside her, he explained that she was born and raised on the losing end of sharecropping. She was one of sixteen siblings, but only eleven lived past the age of ten. Each day of her childhood consisted of back-breaking farm chores, including picking cotton, milking cows, and churning her own butter. Like everyone else in town, she always missed the first six weeks of school for the harvest. My grandmother was on track to be a farmhand for her whole life, but she was different. She managed to enroll in a “business school” where she learned secretarial skills, like writing shorthand. During an enlisted airman’s time in Mississippi, he met the love of his life, married my grandmother, and whisked her away from her family’s financial damnation. 

Both of them worked full time jobs to support themselves and their four sons. Moving every three to four years, they just managed to put food on the table, but they provided a safe home in which the boys could grow unmolested. When it came time for college, the boys were on their own. The younger two brothers never attended college, preferring instead to go straight into handyman work or unskilled labor. But my grandmother’s example taught my father to work. He washed dishes and bussed tables at Shoney’s to support himself through college. Eventually, he earned his Master’s degree and set off. After a lifetime of careful financial planning, he prepared a home where the food was always there, but more importantly, the home was always there.  

When my grandmother passed, it fell to her three surviving sons to fix up and sell her house. Years of neglect and empty promises of repairs left it reeking of cat urine and looking about ready to shoot the next episode of American Horror Story. In her backyard, my uncle had procured an elephant-sized hoard of rusting metal waste on the off-chance he might need a spare part. His “contribution” to her legacy hit me like a bag of bricks: he never got out. 

My story really started two generations ago. That poor young farmgirl struggled her whole life to raise slightly less poor sons. Some of them fell back into that same pit, with one of them drug-addicted and dependent on his mother until the day she died, and the other dying of an overdose when I was seven. But one of those sons had a child who would have a real shot at getting out. 

Getting out means being productive every day. Getting out means building a moral compass that can weather the storm. Getting out means that that child cannot look around at his absentee mother, alcoholic family, or overdosed uncle for guidance. His father and his parents before him worked too hard and gave up too much. That child was never crippled by poverty nor wondered if there would be dinner tonight. He knows that he was born with most of the work already done for him. That child knows that every success he has is built on lifetimes of success before him. That child knows that nothing he does is his own, and he is not ashamed. Two lifetimes of sacrifice and hardship led to me. Thank you, grandma, for starting this story. I swear that it will not end with me.