Black Families are Black History
/By Troy Flint
February is Black History Month and we generally honor this time by remembering inventors, explorers, writers, artists, and other great public figures that have shaped the course of our race, this nation, and the world. Lost in the shuffle are the millions of “regular people”, everyday heroes whose efforts and sacrifices have advanced the race and society and helped people like me attain a place of privilege. My Grandmother, Ruth Gatewood Squire, was one of these people. It’s critical that my children realize that they stand on her shoulders and not just on those of the luminaries you read about in books or see in Ken Burns documentaries.
We laid my grandmother to rest this winter. It was an unkind twist of fate that a woman who was so devoted to tradition and to faith was denied the typical homegoing ceremony where friends and loved ones gather in fellowship. Instead, in a sign of these pandemic times, we shared our memories and gratitude largely via Zoom. Fortunately, a few family members and clergy were able to participate (socially distanced) from the family church in Youngstown, Ohio while the rest of us joined online from around the globe. It’s not the way anyone imagined we’d say goodbye to Grandma. Still, it’s a blessing that a woman who was born before television was invented and not long after our last great pandemic, lived long enough to have her funeral broadcast worldwide over Facebook.
Grandma’s passing signals the end of an era. She was the last of 15 siblings born into a family, that like so many Black families of that time, migrated north in search of greater freedom and a better life for their children. Life in Ohio was not without its indignities and deprivation, but despite enduring the Depression, a World War, discrimination, and many other hardships, Grandma maintained a relentless focus on family, faith, hard work, and discipline. Those principles earned her the nickname “Sarge”, established her as a pillar of the community, and afforded her children and grandchildren opportunities that would have been unimaginable in her day.
By the time COVID came around, Alzheimer’s had eroded much of Grandma’s mental and physical capacity, but she retained her trademark strength and persistence and never took pain medicine. Youngstown tough till the day she died and a kind that will never be seen again. Grandma’s senior living center was on COVID lockdown for the last 8 months of her life, so I didn’t get to see her last year and my son only met her once, which is hard to stomach. I'll have to work extra hard to pass down the traditions. The fact that my daughter is somehow the reincarnation of a woman born a hundred years before her will help keep the memories fresh.
Really, Grandma was born too soon. If she’d been of a different time, she probably would have been an attorney. She was filled with strong opinions, fierce determination, a firm sense of right and wrong, and could prosecute a case like nobody’s business. I said that her passing is probably the only time she went quietly (that didn’t make it into the obituary). As it was, Grandma directed her considerable physical and intellectual energies toward her family, toward the church, and toward an endless array of community organizations that took up the better part of a paragraph in the obituary. That obituary is a piece of history to me. And Black History Month is as much a celebration of the Black family and Black culture as it is veneration of individual exploits, which are rarely individual anyway as they always depend to some extent upon collective will and collaboration among like-minded people. People like Ruth Gatewood Squire. Rest in Power, Grandma.
Photo by Eye for Ebony