A recent study of the role of grandmothers in the African American community reveals the ways in which women were essential to holding together the personal stability of the family and of the Reconstruction community. Under slavery and in the years following Reconstruction, grandmothers and older women were responsible for caring for children, educating them, and nurturing the community. Kinship bonds were extremely important under slavery and the constant disruption of family created fictive kin as well (when older women were called grandmothers or “mama” even though there was no biological relation) which kept a familial relationship amongst enslaved Africans. But these personal roles also had strong political implications as grandmothers were the primary storytellers of the community. Storytelling as a rhetorical form has always been an expression of African American rhetoric; folk tales in particular transmitted themes of the “coping ability, strength, endurance, trickeration capacity, and power of black people.”[1] Through the stories they told during slavery, grandmothers “socialized all the children in their care into the work and survival techniques necessary for the brutal life of chattel slavery” and offered “a counternarrative to their grandchildren, one in which the owners had less power.”[2] Once slavery had ended and African Americans were working to assemble a new community under Reconstruction, grandmothers and older women continued the work of educating young children with stories of resistance. Jillian Jimenez researched oral histories records in the Library of Congress to discover that following slavery,
grandmothers maintained their status through storytelling, continuing these narratives of resisting oppression, and turning whites' power against them in family histories, folktales, and songs (Family Folklore). Stories praising the courage of slave ancestors and reviling the cruelty of whites were often immediately followed by stories about the cleverness of both slaves and free persons after the war. "Putting one over on the white man" was a sign of particular skill and interpreted as a conquest, whether the victim knew about it or not (Family Folklore).[3]
These messages of survival and resistance should be taken with an understanding of their political weight. Older Black women were instrumental in passing on the tools for the political advancement of the blossoming Reconstruction community, and even when their voices were in the home, they were shaping the future of Black public discourse and political action.
[1] Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 156.
[2] Jillian Jimenez, "The History of Grandmothers in the African-American Community," The Social Service Review 76 (2002): 527.
[3] Jimenez, "The History of Grandmothers in the African-American Community," 527.
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