fannie turner portrait 2 1919-0-Animated

This photograph was taken in Montgomery, Alabama, during my grandparent’s engagement in 1919. I animated it using My Heritage, Deep Nostalgia.

My maternal grandmother, Fannie Mae Turner Graham, was born 133 years ago today. She was born in 1888 in Lowndes County Alabama, the oldest child of Howard and Jennie (Allen) Turner. Here is something my mother wrote about her in about 1980.

Somebody’s Daughter My Mother

By Doris Graham Cleage

            Yes, I’ll tell you, I am somebody’s daughter.  My mother was really SOMEBODY.

            She was the first child of my (who else?) grandmother who was one of seven children born to a woman freed from slavery at seventeen and a free man.  The woman had been trained as a seamstress in the “Big House” and she taught every one of her five daughters to sew.  And so my Grandmother earned her living as a seamstress for white folks in Montgomery, Alabama.

            It was fortunate that she had an independent spirit as well as a skill because she lost her husband when my mother was four years old and a younger sister was two.  While grandmother was out sewing, the two children stayed with their grandparents who were very strict.

            One of my mother’s earliest memories was of a spanking with the flat of a saw by her grandfather because she made footprints across the dirt backyard which he had freshly swept to a marvelous smoothness! 

            She also remembered him complaining often about their behavior to their mother when she came home.  She spanked them too. But mother said she learned early that if they cried loudly, the spanking was shorter and less energetic.  Armed with this knowledge, she and her sister made it through childhood and in due time graduated from Normal school (high school). 

            Mother finished in 1906 and she refused scholarships to college.  She chose instead to clerk in her uncle’s general store and eventually managed it.  I think she valued this and her marriage above all other experiences in her life.  I think they held vastly different meanings for her.  I think one represented what she really wanted to do and to be and the other represented what she thought she ought to want to do and be.

            I never knew her very well.  There never was time to talk to her until she was very ill and I took care of her.  This seems very strange to me.  My mother never worked after she married.  She was always at home taking care of her family.  I lived at home until I married.  When I lived at home in Detroit I saw her at least once a week.  When I lived in other cities, we exchanged letters at least once a week.  For the last seven years of her life we shared a two-family flat.  But I never knew her as a person until she was dying.

            Stereotypes and structures.  Forms and duties.  Oughts and shoulds.  How things are supposed to be.  Never how they are.  Cages and gags and straightjackets.  And we don’t know they’re there.

            When I could see and hear my mother as a person, and not as MY MOTHER, I was delighted and dismayed.  Delighted that we had so much in common and that I liked her.  Dismayed that she was eighty-six and ill and that life had made me wait so long to know her.

            She and my father were happily married for fifty-one years.  They loved and respected each other.  Even in delirium I never heard either one say anything but good and loving things about the other.  Mother spoke with peace and sureness about my father.  But her face lit up, her back straightened, her voice got louder and she was alive when she talked of managing Great Uncle Victor’s general store.  She never tired of telling me about taking inventory, counting money, keeping books, dealing with the help and customers and demanding respect from the drummers. 

            Drummers were white salesmen trying to get orders for their products and you can imagine how difficult it was for a handsome black woman doing a man’s job to get respect from them.  But she knew the power of her ability to give or without orders and she used it without apology.  Her whole tone when she straightened her back and raised her head to tell it was not of asking for respect, but demanding it – and loving the demanding!

            She managed the store for the twelve most satisfying years of her life.  Then she married in 1919.  My father never wanted her to work.  She suggested a small business several times.

            He said, “A MAN supports his family.  I am a man. My wife will never work.”

            She knew he was supposed to be right so she didn’t press it.  She wrote that all a woman needs to be happy is “a baby to rock and a man to please.”  And that’s the way she acted.  She kept the house, cooked the meals, rocked the babies and pleased the man. But she never believed that woman was meant only for this because she raised her two daughters by word and deed to believe that women should be whatever they wanted to be.  I don’t remember her ever saying, “But women can’t be freighter captains, or airplane pilots or doctors or engineers.”  she believed I could be anything and I believed it too.

            How restricted she must have felt doing most of the jobs that go with keeping house and raising babies.