Ongoing Sturggles: Grandmother as Guide

Florence 4

(See earlier posts for more of Florence's story).

At our interview in her house on the Lakota Reservation, Florence told me about her grandmother:

“My mother died when I was thirteen, and I went and stayed with my grandmother, my dad’s mother. My grandmother was a woman who lived by traditional Lakota values that were connected to keeping the family together, no matter what. When relatives came unexpectedly, she would pitch up a tent for them even though we had little. She would find enough food for them even when they stayed for a week. She would go out into her garden and dig up the hole where she stored the fresh picked vegetables. She would go out into the forest and pick wild berries and plums and make berry juice.
“Following in her footsteps, I realized one day that my children were not safe on the reservation. I immediately moved with them down to the river to a small piece of land owned by my husband. We were twelve miles away from the main part of the reservation, but it was the place to raise our children in the traditional ways that I had learned from my grandmother, away from the violence around us.
“From 1952 until 1965 we lived down by the river. It was hard down there, but we had some of our best times there. We spent a lot of our time on the riverbank, washing the clothes and washing ourselves. We had fun doing the things that had to be done. We put in a big garden with corn, watermelon, cucumbers, and potatoes. The water from the river made it a rich, productive garden. My husband would get the children out there picking the potatoes, at a penny a piece.
“When we lived there, we could keep the children safe in the ways that my grandmother kept me safe. We were with the hawk, the deer, the fox, and the fish, which swam in the river with the children. Sometimes my nephews would show up. One week I had twenty-one boys down there, but I managed to feed them all. I had a lot of beans, and they loved beans, and we had bread. My grandmother believed that if she could feed the family we would all survive whatever else we had to face.”
“People helped us when we were down there by the river. One day, my father got us a washing machine and a heater to heat the water to use in the machine. After we got the washing machine, even Richard my husband went out to wash all the piles of clothes. One year my uncle lived down there, and he had cattle, and we milked the cows. One of my husband’s cousins brought a trailer down there to house the boys. Up until then the house was way too small for our family.
“Then one day a social service worker came down and asked me if I could take three little girls who had been abandoned. I told her, ‘I’ll take them.’ I didn’t know how I would care for them, but I couldn’t say no. Someone had told this social service lady to ask me to keep them for a year, but they stayed with me for eleven years. After the one year, the social service lady came down again, and she was going to take the girls, but she told me that no one was willing to take all three of them so they were going to have to separate them.
“The oldest one Michelle started crying. She called me Grandma.
‘Grandma,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be separated from my sisters.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep them.’
“When they came of age and married, then they went back to their village, but they still stay in touch and are part of our family.” As if as an afterthought, Florence added:
“All my kids understand how to look out for others. Being poor somehow makes us know how important it is to look out for others who have even less than we do.”
Florence spoke of hardship as a matter-of-fact. I, who had had good fortune found myself reeling in the face of her deprivation. It occurred to me that my expectations of life made me less able to manage life’s difficult demands. Since Florence expected life to be hard, she had a greater capacity to endure. In developing my story of survival, I had to re-form my expectations of life and begin a search for guides who I might rely on when life was hard. Perhaps you might wish to do the same.