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On Mother's Day, Grandma Often Gets Highest Honors

By Tisha Y. Lewis and Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA

WASHINGTON (NNPA)¸—Bob “Butterbean” Love paused briefly, his voice breaking as he wept softly over the phone.
  “Oh my grandmother!” recalled the former NBA star of the Chicago Bulls in an interview with the NNPA News Service.
    One of the renowned HBCU basketball players and coaches recently featured in the critically acclaimed documentary, “Black Magic”, the Chicago native told how his grandmother, Ella Hunter, was used by God to impact his life.
    Gathering himself, he continued the story of having run away from an abusive stepfather, who had beaten him with a belt buckle. He was an 8-year-old, who stuttered pervasively. One day he broke away amidst one of his stepfather’s beatings and fled to his grandmother’s house.
   “I told her what happened and I was stuttering and so my stepfather came over the next day to get me. My grandmother stood behind the door with an ax hammer and my stepfather said, ‘Is that boy here? Send that boy out here.’
   “My grandmother came out [into] the yard with the ax hammer cocked back. She said, ‘Don’t you ever come by this house again and don’t you ever touch this boy again.”
    Love pressed through tearful pauses to continue the story.

Posted May 7, 2008

   “She told him, she would hit him up side his head with the ax hammer if he ever came around to touch me, you know…That changed my life…Every time I did something good…my grandmother gave me a hug and a kiss…and a pat on the head. As a boy, I would always want to do good things in the neighborhood. I would help old people with their yard. I would rake their yard and the other old ladies would tell her what I did. My grandmother would give me the juiciest kiss you ever had and a big ole hug and would always tell me I was a good boy.”
    In that one brief story about Ella Hunter, the grandmother who raised him, Bob Love expressed the respect and affection that thousands of Black people around the nation feel about those heroic mothers and grandmothers whose abiding love encouraged them to excel through the trials of life.

   In the African-American family, it is not unusual to have multi-generational upbringings by mothers, grandmothers, aunts and even older sisters. The U. S. Census Bureau reports that of the 4.5 million children who lived in grandparent-headed households in 2000, they were most often children in African-American families.
   Therefore, whether through the Jim Crow of the civil rights movement or the oppressive hardships of today, on Mother’s Day, it will often be “Grandma” – or memories of her - who will get top honors.  

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