My grandmother Etta was born in Wilmington in 1924 to parents who had come up from Mississippi three years earlier as part of what they used to call the Great Migration. Her father worked the slaughterhouses on the south side. Her mother took in laundry. They had seven children. Etta was the second.
She left school at fifteen to help support the family. She worked as a domestic for a white family in the suburbs for eleven years, six days a week, taking two buses each way. In 1950, she married my grandfather, who had returned from the war with a Purple Heart and a permanent limp. They bought a house in Wilmington in 1957 for $7,800 — the first house in our family to be owned outright. They lived in that house for fifty-one years.
My grandmother lived to be ninety-three. She buried her husband in 1989. She buried her oldest son, my uncle, in 1996. She buried her younger sister in 2004. She lived alone for the last twenty-eight years of her life and refused, repeatedly and with great firmness, to move in with any of her children. The house was hers. She had earned it.
She voted in every single election from 1948 until 2016. When she could no longer walk to the polling place, my mother drove her. The 2008 election she went twice — once to vote, and once the next morning, just to drive past and look at it again. She cried that whole drive. She cried for an hour. She said: I never thought I would see this day. I never thought I would live this long.
This hex is for her. For the slaughterhouses and the buses and the white family in the suburbs. For fifty-one years in one house. For every vote she cast. For the long walk from Mississippi to here. America was hard on her. America was hers anyway. Thank you, Grandma. We remember.