My mother collects memories: 1940s photographs and my grandmother’s leather-bound Bible. In one fading picture, Granny stands on a NYC stoop with three children, part of the Great Migration from the South. Tracing my family tree brings a quiet sadness—our history stops at my grandparents, unrecorded and lost. Yet looking at that photo, I see myself. My mother is petite, sand-complexioned, with amber eyes and wavy hair. Granny and I are terra cotta, built fuller, with arabica eyes and tight, coarse coils. I inherited Granny’s ambitious spirit and customs: no hats on the bed, no umbrellas indoors, no purse on the floor, and giant wooden cutlery on the kitchen wall—what some call Hoodoo. Though not religious like her, I treasure her Bible as a bridge between the physical and metaphysical. In Orangeburg, SC, Granny left school around age eight to sharecrop. Systemic racism and Jim Crow limited her formal education, but she knew math—and knew the landowner cheated her. Refusing to let circumstances define her, she took learning into her own hands. When I was toddlers-age, she taught me to read, write, and do math using her Bible, bills, and supermarket circulars. Long before preschool, she used scripture and receipts to teach phonics, vocabulary, and early economics. Granny passed before I finished elementary school, but her foundation remains. I model who I am as a person and educator after Lucille Zeigler-Gibbs.

– Jasmin Eli

Relationship:  Grandchild of im/migrant Grandchild of im/migrant