Digging through boxes one night this week in my mom’s dark basement, I spotted an old spiral-bound notebook with the $0.87 Kmart price tag still on it. The cover was missing, the spiral binding was bent and many of the pages had been ripped out, with the remnants of the torn pages remaining inside the binding.
As I opened it, my eyes fell to my grandmother’s cursive handwriting. And then a memory came rushing back. At my prodding, this was her attempt to write down her history.
Over the next eight pages, Grandma (who died in 2002) wrote everything down without any paragraph breaks – a seeming stream of consciousness to just get it all down since her annoying grandson asked her to.
After listing her five siblings, she jumped into their story.
“Our parents were Christians. All my life, we were poor. My dad was a sharecropper all his life. But the love we had from our parents was among the best. Every time the church doors opened, my parents saw that we were in church. My parents were Hardshell Baptist [better known as Primitive Baptists]. They moved to L. R. [Little Rock], then we went to Center Point [Baptist Church, in a small town outside of Little Rock].”
She wrote briefly about how her dad, Hugh, learned to read by using the Bible.
“Two years after Dad was saved, he could read the Bible … He took his Bible wherever he went. That was very good. Before, he could not read. He signed his name with an X.”
She went on to share a story about how their preacher, Brother George Johnson, would ask people in the congregation for various Bible verses. One Sunday, he asked for a verse during worship, and her dad stood and recited it from memory, then the two that followed it.
“Brother Johnson asked for only one verse,” Grandma’s mom, Eunice, said at dinner.
“Well, I thought that if he did not know the one, then he did not know the other two,” Hugh responded.
Coming from a man I knew from stories to be a serious man, I always loved when Grandma shared this story. And now, I have it in her handwriting.
Shortly after moving to Omaha, Nebraska, sometime in the 1930s, my grandparents bought an apartment house from my grandfather’s aunt.
“Sometimes, we wondered how we could feed three boys and ourselves,” Grandma wrote in her notebook. “We had enough to eat and a place to stay. Then we got our house on Grover for $4,000 – no water, no gas. We worked hard to get a bathroom, and to get the house modern, but we enjoyed the new house.”
Imagine working hard for a bathroom. But in an era when outhouses were the norm, an indoor bathroom would have been a big deal.
At one point in the notebook, she wrote a personal letter to my dad and his family. I’ve since shared it with them and all of them have gotten emotional.
Near the end of the notebook, Grandma recalled the night her husband died.
“Ed died 6=26=1985. That night, I was holding his hand. A nurse came in. After a few minutes, she said to me, ‘I am so sorry.’ But I knew he had died. As I was looking at him, I saw an angel with light around the angel for a minute. I knew he was OK. Some people probably don’t believe me, but I know and believe.”
I’ve heard her tell this story many times, but again, having it in her own handwriting is so special.
Her eight handwritten pages contain such an amazing story of faith and resilience, along with heartfelt confession and regret. But ultimately, she tasted forgiveness from her Savior. And now I’m hoping her story continues to speak to future generations in my family – not for her sake, necessarily, but for God’s.
Maybe it’ll inspire you to jot down your own history about God’s faithfulness in your family. You never know … someone in your family might stumble across that notebook decades from now and draw inspiration from it.
