I see it so clearly.  The room partially lit just after 7am by a brilliant sunlight peaking through the half-pulled shades.  She is sitting there at the dining room table fully dressed in a vintage rounded collar black swing coat with white-gloved-hands clutching her tiny box purse.  Her ultra fine hair, slick with royal crown pomade, is parted down the middle and braided into four plats I made for her the evening before. She is, like many other carbon-copy mornings, ready, faithful, and blissing out. 

 

That particular day, when I asked my great-grandmother with my eye lids breaking free from sleep crust what was going on, she told me matter-of-factly that the Reverend C. L. Franklin and Lena Horne were on their way to pick her up for breakfast.  As had been the case so many mornings before, I slid away in my socks on the hard wood floors quietly as if my very real presence could evict the fantasies that regularly leapt out of her senile mind.  I didn’t care if her stories of celebrity were made up or a product of the dementia that had begun to erode her life.  What mattered to me was witnessing the abiding delight she got from imagining herself as legendary.  A star.  Invincible.  

 

My “gra-ma”, Martha Hairston, was to me a woman supreme and I have often reflected on the extraordinary ordeals she lived through in order for me to see the undressed, gorgeous and complicated glory of true womanhood.  She was at times comical, other times reserved.  Regal, but at home among most.  Steadfast more than not, but yielding when guided by her intuition. Stoic to many, but passionately feeling and emotionally intimate with me.  

 

My great-grandmother was many women - as are most of us - and spent much of her life confronting the tragedies life served her with a ferocious appetite to stay living.  She could have responded to the custodial loss of her first child, single motherhood or her fading memory in a variety of ways - including giving up.  Instead, standing in the tradition of the women warriors before her, she showed up for her life - all of it.  In doing so, her portrait of womanhood taught me that shit happens, and that all of it could be made holy through the lens of grace.  She was a living goddess.  

 

Still, what has most stayed with me over the years from the memory of the only great-grandparent I met is how deeply her life taught me that it is each of us individually who must be capable of creating a mythology about our lives that serve and empower us.  That if we don’t exercise the liberty to bring fearless imagination to the narrative we tell ourselves about our lives, we risk becoming a co-star to the dramas we were born to star in.

 

I thank God for “gra-ma Marthy” and her daughter, my beloved grandmother Cora, and her daughter, my sensational mother Mary for showing me firsthand what it means to be a powerful woman.  Along with my Aunties, their examples of sheer feminine brilliance remind me to honor with humility every woman I encounter because I know each set of eyes holds a story; every smile an unbelievable victory.   It is this magic of womanhood that I salute every single day.