I am because she was.

There's a photo of my great-grandmother; she is standing with her sister and sister in law with the biggest smile on her face. It is my favorite photo of her. She is in her twenties with her two best friends, my Aunt Nunnie her sister, and my Aunt Willa Mae, who would eventually become her sister in law. I love this photo because it is rare. It is unique because I am seeing her before she was a wife; before she was a mother, a grandmother, and great-grandmother. I'm seeing her as just Mary, a woman in her twenties dreaming of something more. I had seen this photo many times before. It had a place in all of the homes she lived in until her death. But it wasn't until after she died that I understood the depth of this photo. I realized that I only knew one part of her life and story. That I only knew her for a brief period of her life. But that short period profoundly impacts my life.

For most of her life, I believe my grandmother was misunderstood. She was born black, woman, and poor in Detroit. She was born into a world designed for black women to die. But she did not. Now my great-grandmother didn't go on to be the "first black woman to do such and such." She wasn't marching with Dr. King or any other prominent black leader. She never even finished 9th grade. She worked in factories in Detroit, helping to build materials for the war effort during World War II. And she retired as a custodian. She was a wife, a mother, and later divorced. She was poor. She spent a lot of time in survival mode. She was also resilient, and she never looked like her trauma. I think she was the classiest person anyone in our family ever knew. She taught me how to put on perfume, dabbing gently on each wrist. To only wear bracelets on my left wrist. How to moisturize my face correctly and how to apply lotion on my hands. She taught me all these little lessons as a child while she lived with my grandparents. I can only imagine the woman she was in her prime.

But most importantly, my grandmother was a thinker. And she taught me how to think. She taught me silence. She was quiet, and she often kept to herself, often people mistook that for weakness until she cut them with one of her witty retorts. I believe that she turned into herself as a way to protect herself from a world that could not love and appreciate her. I think she always wanted more. Growing up, I remember her telling me that she wanted to be a teacher, but she had to leave school. I remember the pain she said she felt. How she craved an education.

I believe that craving found its way into many of her descendants. Many of her dreams live on through those of us who are still here to speak her name. She never spoke directly about her hardships; most of the stories come from her children, who say that she loved and provided for them fiercely. But they also realized the strength it took for her to do that. Do I crave for knowledge because she did? I believe that it is the reason. My mother has memories of her reading James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, and she says that it wasn't until she went to college in the mid-eighties that she realized that my great-grandmother was reading literary works of art. A woman with an 8th-grade education. She also expresses anger at knowing that if she were born in a different world, she could have been more. She could have been more than a school teacher like she dreamed but maybe a college professor or a novelist. I find strength in knowing that my great-grandmother was a reader; her daughter, my grandmother, is a reader, my mother is a reader. I am a reader. I am because she was. There are many days I wished I asked her more questions; that I listened more than talked. Sometimes I make up stories about how and why this photo of her was taken. They often seem like the stories my college friends and I have when we make memories. Sometimes we are laughing and getting ready to go out and someone pulls out their phone to take a picture. Or maybe something important happen in one of our lives and we want to remember it. Others we are just being; laughing being women without the interruption of the outside world. It reminds me that she was more than my great grandmother. I thank her for all the unknown and known things she taught me. Because of her I am a black woman; I'm strong and I can be anything I want. And just maybe I am also here to write the stories she never got to write.