A Beautiful Legacy

Remembering my Grandmother

Three years ago today, my family lost its matriarch, and since then none of us have been the same. Euna Sellers was my Meme, my maternal grandmother, and she was one of the strongest and kindest women I’ve ever known. Much of her life was exceptionally hard for her, what with her troubles starting at the tender age of five. Meme’s father died from a logging truck accident in 1934, and her mother passed just three years later of breast cancer. Meme was only eight years old when she and her older sister and brothers were placed with various family members throughout Alabama.

When asked about her childhood, Meme would tell as much of her story as she was willing to share. Memories of the years right after her mother died were the hardest for her to relive; she had gone to live with her uncle on his farm in Conecuh County, Alabama, and during that time, she and another young, female relative were mistreated, neglected, and often abused. So were the animals, and so were the tenant farmers countywide who helped work the land.

My novel Only the Rocks That Float was inspired by my grandmother’s early memories. The novel came to me in 2018 during a time when I was suffering. Some mornings, I didn’t want to wake up. I just wanted to lie there and let life go on without me. During that period, a visit with my Meme inspired me to write a story based on her life before she ran away from her uncle’s farm and moved to Georgia where within six months she’d met and married my grandfather.

In the story, a pair of fraternal twins—Lucas and Dolly—are sent to live on a farm in Conecuh County, Alabama with their grandmother’s brother, Emil Skinner. That farm, that brother, and many of their experiences were directly inspired by my grandmother’s. I wondered what a couple of siblings might have endured on a farm like her uncle’s. Having always been fascinated by twins, I thought, What if they were twins? And, having been in an interracial relationship for over a quarter of a century, with two biracial sons, I thought, Oooh, and what if the twins were interracial? And so, Dolly and Lucas’s story grew from there.

I met the uncle who inspired Emil Skinner. I was a little girl, the same age as Meme had been when she first arrived at that farm. I remember the old white house, a sweet mutt named Lady who escaped the heat in a hole dug out from under the house. I remember the drafty house with squeaky floorboards, the cracks beneath which you could see chickens and puppies running around. I remember having to use the outhouse and how my mother thought it would be funny to open the door and take a picture of me sitting on the plywood hole.

But mostly, I remember how I felt as I walked around the land. Sad. Pain. Like there was a cloud of grief hanging over the area that I couldn’t see but could feel on my skin and in my heart.

When I was a freshman in high school, I started painting landscapes and seascapes in oils on canvas, selling them to save money for school clothes and supplies. The year was 1991 and I lived next door to my grandparents, Meme and PawPaw, and up the hill from my aunt, uncle, and cousins. When I was painting, Meme liked to walk through the woods and watch me. One day, she told me, “Mandy, when I turn 65, I want you to teach me how to paint.”

Three years later, she turned 65. It was 1994 and I showed her everything I knew. We set up two easels in the art room at my house, we chose one of Bob Ross’s paintings as inspiration, and I laid out my palette with all the requisite colors: alizarin crimson, Prussian blue, cadmium red, yellow ochre, titanium white, to name a few. From the very first stroke of her fan brush, her natural talent bloomed across the canvas. When our paintings were done, we both stared at each other wide-eyed before erupting into a fit of giggles. Her canvas was spectacular! It looked as though she’d been painting her entire life.

Meme went on to paint right up until just months before she passed. She was 91 years old and over the years we made sure she had all the supplies and all the Bob Ross and William Alexander tapes and books she needed. PawPaw and my Uncle Keith had a sunroom built onto her home so that she could have a studio space. She filled it with artwork she either sold or donated, and even opened her home to students who also wanted to learn the craft.

A few years into painting, Meme started taking art lessons from a local artist whose medium was acrylics. Again, her talent was natural and the ease with which she picked up the brushes and brought a scene to life made it seem like the painting lived invisible on the canvas the entire time.

My Meme was one of my favorite people. I’ve loved her more than almost everyone I’ve ever loved. I’m an artist because of her. I’m very much alive because of her. And when I fell in love with a young Black man back in the mid-nineties, she was one of the only a handful of family members who didn’t allow racism and ignorance to affect her love for me. For everything she was to me, I am grateful. While her body is gone, and I might not be able to have lunch with her anymore and feel her squeeze me tight when she hugged me hello and goodbye, I am especially grateful that I’m a small part of her beautiful legacy. She lives in me, her memory inspires me, and her beautiful legacy hangs in my heart and in every room of my home.

Meme's legacy lives on

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About Mandy

Amanda "Mandy" Hughes is an author and instructional designer who uses the tarot to inspire storytelling. Her book Mystic Storyteller: A Writer’s Guide to Using the Tarot for Creative Inspiration and companion tarot deck are helping her peers do exactly that. She also writes fiction under pen name A. Lee Hughes. Mandy lives in Georgia with her husband and four sons, two of whom are furrier than the others (but not by much). Visit her website at www.haintbluecreative.com and find her on Substack @HaintBlueCreative.