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On Mother's Day, It's Often 'Grandma' Who Gets the Highest Honors
by Tisha Y. Lewis and Hazel Trice Edney
For New Pittsburgh Courier
WASHINGTON (NNPA) - Bob “Butterbean” Love paused briefly, his voice breaking as he wept softly over the phone.
“Oh my grandmother!” recalled the former NBA star of the Chicago Bulls in an interview with the NNPA News Service. One of the renowned HBCU basketball players and coaches recently featured in the critically acclaimed documentary, “Black Magic”, the Chicago native told how his grandmother, Ella Hunter, was used by God to impact his life.
Gathering himself, he continued the story of having run away from an abusive stepfather, who had beaten him with a belt buckle. He was an 8-year-old, who stuttered pervasively. One day he broke away amidst one of his stepfather’s beatings and fled to his grandmother’s house.
“I told her what happened and I was stuttering and so my stepfather came over the next day to get me. My grandmother stood behind the door with an ax hammer and my stepfather said, ‘Is that boy here? Send that boy out here.’
“My grandmother came out [into] the yard with the ax hammer cocked back. She said, ‘Don’t you ever come by this house again and don’t you ever touch this boy again.”
Love pressed through tearful pauses to continue the story.
“She told him, she would hit him up side his head with the ax hammer if he ever came around to touch me, you know…That changed my life…Every time I did
something good…my grandmother gave me a hug and a kiss…and a pat on the head. As a boy, I would always want to do good things in the neighborhood. I would help old people with their yard. I would rake their yard and the other old ladies would tell her what I did. My grandmother would give me the juiciest kiss you ever had and a big ole hug and would always tell me I was a good boy.”
In that one brief story about Ella Hunter, the grandmother who raised him, Bob Love expressed the respect and affection that thousands of Black people around the nation feel about those heroic mothers and grandmothers whose abiding love encouraged them to excel through the trials of life.
In the African-American family, it is not unusual to have multi-generational upbringings by mothers, grandmothers, aunts and even older sisters. The U. S. Census Bureau reports that of the 4.5 million children who lived in grandparent-headed households in 2000, they were most often children in African-American families.
Therefore, whether through the Jim Crow of the civil rights movement or the oppressive hardships of today, on Mother’s Day, it will often be “Grandma” – or memories of her - who will get top honors.
 | Kiona Daniels treasures her grandmother, Ella Daniels, for having imparted to her the "strength" of womanhood.
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For Mobile, Ala. native Kiona Daniels, the honor-giving started last Sunday.
“Grandma, you know that you are my heart and that I love you unconditionally. People often say, ‘God bless you for taking care of your grandmother’, but I’m the one who is blessed. There’s no charge, no debt that I feel for being in your life. I thank God for birthing me and planting me to be a part of your family,” she told her grandmother, Ella Daniels, during a surprise 93rd birthday celebration and special honor as the eldest member at Dominion Church of Washington, D.C.
Kiona Daniels, now deputy press secretary in the Capitol Hill office of U. S. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), recalled for the church’s congregation the impact on her life as she was raised in a household with her mother, her grandmother and her great grandmother. “Because of that, I have a foundation and a cornerstone of strength, virtue, long-living and life vitality,” she said.
When Daniels was only 16, her mother was killed in a car accident. Her grandmother, Ella, took over the mothering. “I have never known not knowing the Lord because of my grandmother,” she said.
The impact of a matriarch upon the life of a man and of a woman may differ. Yet, they can be equally inspirational during difficult times.
For both Love, the basketball player, and Daniels the legislative aid, their Grandma Ellas made all the difference.
“I thank you for being my mother when I lost my mom,” Daniels told her grandmother. “For showing me what a woman is supposed to be like, what she looks like, her stature, her beauty, her grace, her intelligence, all that a woman encompasses and on top of that more importantly what a woman of God encompasses.”
Love, whose mother had him as a teenager, says they have a wonderful relationship and he does not blame her for how he was treated by her husband - his stepfather from whom he fled.
However, on this Mother’s Day, Love – now a motivational speaker - credits the discipline and the Christian upbringing of his grandmother for changing the course of his life.
Now laughing, he tells a happier story of overcoming the hard times.
“I would come home from school crying all the time because I stuttered so bad and the kids at school would laugh at me all day long, you know and I was scared of school all the time. My grandmother would meet me at the front gate with her hat on and her apron…she would ask me, ‘What’s wrong?’ I would tell her, ‘Grandmother, the kids at school made fun of me. They laughed at me all day long.’
“She would try to make me feel good and always gave me words of encouragement, to make me never give up. She’ll always tell me, ‘Robert Earl, son, let me tell you something. There is only one perfect person who ever walked on this earth and that’s our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Everyone has a handicap and everyone has a disability and what you have to do, son, is you gotta hold on to your dreams. You gotta have a dream.’ And those words have carried me through high school, college, all my life.”
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