Sherry L. Howard shares fond memories of her grandmother Annie Lee “Big Mama” Howard.

My recollections of Big Mama (my grandmother, Alonzo Howard’s wife) were that she was always there, bigger than life, wider than the sky, as nourishing as air. Filling the spaces of my life with her teacakes made of flour and cane syrup, her candied figs and blackberry pies, her bottom lip filled with Peach snuff and her Red Fox stockings rolled down just below her knees.

Big Mama was a pretty woman, with small facial features and café-au-lait skin that she dabbed with nut-brown face powder when she was going to church. She also was a private woman, who rarely talked about herself and waved off any questions that she considered personal.

During my younger years, her best friend was a church mate named Bessie Collins, whom she talked to on the phone every day. Years later, after Bessie Collins and Giddy – that’s what we called our grandfather Alonzo – died, I remember wondering if Big Mama was lonesome. I never asked her, but I felt that it must be hard, being the only one of her generation left.

When Big Mama was older, in her 70s, I did ask her if she was afraid of dying. She said no, there was nothing to be scared of. I supposed that when your heart is in the church and you’ve spent your life as a Christian – as Big Mama did – death is no phantom.

Big Mama loved the church and she loved cooking.  When the two came together every fourth Sunday in August when I was growing up, it was awesome. As children, we loved it. The house swelled with the aroma of fried chicken, ham, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, and cakes: chocolate cakes, coconut cakes, white cakes. The stuff of children’s dreams and tummy aches.

She got dressed first and supervised my aunts as they carefully stacked pans and trays of food in cardboard boxes and placed them in the trunks of cars. Our mouths watered, but we knew not to touch any of the food until after they came back from church.

Sometimes we went to church, in our starched dresses and shirts and shiny patent leather shoes. We sat impatiently in the hot church, the food waiting in trunks outside – along with our attention.

The service finally over, the church emptied, and we all headed out to the dirt yard to cars under the shade trees, where the men dutifully opened their trunks. Big Mama and my aunts placed the food on small tables or left some in the pans in the trunks. In earlier years, the food was placed on long tables on the church grounds.

Men of the church made tubs of lemonade. Family members, usually the children, took empty pitchers and pails to be filled with the sweet sticky drink.

One of my biggest joys as a child was getting Big Mama to scratch away the dandruff in my hair. She sat in one of the red metal  chairs on the porch at our house in Lizella, GA, with me sitting flat on the porch and my back between her legs as she parted my hair. When she couldn’t find anything, she’d try to wave me off. But with a little coaxing – “Try this side” or “Try here” – she’d be back at it, parting and scratching and peering through her glasses. In a lot of ways, I believe she enjoyed it, too.

Big Mama didn’t visit often with neighbors, but she seemed to look forward to the visits from her daughter Rebecca and sons Walter and Floyd, their spouses and children from Cincinnati. We started preparing for them weeks in advance, painting and cleaning, because these were what we thought were our well-to-do kinfolks from up North.

Some of them felt that Big Mama should not have been trying to raise her grandchildren, that it was too much for her. Big Mama said they were always trying to get her to come live with them.

She wouldn’t leave, though. “I don’t wanna go and live in Cincinnati,” I remember her saying often. Georgia was her home; it was all she had ever known. We were glad she never left us. It’s hard to imagine growing up without her. She practically raised us in the house in Lizella that Alonzo had built on land he bought in the 1950s. She cared for us while our mothers were working.

My first trip away from home was with Big Mama. It was the mid-1960s, and she and I rode a Trailways bus to Cincinnati. I must have been about 14 or 15 at the time. We caught the bus in Macon and rode for most of the morning to Chattanooga, TN. We sat inside the station for a while, until the announcer called our bus.

Buses were lined up outside the station, so I went up to a white driver and asked if the bus was going to Cincinnati. He said yes. What the driver didn’t bother to mention was that the bus was going to Cincinnati by way of Spartanburg, SC, – which was not our route. We rode all night, ended up in Spartanburg and were late arriving in Cincinnati. By the time we arrived, Big Mama was tired (she was in her 60s then), I was embarrassed, and Rebecca was worried.

Big Mama was always dear to me. I realized how much right after she fell at home in 1975 and broke her leg. I had finished graduate school at Ohio State University, living in Macon and working at the Macon Telegraph as a newspaper reporter. I stopped by the hospital one day to see her. My aunt Bessie Mae Pearson was there with her.

Big Mama lay there on the bed sleeping, her leg raised in a metal contraption. The sight of her lying there helpless was devastating. I held back tears as I tried to talk to Bessie Mae. A nurse came in and asked us to step out for a moment. When we went out into the hallway, I could not fight back the tears any longer. I broke down, crying.

For the first time in my life, I saw her frailty, her fallibility. At that moment, I realized that she would not be with us forever. Big Mama lived on this earth for seven more years. In my heart, she’ll live on forever.