Grandma Grace

My maternal grandma below—Grace Leigh Hinnant Jacques—inspired my love of history, reading historical fiction, and my first novel of historical fiction, Under the Lemon Tree. While it’s not yet a finished product, the novel captures my love of Florida where I was born and raised.

Grandma Grace, the best Grandma ever.... When I was a little girl, Grandma Grace would gather me in her arms charming me with tales of yesteryear, what I as a child called ‘the olden days.’

Grandma’s papa and mama both passed away within days of each other when Grandma Grace was only 18 months old—so she had no memory of them. Her mama died from a brain hemorrhage and her papa from blood poisoning, apparently from a decayed tooth She and her younger brother, Arthur, were raised by three ‘old maid’ sisters’ (as she put it), the daughters of my great-grandfather’s first marriage.

The Leighs were proud ‘Florida crackers’ she said: hardworking, scraping by with little money, God-fearing. The sisters moved the family at some point from what I suppose was sharecropping farm work in Haynes City, Florida, a town an hour east of Tampa, to Jacksonville, a city that promised other opportunities. According to Grandma Grace, the oldest sister, Ida, was a hard taskmaster, but I’ve no idea what she or the other sisters did to support themselves. Yet they had educated themselves and later, encouraged Grandma Grace to pursue a career as a private duty nurse. I wish my grandma were alive today, as I’d be spending time recording her stories about what she left unsaid.

From Jacksonville to Birmingham to Lemon City

As a private duty nurse, Grandma Grace met her future husband, Stephen, a widower who was nearly 40 years older than she, they married. He, too, had three grown daughters from his first marriage but also fathered three children with Grandma Grace. My mother, Lydia, was born when he was 61. He worked in the construction industry but moved his growing family from Jacksonville to work in the steel mills of Birmingham, where he could earn higher wages. When my mother developed life-threating asthma as a child, they left polluted Birmingham to forge a life in Lemon City, Florida--now called ‘Little Haiti’ in North Miami. I suspect they thought the temperate weather and clear skies would help my mother, but also, Stephen had begun to see a future in South Florida’s land boom which had started in the mid-1920’s.

One old photograph survives of what I call a Snuffy Smith (if you remember that old cartoon series) cabin, typical of what the Crackers built for homes in Florida. My grandpa built this home shortly after they’d moved to Lemon City. Imagine a wooden cabin built with planks of wood, a rectangle with a pitched roof, and an entry porch that spanned the front of the cabin. Grandma Grace told me she was so proud to own her first home, with its pot-bellied cooking stove. At the time, they used an outhouse. She recounted how she’d capture one of the yard chickens and lop off its head with a machete, leaving the poor headless creature to run around until it dropped dead. She’d submerge it in a pot of boiling water to loosen the feathers for plucking. Another era. The ice man came trundling around once a week and delivered big blocks of ice wrapped in sawdust to preserve food in their icebox.

Shortly after they’d moved into the new cabin, my grandma was cooking a meal over the stove, and her long, silky auburn tresses caught fire. She got herself and all three children, ages five and under, out of the home to safety. But the house burned to the ground. When I asked her where they went to live, she said their church friends took them in. Stephen was also a lay preacher.

In 1926, a major hurricane devasted South Florida, ruining the just-completed Biltmore Hotel where the wealthy came to frolic, escaping the brutal New England winters. A golf course with canals running through it bordered the hotel and featured real gondolas from Italy for the Biltmore patrons. The 1926 hurricane pummeled South Florida into the Great Depression, three years before the national economy crashed in 1929. After the 1926 economic crash in Florida, I don’t know how my grandparents came to live in a cinderblock home with a plastered, whitewashed finish on both sides, decorative braided columns at the entrance, a real bathroom, and room enough to take in boarders.

Grandma Grace told me about how hard life was then, with other parents needing to leave South Florida to find work elsewhere. Some left their children behind, boarding them with people like my grandma. For a decade or more she had the orphans and other paying boarders crowded in the bedrooms to help her and Stephen survive. Every evening after a simple supper, Stephen and Grandma Grace would play the piano and sing hymns.

Stephen didn’t trust my grandma to drive his car. But eventually he relented. One day, she inadvertently forgot to put on the parking brake. When she got out of the car (parked by Biscayne Bay), it rolled off the embankment into the ocean.

Spending the Night With Grandma Grace

After being widowed twice, Grandma Grace moved into a South Florida trailer park just across the street from one of the first Burger King’s. For lunch, we’d dash over there for a Whopper, fries, and chocolate milkshake. Her trailer smelled of fabricated plastic, but when she made her famous carrot cakes, the aroma of baking butter, flour, sugar, and nuts infused the entire park with her confection. We’d layer on cream cheese frosting and eat warm slices with milk. She told me she’d never danced or played cards, something her strict Baptist upbringing forbade. This, after I’d told her how all the 7th graders danced in the gym before classes, and how I’d mastered canasta, playing with my paternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth. Grandma didn’t condemn me for my love of dance and cards though. She never condemned me for a thing and embodied ‘unconditional love.’ Grandma Grace was unconcerned about the need to develop one’s talents or act sweet to be ‘pretty is as pretty does,’ the sweet, repeated advice of my Grandmother Mary Elizabeth. Instead, Grandma Grace embodied a working-class culture of service.