In Praise of Southern Black Grandparents: 'Queen Sugar' shakes loose memories

Ava Duvernay and her team have outdone themselves Queen Sugar beautiful; the series crackles with a heat that practically jumps off of the screen. Its characters are rendered so tenderly that the hair on the back of my neck stood on end when I watched the first episode. To be honest, I cried through most of it. The entire time I had this tightening in my chest because I recognized so much of what was flickering before my eyes. The familiarity of the sights, the sounds, the people, made me reflective of my own roots in the South and how little thought I have given them. Queen Sugar shook loose some memories that were dormant for years.

The last time I went down to Mound Bayou I was around 3 years old; it was for my mothers grandmothers funeral. Everyone called her Big Mama, but her name was Julia.

My memories from that trip are hazy, but I do remember a two things very clearly: 1. my great-uncle Francis sitting on top of the deep freezer telling stories and eating frozen a Butterfinger candy bar. Even now, every time I walk past the frozen section in the grocery store I open the freezers to remind me of Uncle Francis and his wide, gap-toothed, devilish smile. And 2: pissing on Cousin Larrys white suit at Big Mamas funeral. I was on his lap, sitting up front, and he was wearing white, as was most of the family. Thats the extent of my memories of down home.

My mothers mothers parents, Big Mama and Big Daddy, loom large in our collective family memory. They raised a family of 6 girls and 1 boy on a farm they owned in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Mound Bayou was founded as an all-black town by former slave Isaiah Montgomery. My great grandparents stressed hard work, ownership, and paying for things in cash outright. They harvested cotton and made all their own food. They were good old-fashioned country folks.

Like many people from the Deep South in the 1940s and 50s, my grandmother left the farm she was raised on after high school and ended up settling in Virginia. Her sisters too, they fanned out across Chicago, Minnesota, Detroit, California, while uncle Francis stayed in Mississippi. They left because staying in Mississippi meant choking on the lack of opportunity and racism that swirled about outside of their family farm.These small, silent migrations, part of a larger movement captured superbly by Isabel Wilkersons The Warmth of Other Suns , have been an unseen force in my life.

My grandparents helped my mother raise me and so these vestigial pieces of country ways worked their ways into my childhood. Like the way we always had to help Granny with her outsized garden; big wild elephant ears and irises and rose bushes and azaleas and hydrangeas sprung forth from every corner. And if it wasnt flowers, then it was food peppers and turnip greens and tomatoes that she picked and pickled or cooked. It was the sing-song accent Granny had, even after years of schooling, turning words like vegetable into veggible and using terms like get your lessons to mean, study hard. Its the emphasis she put on education at all costs, or the unyielding way she demanded respect. I never questioned why my grandmothers green thumb was unimpeachable, or her desperate devotion to higher education, or why a flippant store attendant might send her on a fussing storm. Id never asked her what she had seen as a young woman growing up in the heart of Jim Crow country and what she had to do to make it out.

I share this family history of mine not because it is special, but because of how normal it is, and how beautiful it is. Thats what made Queen Sugar arresting it felt like walking by a mirror after having not seen your reflection in a long time. That is what I look like?

For many black folks, the Deep South is our old country, our motherland. Our lines stop there. But the complicated culture that we come from is beautiful and worthy of consideration, just like we are. Natalie Baszile (with her book Queen Sugar, the source material for the series ), Ava (the engine behind Queen Sugar series) and Oprah (the distribution muscle) have given us a mirror and allowed us to see ourselves in way we havent been seen in a long time the white you wear to funerals, the food, the language, the aching love. I cried when I watched because as an adult it has finally become clear that my history is important, it is valued, and it is infinitely fascinating.

Terryn Hall is a Detroit-based, Virginia-born writer. Follow more of her work on Medium or on Twitter @terryntweets .