One of My Favorite Inspirations
My Grandpa
This is a picture of my grandpa. One of the first things I noticed about myself when I started writing on a regular basis, was how much he influenced the adult I became, even though he died when I was only fifteen years old. I found myself writing stories set in North Carolina, his hometown, not because I knew it well, but because he seemed so much a part of the place.
My grandpa, who everyone called Papa, owned and worked his own farm and, in his spare time (which he can’t have had much of with nine children), he ran the molasses mill in the town, where he turned stalks of sugar cane into hot molasses for anybody who brought him their crop. When my mom and her siblings grew up, most of them became a part of the great migration, in which thousands of Black people fled the segregated South to start new lives in the North. Papa missed his children sorely and made sure that all nine of them visited often and brought their own children with them. He didn’t ask much when we visited– just a few quiet minutes sitting next to him under the car port. And like my favorite characters in books, he was always ready with a story.