The World Wants You to Make Beautiful Things

The following excerpt is from my essay, “The World Wants You to Make Beautiful Things,” anthologized in Pretty Little Brick (2024), a publication from the Free Black Woman’s Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Civic Practice Partnership.

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In my hometown there was no high school for Black children until 1946. Before then, if you were Black and you didn't have a relative you could live with 60 miles away in New Orleans, your schooling simply stopped at eighth grade. My maternal grandparents were two such people. 

My grandfather is a handyman and landscaper and sometimes cook for a wealthy family in town. When the family goes down to Grand Isle, a barrier island off the coast of Louisiana, for the summer, they want my grandfather to go with them. My grandparents have 11 children and, according to my Aunt Carolyn, my grandfather tells his employers he can’t possibly go to Grand Isle for the summer unless he can bring his wife and children. My aunt says all the children were never home at the same time, but there is something very delicious about my grandparents and no small number of children showing up on Grand Isle to summer––summer as a verb, not a noun. Of course that isn’t really true, since my grandfather is very much an employee.

My aunt is too young to remember the fine details of those summers, but I like to imagine them wading into the Gulf. Perhaps building a sandcastle. My grandmother is nearby, watchful, likely not getting wet because I never in my life saw her with a single tendril of hair out of place. They watch their feet sink into the wet sand as the surf rushes forward and recedes. It is an outrageous notion in a time of vicious segregation, which is why I think of my grandmother watching, watching, watching. At the time, Grand Isle is…a sundown town.

My grandfather dies before I am born, but by all accounts he is a loving man who adores his wife and children. When he isn’t working, he stays home to cook whatever he can find in the freezer, feeding his children the specialties of Bayou Country––fresh fish and game he catches himself––alongside the “fancy” food he sees prepared at his employer’s parties. From the stories my mother and aunts tell, he makes sure they have a little taste of everything. I like to think this is to wet their appetite for a future beyond what my grandparents can see or touch, but which they can feel out there, somewhere. 

There’s a high probability that my grandfather just doesn’t want to be alone on Grand Isle all summer without his family. But maybe he is also giving his children a taste of leisure otherwise out of reach. I like to think my grandfather approves when close friends invite me to spend a summer week or two at the beach on Cape Cod or in a house on Martha’s Vineyard.

Yes, of course most people want their children to have a better life than they have. Still, my grandfather’s oldest grandson recently retired from NASA, where he was a literal rocket scientist. I imagine my grandfather dreaming of that future late one night, standing on a narrow island at the bottom of his known world, gazing up at a sky full of stars, the sea at his feet, a sundown town at his back. 

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