My super-shero was Grandma Dora, my Maternal Grandmother. She lived in Wadley, Georgia on a small farm where she raised chickens, pigs and at one point she had a cow. She had 8 children and raised 5 from my grandfather, Homer Burton’s first marriage. When her kids were growing up, she took in wash and sold eggs, so she could buy land, so that “her boys could hunt and fish on their own property without the white man bothering them.” The rest she leased out to cotton, corn, and soybean farmers. She had pecan and pomegranate trees on her land and would occasionally send us a suitcase full of pecans. No letter or note, just pecans, in the shells.

Grandma Dora Had a Farm

Grandma Dora also had a small garden and practiced topiary art, by trimming the bushes in her front yard and planting flowers in the middle of them to look like baskets of flowers. She also knew traditional healing methods.  Once we went to visit her in the summer and she had been bitten by one of her pigs. Alarmed, my mother asked her if she’d been to the doctor. She said she’d never been to a doctor. She treated herself by pouring kerosene on the wound, and wrapping it in spider webs. Mama made her go to the doctor and get a tetanus shot anyway.  It was the dog days of summer, and she was afraid of infection. I went to town with her to the doctor. I heard her yelp when he stuck her. Boy was she mad!  But only for a little while.  She bought me a glass piggy bank to commemorate the occasion. The pig who bit her was somebody’s barbeque the next day.

Grandma Dora Practiced Natural Healing

Funny, I later learned that kerosene can be used as a cleaning agent and spider webs have antifungal and antiseptic properties and have been used on injuries for millennia. She loved the Lord, fiercely, and had a great sense of humor. She also sewed and the beds in her home had her colorful quilted counterpanes on them.

Married When, “She Was a Bird”

Grandma Dora had married my grandfather when she was relatively young, when she “was a bird,” as she said, so her formal education was limited. In spite of this, she had a sweet, creative, and had an entrepreneurial spirit. Her advice was always simple: “keep on praying to the Lord, baby; always listen to your mama and daddy, but above all else, be particular.”