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Pecans & Power
From Chicken Soup for the Soul: I’m Speaking Now
By Crystal Marie
We have to raise our daughters to be the women they want to be, not the women they think we should be.
~Jada Pinkett Smith
When I think of Black motherhood, I think of pecans. They evoke many of my favorite memories as one of the South’s daughters.
The picture is fuzzy, but I recall sitting with a stainless-steel bowl between my legs on my grandmother’s front porch using pliers — which felt like a very grownup tool — to shell pecans. My mother’s mother, Grandma Vernell, mother to eleven children in rural, upstate South Carolina, knew what an eight-year-old could handle. We’d sit side by side, watching cars whiz by as she spoke to me like we were old friends, our conversation punctuated by the surgical crack of a pecan’s husk.
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