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caution, “You’d better take care of him, ’cause he is my baby.” She let me know her expectations all in the flash of her eyes.
    As we prepared for the wedding, we knew she would not be able to attend and thought to include her and my deceased mother in our celebration, so we planned to put a picture of each of them and a bouquet of flowers on their seats in the church. Two weeks before our wedding we learned Miss Gladys had taken a sudden turn for the worse. When we got there she was in the hospital surrounded by several noisy machines. Her eyes were closed, her breathing raspy. No “possum,” this time. She was passing away. My husband-to-be was shattered and began making arrangements for her funeral, to be held exactly one week before our wedding. While I didn’t really know her well, I felt I was losing a wonderful mother-in-law for the second time in my life and wished that I had had the chance to learn from this woman. I knew that to be so obviously loved by so many, she had a wealth of wisdom to share.
    For many weeks after our beautiful wedding and honeymoon, my new husband was quiet and withdrawn, had erratic sleeping habits and was always looking for something to do so that he wouldn’t have time to think.
    One rainy Saturday morning, watching him struggle, I asked, “Honey, what’s wrong?”
    He replied, “Nothing.”
    I said, “You are grieving for your mother.”
    He looked as if it had never occurred to him, “Is that what this is called? I thought that happened at the funeral.”
    As if we had opened the floodgates, he opened up and started telling me story after story about “Mama,” Miss Gladys Gramps, Auntie, Sister Glad—any one of the affectionate names she had earned.
    Every story was like opening a present; some were funny and involved him, his brothers and sisters, and her method of discipline. Others were about him and his special love for her as only a son could see his mother. Many were about her wisdom and levelheadedness in dealing in the world without being able to read or write in the Jim Crow South of the twentieth century. Story after story cascaded from him when we were riding in the car, taking our walks, waiting in line at the store, falling asleep, every day some mundane situation would bring a story that started “I remember when Mama . . .” and he would sink into that state of peace and comfort where fond memories take you like a feather bed. I would soak the stories up as I got to know the woman with the penetrating eyes.
    Once my husband began sharing his stories, I could see his grief lifting.
    I learned that Miss Gladys was born in 1913 in Virginia to a white mother and a black father. She was not schooled past the third grade. In 1931 she married and had eleven children. During the course of their marriage her husband would go back and forth between Virginia and Philadelphia every two years leaving her pregnant after each “homecoming.” My husband was “homecoming” number nine, and after number eleven she never let his father return. She did domestic work, picked cotton and tobacco. Her greatest personal pleasure was gardening. She would spend hours tending perfectly straight rows of seasonal vegetables. My husband laughs saying that he was a vegetarian until he was twelve and never knew it.
    I learned that Miss Gladys prayed all day on her knees—in the kitchen, bedroom and in her garden. By any account she did an incredible job raising her children. When my husband became an adult, he asked her how she fed, clothed and cared for eleven children with no visible means of support, and she replied, “On the arms of Jesus, son, just leanin’ on his arms.”
    When one of her daughters was murdered by a serial killer, Miss Gladys, age sixty-four at the time, took custody of her four-year-old granddaughter and raised her until she successfully completed college.
    In her