Just Like Me

In two days, she will have been gone for 27 years. Born on this day in 1908 and passed away on my mother’s birthday, Mary Matthews Bull was my maternal grandmother and probably the most influential person in my life.

She taught me how to love all people--at times even the most unlovable ones--and how to love God above all else. And she instilled these lessons by how she walked out her life, not just by her words. But oh, how I miss listening to her words as well. I can still see her on her knees and hear her in her bedroom at the foot of her bed talking to her Savior at the end of the day.



Her gentle and kind spirit was known to all with whom she interacted along her journey. She was a steadfast helpmate of a wife and a devoted mother, who at one time or another also raised her younger siblings upon both of her parents' untimely deaths; a trail blazing woman well before the time working women became the norm; a woman who also loved working and living off the land, whose green thumb could coax anything to bloom; and most importantly of all, she was a faithful servant of Christ.



While my grandfather was out driving a candy truck route early in my mother's life, my grandmother ran the H. L. Bull Grocery Store and Texaco gas station right on the highway of route 13 just south of her church home, Zion Baptist. This was quite unconventional for a woman sometime in the 1930s through the 1960s.

Later on when my grandfather gave up his truck route and returned to help run the store full-time, there was a little kitchen built in the back of the store where my grandmother cooked family meals while also helping to tend the store and gas pumps. In her many years there, she was robbed at gunpoint, had nonpaying customers run off with full tanks of gas, gypsies attempt to ransack the store goods and had her home burglarized.

And yet---still never lost hope in humanity. 



The majority of my grandparents' customers were not white like me. In a world that was quite divided in the 1960s, no one who stepped foot inside my grandparents' store would have felt society's vibe as some of the biggest hugs and smiles I ever saw exchanged were there in that store from those whose skin colors didn't match mine. The genuine respect and jovial interactions between “Mr. Herbert” and “Miss Mary” as they were affectionately known by many and their store patrons, was something I still remember as part of a feeling that family went beyond the walls of my own brick home. 



There were 3 bathrooms out back of their little store reserved for passing by travelers who rode the Trailways or Greyhound bus lines or were zipping past, coming and going from far off places such as NYC. Back then as dictated by the law, each of the three doorways were labeled either "Ladies", "Gentlemen", or "Colored"--I always had a hard time processing why it was that way when just around the corner, inside the store walls there seemed to be no separation or categorization of people—just valued customers and friends of my grandparents, no matter how dark or light their skin. 



One of the earliest lessons I remember in those late 60s that has hence stuck with me was on the night before my first day of public school at Accomac Primary, a few miles south of my grandparents' store. Finally, segregation was being dissolved albeit slowly as I would later learn that our county was behind in embracing and implementing it than many other more progressive and bigger places to live on the map.

On that night just a few hours before my first day of first grade, I remember my grandmother brushing my hair and reassuring me of how wonderful this new experience was going to be in my life. She talked of teachers who would help me learn and how much fun it was going to be to be a big girl and ride the yellow bus each day. She told me that I was going to make many new friends and meet so many nice children just like me.



Just like me. 



In a society where so often what we hear these days are divisive messages and language, I want to repeat something so very different that my Grandmother Bull instilled in me nearly 55 years ago.

She told me that night right before I knelt to say my prayers and climb into bed hours before my life would become a cycle of 12 years of climbing through the grades to adulthood, that I would make many new friends. Some she reminded me would look very different from me but that they also would be very much just like me.

Just. Like. Me.



She went on to describe how other little girls who would look quite different from me would have ribbons and barrettes in their hair just like mine. That while other boys and girls would have different skin tones and hair textures, they also would be giggling and wearing smiles on their faces. And that just like me, they would want to learn to read and write and add and subtract and also be my friend on the playground at recess.

Because just like me, they had families that loved them. And just like me, they were God's little children, too.

She knew that different skin colors weren't anything new to me from the years spent under their customers feet and hers in that little country store and gas station. But I think what she wanted to make sure of, was that once I got out into the bigger world as the years unfurled and truths can tend to get all twisted up, that I never forgot that truth.

That our humanity will always transcend the color of our skin.

That we are more alike than different.

That God made us all and if He is love, then we are, too.



A lot of the lessons that my grandmother instilled in me and my brother I know have lasted throughout our ages. In a world full of brokenness and busyness that often sees extended families not knowing much about each other these days, and a society that seems to do so much jockeying for who is better and who has this right and who doesn't, I thank God quite often for the woman that He gave me as my grandmother.

The woman who made sure that from my earliest footsteps beneath her apron strings that I would know who God says I am.

And that I also would know Who God says that others are.

That in spite of all of our differences, that others—of different ethnic and economic labels, of varying levels of education and family backgrounds—black, white, brown and olive--are just like me.

My grandmother--

four doors down the street for most of my childhood but forever in my heart.

Whose lived out loud and well sown lessons will always help me recalibrate life's compass that has guided and continues to guide me onward in this messy world. That continues to guide me with hope to my eternal Home.

I am not only blessed because I had the fortune of calling an early career pioneering woman named Mary my grandmother, but mostly because through this woman who never forgot Whose she was, she ultimately helped remind me as well of Whose I am.

And Whose you are, too.

Just like me.