By Elena Osmanllari
It’s crazy how fast things change. You blink and everything around you changes. Do you ever wonder how your grandparents used to live when they were your age? I can assure you that it was different.
Samuel Jonita Gates, the grandmother of high school student Paris Bryant, recently visited Journalism students and shared details of her life as a teenager, and mor
Born in Texas, when Mrs. Gates was a teenager, in late 1960’s, she was not allowed to go to white schools, as she is African American and grew up during segregation. Not only prevented from studying in a white school, she was not even allowed to go to football games of those schools. After segregation ended, Mrs. Gates was the only black student in her class for a few years, and that was hard for her.
Despite these difficulties, she enjoyed her life as a teenager. Mrs. Gates used to go to her grandparents’ house every day.
“My grandmother was my best friend,” she said.
Mrs. Gates enjoyed helping with the chores like drawing water from the well.
“We did not have a water system at my grandmother’s so we had to draw water from the well for everything,” Mrs. Gates said.
In her grandparents’ house, they used to make their own sausages and patties. She brought the meat grinding machine she inherited from her grandparents and explained step-by-step the entire process of preparing those meat products. She told about her grandparents’ smoke house, where they smoked meats.
Another interesting thing she did as a teenager was picking cotton and weighing it the same way as people used to during slavery. She brought a part of the cotton scale that was used to weigh cotton.
“It was not hard for me to do those things,” Mrs. Gates said. “I enjoyed every single one of them.”
Spending time at her grandparents’ house was her way of having fun.
“I did not have many friends growing up. I was an isolated teenager,” she said. As some other teenagers were smoking, skipping school and being rebellious to their parents, Mrs. Gates preferred to study, read and write. She wrote weekly articles for the Garrison newspaper and for the Timpson newspaper. At the time, those newspapers also published some of her poems. She was a school teacher for many years, and she taught many subjects.
Today, Mrs. Gates is a happy grandmother who loves to take care of her house and cook. Her duties have not stopped her from writing nor have they faded that passion in her. In fact, she has self-published her book “The Color of My Hair” and is currently writing a Prayer Journal and a mystery titled “She Has to Die,” which will be copyrighted within next month.
Music is another passion of Mrs. Gates. She is a songwriter and currently is working with a musician for her CD, and her songs will be copyrighted next month.
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