Tribute To Grandma: Quilting Leadership
Self-leadership is like being a quilter.
Like threading a needle, developing yourself, growing your sound to sing your unique song, takes focus and practice. Thread by thread, patch by patch, you weave together yourself as a leader.
In my ancestral tradition, folks like my Grandma Honey quilted, generation after generation, from slavery times through Jim Crow to the days of the Civil Rights Movement. My grandma, whose married name was Martha Roberts, was a woman sanctified in dedication. “You must have faith,” she’d emphasize. Be patient. As Dianne Reeves says in her poignant song: “Better Days” are ahead.
Holy=Becoming Whole
As well, my grandma strove for holiness.
Martha Roberts as a young woman
Holiness ain’t just about “purity,” a desire for perfection, becoming “white as snow.” No. Holiness is also about becoming whole. To become whole, when broken by trauma, when kicked, rebuked and scorned by injustice, and when harassed by the blues, isn’t easy.
Neither is great leadership.
Great leadership is like designing patterns of the good, the true, and the beautiful into a harmonious whole. That’s what true leaders strive to do.
Self-Leadership
Self-leadership is the first pattern of the quilt, the first step on the road to leadership. I happen to know from (smh) experience that trying to lead others when you can barely lead yourself is a path to dysfunction.
Mind you, it takes much time and effort to weave the pattern of self-leadership to attain the quilt of self-mastery. Sometimes you gotta speak up when you’re shy, or listen deeper from the heart when the habit is yap, yap, yap from the ego. Peter Drucker, a grandmaster scholar of modern management, once said that “Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.”
Touch, taste, patient practice, perseverance, and close listening are necessary to cultivate the (so-called) soft skills of emotional intelligence. These also ground self-leadership in these times of peril and possibility.
Missionary Martha Roberts
My Grandma Honey was a missionary in a holiness church based in Brooklyn, with branches down South, including Ludowici, a very small town where my mom was born in Long County, Georgia. After grandma’s husband, my grandaddy Kermit Roberts, died from a heart attack in 1973, her elder peers called her Miss Martha or Sister Martha. Her missionary work was her leadership service on behalf of the church and the Lord. But she wasn’t a big proselytizer. She mainly let her life and light shine as an example for others.
She spoke softly and lived modestly. Grandma loved gospel groups and singers such as the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Soul Stirrers, Shirley Caeser, James Cleveland, and, most of all, Mahalia Jackson, who inspired hope in an entire people when she sang “Move On Up A Little Higher” and “How I Got Over.”
Grandma Honey and her grandson Greg, circa 1991
When she, my mom and the young me would take walks on streets near Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, they’d hold my hand tightly so I, a young ball of energy, wouldn’t run off into the traffic. Grandma Honey would substitute the Southern vernacular word “hockey” for feces when steering me, leading me, away from stepping in dog poop. When exasperated by some secular or racial nonsense she’d intone shuurr when what she meant was the profane word for excrement.
As a woman of the church, she was disciplined with her tongue and speech. As a quilter, she was patient with her fingers and her hands to weave patches of beauty and memory. Her faith and her craft served her well on the road to wholiness.
Quilting Warmth
Quilt patch by Grandma Honey
To this day my mom has quilts, bedspreads, and pillowcases made by Grandma Honey, mementos of creativity, form, and function. She even made dresses for my sister, Angela. Her designs weren’t a hodgepodge, an incongruous patchwork with no intent. No. They were reminders of family, community, culture, and love to keep you warm amid storms.
Our words and thoughts are like quilts. Will they keep those around you, at home and work, warm? If so, continue weaving words to edify and encourage. That’s what true leaders do.