My grandma Eva Rutland passed away March 15th, 2012. She was 95. I had hoped she would live to be 100 but when I mentioned this to her she would crinkle her nose and declare “Can you imagine anything so horrible?” She was ready to go.

          To say she lived an amazing life is an understatement. A granddaughters of former slaves, she was born January 15th, 1917 in Atlanta, GA. Despite discrimination she had a happy childhood. Five years ago, I traveled with her toAtlantafor her 70th reunion fromSpelmanCollege. She was 90 and her childhood friend was there. They chatted like teenagers about old friends and boyfriends. One of her old boyfriends was across the street at Morehouse, the men’s college and he called her. At 90, we all said “grandma’s still got it.”

          In 1943 she married  Bill Rutland, a civilian employee at the Tuskegee Army Air Base, where black pilots were trained for combat for the first time.

          She and Bill moved to the Curtis Park neighborhood inSacramento,CAin 1952. Eva was already published articles in the leading women’s magazine’s of the day, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal and Women’s Day, not bad for a black woman in the 1940s and early 50s.

          She grew up in the segregated South and loved it. She worried about her children who would have to interact with whites in the integrating West of the 1950s and 1960s. Eva started writing stories about her children to tell white mothers, “My children are just as precious and just as fragile as yours. Please be kind to them.” She compiled these stories into a book entitled The Trouble With Being a Mama, published in 1964.

          When she was in her early 50s, grandma went blind but she didn’t let that slow her down. She bought a talking computer and became one of Harlequin’s most prolific writers, eventually writing over 20 books for the well-known romance publisher. 

          Still with all that, I never realized how amazing she was until I was 20-years-old and our family republished The Trouble With Being a Mama under the new title When We Were Colored, a Mother’s Story. Grandma went blind before I was born and I never even thought about it until I saw how much she struggled to find her way around the house and to write. I had never thought how much the tracheotomy tube in her throat, which was the result of a botched operation in a segregated hospital in the 1940s,  bothered her. She had to cover the hole to speak and uncover it to breath. In later life it made her cough all day and all night.

          My mother and I traveled across the country with grandma to promote her book. Grandma was always the quintessential Southern belle. Watching her, I became a “born again grandma worshipper.” I know it was time but it was still too soon for me. I love and miss you grandma. My mother and I are continuing her legacy. We are putting together her final book the Trouble With Being a Grandma and adapting When We Were Colored into a play.