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Poem about Rosemarie’s great-grandmother (Mariah Grant/Grandma Rye, an ex-slave) and the rituals and prayers she created for healing.

Relates Mariah Grant’s personal history and some of her personality traits. This chapter helps explain the origins of the mystic and healing traditions in the family, and draws parallels between Grandma Rye and Rosemarie’s own mother, Mama Freeney. Through Grandma Rye’s story, the chapter also speculates about the transformation from the practice of African religions to the acceptance of Christianity among early generations of African Americans.

Recounts Rosemarie’s parents’ mixed reaction when she and her husband decided to move to Georgia (which the family had left in the 1920s, before Rosemarie was born). The chapter details the violence that sent the family north during the Great Migration, the sense of homecoming Rosemarie experienced when she returned in the early 1960s, and the civil rights work and movement colleagues Rosemarie joined in the South.

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