By Jaeden Middleton
Salute
My grandmother’s name is Elizabeth Bright. Her only job ever was being a cosmetologist, and she has been one for over 60 years. She is retired, but she still chooses to do people’s hair.
My grandmother is from Fairfield County. She attended Crane Creek Elementary and C.A. Johnson High School. Her parents’ names were Cliff Burrell and Emma James Burrell. She had six siblings: Mary, Jonathan, Sunny, Edward, Leroy, Marie, and Samuel.
My grandmother attended Zion Pilgrim Baptist Church. My grandmother had to walk to school, and she remembers how the white kids used to ride on the bus and laugh at them as they rode past the black kids walking through the freezing snow and ice, and the blazing sun. She remembers how the teachers had to catch a ride to school early so they could turn on the wood stove before the students arrived.
My grandmother was always an early sleeper. She used to go to bed as soon as it got dark, and she still does today. She never had a tv growing up; in her house they had a radio. But when she got older, she was the first person in her neighborhood to own a tv.
She loves to eat buttermilk and cornbread. My grandmother has always been an entrepreneur, when she was little, she would pluck grass out of the yard and sell it as brooms. She would also take socks from the white children and make potholders out of them and sell them right back to the people she took them from. My grandmother got into a fight in the eighth grade though, so she had to stop selling things, instead she would do her neighbors hair on her front steps. But when she married my granddaddy, the late Benjamin Bright, he paid for her to go to cosmetology school. She has been doing hair ever since.
Jaeden Middleton is a freshman at the College of Charleston.