Tiny Yellow Suns, by Lindsey Lunsford (Tuskegee CISC Staff)

Описание: In this intimate reflection, Lindsey Lunsford revisits childhood memories of her grandmother’s home—where hospitality, discipline, and quiet strength shaped a legacy she didn’t fully understand until adulthood. What once felt small now reveals itself as nation-building work rooted in family, education, and place. As Lindsey’s journey comes full circle in Tuskegee, she recognizes how love, land, and lineage can call us back to who we are—and who we’re meant to become.

Lindsey created her story in a custom digital storytelling workshop facilitated by StoryCollab in partnership with the Tuskegee University; the Carver Integrative Sustainability Center (CISC) HBCU Graduate Fellowship Program; the Tuskegee University Cooperative Extension Program; and the Center for Farming Systems, Rural Prosperity, and Economic Sustainability.

To learn more about a custom digital storytelling workshop or program for your organization, please visit our website at: https://www.storycollab.org/

Transcript:
My grandmother always kept a clean home. Not in an impossible way, but in an inviting way. She was a hostess supreme. My earliest memories are of the dinner parties she’d host in her beloved white room. No kids were allowed in there, but I remember sneaking in and seeing a giant metal tub filled to the brim with sweet tea, lemon slices floating across the top like tiny yellow suns. She could make a home feel like a whole world. She’d been trained to do that, graduating in domestic science from Tuskegee Institute in the 1940s. But as a little girl, I didn’t see that as science or legacy. I just saw a housewife. And I told her that I never wanted to be one. “I want a career, Grandma.” I said, “I want to do something in the world. I want to matter.” Looking back, maybe my words stung, but she never showed it. She just said, “Baby, what I did was establish and nurture my family, and that is something.” At the time, I didn’t get it. I didn’t get her or her love of home. And I definitely didn’t get her love of Tuskegee.

When she finished raising her family in Indiana, she moved back to Tuskegee and earned a second master’s degree in her late 70s in nutrition science. She became one of the College of Agricultures oldest graduates. She was relentless. She used to drag me kicking and screaming on the Greyhound bus to visit Tuskegee. We’d be surrounded by women with names like Ethel, Mercedes, and Phyllis, her classmates, other nation builders. And I guess it all rubbed off on me because now that she’s gone, I live and work in Tuskegee as a professor, but I still tend the home. Her home, the greenhouse, the one she left me. I take care of it because I can’t take care of her. I fought Tuskegee. I thought I was meant for something else, but it was like fighting my DNA. My grandparents met here. There’d be no me without this place. This soil made me. This is the place that conjured me into being. And now I love it like she did because I finally see it. And I know that it sees me.