Eryka W. Jackson | The Brand Ambassador

A Love Letter to My Grandma and My Daddy

My grandmother’s house never needed an address.

It had a smell, a temperature, a way of holding you.

I was thirty‑five before I ever learned the number on the front — because nobody used it.

You just went to Granny’s house.

She moved into that house at sixteen, a young bride with a long life ahead and no idea what was coming.

Back then it was a shotgun — one straight line of rooms, no bathroom, no privacy, no luxury.

But she made it a home the way Southern women do: with pots, with prayer, with babies, with whatever it took to make ’enough’.

She gave birth to thirteen children, but five didn’t make it past childhood — losses she folded into her apron pockets and kept moving.

My grandfather added rooms as the family grew — stretching that little house into something that could hold all those lives.

A bedroom here.

Another there.

A bathroom finally — a blessing she never took for granted.

Then one day, a concrete slab fell at work and took him away. My daddy was right there when it happened.

He saw it.

He carried that moment like a bruise on his spirit for the rest of his life.

My daddy carried sadness the way some men carry wallets — always on him, even when you couldn’t see it.

But he kept working with his hands, becoming a carpenter and painter by trade. 

He took care of Granny’s house whenever it needed it, building a handicap ramp when she couldn’t walk anymore. He did his best for her and made her world safer.

And they smiled the same.

That one‑eye squint.

That half‑grin that looked like they were letting you in on a secret.

Sometimes I look at pictures and can’t tell where his smile ends and hers begins.

Granny lived loud.

Colorful house dresses every day — as if her closet held no other garments.

She sat on the porch until she got “too old to run from gunshots,” her words, not mine.

And she meant it.

That porch had seen everything — including the day my uncle was shot and killed right there in 2018.

She kept a big safety pin on the gate so the grandkids couldn’t sneak out the yard. That pin was her security system, her boundary, her way of saying, “Not on my watch.”

She was loud, judgmental, called anybody out on anything, and she remembered everything. She was the oldest of her siblings and the last one to die — the final keeper of stories nobody else knew.

And through all of this, she never drove.

Never worked outside the home.

Never touched a computer.

Never used a smartphone.

Never had cable.

But she lived long enough to see her own face on my iPhone.

She’d lean in real close, squinting like the phone owed her an explanation, and ask:

“How did I get in your phone?”

Every. Single. Time.

And now she’s gone — at almost 103 years old — and the only way I can see her is through that same phone she never understood.

The same device she thought was magic is the one holding her for me now.

Sometimes I scroll through my photos and stop on her face.

And I see my daddy’s smile in hers.

I see the porch.

The house dresses. (I’m wearing one of hers as I write this.)

The safety pin on the gate.

The heater blowing in her bedroom.

The window unit freezing the living room.

The life she lived without ever leaving that house.

She never babysat me, but I sat with her.

And she was my baby.

My old baby.

My forever baby.

And when I hear her voice in my head — that loud, sharp, unforgettable voice — I hear her asking again:

“How did I get in your phone?”

And I whisper back,

“You never left. You’re right here.”

They both are. On the phone & in my heart. 

I Am Eryka also known as Mr. Willie’s Daughter.