Legacy of care

Keeping grandma at home is more common in the black community, partly because of the long-held cultural stigma against nursing homes. Longtime personal-care aide Cheryl Jones, who is black, says she was brought up with a general mistrust of the medical system and a specific disdain for nursing homes.

Lucille "Big Mama" Blackwell steadies herself as she descends some steps in her home.

“In my culture, we never put anyone in the nursing home,” Jones says. Caring for frail elders “is our responsibility — and it’s our honor to do it.”

Hanging in Big Mama’s entranceway, a quilt illustrates her family history and reinforces the Blackwells’ belief in home. In its center is a picture of the slave ship Doddington, which sailed into the York River in 1735.

The first Blackwells in Virginia were slaves who harvested plantation tobacco, and it was into that legacy that Big Mama was born in 1925. “I’m the great-granddaughter of slaves, and most of my life I worked half-shares. That means, you do all the work — and the white man take all the money.”

There were times when the family’s annual share of the crop amounted to just $40 a year. But as her daughter Vivian Harris recalls: “We never went hungry, we never went naked, and Daddy made sure we always had somewhere to lay our heads” — even if they had to sleep three and four to a bed.

It had been Holland Blackwell’s lifelong dream to own his own home. When he moved his family to Roanoke in 1972, he finally pulled it off, working as a Singer Furniture security guard. “He bought this house, and he never made more than $5 an hour his entire life,” Big Mama says, still proud of the accomplishment.

When he fell ill in the mid-’90s, she took care of him at home for four years — even after she had a stroke.

“He got so bad off that we tried to talk her into putting him in a nursing home,” granddaughter Portia Anderson recalls. “She was like, ‘This is my husband and I will not disrespect him by taking him out of his home.’”