KaaVonia Hinton

Love is true-blue: Grandmothering in Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer and P.S. Be Eleven

Abstract Recent images of President Obama’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Marian Robinson, caring for her granddaughters in the White House are a powerful reminder of the prominence that grandmothers have had in African American communities. The significance of the grandmother figure can also be seen in award-winning literature for young adolescents such as in Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer (2010) and P.S. Be Eleven (2013). An inductive qualitative content analysis of the functions of the grandmother in these novels provides insight into the significance of grandmothers in African American families. Framed by Black feminist thought and research and scholarship in family studies, analysis of the novels finds that the grandmother serves three major roles: caregiver, teacher, and disciplinarian.