This week marks the end of an era as the long-running ABC sitcom Black-ish comes to a close. For eight hilarious and heartwarming seasons, millions of viewers and I watched as the Johnson family navigated the nuances and complexities of Blackness in an upper-middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood. One character I’ll especially miss is the family matriarch, Rubeline Eveline “Ruby” Johnson, played by the national treasure that is Jenifer Lewis. A vivacious, churchgoing, bingo-winning paternal grandmother whose bravado often mimics that of a Baptist preacher, Ruby has lived with her son Andre and his family of seven for nearly the entire duration of the show, and through it all, we’ve seen her be a supplemental source of support, especially to her grandbabies, who she’s helped with everything from fashion choices to relationship problems and shaping their moral codes.
I can’t name many TV shows where I’ve seen the nuances of a Black matriarch so prominently highlighted. From cult classics like The Golden Girls and Laverne and Shirley to the more recently acclaimed series Grace and Frankie and Hacks plus the not-so-acclaimed recent series And Just Like That…, it really does feel like older white women are having a moment onscreen. Black women in their 50s, 60s, and beyond, on the other hand, are still either overlooked or stereotyped in most Hollywood projects. Such a limited offering paints an empty, one-dimensional view of the rich and colorful lives of older Black women, and as someone who grew up in a heavily matriarchal family, I know this portrayal to be inaccurate.
In my family, great-grandma Surula was our Ruby. While my great-grandmother and I never lived together, I was able to make countless memories with her the first 25 years of my life, spending summers at her home nestled in Missouri’s bootheel with her expert hands carefully passing a hot comb press through my thick curls during our pre-church Saturday night ritual. Years later, she would proudly display the Essence magazines I’d been published in across her coffee table and hang framed articles and photos from my historic Georgia high school basketball state championship throughout her living room.
Although I knew her as Grandma (I call my grandmother, her daughter, Nana), I also knew her as a woman with a robust life outside of her nine children and her seemingly infinite number of grandkids and great-grandkids. When she passed in 2019 at the age of 93, the seams of her homegoing service burst with community members sharing stories: her leadership roles at church, her decades-long attendance at the local high school’s sporting events, her vicious moves in boxing class (whilst faithfully sporting her ankle-length denim skirt, as OG Pentecostal ladies do), and her famous Sock-It-to-Me bundt cake. I was lucky enough to know the many human dimensions of my grandmother, to see her in her entire fullness.
Let’s compare this kaleidoscopic realness to Hollywood’s hackneyed perceptions of the Black matriarch, particularly the Mammy, one of Hollywood’s most racist tropes. Typically depicted as a large-sized, dark-skinned Black woman with a motherly personality, this caricature dates all the way back to slavery in the antebellum South when Black women worked for white slaveholding households and nursed and cared for the family’s children. She dedicates her entire existence to the domestic sphere and looks after the family of the people enslaving her more so than her own family. Actor Hattie McDaniel’s (notoriously) historic Oscar win for her performance as Mammy in the 1939 film Gone With the Wind seemed to set the groundwork for this trope to persist in film and TV.
Even today in some contemporary art forms, we still see a one-dimensional view of Black matriarchy. Take entertainment mogul Tyler Perry’s beloved Madea character. To be clear, I’ve been a Madea fan long before the blockbuster hits and Netflix deals, back when the theatrical plays came on burned CDs sold at swap meets, out of car trunks, and at the hair salon. (Sorry, Tyler!) So I can hold space for the character’s specific portrayal of Black womanhood and maternity (Madea is based off of Tyler’s own mother and aunt, mind you) while also acknowledging the limitations of her role as lighthouse and harbor for loved ones in times of distress, especially when a pot of hot grits is necessary. Where are the storylines that show Madea independent of those who look to her for help, rescue, and care? Where’s the movie about her and her bestie having a girls’ trip to Vegas? Madea’s version of Black matriarchy isn’t necessarily false, but it certainly lacks the layers and complexities that make up a compelling, nuanced, and real person.
In Atlantic writer Hannah Giorgis’s 2021 cover story on the unwritten rules of Black television shows, Black screenwriter and producer Felicia D. Henderson and Giorgis discussed a plight that Henderson and her other Black colleagues are tasked with producing in writers’ rooms: negotiated authenticity. “Blackness, sure, but only of a kind that is acceptable to white showrunners, studio executives, and viewers,” Giorgis explained. That’s why multifaceted depictions of Black matriarchs like Ruby in Black-ish, Angela Bassett in Motherhood, Alfre Woodard in Juanita, and even Suga Momma in The Proud Family and the new Disney+ reboot have power. They challenge white, narrow imaginations and flesh out varied, shaded versions of Blackness across the spectrum. They foster the idea that, like my own Grandma, older Black women are deserving of fully realized, self-determined lives.
In a recent Black-ish episode, Ruby has a moment with three of her five grandkids, Jack, Diane, and Junior, as she’s preparing to move into her own home with their grandfather. “Watching you all grow up has been the greatest joy of my life,” she said. “I wouldn’t trade a single second of it.”
“Us either,” said Junior.
With the show now coming to an end, we’re left with another gaping hole in the representation of Black matriarchs. The erasure is twofold: little evidence of the bond that many grandchildren share with their Black grandmothers and a narrow, incomplete view of what life can be like for Black women after a certain age.
When Grandma went on to glory in 2019, I made sure to snag one of her famous Sock-It-to-Me bundt cake pans from her kitchen cabinets. My sweetest dream is to bake her recipe in that pan alongside my own lineage one day, showing them how to flour the inside of it just like she showed me as I tell them all about who she was, what she did, and the 25 years we shared together.
I wouldn’t trade a single second of it either.
