I Shall Not Be Moved: The Purpose and Power of Black Grandmothers

There’s a particular kind of power that lives in the women who raised us.

A quiet, unshakable strength.

A rootedness you can’t always name, but you feel it every time you think of them.

Maya Angelou captured this power in her poem Our Grandmothers, where she threads together the voices of Black women who endured, protected, birthed, held, prayed, and persisted. Through her words, you can hear the heartbeat of our lineage saying what so many of our mothers and grandmothers lived:

“I shall not, I shall not be moved.”

Those words aren’t just poetry.

They’re inheritance.

They’re instructions.

They’re a mantle passed from one generation to the next.

And for many of us stepping into the second half of life—becoming grandmothers, mothering adult children, entering retirement, healing old wounds, and rediscovering our own creativity—this poem is more than literature.

It is a mirror.

It reflects who we come from.

And it whispers who we are becoming.

The Legacy of Standing Still on Holy Ground

Angelou wrote about women who bent but did not break, women who were called every name except the one God gave them, women who walked their children toward freedom with nothing but faith and stubborn hope.

She said they had “a certain way of being in this world.”

That line sits right at the heart of The Holistic Homebody.

Because part of building a sacred home and a sacred life is remembering the ground we stand on. Our grandmothers taught us how to:

-survive storms with grace

-build homes out of nothing

-create beauty out of scraps

-pray with a faith that shook the room

-carry more than they should have ever had to carry

And yet, even with the weight of it all, they kept walking.

Kept teaching.

Kept giving.

Kept believing that something better was possible.

This is the spiritual DNA so many of us carry into our own grandmothering, our own transitions, our own seasons of rebirth.

Their resilience shapes our ease.

Their prayers cover our rest.

Their strength becomes the soil where our new dreams find root.

Becoming the Grandmother We Wanted and Needed

One of the most moving lines in Angelou’s poem is:

“When you learn, teach. When you get, give.”

This is the rhythm of Black grandmotherhood.

Not perfection.

Not a never-ending sacrifice.

Not holding the world together with tired hands.

But wisdom.

Transmission.

A sharing of the lessons we’ve lived through—freely, gently, without losing ourselves.

Today’s Black GrandMothers are walking a very different path than the women who came before us. Many are building new boundaries. Learning rest. Healing generational trauma. Exploring creativity that had been set aside for decades. Asking deeper questions about identity, purpose, and God’s voice in this new stage of life.

We are becoming grandmothers who still remember the old ways and honor them in our own fashion, but refuse to be controlled by them. We unlike many of our Grandmothers, have choices. We are choosing:

-rest instead of overwork

-clarity instead of silence

-emotional honesty instead of swallowing everything

-joy instead of martyrdom

Angelou’s refrain—

“I shall not be moved”—is no longer just about resistance. It becomes a declaration of sacred selfhood.

It becomes a boundary.

A prayer.

A line drawn in the sand that says:

I belong to myself, too.

A Grandmothering Path of My Own For the last ten years, I’ve been a full-time grandmother in an intergenerational home, helping to raise my three neurodiverse grandchildren. It has been one of the greatest honors of my life and also one of the places where I have learned the most about myself. Their needs, their brilliance, their rhythms—all so different from one another—have stretched me in ways I never expected. They have taught me deep love, joy, and excitement! I've also learned deep patience, tenderness, endurance, and the art of loving without rushing. And in many ways, they have been my teachers in this sacred work of becoming the woman I am now. When I think of Angelou’s refrain, “I shall not be moved,” I hear it in my own grandmothering—standing firm in love, even when I am tired; standing rooted in faith, even when the path feels uncertain; standing present, willing, and open as God continues to shape me through the very children I have been called to guide.

Our Homes, Our Healing, Our Holy Ground

At The Holistic Homebody, we believe home is a sanctuary—not a burden.

We believe rest is reverence.

We believe healing is part of the legacy.

And we believe that Black grandmothers are the quiet architects of generational transformation.

Angelou’s poem honors the breadth of who Black grandmothers are:

Sheba and Sojourner

Harriet and Zora

Mary McLeod Bethune and Angela Davis

spiritual, political, domestic, artistic, and holy

She reminds us that grandmotherhood is not a role—it’s a lineage.

It’s a way of being in the world.

It’s a posture of strength, softness, and sacred resilience.

And so today, for every grandmother reading this—whether you became one through birth, community, or choice—I want to remind you:

You are allowed to grow again.

You are allowed to rest.

You are allowed to change.

You are allowed to reclaim the parts of yourself you left behind.

You are allowed to be the grandmother your younger self needed.

You are allowed to live with ease in ways your grandmother could not.

Your life is its own poem.

Your legacy is its own altar.

Your presence is its own sermon.

And through all of it, your spirit echoes the promise our foremothers spoke into the wind:

I shall not be moved.

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