What My Grandmother Knew Without Knowing She Knew It

A Juneteenth Reflection on Roots, Truth, and the Spiritual Inheritance I Almost Walked Past.

My grandparents never graduated elementary school. My grandfather worked as a garbage man, every day, for years, so that his family could eat and his children could have what he didn’t.

My grandmother worked as a maid, in other people’s houses, cleaning up after other people’s lives, so that she could come home and pour everything that was left into raising my twin sister and me.

Neither of them had formal education. Both of them had something else, something that doesn’t show up on a transcript or a resume. They had Louisiana. They had the old ways, carried north and west with them like everything else they owned, folded carefully and kept close. They had a knowing that ran underneath the daily labor of survival, a knowing I didn’t have language for until decades later.

This Juneteenth, I want to talk about that knowing. About where it came from, what it cost to carry it, and what it has meant to finally allow myself to fully receive it.

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My Grandmother’s Hands

My grandmother spoke in a particular way. Phrases, small practices, specific instructions about what to do and not do, and spoke with an authority that didn’t invite questions. I grew up inside those phrases the way you grow without realizing it was anything other than simply how things were.

It wasn’t until years later, when I began studying Hoodoo formally, deliberately, as an adult building my own spiritual practice, that I sat upright in recognition. The phrases, practices, specific instructions. They had names. They had a tradition. They had a lineage that stretched back through Louisiana, through West and Central African spiritual systems that survived the Middle Passage by adapting, hiding inside Christianity, hiding inside folk wisdom, hiding inside what got passed to a granddaughter as simply “the way things are done.”

My grandmother was practicing Hoodoo. She never called it that. She probably didn’t think of it as a spiritual tradition with a name and a history. She thought of it as what her mother did, and her mother’s mother, the practical, ordinary knowledge of how to protect a household, how to read a sign, how to know something before you were told it.

I spent years not knowing what I had been given and then I spent more years deciding what to do with the knowing once I had it.

The Cost of Choosing a Lane

For a long time, I kept my spiritual gifts separate from the rest of who I was. The clinician in me wanted credibility, the kind the world recognizes immediately, the kind that doesn’t require explanation. The medium in me, the granddaughter of a woman who read signs without calling it reading signs, wanted to be fully here, fully herself, without translation, but she even hid that part of herself, but fully supported me discovering my abilities. I deeply suspected my grandmother had abilities due to her willingness to immediately believe me when I told her things I saw and experienced as a child.

I kept these two parts of me in separate rooms for longer than I want to admit. I told myself this was professionalism, but now looking back, it was actually a quieter form of the same pressure my grandparents lived under their whole lives: the pressure to make yourself smaller, more palatable, more legible to systems that were never built with you in mind.

My grandparents didn’t have the luxury of choosing a lane. They worked the jobs available to them, in a country that offered Black people in their generation very few choices and even fewer protections and underneath that labor, they carried something the world around them didn’t value, didn’t see, and in many cases would’ve been actively punished if it had been named clearly. They carried it anyway. Quietly. Faithfully and then they passed it to me without either of us fully understanding what was being transferred.

When I finally stopped splitting myself, when I let the clinician and the medium exist in the same room, the same practice, the same body, and something in me settled that I didn’t know was unsettled. It felt less like learning something new and more like finally putting down a weight I had been carrying for no reason. The growth in my abilities since that integration has been undeniable. I’ve been receiving even clearer messages and have developed a deeper trust in what I receive. A steadiness in the work that wasn’t available to me when I was still negotiating which parts of myself were allowed to show up.

Integration was never about adding spirituality to my clinical practice. It was about stopping the abandonment of what my grandmother gave me.

What Juneteenth Means in This Context

Juneteenth marks a specific kind of delay, the gap between when freedom was declared and when it actually reached the people it was meant for. Enslaved people in Texas didn’t learn they were free until more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Freedom existed on paper before it existed in their lives.

I think about that gap often in relation to my own spiritual inheritance. The freedom to fully claim what my grandmother gave me existed, in some sense, the whole time. It was always mine. It’s always been real, but it took me years to actually receive it, to stop hiding it, to stop treating it as something separate from my legitimate, credentialed, professional self.

There is a version of freedom that is declared and a version that is actually lived. I spent a long time in the gap between those two things, the same gap my ancestors waited inside for two and a half years before becoming legally free of enslavement. My freedom to be fully myself, clinician and medium, granddaughter and practitioner, was always true, but living inside that truth took longer for me to accept.

I Am a Soulann Woman

My maternal lineage comes from Louisiana. From a lineage that survived the Middle Passage by hiding its spiritual truth inside whatever container would keep it alive, Christianity, folk wisdom, the ordinary instructions of a grandmother to her granddaughters. My people carried Hoodoo without always naming it Hoodoo. They carried ancestral knowing without a vocabulary that named it as such. They survived by adapting, by disguising, by passing the real thing down quietly enough that it would not be destroyed.

I call myself a Soulann woman because that lineage, that specific Louisiana root, that specific blend of survival and spirit and quiet, fierce knowing, lives in me. It is not abstract ancestry. It is my grandmother’s hands. It is my grandfather’s labor. It is the elementary education they never received and the spiritual education they gave me without either of us calling it that.

My ancestors live through me. Not as a metaphor but as a literal reality that shapes how I move through grief, through ritual, and through the work I do with every woman who sits across from me carrying her own inherited knowing that she hasn’t yet had permission to claim.

What I Want You to Know This Juneteenth

If you are carrying something similar such as your grandmother’s phrases you didn’t understand were spiritual practice, a knowing that runs underneath your formal credentials, a sense that part of yourself has been waiting in a separate room for permission to come fully forward, I want you to know that the permission was never actually required from anyone outside yourself.

Your ancestors who survived what they survived, worked the jobs they worked, and carried what they carried without the language or the safety to name it fully, didn’t do that so you would keep splitting yourself the way I did for so long. They did it so you could be whole. Freedom was always real and the work now is simply to live inside it.

Come Claim What’s Yours

🌿 The Grief Sanctuary: For women ready to integrate the full truth of their ancestral inheritance, spiritual and clinical, named and unnamed, into one whole practice of healing.

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🔮 Spiritual Development Mentoring: If you are sitting with your own version of what I sat with for years, a gift you’ve inherited but haven’t fully claimed, this one-on-one work is built to help you stop splitting yourself. [Book a consultation at www.healingwithamber.co]

With care and intention,

Amber