Growing up, as his mother worked two jobs to make ends meet, Ricardo Yancey Jr. always had something to look forward to: spending time with his grandmother.
The aroma of her home-made spaghetti filled the house, the pasta piled so high his eyes would hover over the plate.
“I knew even at a young age that I wanted to make a book about her one day,” Yancey said.
And that’s exactly what he did.
Yancey dedicated his book “My Best Friend Granny,” which he wrote and illustrated, to his grandmother, Frances Lee Bell. The 32-page children’s story depicts the special love between a grandmother and her grandson, the cover showing the mountain of spaghetti and meatballs Yancey looked forward to nearly every week.
“I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck,” was Bell’s response whenever Yancey told her he loved her.
The book was launched in 2020, but Bell never saw it published after battling cancer and passing away in 2017.
Still, Yancey, a father of three, said he feels his grandmother’s spirit everywhere he goes and has videos he recorded in his early 20s, asking Bell about her wisdom and upbringing.
“I knew if I were lucky enough to at the time have a family one day, have some kids. I would want them to know my grandmother,” he said. “I knew her and have all this footage they could look at and see how special this woman was to me.”
The book shows many of the activities Yancey and his grandmother did together. He said they would often go fishing, sometimes to Morehead City, leaving their house in Durham as early as 5:30 a.m., feeling as though they were the only two people in the world.
In a 2009 recording, Bell said she was 16 when she met Yancey’s grandfather, a truck driver who worked long shifts. Their first date was at a club in Creedmoor. The couple would often go bowling, an activity that Bell took Yancey to as a child, which he also shows in the book.
“He proposed in the car; we was going to the club, and he proposed there,” Bell says in the video. “He was determined to marry me.”
According to Yancey, the No. 1 life lesson his grandmother taught him was to always treat people with kindness.
‘African-American experience’
“My Best Friend Granny” recently earned second place in the 2024 BookFest Awards in the Children’s-Family category and was named a finalist for the 2024 International Book Awards. Yancey hopes to turn the book into an animated short film.
“I don’t think there’s very many, at least in my opinion, animated short films that show the African-American experience in a single parent home,” he said. “Where the mom works two jobs and the dad’s not around, but grandma’s there, right?”
“She [was] there to provide support and wisdom and love,” Yancey said. “And help out wherever she can try to raise, at least in my situation, a young boy into a man.”
Yancey’s experience is not uncommon.
Grandparents have long served critical roles in U.S. families that are shaped by changing demographic trends, such as increasing life expectancy, according to a 2024 report by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Nationally, 3% of grandparents live with their grandchildren, and about a third of them are responsible for the child’s care. Southern states have “a higher percentage of Black or African American populations in the region who have a relatively high rate of living with grandchildren,” according to the report.
Yancey spent years illustrating and writing pages and at one point, he said, lost his motivation. His children pushed him to finish the book after a trip to a Barnes & Noble.
“My daughter, she comes up to me and she says, ‘Dad, you know that book that you were writing for grann? I think your book could be up here,’” he recalled.
Desireé Duffy, founder of The BookFest Book Awards, said in a news release this year’s competition was exceptional and that Yancey should be very proud of his accomplishment.
“I know there’s a lot of people that, at least from what I’ve experienced from the comments and reviews like that, have related to this story,” Yancey said. “It’s not just kids.”
Yancey’s book was published Sept. 10, 2023 — National Grandparents Day.
