FIVE
“What racial mixture are you?” and other stories about my mother’s family, plus how they made spectacular national news on the twenty-eighth of March in nineteen-twenty-eight
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When looking on my computer for some notes I’d made on my parents and Lawrence, Kansas, I came across a brief one I’d written after a conversation with my mother in 2016 that I'd completely forgotten about, this concerning an experience my mother had never mentioned to me previously. Though her stories were routinely suspect as she had no respect for the truth, this one rang true. This was how I recorded it in 2016:
My mother told me today a story I'd never heard before in which she was on a bus and the black man who was collecting tickets bent down and discreetly asked her, “What racial mixture are you?” She said she didn't know of anything other than white. He then gave her an address for a regular meeting of people who were of mixed racial heritage, inviting her to come.
This account may not have then caught my attention because growing up I was used to stories of my parents being asked if they were mixed-race. Dependent on what part of the country he was in, it was sometimes questioned whether my father was mixed-indigenous, mixed-black, or Middle-Eastern (now, North African), which used to be counted as white but a different kind of white, dependent upon what part of the USA one was in, and remains white or not white depending on who is talking about it, just as with European Spaniards, who used to be considered white and still are though not always.
Color is odd. One who isn’t white might imagine that whites count themselves as a single conglomerate entity, and many do, yet color differences among whites have impact, and ethnicities certainly do. Dark hair. Light hair. Brown eyes. Blue eyes. The movie, One Million Years, B.C., from 1966, has a distinction in color that drives the plot. A tribe of people that have dark hair is aggressive and primitive. They are the Rock Tribe and reside in unforgiving, rocky terrain. Where else? If you fall down and can’t get up then you’re left to die. They’re a pitiless, hard people. Down by the seashore live the Shell Tribe, composed of light-haired people who are more advanced, compassionate, take care with their grooming and decorate themselves. They were designed to be equivalent to surfer culture. Not only do they have lighter hair, the fur pelts that they wear are even lighter and better-groomed than those of the Rock Tribe. Raquel Welch, with English heritage on her mother’s side, Spanish heritage on her mother’s side, hair dyed gold, dressed in an animal skin bikini, is the
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glamor beauty of the Shell Tribe who meets, Tumak, a handsome hunk who’s been expelled from the Rock Tribe, and introduces him to the good beach life in the sun where brute force and bullies are frowned upon and people aren’t ruled by fear. Food is plentiful. The Shell Tribe enjoys their children. They appreciate laughter. Mating is a matter of choice rather than men seizing who they want. Of course the two cultures eventually collide and they fight because the Rock Tribe doesn’t know the arts of hospitality and negotiation, then a volcano blows its top and in order to survive everyone has to figure out how to get along, led by Tumak, the reasonable Rock Tribe person who had been driven from them, had met Loana of the Shell Tribe, had learned their ways, and they had become a couple, proof that common ground can be learned. The hair color divide is less obvious in the 1940 film One Million B.C., of which One Million Years, BC. is a remake, but it is still there to some degree. One might wonder if the 1966 film was attempting to make some sort of statement on racial strife and unity in a Civil Rights era, but the Blonds as the cultivators of pacific ideals and higher culture would be a huge problem if that were the case, and the conflict has always seemed more California sea froth catch-a-wave good times vibes versus simple squares or East Coast urbanites anchored in gnarly, competitive, survival-of-the-fittest lifestyles.
Do blondes have more fun? My mother’s natural hair color was black, and when she began to go gray she dyed it black for a number of years. In middle age, my mother went blonde, not worrying about her coal black eyebrows and eyelashes. Going blonde, she believed, would make her appear more youthful. She said she was having more fun.
The name Kearns, my spouse’s family name, is Irish and means “dark one”, it’s the anglicized form of the Gaelic Ó Céirín or Ó Ciaráin, deriving from a word meaning black or brown. One would surmise that at some point in his family’s name origin history they were dark enough Irish that that this name was attached to them. Some people with the name Kearns associate it with the term “Black Irish”, which appears to be Gaeilge dubh, believed to be descendants of Spanish sailors who were shipwrecked on the west coast of Ireland in 1588. Having failed to invade England, turned out of the English Channel, the ships were attempting a North Atlantic route back to Spain when storms wrecked about twenty-four to twenty-six of them. There are different versions of the story but five to seven thousand or as many as nine thousand were lost, most said to have drowned, most of the survivors executed. The English Lord Deputy of Ireland, Fitzwilliam, had issued a proclamation that to give aid was a crime punishable by death. I read many cooperated or took their own advantage of survivors, but in what are now north Mayo, Sligo, and Leitrim Counties, which had been in revolt against England, some chieftains gave survivors harbor. As it turns out, Kearns is a name associated with Mayo, historically in possession of the greater part of the barony of Costello. They are also associated with Sligo, Roscommon and Galway. But the name, Kearns, goes back beyond the twelfth century, when it first appeared as “Kearns” in historical records, and DNA studies find in Irish DNA few traces of Spanish DNA. There’s myth and there’s reality. Long ago, before the Spaniards, a person who was Irish was called Ó Céirín or Ó Ciaráin because they were
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a bit darker and this distinguished them. “Oh, that’s the family with the black hair.” The word for black hair is ciardhubh. It’s reported that the term “Black Irish”, in Ireland, was used in reference to physical traits, while in North America it was used racially for Irish refugees of the Potato Famine and then shifted to refer to color. It’s also reported that the term “Black Irish” is said to have originated in America, as early as the 1830s, and with the Potato Famine was intended to block Irish refugees from entrance into White American society with the suggestion they were racially inferior and willing to mingle with African-Americans. Some say Irish immigrants started using the term themselves to conceal interracial children. As for the resistance of White American society to the Irish, in the old county the situation between the Irish and the English was, shall we say, historically strained. For what purpose were the Irish fleeing Ireland but that they were being starved out by the English. It wasn’t just because the Irish were Roman Catholic whereas the English were Protestant, the hatred was evidenced before King Henry VIII in the Statues of Kilkenny of 1366 and laws by which Irish customs, dress and language were prohibited in an attempt to force them to assimilate into English culture. After all, English settlers in the Lordship of Ireland colony, were being absorbed into Irish culture, creating a cultural “middle nation” and English culture had to be reasserted. In 1188, an Anglo-Norman monk, Gerald of Wales, having traveled to Ireland in 1885 with Prince John, wrote of how the Irish, as a race, were “inconstant, changeable, wily and cunning.” And they wore beards. The Anglo-Normans of 1185 pulled on the beards of the Irish princes in mockery of them. Though they were patrilineal and patriarchal, the Irish were deemed as barbarians, plus they practiced guerrilla warfare. There’s generations of history behind the strife between Ireland and England and it’s not going to be sorted out here, except to say that the Irish didn’t want to be invaded by the Anglo-Normans, who had made their conquest of England in 1066, and, conceiving of themselves as English by 1140, first set out to dominate Ireland in 1169.
It was an Irishman who promoted the idea of Irish marrying with African Americans, with the hope this would backfire against abolitionists. The Irish-American journalist, David Goodman Croly (born in Cork County, Ireland, became an American citizen in 1851) created the term “miscegenation”, it being first used in an anonymous pamphlet, The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, co-authored by Croly and George Wakeman, published in 1863. Passed off as an abolitionist text promoting intermarriage, the plan was to foment hostility against racial equality and civil rights. However, when I do a search of the pamphlet’s text in Internet Archive I don’t find the term “Black Irish” used. The pamphlet does say that the Irish of Mayo and Sligo have developed the features of the African and are so degraded that “the blending of the Irish in this county with the negro will be a positive gain to the former. With education and an intermingling with the superior black, the Irish may be lifted up to something like the dignity of their ancestors, the Milesians.” Further, “The Irish are coarse-grained, revengeful, unintellectual, with very few of the finer instincts of humanity…the Milesian is a child of the sun. He was originally of a colored race…His long habitation north, however, and the ignorance in which he has been kept by misgovernment, have sunk the Irish-man below the level of the most degraded Negro.” Who are the Milesians? Ireland’s “Book of Invasions”,
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compiled in the eleventh century, says first there were the Fir Bolg, a small dark race, then the Tuatha Dé Danann, a magical super-race, and then came the Milesians, the sons of Mil, the legendary ancestors of the modern Irish, Gaels of Iberia (Spain) who drove the Tuatha Dé Danann into the Otherworld, where they became the fairies. I read that if you go back far enough, the Irish are related to the Basques. And some make much of this, but genetically the Irish mostly derive from the Western Steppe Herders of the Bronze Age. David Croly’s son, Herbert, who was twenty when his father died, was already by that age a “significant disappointment” to David. Herbert would come to be called the Father of Progressivism, and was editor of The New Republic, also a founder with Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl.
A problem with approaching and writing about race, as in divisions made by “physical traits regarded as common among people of shared ancestry” (Merriam-Webster) is that it is a social construct that has been so engrained by centuries of European colonialism and bad science that it’s difficult for many to see how race is a social construct. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists released their official Statement on Race and Racism, of which the leading paragraph is, “Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression and discrimination. It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination. Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences.” Books can be written on this, and have been.
We are left to deal with a world built of the material generated of centuries of racist policies.
Consider my South Asian friend in Seattle, just because she has already entered the story. Her father was what is now called South Asian, but nationally he was identified as Pakistani, while he was born in Goa. I don’t know what his exact heritage was but culturally he was Roman Catholic and Hindu, things which are not fixed, can change. On paper her mother was identified as “White Russian” which I guess means that she was Belarusian. In appearance genetic roulette had my friend take after her father, but there is also the genetic inheritance of her mother, and there will have been cultural and ethnic influences as well. My friend was born in Brazil but grew up in America. Just one off the top of my head as an example of complex diversities. We both lived in an area of Seattle that the census shows previously had a robust Scandinavian population, Swedes and Norwegians who a little census research reveals were now marrying into the general population. By the time we were there it was no longer a Swedish and Norwegian neighborhood but there were likely some residents from those decades who still lingered. We had a Chinese couple for neighbors, and
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they stood out significantly to me as I saw them everyday. In my early twenties, my husband and I moved into an apartment complex that was home to many South Vietnamese refugees, Hispanics, some French and some German individuals, so I rarely heard English, and I felt at home not hearing English. It has been important for me to identify my friend’s father as South Asian to illustrate the impact even a minimal amount of diversity had on me through my sixth year, I’m concentrating on my earliest years here, to be in my youth around people who spoke different languages, who brought with them different traditions and histories to which I was exposed. It was enriching. But there were differences as well in our little nuclear family, which did stand out to me by the time I was five or six, things as simple as this, that I had hair that was sometimes red-blonde and sometimes blonde-red while my parents both had black hair. My father was dark-complected, I was so transparent white that my blue veins shone through my skin. People would look at my parents then look at me and they’d say, “Where did she come from?” Because of my family, those basic differences of hair color and color of skin, and because of a way in which we were “different”, I identified not with The Andy Griffith Show but with shows about mixed-ethnic households. Though my household was not mixed ethnic, I identified with it being mixed-ethnic.
Odd as it may seem to anyone who may examine a photo of her, and yet not so odd that it didn’t happen, my mother had been sometimes asked if she was part Asian or Aleut (Eskimo in the parlance of the day, which means “Netter of Snow Shoes”). She was different enough in appearance from what individuals thought white people should look like that people took notice but didn’t know what to make of it. Part of this was passed down to me. When I wasn’t being made fun of at school, by any student even a tone darker than me, for my whiter than white skin that didn’t tan (whereas both my parents would tan, never burn, after ten minutes in the sun), I too was sometimes mocked or bullied for features that subtly excluded me from templates for the standard white norm, and when I was older the occasional friend or acquaintance might ask if I was part Asian or Native American, and I should say that no one who was Asian or Native American asked. This is a clunky subject. It feels like a taboo subject though it’s interesting for how whiteness is codified or interpreted. It feels like a silly subject for someone of my predominately Irish (paternal) and Scots-Irish (maternal) background to raise. Asian and Black and Native American individuals may be bewildered by this and find it preposterous I would ever be taken as anything but white, and twenty-first century whites as well may feel the same, but back in mid-twentieth century America there was, from place to place, in the white community a generic idea of whiteness that not only assumed certain complexions, but hair textures, shapes of eyes and faces. One can perhaps see in this a throwback to and continuation of the “one drop” rule, which a December 9, 2010 article in The Harvard Gazette informs, “dates to a 1662 Virginia law on the treatment of mixed-race individuals. The legal notion of hypodescent has been upheld as late as 1985, when a Louisiana court ruled that a woman with a black great-great-great grandmother could not identify herself as ‘white’ on her passport.”
Hypodescent is when a person of mixed race or ethnicity is assigned to what is less,
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hypo, dominant, while with hyperdescent a person is assigned to the one most or hyper, dominant. The 1662 law ruled that social status—such as enslaved or free—was transferred from the mother to child whereas in English common law it had been transferred from the father to child. Called partus sequitur ventrem, that which is born follows the womb, this refers back to Roman civil law concerning chattel slavery and ownership by birth. One could perceive this partus sequitur ventrem ruling as promoting matrilineal descent as opposed to patrilineal descent and that it might upset the English patrilineal system, except that it had everything to do with ownership of the mother and that if the mother had been enslaved so were the children. The law also meant that if a mixed-race child had a white mother who was free then they were free, and what the law then tells us is that White males controlled the system and had most at stake in protecting their “property”.
My mother’s siblings took more after their father, which was not exclusively Scots-Irish but his family name was Scots-Irish and their DNA took this as a leading suggestion and generally ignored what the New England lines had to contribute. As if everyone who is Scots-Irish looks alike, which they don’t. I once met, unfortunately, through the internet, a very distant relation on my mother’s father’s side who had genealogy and supporting documents to give me on this Scots-Irish line and insisted upon doing it in person as she happened to be passing through town, and I knew it was a bad idea to meet with her, to consent and welcome her into our apartment, I knew she wouldn’t like the problem of having to find a parking spot in our urban neighborhood which was a perfectly good neighborhood but did have sex workers up and down the street and houseless all around as we were several blocks from a large shelter in one direction and a food kitchen in another direction (in that way it wasn’t a perfectly good neighborhood as I don’t believe anyone should be houseless), and I knew she would be put off by our living in a rundown 1920s apartment building (which I loved), I knew she would be put off by the fact we weren’t suburban, but that was her problem if she turned out to be like what I anticipated with her insistence on meeting relatives to whom she gave genealogical records, the way she had dominated like she was the royal queen clerk of family information, and I knew we were going to be judged. She arrived and though I endeavored to make it not tense, there was no possible way it wasn’t going to be uncomfortable. She asked if I had photos and I deftly avoided family drama as to why I didn’t have much in the way of family artifacts, able to show her a couple photos that I had of my mother’s father who shared with two of his daughters a distinct prominence of chin, not the Hollywood type of manly chiseled chin, but a chin that at certain angles can be best described as very “there”. “Ah, that’s the family chin,” she said, like we had proved ourselves without a DNA test, though it’s a chin upon which the line has no copyright, as if others couldn’t have that chin and everyone in our family must have that chin. Since then, I’ve found online a few photos of my grandfather’s family, both his paternal and maternal sides, not immediate but first and second cousins of his and none had his chin, so that chin may or may not have come down his paternal family line.
The distant relation who was there to judge me and give me family records turned out not to have much in the way that was informative about anything but her direct family
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line but she did have a news article about the family’s state-side patriarch who was responsible for my mother’s father’s line crossing the Atlantic, a news item of which I was obviously supposed to be somehow proud because it was about my mother’s father’s great-great-grandfather down that Scots-Irish paternal line, who was born in 1768, but the article was from 1904 and had a picture of five generations of the family including that progenitor’s wife, a picture that had been likely poorly printed in the newspaper and had been xeroxed badly multiple times so there was no making out the features of anyone on display, only that one woman was very old and three were younger and there was a baby. How could there be a news article from 1904 showing the wife of that man born in 1768 in Donegal, Ireland, who came to the United States of America supposedly because his landed family (so said, who knows) wouldn’t permit him to marry the Irish lass that he loved? The picture was able to show his wife because this had been his third and last wife. His first wife had thirteen children and died in 1840 at about the age of 70. His second wife had no children, lasted a year or two, and who knows what happened to her, I don’t know when she was born but I assume she died before he married a third time. His third marriage was when he was seventy-five and that third wife was just seventeen, yes, you read right, there was a fifty-eight year age difference between them. His first wife’s (my ancestress) eldest child and daughter was forty-seven when he married the seventeen-year-old. His youngest son by his first wife was twenty-seven when he married the seventeen-year-old. He and this third wife had a child a couple of years after their marriage, and after that child this patriarch lived to be eighty-eight, so the third wife was thirty when he died and she never married again. I didn’t joke and say, “Oh, I wonder if that was really his child,” though this seemed something that could be seriously considered, and I didn’t say, “Oh, she must have been disappointed when he went on to live thirteen more years,” though this seemed a very practical way of looking on the relationship. I didn’t say, “I wonder if his ten surviving children by his first wife resented their young stepmother and feared she’d get the entirety of any estate there was, or maybe they were glad she got the job of taking care of him in his old age.” I said none of these things, and I should have, because my visitor said a couple of weird things that I understood might be intended to make me feel personally offended, so weird I’ve always been helpless to interpret her remarks so won’t share them, and now I sardonically wonder if, like my mother, she actually hated her family, if her mission was to meet as many as she could and apply her knife. Or maybe she simply didn’t like me. I didn’t respond to these remarks she’d made just before leaving, like she’d been holding on to them for a parting shot. I just stared, speechless, my brain whirling, trying to compute, and then as our meeting was over and done with she aimed for the door and I showed her out, politely thanking her for being so kind as to leave with me a copy of her research.
That fifty-eight year age spread between elder groom and young bride will never cease to boggle my mind. She was seventeen, so one couldn’t say the cradle was exactly being robbed, and if it worked for them then it worked for them, as long as it’s two consenting individuals I’m not one who believes marriage belongs only to those who are a love match, when I was young I thought it should be for love, but then I realized history and the world is full of people marrying for reasons other than love, so I’m fine as long as both are in solid agreement.
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James willed his young wife his cow, his sheep, half of his bedstead (which isn’t a sad half of a bed, that means a bed with partial canopy) and bed and bedding, a case of drawers, one saddle, the kitchen furniture and his books, plus the interest of one third of his real estate was to be paid annually to her as long as she remained his widow. He specified money for their daughter’s education, so there’s that. He believed his daughter should have an education.
My mother, though she too looked like her father, stood out in her own family as different. Not all white people have the double eyelids that make one’s eyes large and round. Double eyelids are strongly associated with white people, while individuals with epicanthic folds and hooded eyes are associated with Asian and sometimes American Indian populations, but variants of epicanthic folds occur in white populations as well, such as the Irish and Scandinavians. I was amused when an American comedian with Irish ancestry, making humor of his childhood, raised the issue of being sometimes mistaken for mixed-Asian because of his eyes. As a child, my mother was mocked as having Asian “slant eyes”, and I was not only mocked in school for having the same eyes, but also by my mother who would sometimes greet me at the breakfast table in the morning by pulling on the outside corners of her eyes to narrow them further in imitation of my eyes while also speaking mock Japanese or Chinese. I was not so much offended for myself as I was puzzled. I could take offense for Asians, but I couldn’t really take offense for myself because I wasn’t Asian. However, I could be annoyed for myself because I was just fine with my eyes. People who don’t have the highly perceptible double eyelids sometimes opt for surgery as those with double eyelids can interpret those without them as having small eyes, tired eyes. It always annoyed and perplexed that my mother-in-law, each time she saw me, would say I looked tired, no matter if I felt good and rested, and one former employer would so regularly say the same that I grew to resent it, then one day I wondered if it was perhaps an unconscious response on their part to my not having the obvious double eyelid. Plastic surgeons sometimes call this appearance bedroom eyes and say the excess skin over the eyelids gives a “permanently tired” look, which can be naturally had through genetics or caused by age. Website after website after website promises that plastic surgery will create a more “awake” look. This might sound like a non-problem to some, but it’s not for Asian women who have plastic surgery to make their eyes wider, and it says something about appearances that have even unconsciously been accepted as white, and that if one departs in certain ways from what is a fairly broad spectrum of whiteness then one is perceived as Other.
You don’t want to read about my eyes. I don’t want to write about my eyes, but here we are, because they matter to some, and because my mother’s eyes so mattered to her that she would have plastic surgery to change her eyes. That my mother had plastic surgery to change her eyes, informs as to how big a deal this was in our lives.
In elementary school, because my hair pouffed out and was frizzy, defiant against being beaten down, I was called Dog Ears, for though barettes were used to attempt to train and pull my hair straight at the crown, immediately below the barettes my hair billowed out, unruly. Tired of the bullying, I retaliated in seventh grade by calling a boy who was harassing me “Pizza face”. “Dog ears,” he kept calling me from his desk
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two rows away, with others around appreciatively laughing, and finally I blurted, “Pizza face,” and even as I said it I disliked myself for calling him this because it was vulgar, unkind, and I knew he couldn’t help it if he had acne, it was a fact of life for him just like my hair was for me. The boy who was bullying me flinched for a moment, I saw a momentary surprise in his eyes, a hint of pain, then continued his bullying, and I still scorned myself for having said what I had.
You don’t want to read about my hair. I don’t want to write about my hair, but here we are, because a certain kind of hair was expected and mine was not that.
It’s impossible to say where my mother got her eyes from. It’s impossible to say where my mother got her deviated septum from, or her Morton’s Toe so that the second toe on both feet was longer than the big toe (I believe her mother also had Morton’s Toe). It’s impossible to say where I got my hair from, but my mother couldn’t handle it and didn’t like it. I only touched my mother’s hair once in my life, that’s the kind of relationship we had, the one time I touched her hair she was seated at the breakfast bar in the Edinburgh house, I was a young teen and was standing behind her, I don’t remember how it was that I touched her hair maybe a moment’s curiosity nudged me or maybe it was by accident but it was a quick brush of my hand, so lightly she didn’t notice, and I instantly withdrew, surprised at how her hair felt nothing like mine. Her hair felt, I don’t know, coarse. It was straight hair but easy to shape. She always had bangs and they never curled, they always laid flat. It would seem like a natural thing to touch the hair of a close relative, but I never, not once, touched my father’s hair either, or the hair of my grandmothers or grandfathers. My mother tried to control my hair and hated it and fought with it from the time I was a two, then my father’s mother hated my hair and was obsessed with taming it. When I was ten, my father’s mother took me to a beauty salon where they painfully yanked my hair out of my head, thinning it and thinning it in an attempt to make it more controllable, but still it frizzed and pouffed unless it was intensively conditioned or gelled with a product called Dippity-Do (green, the extra hold, rather than the normal that was pink) and that would last for only a short time. My childhood was a constant ordeal of beating my hair down with curlers—foam, brush, heated—and gels and conditioners and sprays. When I was very little my mother tried smelly perms which were not simply annoying but terrifying because if the solution got in one’s eyes it could cause blindness and my mother was always careless when just washing my hair with shampoo so it would get in my eyes and sting, for which reason as soon as I was able I took over washing my own hair which must have been by the age of five or six. Most every daughter has heard from her mother, “Beauty hurts,” and if my mother was normal in any area it was in this one, she would excuse scary perms and painful curlers that dug into the scalp with the silencing scold that, “Beauty hurts.” When I was a teenager, a friend ironed my hair and marveled as it immediately sprang back out in a halo rather than lying flat and straight. Straight or some bouncy gentle curl was the ideal. When women ran (literally) in commercials their hair bounced but their breasts didn’t, that was the ideal. Marlo Thomas was perhaps the first woman to run with bouncing breasts in the opening footage for her series That Girl, beginning with
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season two, 1968, she’s dressed in white top and pants and running through Central Park flying a kite, the breast bounce is barely there by today’s standards but back then it was near scandalous for some. My best friend in Augusta loved Marlo Thomas, we watched the show together, and she was aghast. She thought it was a wrong look for a role model. But I loved Marlo’s character going no bra feminist. I wore a bra until I was seventeen because as a little girl I’d been trained to eagerly, excitedly wait for when I would be able to wear a bra, then when I was seventeen I stopped, and was surprised it was an issue with some friends. Oh, and when Marlo ran her hair didn’t bristle out in a frizzy halo, its shiny black curls gently bounced. I understood why people mocked my hair when shiny, glossy, bouncy hair was the ideal, but mine wasn’t naturally that, it was a daily battle to flatten my hair, and at seventeen I decided to stop fighting it and let my hair do what it naturally wanted, which meant going in for all my minimum wage job interviews and waiting for the moment when they would glance at my hair in such a way that would tell me I wouldn’t get the job. When I was nineteen or twenty I was hired by a Caribbean manager at an art frame shop. She was Latina-Afro maybe partly indigenous, a soft-spoken and rather subdued woman whose relationship with her white, quietly domineering husband concerned me, and I eventually learned my instincts were right. We got along well, the job was okay, I even liked it, she said I was the best person she’d ever had working for her, I never made an error chopping the moulding for the frames or cutting the mats which meant I didn’t waste supplies and I got along with customers helping them in their matting and framing selections, the job was satisfying. I liked her and she began to loosen up after a while but I also knew it made her nervous the day she told me about her husband and that she was thinking of leaving him, but then the swelling around her eye went down and she didn’t leave him. After a couple of months the owner, who lived in another city, dropped by, she critically eyed me up and down, and the next day the manager told me she was really sorry about this, she said she tried to plead my case with how good I was, but the owner didn’t like my hair and had told her to fire me. A year or so later I cut off all my hair (there were several reasons why, which I won’t go into here, but the final decision was the hope it would make me less a target for the more alarming forms of male aggression on the street) and if it grew longer than an inch it began to get unruly curly so I wore scarves over it at abysmal soul-sucking minimum wage receptionist and secretarial jobs. In my late twenties I grew my hair back out, and when I was working as a waitron in a nightclub, drunk patrons, male and female, always white, would come up and touch my hair and then eyes widen with surprise as they drew their hand back like they’d touched a flame, exclaiming, “It’s soft!” What did they expect it to feel like? Strangers routinely asked, “Can I touch your hair?” After having had some plays produced, I went to a theater conference where I expected to be treated as a playwright, but even there a man came up to me and said, “I can’t wait to hear what’s underneath all that hair,” and I resented it because my identity was made to be about my hair. At the same time, I well understood, from when I was two and my mother gave me my first perms in her attempt to force my hair to have manageable curls, that identity could be all about hair, would be all about hair, Black people have dealt with hair discrimination forever, White society demanding that African-Americans with frizzy-curly hair control it and redefine it. As I’ve said above, no longer willing to fight my hair I’d let it go natural at
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seventeen, because that was the way it was and I’d decided I liked it the way it was, I’d decided to stop hating my hair, I wasn’t going to keep forcing it to be what it kept naturally fighting against. If that was my hair’s identity, let that be my hair’s identity. Black individuals I knew who were co-workers, friends, acquaintances, usually said nothing about my hair, but I lived in an almost all black neighborhood through my late twenties and thirties and when I was walking home from the subway station sometimes I’d be called out for my hair, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. “Do something with that hair!” One day a little black girl, perhaps about seven years of age, on her way home from school, was passing by me on the sidewalk as I checked the mailbox, and she stopped and stood transfixed, staring at me and my hair. Her stare wasn’t in scorn, from her expression she simply seemed fascinated to see a white person with hair like mine, like she didn’t know what to think. I smiled at her and said hi, which broke the spell, she smiled and we parted.
When I was young, red hair was to be mocked rather than a desirable feature. People liked red hair on Lucille Ball, who was brunette and dyed her hair red. If you had naturally red hair for some reason it wasn’t desirable. My hair was a sneaky kind of red. Sometimes my hair was red but not always. When my spouse and I met, my hair was red, not bright red but noticeably red and he always described me as a redhead even during the times I didn’t think my hair was noticeably red, I thought redheads had to be a vivid red. When I look back at the few portraits I have that I painted of myself, I'm surprised to see I always gave myself very observably red hair, and I know I painted myself this way because that was most like what my hair was, but I still didn't think of myself as being a redhead, nor did I think of me as painting myself as a redhead, my hair just wasn’t brown or blond, it was whatever. I thought it was likely dishwater blonde that cleverly cheated some people into thinking it was red. I felt like an imposter redhead, but in my twenties I got an Irish Setter, because, well, she kind of felt like family (absolutely beautiful dog, one moment noble and proud, and in the next a ridiculous goof, everyone who has had an Irish Setter will nod their head, yes). My hair began losing its color at sixteen, but didn’t look gray, the red hair was what turned and became a hard-to-describe color, like my hair became a blend of shades of light wheat and reddish oats that would reflect white in harsh light. I didn’t think it was in any way unusual, but a worker at a bakery I used to frequent in my early thirties asked me what color my hair was, she said she’d never seen anything like it. Taken aback whenever I was asked a personal question, I didn’t know what to say, so I said I didn’t know, it was just my hair. Our son was born with dark brown hair that assumed red highlights as he grew older. In photos with flash he becomes an Irish Setter redhead. Yes, we joke about his being an Irish Setter redhead. I think he was the one who made the comparison first.
Few people I knew had naturally red hair. No one told me how the pigment in red hair typically would fade in this way over time. I observed it was my red hair turning color, but I also thought it was just me, that all other redheads stayed red, and so I thought, because my red hair changed color, that well maybe I had been a fake redhead, like my red hair wasn’t truly red since it changed color. Where did the red come from? My father, though he had black hair, said that when he’d once tried wearing a beard it had
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red in it and he didn’t like that so he shaved it off. But my mother was the one who had freckles all over her and when I was young I had freckles but I lost these as well, my skin stopped freckling when I was about eleven, but we had also moved away from the desert. A niece of mine has copper-color hair, and a grandnephew has bright carrot-color hair. As it's a recessive trait, for it to be observable it must descend down both sides.
As a child, it was easy enough for me to see how my hair, which didn’t swing when I turned my head, didn’t bounce as I walked, didn’t meet the ideal, but I never understood why some peers would tease me as having “slant eyes”. I understood with the hair. I didn’t see it with the eyes. When I looked at my eyes I saw them as being just eyes. I didn’t understand why when other thirteen-year-olds were experimenting with eye makeup and eyeliner, any eye makeup or liner I put on my eyes disappeared, you couldn’t see it. I didn’t understand how my eyes were different. Then when I was sixteen I had one of those strange moments where you look in a mirror and, instead of seeing what you expect, you witness how others see you, and my response was who is that person, damn, my eyes actually are different than what I’ve imagined them to be. That lasted a day and then I returned to seeing my eyes as simply eyes. There are a number of variants on eyelid type and shape, and it’s a wearying subject for me, a banal detail I’d leave out except that it daily hung over our lives with my mother’s preoccupation over this detail of appearance. I have a difficult time parsing eyelid shapes between very obvious extremes, the same way I am a bit blind when it comes to perceiving and understanding differences between leaf shapes and flower petal arrangements, as if during a formative period when one becomes attuned to differences, the fine details, all of that concerning eyes passed me by. When I was older, with drawing, I had to teach myself the differences in eyes, and what made them different. I have never seen eyes without the double eyelids as being tired or irregular, they look normal for what they are. But the more sensitive I was made to some people seen as having small eyes, I noticed instead when people had what seemed to me to have big eyes, the kind a number of fashion photographers seemed to pursue.
When science announced that infantile features such as big eyes were an evolutionary advantage that motivated caretaking behavior because of big-eyed cuteness, I wondered what kind of bullshit was this because though some populations have big eyes, I had “small” eyes as a baby. What about populations with “small” eyes? What about their babies? Are they to be left out in the snow to the wolves? When my son was born with “small” eyes I was, “Oh, you are so cute with your small eyes, I love them. You are the most beautiful baby in the world.” I wondered what kind of racism had motivated this theory of kindchenschema that was telling everyone big-eyed babies were the ones protected by evolution ensuring their survival. I look up Konrad Lorenz, the proponent of the theory, and find the Nobel Prize winner was stripped, in 2015, by Salzburg University, of his honorary doctorate because of his “fervent embrace of Nazism”, a stance which he denied, but, not only had he applied to become a member of the Nazi party in 1938, he had spread, in his work, “basic elements of racist ideology of National Socialism”. That he was awarded a Nobel Prize was being
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questioned back in 1973 in a New York Times article, for during the 1940s his writings had supported “race preserving” to avoid “degeneracy”. Dr. Leon Eisenberg, challenging Lorenz’s view on human behavior being largely instinctual, wrote that Lorenz’s “’scientific logic’ justified Nazi legal restrictions against intermarriage with nonAryans.” Scientists are still selling kindchenschema and websites that are not consciously racist publish its claims accompanied by photos of infants with big eyes.
During the early days of COVID-19, post quarantine, an older, unmasked white woman in a grocery store parking lot lashed out at my son for being one of “those damn Chinese”. He was perplexed then realized she could only see his eyes as he was wearing a protective face mask and she had perhaps mistaken him as being Chinese. If you saw him you’d wonder how this happened, but it did. It was during that weirdly volatile time during which people who said COVID-19 didn’t exist, who were of a certain political leaning, also blamed all Chinese for the existence of COVID-19, and what my son couldn’t figure out was if she was angry at him for the existence of COVID-19, or if she was mad that she couldn’t open her car door all the way as our car was parked fairly close to it and so she lashed out at him racially.
A self-identified “Afro-American” newspaper called, The Appeal, in response to segregation of transportation and the Jim Crow railway car law, wrote in 1891 that for the law to be enforced ethnologists would need to be hired to determine who was and wasn’t Afro-American.
During major flare-ups of prejudice against North African or West Asian countries, my mother would caution my father and my brother, B, to be careful, as they were dark, and their ethnicity could be ambiguous.
This is all tedious, and yet physical characteristics do more than impact lives, they make lives. Heritage, class, and privilege or the lack of it make lives, not just in America but wherever one pops into the consciousness of the world, to grow up in relative ease or be relentlessly harried on the battlefield of survival. Every culture has each their own prejudices but with Anglo and European colonialism certain ideas of racial sets and subsets went worldwide and they not only tried to box with hard definitions they prided themselves in judging what was beautiful, pretty, lovely, cute, charming, attractive, simply pleasing, intelligent, handsome, sophisticated, well-formed, and what was not, to be further amplified by Wall Street and advertising’s selling of the arbitrary ideal, from skin and hair color down to the shape of one’s nose and toes, creating not only what was normal-ideal but what was exotic and moreover desirably, sexily exotic. From early Greek philosophers to twentieth-century psychiatry, crackpot science has dissected physiognomy, defining what is criminal and base and spiritually and intellectually elevated, so the personal fetishes of egomaniacs and racists with a podium or publisher became bibles of how to code and classify at first glance every human being who crossed one’s path, because people like guide books. How easy would life be to meet a person and determine by the shape of their nose or forehead exactly who and what they are and what can be expected of them.
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Just what is a noble profile?
So many guides have been published illustrating what is beautiful, pretty, cute, handsome, distinguished. What is the perfect nose, the just right leg, or mouth. What gives anyone the right to judge? What about beauty contestants, women pitting themselves against one another, not quite like boxers battling it out in a ring because what is attractive is purely arbitrary, but both are ruthless entertainments, and young girls are left literally measuring themselves up, one against another against the person sitting next to them to everyone in the world, part by part, from skin tone to pore size to toes to calves to kneecaps to thighs to asses to waists to busts to fingers to elbows to collarbones to necks to facial shape, chins, mouths, noses, eyes, ears, and hair. Even within its own ranks, systemic White racism created ideals that were possessed by only a few, whose features might be enhanced by make-up, prosthetics and surgery. As a young teenager I yearly sat down to watch the annual Miss America beauty parade on television, specifically Miss America, for the talent show, which was sometimes amusing, and for the answers the finalists gave to often absurd questions that tested their interview poise and diplomacy, and because it was just so bizarre, this beauty battle between Alabama and Maryland and Idaho, the artificial extremity of award-winning femaleness. Not that I wanted to, but I knew I could never be a beauty contestant. The women weren’t identical but they shared an aesthetic that I was entirely outside of, and I didn’t want to look like that. To reacquaint myself I go to Youtube to watch the 1970 Miss America broadcast and listen to Miss Minnesota relate her opinion on how a woman is too emotional to be president and that men should operate the country as they have more insight and can overcome their emotions with logic. As a child, I considered maybe beauty contests were viewed as a way out for girls in Small Town America with scant opportunities, but I also didn’t see how they took care of that problem. Though I was only a preteen when, in 1968, feminists protested the Miss America pageant as oppressive, racist, and a “cattle parade”, they were expressing the opinions I’d already formed of it as well.
When I was in seventh grade, twelve years of age, a new girl appeared at our school, one who I rather liked but was for some reason immediately a social outcast, and I couldn’t figure out why because she was a pretty girl and congenial, except she over-performed being nice to the teacher. In our school photo, taken seated in the classroom, we are the only two with our eyes shut, only I am slouched down in my seat, arms crossed, not looking at the camera, guarded, resolutely not smiling because life is hell, my desk stands out as the only one under which is a piled-high mess of papers, whereas she sits pertly upright, hands neatly folded on her lap, facing the camera, smiling. She’s wearing the slim and short A-line cranberry-red skirt, short-sleeved (with cuffs) delicately-flowered blouse buttoned up to the collar, white knee socks, and scuffed brown loafers that I always picture her in, her long dark brown hair held back from her face with a headband. We began to become friends, and when my family visited my mother’s parents over the holidays, this must have been at Thanksgiving, somehow the subject of this girl came up, I think my mother raised it, and when my grandmother heard the girl’s last name she cooed and remarked on how that was the last name of her paternal grandmother and we were likely distant
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relatives, which I now can easily check out and we were, very meaningless distants, sharing a same immigrant Revolutionary War generation of however many greats-grandparents fresh from North Ireland. This was also my grandmother’s middle name, but she wouldn’t tell me what her middle name was. She played, one day, a game of “Can you guess my middle name?” which of course I couldn’t and she said she would never tell me it because she found it too embarrassing, I don’t know why (when you ask a granddaughter to guess your name and then refuse to divulge it ever because it’s too embarrassing, it’s rather strange, in my grandmother’s case she sent me away to wonder at what it could crazily be, like Scrumptious or Dullwater or Frigidaire, when instead I would later learn it was a family Scottish surname that raises no eyebrows, in the rank of family names it comes in at 131,486, which is 1 in 2,119,705 people, which is perhaps not usual but it is by no out-of-the-ordinary). The girl over-performed being nice to my parents as well, which made me a little uncomfortable, as well how nice my mother was to her and approving of her. Still, we were undeniably becoming good friends and her mother was very nice and gracious with me, commenting on how glad she was her daughter had found such a good friend. I wasn’t sure if I should trust all the niceness, even if I didn’t read any disingenuousness on the part of the girl or the mother, who the girl strongly took after, the mother had been at some point a model, unsurprising, she didn’t look like an ordinary everyday mother, was also nonchalantly artistic, wind-blown from riding horses, the girl was in the cocoon stage both protected and dazzled by her mother and they got along very well as far as I could tell. Then I spent the night at her house. A nice house half in the suburbs and half in the country. She had a nice bedroom with nice things. The night I stayed over, she wore babydoll PJs which were popular about that time, usually a short full top of two layers, a gauzy fabric over an opaque one, nylon, with matching panties, the top usually just long enough to skirt the top of the thighs, dressed up with ruffles and ribbons it was intended to be an innocent, cute look on little girls but was overtly sexual on women. When I was ten I’d had babydoll PJs in pink. My mother had a set as well, light blue, and on her I interpreted them as weird-sexy, while when I was ten I interpreted my pink babydoll PJs as only being preteen slumber party fun, I didn’t see them as about sex on someone my age, though I was bothered when my little sister had a set. At least I remember this girl in babydoll PJs, but if she was instead in flannels or poplin pants and shirt-top style PJs and a quilted robe I wouldn’t be surprised, I remember her wearing both styles and I think it’s because we had two sleepovers, the first one would have been at my house, which is when she wore the pants and shirt PJs and she’d slept in my little sister’s bed. It’s the second sleepover, the one at her house, that went wrong. We were friends when we went to sleep in her nice room with its nice bed. We had enjoyed ourselves that day, I thought she lived in a really cool place and she had a very nice life. We went to sleep in the same bed which was normal if someone had a double bed. Nothing was wrong when we went to bed. When I woke up in the morning it was to the other girl screaming and crying, her hands up trying to defend herself as I had physically attacked her in my sleep. As I came to, in the middle of attacking her, I was still half in a dream in which my parents had preferred her over me, which ignited some jealous anger on my part, then in the dream something odd happened, my father’s father was in the bed, I felt sick and afraid, and then my rage exploded, which is when I woke up attacking her, I don’t
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recall exactly how now, only that I wasn’t just beating up on her, I felt like I was desperately fighting to save my life. It took me a second to realize what was going on as I woke up, and was terrified by what I’d done, that I’d attacked her, gathering my senses I drew away, she was sobbing, she wanted to know why I would attack her like that, she wasn’t screaming at me that I was horrible, to get out, no, she was shocked and trying to understand, and I wouldn’t speak, I wouldn’t tell her, I couldn’t tell her that in my dream our identities had kind of become confused with my parents preferring her, that they had been in bed with her, then it transformed to my father’s father in the bed, just suddenly there, overwhelming, sexually engaged, and I was desperate, fighting, I had to save my life, I was too traumatized, it was too confusing, the dream was all fractured, disordered. There were so many emotions, and among them was hate, I hated her because of that dream in which she’d been so innocent and people-pleasing that my grandfather had climbed into the bed and was sexually engaged with her and my identity had become confused with her. I didn’t comprehend how I could be both terrified and fighting for my life and wake up and see her face as my fist went down onto it and hate her for that innocent smile, I wanted to kill it. I didn’t understand the jumble of it all and didn’t want to understand it. I felt like my life was threatened, that I’d die if I tried to think about this, look directly on it, no, it had to be forgotten. Absolutely mute, I dressed and immediately went home and was so terrified by the dream that from then on I wouldn’t speak with her, I wouldn’t even acknowledge her existence. I had to forget about the nightmare, I had to forget about it all, which meant I had to act like she didn’t exist. She would plead with me why, why was I no longer her friend, what had happened to make me hate her, and I would refuse to answer, acting as if she wasn’t there, invisible. Then to put a stop to it all, because she persisted, she wouldn’t stop, during lunch period one day, in front of a couple of other girls who didn’t care for her much and would serve as witnesses, I threw her peanut butter and jam sandwich on the ground and stomped on it in order to make her cry, or I did something like that, it involved a peanut butter and jam sandwich, and she sobbed and then slapped me, which I’d anticipated she’d do, and as she’d slapped me I had the excuse now to let loose and slap her back harder, so hard her nose bled, because I had to drive her away from me, I had to make her stop trying to be friends, I had to completely forget we’d ever been friends at all because of the dream in which her fawning had won my parents, and I’d become her and been sexually assaulted by my grandfather. Still, it was all only confusing bits and pieces, not a dream story. The rage that had taken me over in the dream, that had escaped dream life so that I would beat her up in my sleep, the all-consuming quality of that hatred, which I recognized as being for myself, came from a place too dark and bewildering for me to cope with. It had to go away. I had to forget. And the way to make that happen was to alienate her and pretend we had never been friends. I always felt guilty about how I treated her, and felt that I should apologize and explain it had nothing to do with her, that it was about me, but it was a far too dangerous situation for me to address, I had to keep my distance, I had to erase her. The reason I think of her now is because her mother soon opened a modeling school and her daughter became a feature and showcase of the fruits of her school, the girl moving from naturally pretty and nice to an artificial performance of beauty and grace appropriate for beauty contests, and she did win at least one. I took note from afar as it happened
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and felt a little sorry for her, though there was no reason as she seemed happy with it, I think she was, but I wondered also if she did it because of the ostracism and bullying she’d experienced, I wondered if she was attempting to make herself picture perfect beyond reproach which, as we grew older, only earned her more scorn from some of her classmates as her nose now also had the tilt of being above the rest of us, which I interpreted as self-protection. She’d been hurt by us all, and by me. I reasoned she’d get over it by being better than the the rest of us in this model and beauty contest form, which was fine by me, who knew where she’d go with it, but I still felt a little guilty that she was also losing perhaps something essential in herself.
I rationalized that the dream was only about my individuation having been threatened somehow. I thought maybe it had to do with my mother liking her, like she had replaced me in the dream and maybe I’d attacked her in the dream because my parents liked her better, I shut out the sex part with my grandfather which was too confusing, the terror that had swept over me, along with a great rage. In the dream I felt like I had to kill that me who was in bed with my grandfather. I wasn’t so much attacking my grandfather as I was attacking the me that was this girl’s innocent smile that had attracted my grandfather to climb into bed and do what he did and she didn’t stop it. Then after the dream I was desperate to never have anything to do with her again because I was that terrified. I had to forget and distance myself. I had to pretend we’d never been friends. When I say that I felt guilty about this all the way through our graduation from high school, after which I didn’t see her again, it seems like I would be always recollecting this event, but I was able to block that out for the most part and instead felt guilty for how I had rejected her so completely and suddenly and been mean to her.
Twelve-year-olds shouldn’t be tragic. They are little cocooned larva painfully transitioning from childhood to they know not what, all they can grasp of the future is what they see when they look in the mirror and with the majority what they see is not what they want because it is a gawky puppy malformed by the threshold of adolescence, but they must live with it, which is distant from an ideal that forms and reforms, all the template models unobtainable because those are not their destiny, the one assurance is that childhood is fast retreating as the new self approaches. Twelve-year-old puppies shouldn’t be tragic, but there I was with my grandmother’s excitement that the girl and I were certainly related, which must have been simmering in my unconscious, the girl’s name twisting around with my ancestral line that had that name, and in my dream she became the me I hated, who was innocent, with which I couldn’t live, the dream zone flooded with a flashback and it was as much that flashback as her yelling when I struck her that startled me awake.
For me to physically attack anyone was a thing that almost never happened. I can’t say it never happened because I had a physical fight with someone once before, when I was nine, a boy who was my age. We were on the playground after school, he was with a friend, I was alone, we were by the fenced back walkway over a shallow ravine that I always took walking to and from school, whereas most of the other children came and left in front of the school. By this I mean it was a solitary situation, only me,
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him, and a friend of his. I have no idea what happened but he said he could beat me up and I put down my violin case and immediately lit into him, not giving him a chance to start, I went straight for his face and socked him so hard he was screaming I’d broken his nose, which hadn’t happened, but it had been bloodied, he started crying and saying he’d get his older brother on me, which didn’t happen, he did bring around his brother the next day but when his brother saw me and how small I was he laughed and told his brother, my schoolmate, to take care of himself, and that was the end of that. For some reason I got in no trouble at school for the fight, at least not that I can remember, so the boy must not have reported it. After that incident he left me alone and that was that. The reason why I remember myself as having attacked him is because I hit him first and hard enough that he was shocked and too stunned by his bloody nose to lay a finger on me. He had been an asshole, and after a readjustment period of a few days, getting over his embarrassment, I even vaguely remember him as becoming friendly the rest of the school year. Not friends, just friendly. That surprised me, how there was no animosity, how it was so quickly put aside and forgotten.
Though I leave this subject now, I will return to it later, because there are things that one can try to forget, there may be things that one can’t remember, but they keep volcanically erupting in one’s life, magma rising from the depths, and if I can be excused for attacking the girl, while in a nightmare, it’s because some tectonic plates in my brain had slipped, lava had coursed through, I was having a flashback in my nightmare. I will add I was now afraid of sleep leaving me unguarded internally if I could attack someone during a nightmare, I don’t remember doing any sleepovers with anyone afterward and that may have been a way of my coping, then when I was in a situation of sleeping in a same space with peers later we were always in individual beds, but I never attacked anyone in my sleep again.
Back to the eyes, and then I’ll be done with them for good. Most of us likely have something physically about ourselves that we believe distinguishes us from the millions of others who inhabit the planet, which is also a bridge back to ancestors, a binding link, an evidence of inheritance, and we may believe we see how it descends from a parent or another relation, or we may not have any idea at all where it has previously appeared in the family tree. We may like these features. We may deplore these features. My mother, who hated her eyes, back in the late 1970s, in her early forties, took some money she and my father had come into and opted to use it for cosmetic surgery to give her the cherished double eyelids that she had always lacked. After the surgery, others saw a difference but I only noticed that when my mother wore eye makeup one could now see it and it did look attractive on her.
In preparation for the surgery, she had to go through a time of weaning off whatever heavy cocktail of drugs she was on, as she was told that the anesthesia required for the operation would kill her. I wasn’t surprised except that this was viewed by her as funny, ha-ha. My father said nothing. It was, for me, proof that my mother was excessively medicated. I never had any idea what she was on, it was never discussed, I begin to think it was even purposefully hidden what she was taking. At the beginning
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of our last period of communication after near two decades of none she told me she had recently gone through a period of self-electing off medication, at the time divorced from my father but still seeing him frequently (they would marry each other again after a few years) and hinted that she might be wondering if she had been inappropriately or intentionally doped up all her married life. I don’t know who was prescribing the medications as for all she let on she hadn’t seen a psychiatrist in decades, since I was thirteen. Whether my father was medicating and over-medicating her, I don’t know, as neither ever disclosed who was writing her prescriptions. When I was a young teen and he returned to school to become a psychiatrist, I believed it was in order to prescribe for her as she had sworn off psychiatrists, and to my knowledge she never saw another. But I don’t know. The fleeting suggestions she made that she had been overmedicated were said when she was dropping hints that their marriage had been a soul-crushing one in which she’d been unhappy and that she was flourishing outside of it. However, as the stories she offered were more often than not fictions, outright lies rather than alternate perspectives, I didn’t and don’t know what to believe, except that this was a time during which she wanted to look good by making him look bad. My siblings didn’t discuss it with me, we didn’t discuss anything, but I was dimly aware that at least some of them had been upset with her over the divorce, which she initiated, and were in sympathy with him as the injured party. My mother went so far as to remark she’d divorced my father in order to save her life by taking control of it again, though she didn’t elaborate on this, and several times confidently commented she could look at women riding with their husbands in cars and tell who was trapped and miserable in their marriage, which I thought presumptuous. If I didn’t further inquire into what she said about her medications or marriage, it’s because I had the feeling, even if she was telling the truth on some level, that she was laying out bait, negotiating for me to choose a side, but I didn’t trust either side, and I didn’t know how she would use this, if it might ultimately be turned against me if I actively involved myself, so I didn’t engage. Then this changed and after a few years they were again living together and suddenly were remarried without telling anyone their plans beforehand, we were expected to rejoice, wasn’t this wonderful, and my father was once more, according to her, the best husband and father in the world and always had been. Though I didn’t trust either of them, and shouldn’t have, I would never know what was honestly going on in their heads, or what was actually going on in their lives as opposed to what I was being told. It did seem to me that when they weren’t living together both my parents were pursuing outside interests that seemed to benefit them, I was glad for them, but that stopped when they got back together. My spouse was suspect of my mother’s story that she had stopped taking her medications, whatever they were, she never once named any one of them. I do know that when my father needed pain meds before his death, my mother complained the hospice workers who came to their home to care for him were stealing the meds, which is why there weren’t pain killers for him and why she had to beg the doctors for more. I was told later, after his death, it was believed she had been taking the meds herself. Ah, of course. Plus, as it turned out, there were no hospice workers, but I’m not going to tackle that right now. Later.
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2
Why did this story of my mother’s encounter on the bus ring true? The way she spoke about it, her tone wasn’t one of telling me a story toward a particular manipulative end, it was more like she was relating it to herself, an unadulterated recollection that she had perhaps not thought about in years, she even sounded a little surprised by it. She had spoken previously, though rarely, of taking the El train in Chicago, but never had told me a story specifically concerning the train or a bus. In this memory, she could have been speaking about either Chicago or Lawrence, Kansas, but I automatically assumed this happened in Lawrence, perhaps because of the level of autonomy suggested in her voice, she sounded as though she was relating an incident that had happened when she was out in the world rather than living in the household of her parents. The bus stood out to me as a very naturally-related detail, also that it was the man collecting tickets who had made this inquiry, such a specific memory, and that he’d written the address down for her. Though she lied in nearly every sentence she spoke, she wasn’t greatly imaginative when it came to details, and these seemed like real facts that she’d be unlikely to fabricate.
As she related the story, I had automatically tried to picture it, my mother on the bus, I saw her seated up front to the rear of the driver but on the other side of the aisle, and what did she look like, what was she wearing. And I couldn’t and can’t, of course, visualize it, if I tried it would be a fiction, I don’t know how her hair was styled, how she was attired, what she might have been carrying with her. I can’t picture anything about her or the conductor who was collecting the tickets, but I know if it was in a movie everything about it would be wrong, nostalgic, probably given the golden glow treatment.
I had completely forgotten about this conversation which didn’t fit in with all the other stories my mother had concocted in an attempt to remake her ancestral history in order to escape being her father’s daughter, who she resembled, just as she resembled her siblings. She didn’t have the strident jaw of her father but they were still obviously father and daughter. And my mother was always trying to find a way of disavowing that connection. Who can blame her? He was always otherwise without facial hair in pictures, but a 1934 photo shows him with a very precisely manicured Kaiser mustache of the style Hitler wore. It was the year Hitler became President of Germany then abolished the office of President, the posts of Chancellor and President merged, and became absolute dictator of the Germany, Fuhrer and Reichskanzler. This could be very well a coincidental fashion choice, but even before I examined the photo and realized the presence of the mustache, I had told my husband that if my mother’s father had been in Germany during WWII he would have made something of himself in the way of those who became Nuremberg Trials famous, though I don't believe I ever heard him say anything antisemitic, he was just that much of an authoritarian who seemed he would have excelled at following bad orders and coming up with ways to efficiently do bad things.
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During the decades of our estrangement, I don’t know what stories she was spinning, but with our last period of connection my mother would call and try to convince me she wasn’t her father’s daughter, that she was instead Jewish and this had been hidden, her proof being that she’d seen photos of young Jewish girls with large bows in their hair and when she was little she had worn large bows in her hair therefore she had actually been Jewish and her parents had covered this up. She normally had no interest in any photos from her youth but, in order to promote this new idea of heritage, she kept pushing at me one particular photo from when she was perhaps three years of age in which she is sitting posed on a table with a knee bent and her hands wrapped around it, an eager smile on her round face, her dark hair bedecked with a bow more than half the size of her head. There are more than several photos from when she was one to maybe eleven years of age in which she and her middle sister, two years older than her, sport these oversize bows that are designed to recall the layered profusion of petals of the corolla of a rose. They were, if oversized, beautifully-fashioned bows and not the comically oversized Minnie Mouse bow that was also popular. She didn’t yet have bangs, her hair was always parted on the left, all of one length and swept over to the right until somewhere in her sixteenth year, progressing to seventeen, she appears with the bangs she will keep from then on. When she was very young she is always pictured with a bow, not always oversize, adorning whatever fastened her hair on the right. As she grew older than about four or five the bow began to not be always present, or if it was present was diminished in size, and had disappeared by the time she was twelve. She always picked out the studio shot of her seated on the table when she was about three to illustrate how she was Jewish due the size of the bow. I could understand her inclining to this photo as it was a lovely one and she was quite cute in it. I never got the reasoning from her as to how she was Jewish, other than the large bow. When I asked she’d brush the question aside and focus on the bow. I would tell her that back then it was common for little girls to be adorned with huge bows and eventually she gave up trying to coerce me into agreeing that the large bow proved she was Jewish. She had a someone Jewish friend somewhere around that time and maybe this inspired her, just as she then several times spoke about how even though she didn’t know exactly what Jews believed she would convert to Judaism if it wasn’t so much trouble. I couldn’t reason it out how the bows her not-Jewish parents decorated her with were proof that she was Jewish, but had the uncomfortable feeling she had seen photos of Jewish girls with large bows in their hair pre-Holocaust and was entertaining ideas of how to eventually convince me she had been secretly adopted from a European Jewish family. I don’t know. She never went that far, she just kept trying to convert me to the idea she was secretly ancestrally Jewish.
After this came her determination to convince me she had instead secret Gypsy heritage. She said she had dreamt her mother had been raped and she knew it was her mother communicating to her from beyond that she’d been raped by a Gypsy in an alley in Chicago, so she had researched and found who it was, she was the daughter or granddaughter of an Irish Gypsy king, her idea of “research” meaning that she had looked up Gypsies and had come upon a certain Gypsy clan that bore the same family name as her mother, thus her mother’s family was Gypsy and had hidden
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it. She had contacted a man online about this, who was part of that clan, and had purchased several books from him on being a Gypsy and read them. Earlier in her life she told me she never read as books didn’t interest her, then in her 80s she diagnosed herself as having Attention Deficit Disorder and from then on used this as her excuse as to why she had never been interested in movies or books (I was inclined to think as my mother was never interested in anything to which she wasn’t center of the plot, this was why she was never interested in movies or books). She had developed a long correspondence with this man, she said, had read his books, she was even sometimes speaking with him on the phone, and her mother’s mother’s side she’d determined were of this Gypsy clan. I tried to tell her that her mother’s side was well-researched genealogically in respect of that family name, that family name was well documented back to 1733, to Donegal, Ireland, and and they weren’t Gypsy, down that line my mother’s ggg-grandfather was a sea captain who had settled in Virginia (he discovered a salt mine, which I guess was what secured that ancestor’s wealth), and my mother said that it was all lies on her family’s part, that instead they were Gypsies, had been ashamed of it and had tried to hide the fact. Out of curiosity, though I already knew there was no relation, I looked at the Gypsy clan to which she said her mother really belonged, they appeared to have been Romani and had been in Brazil before coming to America in the mid 1800s, while her mother’s paternal Irish (probably Scots-Irish) were documented as arriving in the U.S. around 1794 from Ireland and had first settled in Virginia, her ggg-grandfather had a first marriage, that wife died, he’d second married my mother’s ggg-grandmother, we had the wedding silhouettes, the ggg-grandfather had died and the widow had remarried to a minister and moved to Missouri in 1836, we had a copy of the family bible, we even had a copy of the travel diary of her ggg-grandmother to Missouri. They could be followed census by census. Her mother’s paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister who had served as president for a relatively short-lived college in Missouri. But no matter the facts I gave, “They were hiding who they really are,” my mother insisted. She said this was all fake.
In her desperation to rid herself of her father who she hated, my mother had preferred to conjure a rapist Romani as her real father, who had the same surname as her mother, in her mixed up fashion she had pushed her mother’s family into being the same family name as her imaginary Romani father, which is some twisted psychology but says something as to how badly my mother wanted not to be her real father’s daughter. She could have fantasized that her mother had an affair, and she was the child of that, but, no, her mother, instead, had to be a victim of violence—which was alright as long as her father was a Romani who had the same last name as her mother? Did she imagine the rapist as tall, dark and handsome, as in a bodice-ripping romance novel. I have no idea what she was telling the man with whom she was corresponding, for all I know she wrote him saying her family had no history except that they belonged to that Romani family, hello cousin, tell me about my lost history.
According to her, one of her sisters had long operated under the belief she was herself adopted, and for years they tried to figure out which woman on their mother’s
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side of the family had a child and secretly gave it away to their parents to raise. If that sister was trying to find a way she had been adopted, then she too was trying to escape being her father’s daughter but, like my mother, she too bore a resemblance to their father, and I’m not even sure my mother was telling her sister’s truth or if she was making up a story for her that she was telling me. She would call me and say they had decided her sister’s mother was so-and-so and I would say no it couldn’t be as so-and-so was dead before her sister was born, she had died in 1925, and had she been alive she would have been fifty-eight at the time of my aunt’s birth, and my mother would call several months later and would say they knew it was so-and-so who was the sister of so-and-so and I would say no it couldn’t be so-and-so as she died in 1928 which was before my mother’s sister’s birth. Disgruntled, my mother would say, nominally in agreement but evidently in dispute, “Oh, well, I don’t know”, as if these facts were flexible, as if birth and death dates had no meaning.
One will imagine this was a delusion, a real belief manifesting as an expression of mental illness, as with the story of her being Romani, when instead it was my mother trying to force a truth, trying to get others to believe. A forced truth didn’t have to be supported by anything resembling fact. She would deflect what I related as facts, as the facts didn’t fit in with the story she was constructing, and she would call again a year later, then a year later with the same story of it being one of those two women, sisters of her mother’s mother who had never married, one of whom was a music teacher and the other a teacher of art and music, both of whom had died before the supposed child of one or the other had been born. My mother’s reasoning would have been that if she told me it was true enough times then I would eventually have to accept and say, yes, it was true. The more people she could get to agree this was true, the more true it would become. Then she said my father had researched her DNA and said she had Romani history. That she was Romani was on its way to being true because he said so, which didn’t even mean that what he said was factual, because he fabricated things as well. As my father had signed onto the game, her mission was then to get others around her to accept it. People will imagine this behavior is only a matter of mental illness but accept that a con artist will fabricate an entirely different history for themselves without any shred of delusion. My mother was ill but she wasn’t so ill she didn’t know what she was doing, she was a good bit con artist, and she was determined to annihilate both sides of her family and begin fresh.
She told me that on all her documents she was now identifying herself as Gypsy.
More than a few people have run away from their former lives, and not just con artists or performers who create a new persona for themselves. One hears about those who have gained a certain stage of fame or notoriety, which eventually may attract others to dig into their background, curious to know more about them, and because they have attained a certain stage of fame or notoriety it becomes news when the past is elusive and not what it has been said to be. Before contemporary technology it would have been easier to disappear or take on a new identity without even changing one’s name, though people who went to the far edge of the frontier that kept pushing itself further west were bound sooner than later to run into someone they knew, much like
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the saying that if you’re a tourist and visit Times Square in New York you’re likely to run into someone you know. The edge of the frontier was, oddly enough, much like a crowded city. I’m not going to automatically fault someone for wanting to shed their past, or for throwing up brick walls so that little is known about them, we all to some extent do this, most people losing bits and pieces rather than their entire past, while some of us are just very adept at having multiple boxes of lives going at once that are kept strictly apart. Where it’s problematic is if one is, say, a dangerous criminal, but it’s also problematic when someone who’s not a dangerous criminal lies to one’s intimate companions, children, friends, people who rely on a foundation of some truth, maybe not all the truth, but a better part of the truth that is the basis of knowing who one is in a relationship with, which becomes part of the fabric of building trust and faith. I’ve given a lot of thought to this over the years, for we all have a right to our privacy, though sometimes we don’t, there are people whose obfuscation is damaging, but there are also those among us who have legitimate reason to protect ourselves with obscurity. When I left home at seventeen I didn’t want my parents to know where I was living, for instance, because they had threatened to have me kidnaped and disappeared, and there were people who questioned my being out on my own, they wanted to know who was my family and I’d reply, “They’re dead.” It would have been easy for them to discover if this was true, I knew that, but as far as to-my-face personal inquiries that was enough to stop them cold.
More than a few people have run away from their former lives, and by this I mean everyone in some respect, however minor, just as the collective turns its back on certain doors to the past, even great landscapes of the past, because it prefers a fantasy and convinces itself the fiction is true.
My mother had a unique appearance but I imagined it came from some Scots-Irish quirk, which I knew was the bulk of her ancestry. In fact, after putting what I could of her family’s genealogy together, the direct lines of which were already pretty fleshed out, I had paid little attention to certain other lines because they looked straight-forward except for one road block which ended in Ohio and I reasoned that would ultimately go back to Mid-Atlantic immigrants, plus there were too many clergy in both her paternal and maternal family lines for them to interest me. Instead I had concentrated on my father's part of the family, which had no clergy, interested in particular in the interviews with relatives that specifically named which ancestor was Ioway Indian and how after her death the children were fostered out for a time (which proved to be true) so they would grow up as white. They eventually landed down in Osage territory and had family that married into the Ioway and Osage and other Indian tribes. My struggle with that was trying to learn what was true. Had she really been Ioway or not? Plus, even without the Ioway, their history had proved to be interesting.
My mother’s story about the incident on the bus was one that I’d so dismissed that, though I had written it down, I didn't recollect it when I when I was given access to my mother’s genealogy account because she wanted me to handle the correspondence with some DNA cousins that were popping up on her mother’s side,
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writing her (she said she didn’t visit the account as she didn’t know how to manage it), and through this I saw the results of the DNA test my mother took, which showed we were part African-American. So it now stands out to me as possibly significant that it was an African-American man, taking her ticket on a bus, who was convinced enough she was mixed-race that he asked her about this. Not only had he invited her to a regular meeting of mixed-race individuals, he had gone so far as to write down the address for her despite the fact she stated she only knew herself to be white. In the mid-1950s, that seems to me it would have been a rather risky thing to do.
Just because a family passes along a story down the generations doesn’t make it a true story, no matter how much of an heirloom gleam it wears, burnished by the fondling of all the hands who have cared for that treasured inheritance of a fact that vivified the character of maybe only one individual but was inscribed on all those who followed. Such as on my father’s mother’s mother’s side there was the story of an ancestor who was a Union sympathizer who had been forced to leave North Carolina, went to Illinois, then disguised himself as a peddler and returned to North Carolina to get the girl he loved, they eloped, returning to Illinois, then moved to Kansas, and her family was so angry that they never spoke to her again. What I instead found was that though the man had been born in North Carolina, he and his parents and most of his family had left North Carolina before 1850 and settled in Illinois by 1851. The family of the woman he married had left Tennessee and settled in Illinois by 1828, where the woman’s father died in 1837, gored by an ox, leaving his wife with a large family to support, most of whom would stay in the same area when they became adults. I am wary of bits of lore that are too romantic, and this story was one of which I’d been suspicious, such as the part of the story in which the man has disguised himself as a peddler in order to return to North Carolina and retrieve his true love, at which point it has crossed the line and begun to sound like a fairy tale and that was a red flag. However, when such stories don’t pan out as true, rather than tossing them out entirely I wonder instead if there is a tiny truth in there that has perhaps been warped by time, if the story has been broken and reformed, misremembered, perhaps a part of it has become unhooked from the person to whom it originally belonged and become attached to someone else. To whom do various parts of the story belong, perhaps people not even in my direct line? In this case, I can’t find anyone who it would begin to fit, so if it is a complete lie that wanted to be lore, what does it say about the people who conjured it? They wanted to be remembered as people who left the South for the North, they probably wanted to present a picture of being opposed to slavery. Both the families of the husband and wife had come from the South and moved up North before the war and neither one had owned slaves. A main plot point is the fracturing of the family. Might the two have married without the approval of the bride’s widowed mother? But after their marriage the couple had remained in the same county as the mother and other members of the family, not moving to Kansas until after seventeen years of marriage, some nine years after the mother of the wife had died. Members of the husband’s family made the move with them, but not her family, so was there a fracture at that time and that fracture transformed her history? A lover disguised as a peddler, traveling all the way back to North Carolina from Illinois to get his girl and elope from her, she forever estranged from her Southern
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family, is heroic true love that imagines a romance of the ages. What’s rather perplexing is that a several page biography of the family was written in 1874 for a book on pioneers of the county where they’d settled in Illinois, which is a not-very-common resource for individuals, it gave the history of the family in Illinois, and still this fairy tale story was manufactured and passed along. And it’s odd as well that the elopement story of that generation is followed immediately by yet another elopement story in the next generation that doesn’t pan out, only in that tale the girl who married into the family was an orphan and to prevent her from marrying the man she’d fallen in love with her relatives put her in a Roman Catholic convent in another state, they were mean to her, she was unhappy, and her beau, a brother of my ancestor, traveled to that other state to rescue her from the convent and they were married. Again, the world was powerless to keep apart the two lovers. The girl may have been an orphan, I can’t locate her family, but they were married in Osage Mission in Kansas, which I think is the source of the convent myth, as the Osage Mission town had grown up around a Roman Catholic mission for the Osage. I find the marriage certificate gives the girl as fourteen, while the groom was nineteen, and through the following years she was made several years older in documents, perhaps over concern with having appeared to marry too young, so that when she died her burial marker had her married at seventeen. She died of puerperal fever after fifteen years of marriage, the last child lost as well, and The Chautauqua Journal reported, “Her neighbors and those who visited her during her illness, made the very grave charge against her husband that he abused her shamefully, and willfully neglected her. A little scorching is about the only punishment that will fit the case of a man who will treat a woman as it is said he treated his wife.” It was 1882 and the abuse must have been shocking, because during that time papers almost never become involved in accusations of spousal abuse. That wasn’t recorded in the family genealogy, instead one finds an orphaned girl whose relatives tried to keep her from the man she loved, going so far as to put her in a convent from which he rescued her. Their story had been transformed into one of happily-until-death true love that was to be remembered, rather than a woman severely abused unto death.
3
My mother’s family was fractured and dysfunctional in her generation, and her mother’s mother’s family was fractured, and my mother’s father’s family was radically fractured. My mother’s father hated his family and had left all that behind in Washington State with his early move to Chicago. My mother’s mother hated her own family but never broke off from them, she instead passed over her own genealogy to study her husband’s genealogy, despite the fact she too wanted nothing to do with his family, and was convinced that her husband was the reincarnation of the son of an eighteenth-century Congregational Church reverend from the New England part of his lineage. What did she know about this man who had reincarnated and become her husband? She had made transcriptions of years of diaries that had somehow come into possession of her spouse despite the fact he had left behind everything to do
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with his family and had nothing from them. Yet she had these original diaries from 1789 to 1822, which now perplexes me. Not just one diary but years of diaries. Not copies but the authentic real deals. For her to come by them they would have had to been passed down from their author, Ebenezer Sparhawk Jr., who had died in Rochester, Vermont, in 1836, to his daughter Priscilla Sparhawk who had married Rev. Daniel Warren, himself a Congregational Church clergyman, who died in Vermont in 1854, the diaries then passed along to their son Henry Daniel Warren who was not in the ministry, he was a foundry worker who had died in Buffalo, New York, in 1885, then to his divorced wife Harriet who died in Wayne, New York, in 1909, then to their daughter, Jennie, who had married my maternal grandfather’s father and died in Leavenworth, Washington, in 1939. It’s not just as simple either as the diaries having been passed along, but to who they’d been passed along, how had these people become the chosen recipients of the Sparhawk diaries? Ebenezer Sparhawk Jr. had eight children who lived to adulthood, two of whom had died later than his daughter Priscilla, but it was Priscilla’s line who received the diaries. Priscilla’s son, Henry Daniel Warren, had four other siblings who lived to adulthood but he received the diaries. Henry had two children, Jennie and Frank. Frank stayed in New York, but rather than him receiving the diaries it was Jennie who married a railroad man and moved to Washington State who was the one who received the diaries, and then somehow my mother’s father had received the diaries though he had left his family and Washington State, and despite the fact he had a sister who remained in Leavenworth, Washington, who wouldn’t die until 1975, but my mother’s mother already had the diaries before that time and had been working on transcribing them for years.
The possession of such antique family artifacts is rare, and in our case surprising as my mother’s father so loathed his family that no photos he may have had of them survived, at least not to my knowledge. I was told they were destroyed. Yet he had received the diaries and his sister had not. Presumably because he had children and though his sister had married she’d not had children? So he could pass them along to one of his children? To my grandmother’s credit, concerned with their fragility, she willed the diaries, all of them three-and-a-half inches by six inches in size, made of folded paper hand-sewn together with thread, to the historical society of the town in which Ebenezer had lived. That the diaries had returned to Ebenezer’s home made the news in the town’s paper in 2004, which is how I know the detail concerning their size and fabrication, as it is mentioned in the news article. My grandmother never gave me a glimpse of the diaries which she kept in a fireproof lockbox. I asked to see them but it was as if they were too sacred, not only delicate. I could have been shown them if they were only too delicate to be handled, but my grandmother never would show them to me though they were in her home in their fireproof lockbox. I asked for copies of the transcriptions she had made, and she did give me xeroxes, but not the complete set. Later, when I learned that the diaries and transcriptions had been given to the historical society, I requested and received copies of the remainder of her transcriptions from the historical society. Because I was a granddaughter of the donor, they did this for free, which was nice.
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My grandmother’s hand-written transcriptions, then her donation of the diaries, I imagine was her way of both giving back to the world and leaving something of herself behind in the way of what she thought of as her life’s work. I can imagine her making the decision that, as she had the diaries, she would take on the responsibility of transcribing them for posterity, so they could be xeroxed and made available for interested others, I understand this. My grandmother and grandfather were throwing out whole tracts of their families’ histories left and right, but she would be remembered as the keeper of the worthy history of Ebenezer Sparkhawk Jr., whose reincarnation she had married.
On 19 June of 1797 she has Ebenezer writing, “W. clear work’d at drawing Stones & several men framing my house.” On June 23 he was married. No diary entry. Then she transcribed for 24 June, “W. clear & warm raised my house P.M.” The “W” is short for weather. This was the standard for all his diary entries, what was the weather and what work was done, no personal notes, no meditations, no musings, and based on these notes she fell in love with him, their souls united, her husband became his reincarnation so that not only did she have access to Ebenezer through his spare diary entries he slept next to her in their bed and they had several children together, therefore my mother and her sisters actually weren’t so much the children of their father, they were instead the children of their third great-grandfather. When I was a young teenager and my grandmother would enthusiastically go on about how she had fallen in love with Ebenezer and how she knew her husband was his reincarnation, not meaning being like him, but being genuinely Ebenezer’s soul in her husband’s body, I would glance at my grandfather, who was a horrible person, and I’d wonder what was going on in his head as he listened to this. Did he mind being erased? How did he feel about the fact his wife had done away with him? Had virtually killed him off and replaced him with his ancestor? Maybe he preferred to be Ebenezer. His expression never changed as my mother’s mother, sitting next to me with her transcriptions, the labor of her life, what gave her meaning, would smack her lips, she had an odd way of always smacking her lips while she spoke, a verbal tic, and would lean her head back a bit as she gazed slightly upward, her eyes tearing up with genuine romantic feeling over her relationship with this long dead individual who had returned to share his life with her. As she was supposedly Christian, I wondered how reincarnation fit into her adhesion to the Christian faith, so that she could hold Christian beliefs of souls waiting for the day of their resurrection in Christ, while also believing in reincarnation for some, that such souls as Ebenezer’s could return of their own accord, one lifetime not enough. Though my maternal grandfather was a nightmare, I never had the impression that he abused my grandmother. My mother never spoke of his abusing her mother, in fact she said he hadn’t, and my grandmother boasted he treated her like a queen. Or was it Ebenezer who treated her like a queen? She held she knew he was Ebenezer’s reincarnation as she had fallen in love with Ebenezer and she didn’t like males, so if she liked her husband that meant he was Ebenezer. Something something like that. I never got the feeling she meant she was a lesbian, but she disliked males, loathing her brothers who she said had mistreated her when she was a child, so she was very glad she had all girls because she hated boys. She’d had one sister a good bit older than her and five brothers, three
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older, two younger, and she hated boys as her brothers, she said, had endlessly teased her when she was small. Her father, a lawyer, had died of heart disease when she was six years of age, and she had no use for his side of the family as they were well-to-do and though they’d helped support her mother and the children she would always be upset that it wasn’t in the appropriate style to which they’d been born, which they were owed as children of a well-known lawyer. Unlike the rest of the family, they’d had to struggle after his death, and she’d felt looked down on. As for my grandmother’s mother, she never discussed her and I knew there was friction there, my grandmother not liking her while my mother had liked her, and I sometimes wondered if my mother liked her mother’s mother in order to spite her mother. All my mother could tell me about her maternal grandmother was that she was tall (she was, for the time, I was told she was five foot ten), very thin, had never become bent with old age, loved to read and had a book club. This was my great-grandmother, who died five months after I was born and I never met her though she was then living not far from us in Kansas. She was twenty when she married her enterprising lawyer, and he was thirty-nine, the first marriage for them both. My maternal grandmother’s feeling that she’d been cheated of having the life due her, snatched away by her father’s heart attacking him to death seemed to play a part in her not caring for her mother, she blaming her as well for their lack. Because she hadn’t had all the fine clothes she wanted as a youth she reasoned that as an adult she should have the fine clothes, that if anyone was to have fine clothes it should be always the lady of the house, that the children would get their turn at having fine clothes when they became adults, and though her children didn’t go without and were always well-dressed my mother resented this because she wanted the finer clothes to herself as well and felt she didn’t get them as a child. The relationship between my maternal grandmother and grandfather wasn’t too unlike my mother and father in that my maternal grandmother was the one who always held the floor, discussing her interests, such as about how her husband was the reincarnation of the ancestor whose diaries she spent years transcribing, and her husband never entered the conversation in disagreement. He never offered his point of view on the matter. My mother owned the floor to the exclusion of all else, as did my mother’s mother.
How my maternal grandmother met my maternal grandfather has become a bit of a mystery for me. My grandmother said they had met in a church group for young adults. Through research I now know my grandfather, when he was twenty-two was a member of the conservative Methodist Epworth League, but my grandmother grew up Presbyterian. And that still doesn’t explain how she met Harry, who was in Chicago, and is given as a Chicago resident in Missouri newspaper wedding mentions, when she was brought up in Macon County, Missouri, and had attended Missouri Valley College which had a founder’s link with her father’s father who had been a Cumberland Presbyterian minister and president of McGee College until the Civil War, during which time the family left Missouri, went up to Illinois to take refuge with relatives, then returned to Missouri after the war.
My mother’s father was in Chicago, Illinois. My mother’s mother was in Missouri. How did they meet? How did they have the opportunity to court? I don’t know. Searching
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the news again, I find this time a report of her going to Chicago to take a business course in 1926. Was that how they met? In January of 1927 she was appointed to be a records clerk in the office of the registrar at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She had been teaching high school English and must have decided teaching wasn’t for her.
Come to think of it, I said I don’t have anything from my mother’s mother, but I do. When I was a teenager she gave each of her grandchildren a silver spoon from I think Missouri Valley College, but now that I go to look for it I don’t find it. I used to have the spoon, which was engraved with the college’s name and aspect, wrapped up in plastic along with my son’s first feeding spoons, not silver, just plain grocery aisle baby spoons, but they’re now nowhere to be found. Put away for safekeeping somewhere during our last move and never to be seen again? I trust they’re around here somewhere.
Wait. The spoon has been located under a pile of mustard packets in a kitchen drawer, and I was wrong, it was instead a spoon engraved with a representation of Cumberland Presbyterian Church, of Macon, Missouri, and dated 1899 on the rear, though I read that particular building was constructed in 1901, so the spoons might be dated from when they were manufactured and were later engraved.
No, wait again, I do have a couple of other items, but my grandmother didn’t give them to me, my mother did as she didn’t want them. A watercolor painting of grapes done by Ida, born In 1852, one of the so-and-so sisters who had never married, while Edith, born 1873, seems primarily to have engaged in music. Looking at news accounts I find they both were involved in art and music. They were teachers all their lives. The painting, rather large, wearing a mat and frame that has probably preserved its integrity since before I was born, had been passed along to my mother. I don’t know what else, if anything, my mother got from her mother when she died, or her father. It’s a rather lovely painting—the bunches of blue and green grapes, muted in tone, embraced in leaves, filling the left area of the canvas, the right area blank except for a light wash. My spouse doesn’t care for it, but I like it though I may be partial because it is one of the two evidences I have of any of my ancestral family being involved in the arts. However, I think she has style in the way she has laid out the composition. The other piece is a beautiful woodblock print of wild trees along a river bank that was done by Alleen Woodbury, a sister-in-law of my grandmother’s. Alleen’s style of line is aggressive, energetic. I find online a print of hers of a boulder on a hill and immediately recognize it is hers as it is cut with the same bold and fluid lines. I also find that she studied under a Swede by the name of Birger Sandzén who, after completing his studies in Sweden and France, immigrated to Kansas about 1894 to teach at Bethany College, which had been established in 1881 by Swedish Lutheran immigrants. He would be on the faculty at Bethany for fifty-two years. Though he was principally a painter, working in oils, he also did printing and one can see how Alleen was influenced by his work without copying it. Alleen’s mother, Edith, was also an artist and a student of Sandzén’s from 1926 to 1933. Alleen was good friends with Sandzén’s daughter, was a graduate of Bethany College, and appears in the 1925 Bethany College yearbook as an art instructor there. Alleen also attended the Chicago
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Art Institute and the Denver Art Academy. At the time of her marriage she’d been an art instructor for two years at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. It’s a bit of a shame no one told me about her when I was a child. No one said, “Oh, you are an artist. Your grandaunt Alleen is an artist! You should write her!” She lived to be one hundred.
4
First part of a story. Decatur, Georgia, is a suburb of Atlanta, an urban one, and my husband and I lived there for fifteen years in a clutch of old houses divided into apartments that became a loose community of musicians and artists. Our son was born in Decatur, which we consider to be Atlanta proper. One year our son dressed up as a Johnny Death Angel, with a skeleton death mask, big poster board wings we covered with feathers, and he had also made paper flowers to give to every house at which he trick-or-treated. He didn’t like candy, never ate it, he just enjoyed Halloween for the costumes and meeting the different people at their houses and having that happy interchange on a night when people were jovial and receptive to meeting strangers. He was around ten and we were by then living in Midtown but always returned to our old Decatur neighborhood to trick-or-treat because there was no place to trick-or-treat where we lived and by the time we’d moved to Midtown the Decatur neighborhood, where for years we rarely had trick-or-treaters, via the gentrification that had pushed us out had become a place where Halloween was much celebrated. So that Halloween we went from house to house, my spouse, I, and our son, putting on a little show of serenading each one with our version of “Johnny Angel”, after which our son would hand out a flower and he’d get his treat. The little show gave more chance for engagement and our son really liked this, and everyone else seemed to enjoy it as well. Then at one house, our son gave two paper flowers to the woman who answered the door. He had given her one and she gave him his candy, we did our song, and then for some reason he gave her another one. He had a limited number of flowers and I was surprised he gave her an extra flower, and she too was surprised and hesitated and remarked he had already given her a flower, wouldn’t he like to keep that and give it to someone else? But he insisted she take it and give it to whoever else lived there, he wanted them to have it. That house was the only house to which he gave two flowers.
This is the second part to the story. I learned through online research that my grandmother’s aunt Edith (who would have been my great-great aunt), the music teacher who never married, had moved to Decatur, Georgia, in 1925, hoping a change in climate would improve her health after she had become ill. She had been ill much of her adult life, and had taught for a period of time in Roswell, New Mexico, in the hope her health would improve there. Then she had chosen Decatur because a sister, Rose, had moved there with her husband, I guess for work, the only relatives of mine to have ever lived in Georgia (and they were there only a few years). Edith died a few days after arriving in Decatur, at the age of forty-one. Several years ago I found that this music teacher's death certificate was online, and I almost didn't look at the
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certificate, because I knew from the 1920 census that Edith's sister had lived near the Decatur town square (nowhere near we had lived), and I thought Edith would have been over there and that there would be no new information to glean from it. Then I thought, "No, check the death certificate. Edith is going to have been living within several houses of where we lived.” Just one of those feelings you get. I went back to look at the death certificate and she had been residing on our block when she died, around the corner. The neighborhood is all old houses that have survived and the house is still there. I looked up the house number where she’d lived and it was the house where AK gave the extra flower that Halloween. I find another news item on her death and where she died was then the home of her sister, Rose. It's rather like that extra paper flower went to Edith at the house where she had died. On Halloween, which is all about souls that have passed on.
5
The American history of its “common” people is one of golden opportunity, of those who make or remake themselves.
A number of elites landed on these shores and they didn’t have to make or remake themselves, those whose families didn’t forget who they were, or weren’t trying to outrun their past, didn’t have to fabricate who they were. The American genealogical history of many of its “common” people, all the many people who’d lost track of their origins, perhaps especially if they’d successfully made or remade themselves, is of their hoping to find they descended from one of the elite line of immigrants, such as one of the Mayflower Puritans. Maybe ultimately royalty back in England or Europe. Consider the popular late nineteenth-century fiction of Little Lord Fauntleroy, who lived in genteel poverty in New York after the death of his English father who had been cut off by his upper-class father in England for marrying an American. Then his father’s elder brothers die and little Fauntleroy is called back to England, by his grandfather, to become Lord Fauntleroy. Financial worries vanish overnight, by reason of birth. It’s like winning the best lottery ever. Even better, all little Fauntleroy really wants is a grandfather, which heals his grandfather’s hard heart and causes his grandfather to accept his daughter-in-law.
Fauntleroy’s is a fractured family, though not one that has lost its origins. I imagine more than ninety-nine point nine percent of Americans have never seriously considered themselves as possible candidates to become a Lord Fauntleroy, but as long as you didn’t know who your grandparents were and how your family landed in Oklahoma a sliver of such a fantasy could entertain one’s dreams as a possibility when one’s head met the pillow at night.
Where do you come from? Where did your family come from?
Family history and class. That’s how keeping up with one’s family history started out. It was in the hands of the elites and had to do with titles and inheritances and wasn’t necessarily factual all of the time. In America it initially was elitist, then early in the
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nineteenth century came along John Farmer, said to be the founder of systematic genealogy in America, who thought in terms of egalitarian pride and antiquarianism and the preservation and honoring of local history. In 1890 the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) was founded in response to the SAR (Sons of the American Revolution), which was founded a year earlier, not permitting in women. To see if they were DAR material, which was tantamount to American royalty, people hired genealogists, not all of whom did legitimate work, the spurious results of which have been a problem for modern genealogy. Could you trace your way back to someone who fought in or was a supporter of the American Revolution? If you could, you were in, descendant of a true blue original American. The appearance of such societies has been said to be in response to the 1889 centennial of George Washington’s inauguration and fresh patriotic fervor. The purpose of the SAR was, according to Wikipedia, to maintain and extend “the institutions of American freedom, an appreciation for true patriotism, a respect for our national symbols, the value of American citizenship, the unifying force of ‘e pluribus unum’ that has created, from the people of many nations, one nation and one people.” The DAR’s motto is “God, home, and Country”. Its stated objective was "to perpetuate the memory of the spirit of the men and women who achieved American independence; to promote institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge; to cherish, maintain and extend the institutions of American freedom; to foster true patriotism and love of country; and to aid in securing for mankind all the blessings of liberty." Whatever any public mission statement, one needs to consider the exclusionary principle in respect of the formation of these organizations.
Though the highest rate of immigration was from 1847 to 1854, nearly fifty percent of which were from Ireland, the years 1880 to 1930 saw the immigration of twenty-eight million individuals into the United States, the sources having switched from Great Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia, to southern, central and eastern Europe (Chinese immigration had been severely limited due the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that was supposed to have a limit of ten years but restrictions continued until 1943). Those who could trace their ancestry to become DAR members were typically upper class, invested in the status quo and upholding the old guard. They were conservative, would rally against progressive women as harboring communist sympathies, and pushed socialism and communism as un-American ideologies. During the McCarthy years they got into reviewing textbooks for socialist content, and became so racist that Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organization. The DAR has, with Civil Rights and public pressure, made it policy that they don’t discriminate “on the basis of race or creed”, but there’s long been an inherent classism by dint of proof of eligibility.
Ellen Hardin Walworth, one of the founders of the DAR (Mary Smith Lockwood, Eugenia Washington, and Mary Desha were other founders) was the wife of an abusive alcoholic, Mansfield Walworth, from whom she gained a divorce, but he continued to threaten her and abuse their eldest son, Frank, who defended her. In 1873, at the age of nineteen, Frank shot his father to death after receiving numerous threats from Mansfield that he was going to kill both Frank and his mother, Mansfield having written in his last letter, “You may be certain that sooner or later I will fulfill my promise.” The son gave himself up immediately to the authorities and received life
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imprisonment, but his mother, by 1877, was able to secure his release on grounds of insanity. Ellen was one of the first advocates for the establishment of the United States National Archives, which didn’t happen until 1934. Because of her circumstances and the DAR having formed because women weren’t admitted into the SAR, one would imagine the DAR might have been interested in women’s rights. And there were suffragette-interested parties and suffragettes in the DAR, such as Susan B. Anthony (abolitionist and suffragette), Jane Adams (the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Price), and Alice Paul (instrumental in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and authored the Equal Rights Amendment). They even pushed for progressive reforms. But, again, the bulk of the DAR were upper-class conservative and eventually became friendly with the anticommunist, anti-pacifist, anti-feminist Woman Patriot Corporation that had formed in response to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Considering, it seems only natural that the DAR would become a platform for anti-feminist member Phyllis Schlafly.
With the majority of my family lines, how they came to America is a mystery, they materialized on its Atlantic shore and kept no memory of what came before. Having assumed their husband’s name, women’s maiden names were often lost to history which means an inability to follow matrilineal lines, plus the focus of so many people’s ancestry was on their father and his forefathers, women dismissed as not contributing much more than their incubator wombs. 1850 was the first year that everyone in a household was recorded by name, age, and place of birth, in the census, whereas before only the head was named. Even with the census, wills and family bibles to help one’s voyage back in time, if wives were only remembered by their husband’s names it was impossible to trace who they were without marriage documents and church records. Probably very early on, America had become a place where the majority of immigrants had no idea how they came to be here, they only knew that they were, which meant someone in every family line had boarded a ship that carried them away from an unknown port. Many families have the myth of three brothers who came to America, who split and went North, South and Wherever Else in the hope that one of them would be successful and survive. It’s astonishing how quickly transplanted families can lose their origins, within a matter of three generations, or may elect to be separated from those origins.
Think about it for only two seconds and you understand who is going to have had the records to be DAR material. It will have been families who had, for at least a few generations, wealth, and who were elevated members of society. These are people who had stable homes for generations, at least down the lines that inherited family wealth. Just a single attic, never mind an estate, means the ability to preserve what eventually becomes heritage. Such families had literacy and thus had records, letters, diaries, that would eventually become heritage. They are the families that most meticulously have estate records, birth records, marriage records, death records. I don’t know what documents one had to produce for the DAR in the past but now, as far as I understand, you have to have what amounts to proof of birth and burial and marriage from generation to generation, which is privilege. For more than a few years in America’s history, if you didn’t have wealth then you were not going to have proof of birth (unless you were part of a community that kept records and those weren't
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destroyed at some point) and you were not going to have a grave marked for remembering, and you were not going to have estate papers like wills.
On my mother’s mother’s side, through her mother, then her mother’s mother, then her mother’s mother’s father, then her mother’s mother’s father’s mother, then her mother’s mother’s father’s mother’s father, I could, without problem, become a member of the DAR, preceded already by a few other family members, one of our three Revolutionary War ancestors being Oliver Everett (DAR Ancestor #A037665) who as a young teenager served as a fifer. So my mother’s mother was DAR through her mother who was DAR and only three generations removed from her Revolutionary War ancestor, her great-grandfather. My great-grandmother’s great-grandfather may seem very removed to me, from me, but my great-grandmother is not, just as she may have felt her great-grandfather was not too distant from her as her father had known both his grandparents. Her father had known Oliver who, when he was all of fourteen, fifed for Captains Warner and Stillwell and Colonel John Durkee, and was said to have been at Valley Forge, under Durkee, as part of the Fourth Connecticut regiment organized in January 1777 out of Norwich which is where Everett was from. The Fife Major of the Fourth Connecticut Regiment was Reverend Peter Rogers, I’ve seen a portrait of the reverend and either the artist was determined to do him no favors, or Rogers wanted no favors done, or favors were done and that’s pretty sad except for the fact his frown (none severer) and “I hate you” gaze suggests he was not a fellow one would like to so much as pass on the road. The winter encampment at Valley Forge was harsh and 1700 to 2000 soldiers died from disease. Fourteen-year-old Oliver did not die and he probably told stories of the Revolutionary War to my great-grandmother’s father.
Though my grandmother studied her husband’s genealogy, she did have photocopies of genealogical information, prepared by others, on branches of her family, paternal and maternal.
One particular line stood out as seeming to have been ignored, ending with the maternal grandmother of my grandmother’s DAR mother.
As I’ve noted, late in her life, my mother, after putting aside (maybe) the idea she was somehow Jewish, decided that her father was Romani and her mother's line was Romani, which they weren't. This was pure fantasy, her desire to have a different family of origin, one that had to be concealed. I knew the genealogy and she wouldn't listen to any of my refutations where I had proof as to who were the parents of so-and-so, and so on and all the undeniable documentation that they were who the documents said they were. But that was down her grandmother’s father’s line. I was strong enough on the genealogy that when I learned about the trace of Nigerian DNA that had shown up in her mother’s line, which would have been about the generation of the grandmother of my grandmother’s DAR mother or the generation beyond (in other words my grandmother’s great-grandmother), I was able to guess what very silent line it likely came down, a family that came from Maryland and Virginian and had settled in Brush Creek, Muskingum, Ohio, south of Zanesville, Ohio. That grandmother’s name was Sarah and four of her nine children were given as born in Zanesville.
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Zanesville, Ohio, was profiled in Jet magazine's fourth issue. Jet magazine, focused on the African-American community, began publication in 1951. The article I’m concerned with is “Lost Boundaries”, from 22 November 1951. Quoting from it: "A racial melting pot for more than a century, Zanesville, Ohio, is a city of lost boundaries. Entire families have been crossing and recrossing the color line for so many generations that today it is virtually impossible to tell which families are white and which are colored without visiting city cemeteries, which are still segregated. As well-known for its predominantly light-skinned Negroes (some jibe that there are no dark Negroes in town), as for its Y-shaped bridge (only such structure in the world), the small pottery-making city of 40,000 probably has the highest percentage of Negroes who pass in the U.S. Many break family ties to leave the city and cross the color line but there are hundreds who stay and pass as white...Zanesville traces its racial inter-mixing back to more than a century ago when the city was a popular stopping-off point for slaves fleeing to freedom..."
And yet Zanesville was pro-slavey.
The town of Zanesville, in 1850, didn't have what we might call a high percentage of African Americans, but at three percent it did in comparison to the rest of Ohio, even more than Cincinnati. That three percent doesn’t take into account those who were “passing”.
My mother didn't tell me about the Nigerian appearing in her genetic history (by the modern map it’s Nigerian, not necessarily by a map from colonial times). She had an Ancestry account that I'd been given access to, and I saw when the profile was updated to show she was part Nigerian. Not long after that, the account was closed without any mention of this being made to me. And she kept telling me that her genetic profile showed absolutely she was part Romani. Which she wasn't. I didn't ever confront her with the truth about her being instead part Nigerian, because with someone like that there is no point. She'd erased my life, and her abuses, and she certainly would have had no compunction against lying about this. I wondered if she had closed the account hoping that I hadn't come across the information that her genetic history showed Nigerian ancestry, not Romani, information that wasn't useful to her and her story of having Romani roots. DNA can be slippery, and I have to say that it could be there are traces of genetic history that didn't come up in her profile, but that's beside the point as concerning this story, which is that when Nigerian appeared, she suspended the account, didn't tell me about this, and continued trying to sell me she was "Gypsy", which in her mind was definitely Romani but also would have included Irish Travellers.
I was a little surprised though that my mother buried the Nigerian information as I’d believed she might find this interesting, but I didn’t bring it up to her as she was pursuing “Gypsies” and I got the feeling it was best for me to ruminate on this alone. For all I knew, it could have been that my father had suspended the account. My mother was no good with negotiating online accounts, which was why I had been given access, because someone had contacted her on Ancestry and said they were relatives through her mother’s father, which she didn't want to deal with, she had no
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interest, and she wanted me to see if this person was related and deal with getting rid of them whether they were or weren’t relatives. It may be that my mother, unable to easily negotiate her account, never considered I would have a look at her DNA information, that I would just stick to getting rid of the person who had written her. It may have been that my father was the one who managed my mother’s account and suspended it before my mother became aware of the Nigerian in her genetic profile. He was already supporting my mother in the story she was part Romani. I never talked about it with my father who was also slippery and would lie and gaslight and deny as he found it convenient to do so. His lies and cover-ups were sometimes more confounding than my mother's.
My mother was both an intentional and unintentional fabulist. In other words, she lied and gaslighted constantly, in destructive ways, covering up her destructive actions which she refused to admit, but she also always, to me, accused her mother of being a fabulist and telling lies both to cover her own actions as well as something deeper down the family line that had been hidden. Even though my mother was a fabulist, she was partly right in her insistence the family had covered up something, that there was a silent “other” in the family tree.
I have wondered if this hidden family, the part that was African-American and “passed” as white, was a hidden that she had unconsciously sensed, that had been unconsciously communicated to her. While it translated into wanting to deny her father, it could be that she was acting out the fact that her mother’s family had a secret.
My mother was sometimes cut off from her own destructive family, and they were sometimes cut off from their own destructive family, so it went down the generations. Throughout my youth, sometimes we were speaking with my mother’s family and sometimes we weren’t, and when we were speaking, if it was in person, it always went explosively bad after a day or two, my mother’s mother would run off screaming, my mother was going to give her a heart attack she could feel it, and my mother’s father would yell at my mother how horrible she was and we would pack up and leave. But before the explosions I had enough opportunity around my mother’s mother to be introduced to her own peculiarities, little obsessions and big, such as that she was married to Ebenezer Sparhawk Junior’s reincarnation. Among the small obsessions were whispered remarks that were half jokes my grandmother would make concerning a couple of things about her appearance that she said could be compared with African-American women. Though she was white as white could be, there were a few things about herself that she associated with being instead physically African-American, which she couldn't ignore, so she made them into jokes. I remember her making mention of these things, of which my mother was also aware, because they both joked about her shelf of a behind, which was why I suppose she pointed out to her family these things that made her uncomfortable, so she could in that way own them with her family and accept them and defuse them. She was bothered by the fact she had what she identified as an African-American “behind”, which she said no amount of dieting had ever defeated when she was young so she finally had to accept she was just built that way. And she may have also been proud of it too because she
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would give it an exaggerated wiggle when talking about it and said it had its advantages. I’m thinking that in her youth she had probably taken up a family habit of women taking off their good clothes, such as for an afternoon nap, and lazing about in a slip, over which she might drape a light colorful robe, so my memory of this is strong, because of my grandmother in her slip, and my having the feeling my grandmother was both proud of and shamed by the fact she had such a bold shelf-like behind, which was camouflaged a little by her street clothes but not in her slip and satin robe. As a teen, I thought it was stereotyping on her part when she said her behind was African-American. That feature could have come from anywhere. What’s significant to me now is that my grandmother defined her figure as African-American. And according to DNA her mother’s grandmother, born in 1803 in Virginia, was maybe a quarter Nigerian. That may be a significant distance from me, but it was not a great distance from my DAR great-grandmother.
There was certainly some discomfort there on her part, something to do with the family line, enough so that when my grandmother refused to show me any photos of her own family of origin, and later destroyed them so that no one beyond her would ever have access to these photos (I never saw them, neither did my mother, as far as I know she shared them with no one), I wondered what exactly she thought she might be hiding, though perhaps she was never fully aware of what she was trying to hide. Bad memories? Then why did she keep the photos so long, but privy only to herself, then destroying them so they passed on to no one else? Whatever she didn't want anyone seeing in the photos, I doubt anyone but her would have noticed.
Just as my grandmother didn't want to show photos of her family of origin, and eventually destroyed them, she had no interest in that line of her genealogy. The focus of her attention was instead entirely concentrated on her paternal line and the New England origins of her husband, which gave her Ebenezer Sparhawk Jr., to whose reincarnated soul she was married.
If my maternal great-grandmother’s grandmother was twenty-five percent Nigerian, what if she suspected just the littlest bit about this, and what if my grandmother had known. When I was twelve, my grandmother sat me down to tell me something very important, she said, about part of her family line. I’m in their Huntsville, Alabama, living room, it’s at night, everyone else may be watching television and doing I don’t know what. She and I are the only ones seated on the couch to which she has beckoned me for a private talk. She said that we were descended distantly from North African royalty. As best as she understood, they were maybe descended distantly from Egyptian royalty. She was telling me this because she wanted me to know that I had ancestry from the African continent and it was nothing to be ashamed about. Having defined it as possibly Egyptian, she said, “There’s no shame in having African ancestry.” My mother later asked me what my grandmother had been talking to me about and I said genealogy that went back to the ancient Egyptians. I thought my grandmother was talking about two thousand years ago, like Cleopatra or something (I didn’t know Cleopatra was Greek). My mother said, oh, her mother had never talked to her about their genealogy and she was glad of it because she didn’t care and didn’t want to know. My grandmother knew I was the only one who wanted to know about
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the family’s genealogy, which was why I was the one who was being told this. The prospect of links to the Egyptians I understood, as I’ve said, as I sat there in the dim corner of the couch next to my grandmother, as being at least two thousand years in the dim past, which was so distant as to then be beyond my realm of interest. But I wondered where in the world this was coming from and why she would have a rare-to-never sit-down with me on the divan to tell me this, like she was passing along to me something I might one day find out about and she wanted to prepare me for this secret. Having assured me I could and should be proud of this, she then gave me a genealogy that was instead on her husband's side tracing one of his lines back to Charlemagne, one of those bullshit genealogies from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century that hired professionals put together knowing it was bullshit, though she didn’t know this, prepared for someone in some other branch of the family, it was sound up to a point then across the ocean becomes fantasy. It was very confusing to me that I was handed her husband's genealogy, when she was telling me her family went back to North Africa and I should be proud of that. And because it was just one of those odd, confusing things, I recorded it mentally but paid no mind, and I knew it was likely going to be bullshit. When, several years ago, I learned the family had Nigerian heritage, I began to put some things in place, but it didn't occur to me that maybe, just maybe, there was some lore that had come down through her family about African ancestry that maybe she'd been told was North African but she'd had her doubts, which was why she was embarrassed by certain things she identified as African-American, and perhaps she believed she saw what she imagined could be African-American features in some other members of her family and that's why she didn't want anyone to see the photos. The more I think about this moment on the couch, the more I wonder if she may have been told there was African heritage but it had also been given a frame of Egyptian pride.
Why would my grandmother tell me we had Egyptian heritage?
The abstract for the fourth chapter of Black Minerva: Antiquity in Antebellum African American History states, “This chapter investigates the rhetorical use black and white abolitionists made of antiquity in arguments against slavery. Egypt, they argued, was the source of Greco-Roman civilizations and American black people were the descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Black and white abolitionists pointed to the glories of ancient Egypt, Ethiopia and Carthage and their influences on Greek and Roman culture as proof that black people were not racially inferior to white people, and therefore, contrary to common views, neither were they incapable of emulating and adopting white civilization. The underlying argument in all of these works, I suggest [the author of this chapter is Margaret Malamud], was that if the venerable ancient civilizations of Africa were the achievement of the black race, as Frederick Douglass and others argued, it followed that African Americans were not inferior by nature to white people.”
The abolitionist argument seems to have begun with Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, born in 1757, died in 1820, a French philosopher and abolitionist, who held that the ancient Egyptian Copts were “the proper representatives of the Ancient Egyptians” and that they were Black. He visited the Sphinx in 1782 and determined its features were Black. He lived during a period of
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revival of interest in Renaissance hermeticism, centered in European Masons, who believed alchemy had its roots in ancient Egypt.
In the hands of Frederick Douglass and his 12 July 1854 address to the Literary Societies of the Western Reserve College in Cleveland, Ohio, the Egyptian connection becomes an argument against the then “scientific” division of races, Douglass holding that there is one human race and its divisions are artificial, as reiterated in the 2019 official statement of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. He writes, “Indeed, ninety-nine out of every hundred of the advocates of a diverse origin of the human family in this country, are among those who hold it to be the privilege of the Anglo-Saxon to enslave and oppress the African—and slaveholders, not a few, like the Richmond Examiner, to which I have referred, have admitted, that the whole argument in defense of slavery, becomes utterly worthless the moment the African is proved to be equally a man with the Anglo-Saxon…For, let it be once granted that the human race are of multitudinous origin, naturally different in their moral, physical, and intellectual capacities…and a chance is left for slavery, as a necessary institution…Now, the disposition everywhere evident, among the class of writers alluded to, to separate the negro race from every intelligent nation and tribe in Africa, may fairly be regarded as one proof, that they have staked out the ground beforehand, and that they have aimed to construct a theory in support of a foregone conclusion. The desirableness of isolating the negro race, and especially of separating them from the various peoples of Northern Africa, is too plain to need a remark.”
When I found that abolitionists made the case African-Americans were Egyptian, it dawned on me the possibility of the source for my grandmother’s revelation that part of my heritage was from Egypt and there was no shame in that. I wonder if she was passing along assertions passed down to her in the family, that ultimately came from abolitionist discussions held during the time of perhaps her grandmother, who lived from 1830 to 1925, or Sarah, who lived from 1803 to 1859. I doubt she knew what she was really talking about, or maybe she did. Without the Nigerian provided by DNA test, I would never have given that private talk on the couch a second thought.
I think most people's families are built on a foundation of fables mixed with truth. Some families are more weighted toward truth. Some are more weighted toward the fables. And silence. Secrets that filter down in little dribs and drabs of shame, of anger, and a vow of essential blindness.
As best as I could tell from looking at DNA matches, having determined the African entered on my grandmother’s mother’s side, and going to the line that had a roadblock at Zanesville, Ohio, I was able to come up with a few interesting if inconclusive things. Online, I came across a lovely photo of my grandmother’s mother as a teenager, which my grandmother must have had and I wondered why she wouldn’t have shown it to me. I found a photo of not my great-grandmother’s uncle, and I considered that if my grandmother had been given any reason to wonder if the family had been “mixed”, this might be a photo in which she could see proof of a reason for that doubt. However, there is a photo of a brother of his who looks nothing like him, whose appearance checks off all the boxes for “white”.
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I also found a photo of my great-grandmother’s grandmother, and this was the one that made me go, “Ah, yes.” Her features are impossible to define as the image is so degraded that it’s forever beyond guessing much of anything from it, except that she might not be white by that one drop rule. What interested me was that on the photo, that I found online, was written she was “full blood Cherokee”, a woman born in 1803 in Maryland. Which is what made me feel I was on the right track. Because that full-blood Cherokee story isn’t right. She was somehow full-blood Cherokee and her parents weren't full-blood Cherokee and neither were her siblings? What we can see is that she was a woman who was more heavy than not, her complexion is not dark dark but it’s perhaps not light, her face is round, she has large deep set eyes, appears to have full lips. Her hair is covered entirely with a white bonnet so nothing can be learned from it. I assume that the Cherokee Indian story must have been used to try to explain away some physical attributes and color of skin that were too much of a question mark. The person who placed the photo online made an independent text note that they didn’t know if the family story that she was Cherokee was true. If this Sarah is the woman through whom the Nigerian DNA descends, who may be twenty-five percent African, when did the Cherokee story originate, close to her time or later? Was the Cherokee story told by family who knew better and it was a cover-up? Was it told by one or some lines of the family and not by others? What we know is the family in which this woman grew up appears in Ohio in 1820, and that she was given as born in Maryland, while her siblings gave themselves as born in Maryland and Virginia. Her father may or may not be an individual who is observed in the 1810 census in Washington, Maryland, with nine free whites in the household and nine persons given as “all other free”, which means they were considered full black or mixed.
She and her descendants are always “white” on the census.
There's a court case, often related in books on "racial mixing" in early America, of a man with her family name, in Virginia, obtaining a divorce from his wife in 1803 as he came home from a business trip to find she'd had a child by a slave. As that child was born in the same year, however in Virginia, I wondered if my ancestress could be that child and she somehow was accepted into another branch of the same white family and moved with them to Ohio. But I also think it was unlikely she would be adopted by another member of the family.
Another court case in which the enslaver had the same family name concerned plaintiff slaves fighting for their freedom based on their being descendants of a Native American woman who had been carried to Jamaica as a slave, then taken to Virginia as a slave in 1747, though since 1691 no Native American could be brought into Virginia as a slave. The case was begun in 1809, came to trial three years later, and in 1813 the plaintiffs were awarded their freedom plus one penny in damages, sixty-seven years having passed since their ancestress had been carried into Virginia. The judgment was appealed and the lower court’s decision was upheld in 1814. I’ve located in-depth research done on this case by another (thank you) and I think I can rule out any association there, but I’ll keep it on reserve as the enslaver’s name is the same family surname and I’ve yet to tie either Sarah’s father or her mother into a family, they are unhomed.
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A brother of my great-grandmother’s grandmother lived next to Thomas L. Gray in 1860, who was a historically known conductor on the Underground Railroad. Gray wrote of his having arranged, in 1842 (this is elsewhere identified as occurring instead in October of 1843), for Frederick Douglass to speak at the Putnam Presbyterian Church, which had split off from Zanesville Presbyterian Church, the Putnam congregation being pro-abolition and composed of many associated with the Underground Railroad, its first paster William Beecher, who was brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Frederick Douglass again spoke in Putnam in 1850 and at Zanesville, at the Methodist Church.
As I pursue this line of inquiry, which I'm unlikely to push back beyond the 1810 census showing nine free whites and nine free “other” in the household, and if I’m not chasing the Nigerian ancestry down the wrong line, and if the Nigerian ancestry isn’t DNA “noise” that looks Nigerian until it’s more finely tuned, I consider how they moved into “white" society, and what that would have meant when any knowledge of African heritage is expunged from even internal family history, so that it's not passed down, instead the weight of a secret is conveyed. (Or did my grandmother know enough that she understood it as a secret certainty, for which reason she sat me down on the sofa for the “African heritage is nothing to be ashamed of” talk. and yet my mother said that her mother questioned whether my father’s family had been “passing” somewhere in the past, because of his dark complexion, and had been opposed to their marrying.) I was reading up on African-American pioneer settlements in the early Midwest, and how many are stated as being short-term then evaporating. I wonder how many may have merged into white society, and thus disappeared from the African-American record. That move into the white community means leaving behind the past, which means hiding what they were, perhaps dissociating from family. It means for a couple of generations worrying about the birth of a child who might have characteristics that suggest that African ancestry. I’m going to go with the assumption they felt they were creating opportunity for themselves, their family and descendants because to live as free blacks meant one still had to contend with the burden of racism. They might have made up lies for their children and grandchildren about family and where they came from. Or perhaps they only insisted upon public secrecy that eventually became both public and private denial. What did it mean to them to be “passing” in the balance of what they lost and gained.
Disappearing into White America birthed a secret. That secret was just a couple of generations removed from my great-grandmother, the one who became a member of the DAR through her father. Never mind that my mother's gg-grandmother was only perhaps a quarter Nigerian, that "only" was her mother's great-grandmother, was her grandmother's grandmother, and a secret can be strong, adamantly demanding to be heard from generation to generation.
My great-grandmother’s mother, married a man from New York, whose paternal line was from Cornwall, England, and after the Civil War they settled in northern Missouri where he worked as a carpenter. Out of all my lines this family appears to have been exceptional for the nineteenth century in that they made certain all the girls were
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well-educated, two of whom I’ve already discussed, and that family members pursued the arts. The eldest was Ida, the painter, who received her professional training as a teacher at the Normal School in Oswego, New York, then was on the faculty of Warrensburg Normal School in Missouri until her retirement in 1899, never marrying. She studied at Harvard in the summer of 1894. As for her siblings, the eldest son was educated as well then became a dealer in hardware. The second eldest son went to the Missouri State Normal School, becoming a professor in science and art, worked with the Kansas City Times and Kansas City Star in the editorial departments. His history gets fuzzy after he married a woman who was a concert and opera singer, they divorced and when she was elderly she became a personality on radio and television. He remarried and became an editor for a book publisher in Chicago. The third son died young of tuberculosis. The second daughter studied at Warrensburg Normal School, becoming a teacher, then married. The third daughter was my great-grandmother who married the lawyer, and she too went to Warrensburg Normal School and was the top of her class of seventy-four. The fourth daughter and final child was Edith, who studied at Warrensburg Normal School, excelling at music and art, then taught at varying places, including, Roswell, New Mexico, and at the Industrial Home for Girls in Chillicothe. Like Ida, she never married. She died in Decatur, Georgia, and as it turned out she had lived just a few houses from where my husband and I once lived, the house where our son, one Halloween, as Johnny Death Angel, insisted on giving an extra flower to whoever else lived there.
It's just astonishing to me, that on a bus, an African-American man, in the mid 1950s, taking my mother's ticket, a complete stranger, quietly asked her what racial mixture she was, and then when she said as far she knew she was white, he gave her an invitation and address for where individuals of mixed race had regular meetings. Many generations removed from her African ancestry, and still he'd been confident enough to extend that invitation. I wonder, as he gave my mother the address and invitation, if he imagined that she was lying and so by giving her the address he believed he was offering her the option to not lie.
Though I’m white, I have African-American heritage. If I sideline it as negligible, something I shouldn’t remark upon, because of it seeming inappropriate to say, “I have Nigerian ancestry”, because I’m not Black, because my heritage is almost all white, it seems a disservice to my African line, people likely brought to America in slavery. Also, it erases the complexity of the history of ethnicity in America.
When I was in my early twenties and in contact with my parents after our initial split, it was after my hospitalization for attempted suicide and drinking that one day my mother volunteered to me for whom I was named. I’d never thought to ask as she’d once previously mentioned my naming and it all sounded so spur of the moment I assumed my name’s origin wasn’t worth pursuing. As it turned out, she said she had named me for Julie, Ava Gardner’s role in Showboat, because she thought Ava Gardner was so pretty. Ava Gardner had however been in many other films, and I found it peculiar that I should be named for a movie my mother would have seen six years before my birth, and that I was named for a fictional character whose secret is that her mother was Black and she has been “passing”, which is part of the baggage that drags her down into alcoholism.
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My mother, having taken up watercolors late in life, showed potential with still lives of glass objects, but she wasn’t good at landscapes, and she wasn’t good at portraiture and never much attempted it except for the portrait of Brahms she did based on a photo of him. The one other portrait she did, and worked on for years, was a watercolor of a Black woman. One day she pulled it out, rather demanding that I tell her it was good, that it was lifelike, that she had captured the person—who was imaginary. Before then, I had reasoned there might be a possibility the portrait was based on someone she had known, which was why she wouldn’t release the portrait, why she kept working on it. That day she told me it was her imaginary Black friend, a person who had appeared to her in her imagination. She worked and worked to make the imaginary lifelike. What she was trying to suggest to me this was a real person, not a fiction, a person with whom she must have a spiritual connection. At the time, I thought, “On my god, my mother has made up a Black friend, and I’m supposed to assure her this person is real, that’s what she wants, she’s imagining this is a real person who is somehow telepathically her friend.” Now I instead wonder if somewhere in her youth it had trickled down to her the family secret that she had African-American ancestors, that she’d no conscious recollection of this, and that it had emerged in my name and in her portrait of the imaginary woman. I’ve no idea. I do believe my mother had no conscious idea of any African ancestry, because I think she would have certainly told me about it if she did know. But then her Ancestry account was cancelled with the appearance of the Nigerian DNA. And I return to the question of did she cancel it or did my father? Did my mother know about the Nigerian ancestry or not? I don’t know. I don’t know anything for certain except that her DNA test ultimately revealed she had Nigerian ancestry and she never mentioned this to me so I didn’t know if she knew it, and I never mentioned it to her because she had decided her family had hidden the fact they were “Gypsy”, whenever she was asked what her race was on a form, she wrote in “Gypsy”, and my family was crazy and you just didn’t dare talk about anything real because it couldn’t tolerate reality.
6
I had to take a couple week’s pause after working on this section as it gave me not a small surprise but a big surprise.
Looking at my maternal grandfather’s family, wondering this time how he had come by Ebenezer’s diaries, I had realized I’d never been able to previously find out what happened to his uncle, Emerson Daniel Warren, his mother’s only sibling. I decided to try to pursue this again, and I still didn’t learn how he died, or where, but I discovered their father, Henry, had been murdered, hit over the head one August night in 1885 while walking home from his job as superintendent of the Malleable Iron Works of Messrs. Pratt & Letchworth at Black Rock in Buffalo, New York. The report in The Buffalo Commercial stated it was nine o’clock in the evening when he was “accosted by an unknown man who said ‘Good evening,’ and at the same moment struck Mr. Warren a heavy blow over the had, with some iron instrument, probably a freight-car coupling pin.” He fell to the ground, unconscious, perhaps left for dead, and when he
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woke and recovered his senses he made his way home where he was treated by a doctor. He wouldn’t die for another two weeks. An initial report said robbery was the motive as his gold watch had been taken, but his money in another pocket was undiscovered. The accompanying obituary said he was “a man of noble nature, generous and warm-hearted, and greatly respected by the employees of the works. Many instances might be given of his kindly nature and unostentatious acts of kindness. Those who were his best friends speak in the highest terms of him, as a man, and as the manager of an important trust...” It went on, “The victim himself…did not cherish resentment against his assailant, and in one of his lucid intervals, a few days ago, evidently with the subject of the assault occupying his mind, he was heard to repeat with much fervor, the passage of the scripture, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.’” The following day, a report in The Buffalo Courier was sparer, but reiterated the murderous assault was for plunder and that Warren was a man with numerous friends, a person of excellent character and generally respected. It related he was the brother of the late Joseph Warren who had been the editor of The Buffalo Courier for many years. But three days later, on August twenty-sixth, The Buffalo Times reported, “The belief is general that Mr. Warren himself could have given a clue to his assailant had he wished. Those who knew him say that he was a man who had many enemies and the theory that robbery was the motive for the assault is not given much credence at Black Rock. Mr. Warren had considerable money on his person the night of the assault, which was not taken by the supposed thief.”
Henry Daniel Warren had married his wife, Harriet, in 1855, then by 1880 they were divorced, his wife living with their two children, Emerson Daniel, who was twenty-two and a bookkeeper, and Jennie, fifteen, my maternal grandfather’s mother. Harriet moved from Buffalo to Newark, Arcadia, Wayne, New York, where she died in 1905.
Then I found that Emerson Daniel Warren’s only son, my grandfather’s only cousin on his mother’s side of the family, Frank Stever Warren, had made national news on the twenty-eighth of March of 1928 as he and his wife had been found shot to death in their beds, their bodies burned as their bedroom was then set on fire, and their only son, thirteen-years-of-age (his age ranges from twelve to fourteen in news reports so we’ll go for the middle, I can find no documents online with his exact birth date) shot through the heart in his bed. That’s jolt enough from the initial news story, the family mysteriously wiped out. At first the newspapers gave this as a “perfect crime” that had the police stymied. Everyone was in shock as Frank had been the president of the Chamber of Commerce, before that had been president of the Rotary Club, and was a very successful businessman. The papers serving Newark, New York, where the horror occurred, and Rochester, New York, where he also had business, went wild. Not only there but papers all over New York, it was news across the nation and in Canada. After several days the police concluded the son had shot his his father through the right eye, his mother through the temple, set their bedroom on fire so that it cremated their corpses, had sheltered himself in his bedroom, then when he heard the alarms of the fire engines he pulled his covers up to his chin in his bed and shot himself in the chest, dying a half hour later as he was sped to the hospital in an ambulance.
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Among the few relations mentioned in the paper were my grandfather’s mother and her husband, their surnames misspelled, and my grandfather’s father given as living in Chicago rather than in Washington State. That may be, perhaps they was staying a little while with my grandfather’s family, I don’t know, but he was residing with his wife in Washington State in 1930 and died in Washington State.
Of course I’d never been told about any of this. I doubt my mother knew as it happened before she was born, a year after her parents married, and if she had been told I imagine she would have said something about it as she’d once said she’d heard one of her father’s relatives had done something something it was secret, she thought the person had raped someone, she seemed pretty convinced of it, maybe this was the secret story that had been kept from her, it had tried to find shape and meaning in her mind and she eventually rationalized the crime to be the worst she could imagine, which was rape, she was not prepared to think of murder. My grandparents had given me to believe that my grandfather had been escaping his abusive father and his alcoholism when he left Washington State, which is likely the case, but as it turns out extreme violence was also on his mother’s side. That got me, this double murder and suicide, and I had to stop for some days, absorbing this news, imagining my grandparents keeping secret from their children and grandchildren that my grandfather’s first cousin had been killed by his thirteen-year-old son, who had also shot his mother, then committed suicide. That’s a catastrophe that is never going to be far from your mind. When we visited with my mother’s parents, at any time my grandfather may have had thoughts of the bullet-ridden bodies of Frank and Edith being cremated in their beds by the fire their young son had set, and that son, Jackson dying of suicide. When my grandfather was sitting there listening to my grandmother prattle on about how he was the reincarnation of Ebenezer, which was why she loved him, instead of listening to her he may have instead been thinking of Frank and Edith and their son, Jackson, and the murder-suicide that wiped out that part of the family and was huge news in the New York papers for as long as it took to solve what was first given as the perfect crime. When the captain of detectives of the Rochester police announced their conclusions, that the boy had done it, he also said he was loathe to add to the distress of the community, and that it was initially the most baffling case of his career. But before the captain’s announcement, the newspapers had already been publishing reports of suspicions the boy was the suspect and had begun digging for reasons for why he might have done this. The father was initially portrayed as a successful and energetic insurance salesman, entrepreneur, and leader. He started the Newark Landscape School, “one of the foremost schools of its kind in the country with an enrollment of more than fifty thousand pupils”. I find that it was instead called the American School of Landscape Architecture and Gardening, and was one of a number of institutions used by the United States Veterans’ Bureau for training disabled veterans of WWI. A part of the school was the National Landscape Service that provided students not only plans but all landscaping materials and furnishings. An ad promises you can go into business for yourself three weeks after enrollment. How legitimate was it, I don’t know. Among his other ventures, he had purchased the H. B. Rogers store and the Pollock block of the Arcadia National Bank, “the best business block in Newark”, and incorporated the store as Rogers Inc. He had conducted a large and profitable real estate business for several years. He was given
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as genial in disposition and of a quiet temperament which enabled him to make and keep friends. He was an Elk, Mason, and member of the Damascus Temple in Rochester. His wife, a graduate of Smith College and member of the “Tuesday Study Club”, was stated to be one of the most brilliant women of the community, a musician, also secretary of the landscape school founded by her husband. Just as the portrayal of Henry Daniel Warren had changed a few days after his death, so did thoughts on Frank and Edith. Praise was followed by reports that many believed Frank and his wife had profoundly neglected their son, unwilling to give up their pleasures for parenting, that when he was as young as five neighbors had heard the cries of the boy left alone to fend for himself in their home. It was stated his parents “left him alone on many occasions, some time for long intervals, during the past six years or more.” The parents had just returned from a three day trip to New York. On Monday night, playing cards at the house of friends, Frank had confided he and his wife were living the happiest days of their lives. On Tuesday evening they had left the boy at home while attending a movie, from which they’d returned at about eleven. The father would be leaving the next day on a business trip.
Jackson was often on the school honor roll, was in the Newark Rotary Boys Band, and also in the Boy Scouts. He wasn’t known by his friends to be melancholy. Give a day, and it was reported Jackson had been gun-crazy, pursuing target practice in the basement where thousands of gun casings were recovered. Then those reports changed to the father and his son practicing shooting together in the basement, and the father being so erratic and irresponsible with his gunfire that when hunting he’d once accidentally shot another’s dog, the bullet nearly killing a person who was standing nearby. He “often became careless or lost his head when handling firearms.” What does that mean, that he would lose his head when handling firearms? A statement such as that demands context. What had Frank done to make a person say he would lose his head when handling firearms?
The gun used for the murders and suicide was easily traced, and it was discovered that Frank didn’t have a license for it.
Certain of the boy’s possessions were examined and reported in the papers, that he read the normal schoolbooks but had left behind two notes found curious. On a large sheet of plain paper was, “George Warner, suicide. July twenty-first. 3 p.m.” The newspaper relates the word Warner was not written clearly but looked more like Warner than Warren, the family name. On another sheet of paper was, “James Morrissey, age forty-seven, no residence.” The second “R’ in Morrissey was given as crossed through with a nearly vertical line. Nothing was known about the individuals. Effects examined included the boy’s school reviews of The Last of the Mohicans and The Pilot by James Fenimore Cooper, Master Skylark by John Bennett, Montcalm and Wolf by Francis Parkman, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and an essay on Henry Thoreau’s poem “Friendship”.
After much digging, I find an obituary for a George Warner, sixty-three years of age, employed at Edwards department store in Rochester, who died the afternoon of July twenty-first 1926 at his brother’s in nearby Marion, Wayne, New York. I don’t find a
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cause. This is a George Warner who died on the same day recorded by Jackson and he lived in the same county. Did he die by suicide and it wasn’t reported in the papers? If it was by suicide (again, I don’t know the cause of his death, it wasn’t stated in the paper), why was Jackson attracted to the death of this particular individual? Simply because it was by suicide?
Reporters did enough digging around the Warren family history to disclose in big headlines that several generations of tragedy haunted them. Frank’s father, Emerson Daniel Warren, had disappeared during a trip connected with his “steam packing business”, never heard from again, and was believed to have been murdered, perhaps a victim of robbery. I had already gathered that he’d disappeared, and I’d wondered what had happened to Emerson Daniel but could find nothing on him. The papers also reported on the murder of his father, Henry Daniel Warren, my grandfather’s grandfather, the one who had numerous enemies.
Why did he have many enemies?
As for Emerson Daniel Warren (his birth record gave Daniel Emerson Warren but he later used Emerson D. Warren), at the time he’d disappeared, whatever year that was exactly, I’ve not come across any report on his having gone missing, that he was being sought, nor on the possibility he’d been murdered. When his wife, Lettie, died of typhoid fever in 1894 (an epidemic had struck Montclair, New Jersey, where she was then training in the hospital to be a nurse), her obituary gives no mention of him, only that her parents, sisters and a son survived, so I had reasoned he must have disappeared between 1891, when he made a real estate transfer, and 1893. I don’t have a date on his marriage to Lettie, I’d assumed it would have been not long before Frank’s birth in 1887, but I’ve found a record of a deed made in November 1881 in which Lettie’s grandparents, James and Elizabeth, are grantors to Emerson D. Warren of land in Newark. Maybe he had married Lettie that year. Frank, after his father’s disappearance and mother’s death, was raised by his maternal grandparents in Arcadia, Wayne, New York, which is probably why his Warren grandmother ended up in Arcadia by 1892, in order to be close to her grandson.
Wait, after trying to guess when it was Emerson disappeared, I find that in 1929, an item appears in papers across the nation seeking information on Emerson Warren who disappeared from Newark “about 1891”. If you have any knowledge of him please one is to contact a person whose name, as I suspected, was a trust officer with a bank. My guess is that the inheritance of Frank and Edith Warren was hung up with it being determined who would get what as their son was dead. A will may not even have been left. So Emerson, Frank’s father, whose death was never confirmed, was being sought.
In 1891 Emerson transferred a lot on Niagra Street to his father-in-law, Jacob Stever. On March 25 1891 this lot was then transferred from Jacob Stever to his daughter Lettie Warren. But I find that there were real estate transactions going on between Lettie and Emerson, also Emerson, Lettie and his mother (land to her) on 19 Feb 1892, so he was still around for that. Perhaps he took off early in 1892. In fact, it rather feels like with the land transactions several people were preparing for Emerson to leave. I
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wonder if his wife, his mother, and his in-laws knew he was going to “disappear” and were going to keep quiet about it. I don’t mean they were going to kill him and make him disappear, but that it sounds like, for whatever reason, Emerson and his wife and in-laws (perhaps even his mother?) were quite fine with Emerson disappearing into the sunset and helping him to do it as long as he left his wife and son set up with a house. By 1928, Lettie, Emerson’s mother, and his in-laws were all deceased. And if his son, Frank, knew his father hadn’t actually disappeared, he had no tales to tell as he was now dead as well.
In 1890, Emerson had gone into business with a Daniel P. Smith, Louis H. Morse, Reuben M. Reed and Peter R. Sleight in the incorporation of the Reed manufacturing company of Newark. Reed had invented a process of making anti-rusting tinware, and the company took off, already growing in 1892 into a three-plus story wood-frame factory. It became the leading wash boiler producer in the United States, but also produced ironware, enamelware, flintstone, and copperware, manufacturing a variety of kitchenware items and household goods. Reuben Reed was made a rich man. Peter Sleight, one of the incorporators, was the president of the Arcadia National Bank, the block on which the bank was housed being the Pollock block that Frank Warren would later purchased. As it turns out, Peter Sleight’s wife was Armeda Hyde, whose brother, William Hyde married Bertha Jane Jackson, whose brother James Jackson was the father of Edith Bertha Jackson who married Daniel Emerson Warren’s son, Frank, in 1911. That seems complex, but my point is that one of Emerson’s fellow incorporators was related to the woman who would marry Emerson’s son.
Were there real questions about whether or not Daniel Emerson Warren was dead, which was why information was being sought about him in 1929? Or maybe this was just standard procedure in settling the inheritance.
What kind of wealth did Daniel Emerson Warren have from the result of his involvement in Reed Manufacturing?
Oh, update to this story (an insertion, several months down the road). I have stumbled onto an Edward D. Warren who appears in Mendocino, California in 1894 on a voter registration list. In the 1900 San Francisco census he’s given as single, in 1900 he marries a woman from Mendocino, in the 1910 census in Oakland, California he gives this marriage as his first, in 1920 they are in Los Angeles, California, where they will remain the rest of their lives, his line of work is always in some kind of sales, and when he dies at the age of ninety-seven in 1954, his birthdate is given as the same as Emerson Daniel Warren’s, and the parents aren’t “unknown”, they are listed on the death certificate as the same as Emerson Daniel Warren’s. Hello, Emerson! You weren’t murdered, after all. I’d assumed that you’d skipped town and started a new life. Turns out I was right. And there you are. You went West and hid by changing your name from Emerson to Edward.
On 28 March 1928, “Edward”, paging through his Los Angeles newspaper, would have seen his son and his son’s wife and his grandson had been murdered in Newark, New York. And he didn’t come forward. In the days following he would instead learn his son and daughter-in-law had been killed by his grandson, and that his grandson had then
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shot himself. And still he didn’t come forward. If he had he been running away from his first wife, she had been dead since 1894. If he had he been running off from his mother, she had been dead since 1909 and I imagine he knew this. From what had he been running away when he booked it for California? Or, if he had instead been pressured to leave, why was this, what had he done? All that he had left to connect him with Newark was his son, Frank, who he’d left behind when Frank was about six, and a grandson he’d never met, who was now also dead. He did have one remaining family member still alive, my great-grandmother, Jennie, who had been still living in New York before he disappeared, she had married my great-grandfather and had the first of her several children before Daniel Emerson had disappeared.
I wonder if “Edward” had told his second wife, Mary, before this calamity, who he really was and that he was a bigamist with a wife and child in New York. If he hadn’t, I wonder if he informed Mary, with the breaking tragedy, “He was my son, and that was my grandson who I never met.” If he didn’t tell her then, did he tell her before she died in 1933. The informant for “Edward’s” death certificate, who gave his vitals and the names of his parents, was William A. Feldemen, the head of the Hollenbeck Home for the Aged where “Edward” had lived for about twenty years before entering the St. Erne Sanitarium his final five months. Had he told his story to Feldemen? Or just enough that in death he would be reunited with his former identity? Or had he simply recorded this information for Feldemen so it could be reported on his death certificate, and that in death he would finally be reunited with his family.
Finding Emerson Daniel Warren had skipped town doesn’t answer the “why”. Why hadn’t he and his wife divorced, as his parents had done?
We have testimony to the harshness of the Warren family. Henry Daniel Warren’s brother, Joseph, had been news editor of The Buffalo Courier, and popular enough that pages of accolades were published upon his death in 1876 at the age of forty-seven. A long report on Joseph’s positive impact on the community, and the shock of his death, noted he’d once told the writer he’d never had a childhood and that his life as a child was a “harsh and cheerless one…The joyless boyhood and youth of premature toil thus described, would have rendered most natures hard and austere, but the effect on that of Joseph Warren was the very reverse. Remembering how the sunshine had been lacking in his young life, he never tired in after years of shedding it on the lives of others. The child of poverty and a discipline puritanic in its strictness, became the most indulgent of parents, the most tender-hearted of men.”
The parents of Henry and Joseph Warren had been the Reverend Daniel Warren and Priscilla Sparhawk, daughter of the Ebenezer Sparkhawk Jr. who my grandmother believed was reincarnated in my grandfather. The Reverend Daniel Warren’s lengthy obituary stated he was “a man of clear, sound judgment, of purity of life, and dignity of manner, a good theologian, a sound and instructive preacher, a safe counsellor and guide, a lover of hospitality and good works, a kind and affectionate companion and father and friend.” The Reverend Daniel died in 1864 when Joseph Warren, the news editor, was about thirty-five. From the sound of Joseph Warren’s obituary, it seems unlikely he would have been on good terms with his father when he departed this
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earth. I wonder if there hadn’t been a complete rupture in their relationship. There had been five siblings, and his youngest brother, who never married, worked for him at the paper. Another sister, Nellie, had died at the age of forty-eight (no cause given). Another sister had married, had no children, and had also died at the age of forty-eight (no cause given). Henry, who died as the result of a beating, had been the last sibling alive, dying at the ripe old age of fifty-one. Their father, the Reverend Daniel, had died when he was sixty-six of typhoid pneumonia.
The Reverend Daniel had been trained to be a carpenter then moved into the ministry, graduating from the Bangor Theological Seminary in Maine, trained in the Congregational tradition of the Church of Christ. His pastorate at his first church in Waterbury, Vermont, lasted from 1825 to 1838 when he was dismissed. From about 1838 to 1841 he was at Johnson, Vermont, then went on to Essex, Vermont, where he preached from 1841 to 1846, was dismissed but preached a year longer. From there he went to Bakersfield where in the 1850 census his real estate was valued at $2000 while a neighboring physician had $1300 in real estate, my inclusion of this fact being to show there was no reason for his son Joseph to have been brought up impoverished and apprenticed out when young. Daniel preached until 1854 when in the spring he was dismissed on the ground of “inadequate support”. His wife, Priscilla, died that December. From there he went to Colchester and preached there and at West Milton until 1855. From there he moved to Stowe for a few months, then a year and a half in Lowell, Vermont. In 1856 he married, second, Hannah Beach, who had been previously married as well and had a twelve-year-old son and a sixteen-year-old daughter. Thereafter he assumed a post to a church in Warner, New Hampshire, in 1857. In 1860 he was recorded as having no real estate but his personal property was valued at $2500. A neighboring cooper had real estate valued at $800 and personal estate of $500. A neighboring wooden bottle maker had real estate valued at $1500 and personal property valued at $1000. A mechanic had only personal property valued at $100. In other words, it seems like the Reverend wasn’t hurting financially. Dismissed in 1863, he returned to Vermont where he preached in “vacant pulpits as opportunity offered”. Though it seemed to me he was perhaps frequently dismissed, when I look up the ministerial history in these churches in The Congregational Churches of Vermont and Their Ministry, 1762-1914, I find that the length of his tenures perhaps wasn’t atypical.
The character of the Reverend Daniel, born in 1798, given in a memoriam as being “sterling”, and that he was an affectionate father, contrasts with Joseph’s likely more trustworthy account of his childhood as joyless and severe. Joseph’s brother, Henry, whose marriage ended in divorce in a time when divorce was rare, ends up murdered, perhaps by one of his many enemies. Henry’s son, Daniel Emerson, disappeared when he was in his late thirties and was believed to have been murdered, but then I discover he instead ran off to California. We know nothing about his character other than he was a bigamist. His son Frank was murdered in 1928, at the age of forty-one, by his own son, then thirteen, who waited a little while after killing his parents then committed suicide as their bodies burned. (Forgive me if I seem to be belaboring this history, but discovering it was a punch in the gut, plus it seems a peculiarly modern story for the 1920s.) From the Reverend Daniel to Jackson Warren is five generations of messed up people resulting in that particular line ending itself. And my maternal
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grandfather was fucked up, though that was supposed to be through his father’s alcoholism, which was all that was said about him, nothing was said about his mother or her birth family.
As for Emerson who disappeared, becoming Edward, it can feel odd to have found him, to prove he hadn’t died. I found also another individual who disappeared and was believed to be murdered, on my father’s side, but to have found Emerson is different, perhaps because of how his son and grandson died, and he made the decision to not reveal he was alive and return to New York to mourn them. A sister of the first wife he’d left behind, would marry a man who made a little bit of news in 1934 when after an absence of forty-one years he reunited with a brother in Houston, Texas, his birth family not having known what had happened to him all those years and believed him to be dead.
The house of Frank and Edith Warren still stands. In 1928 it was probably impressive. A picture of it appeared in the papers, an arrow pointing to the charred bedroom of the parents on the street-view right side, second floor, and the bedroom of Jackson on the opposite side indicated by another arrow, a room that was in a kind of tower though not the beautiful round towers sometimes affixed to the corner of a Victorian home, instead it was a weird box-like tower. The house was large, three stories. All the homes around, built in the late nineteenth century and early 1900s, are beautifully even lovingly renovated with details preserved. This home, which the Google car had a hard time seeing as it’s surrounded by trees, looks like it’s likely been split into rentals and is being run hard into the ground with no upkeep. The newspapers also printed pictures of Frank and Edith, and of Jackson as a young child. By choice of my grandparents, they passed along no photos of my grandfather’s family, as they should all be forgotten, so these high-contrast images from the newspaper, images that belong to the world, are the only photos I have of anyone on my grandfather’s side of the family except one of a sister of his that was uploaded to a genealogy site by a relative of her husband. Frank is a template of 1920s good looks, as is Edith. They were a handsome couple with Hollywood style. It was the year before the Great Depression struck and while they weren’t high-powered, they weren’t elite, they were the privileged of their realm and enjoying a measure of success while still in their youth. Previous their trip to New York, taken right before their murders, Frank had returned about a month before from a trip to Havana with the other town merchants including one who had served two terms as mayor of Newark and was then its treasurer. Sounds like party time.
How do I feel about Jackson? Can’t I have sympathy for him while also feeling horror over his actions? What if he instead had taken his rage out against individuals who weren’t family? Would I be sympathetic toward him then? Likely not. Or not as sympathetic. My great horror would be for those murdered outside the family, that he would have killed innocent people. There’s some irony there, for it might be presupposed that the harshest judgment would be reserved for an individual who attacked one’s family, which he did. With the exception of my grandfather’s mother, as far as he knew his only remaining relations on his mother’s side were his cousin and his wife, and their son. While what Jackson did is grotesque, it was also an extreme
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act committed by a veritable child, a legal child, only thirteen. He shot then burned those who were supposed to naturally be, by reason of birth, his protectors. When motives were first being assessed, one that was published in the papers was that Jackson might have acted out of rage due to perhaps having been forbidden to attend a Boy Scout meeting that evening. Which is breathtakingly absurd. Even taking into account the impulsivity of some teenagers, what despair—and rage—would compel a child to kill their own parents and then themselves? Parricide is very rare, it accounts for about two percent of all homicide cases, and even rarer is a child of this age killing their parents. Teenagers who commit suicide typically haven’t a history of mental illness, they are instead responding to long-term abuse. Some of those who remarked on the boy’s death in the news sounded sympathetically horrified for a child who had “jumped into his bed”, pulled the covers up to his chin, shot himself in the chest, then for at least a little while after was conscious enough that he put a handkerchief to his chest to try to staunch the blood.
Though there were no witnesses, again, he was related as having “jumped” into his bed, which is how one describes a frightened or excited child as going to bed, whereas an adult climbs into bed or lays down in it. People pictured the boy, after having shot his parents and having set their beds on fire, as running back to his room, frightened, and jumping into bed.
Sometimes it just becomes a bit overwhelming, probing into the history of one’s silent family and facts like this leap out, BOO. It's horrible about this boy, that he would feel no other out was possible but killing his parents, then taking his own life. But when I was twelve I told my father if he ever touched me again I'd kill him, and I think I meant it, but I was also thinking in terms of self-defense, in the moment. I remember considering how if it came to that, he was big and I was small and I didn’t stand much of a chance, but I hoped my adrenaline would make up the difference.
I grew up in a constant state of freeze, fight, fawn, flight and freeze. I've written a lot of fiction and this time I've decided to write about trans-generational abuse and the secrecy that surrounds it. It's exhausting. It's rough. I'm scraping to the bone on this one because it's not just a familial illness, it's trans-generational on a societal level, and it's not new.
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I was surprised to come across a 1923 article concerned with the number of “child suicides” in the USA, by which it seems they largely mean adolescents. In 1922 there had been about 900 while in 1921 there had been over 850. To compare with the numbers a century later, there were about 830 adolescent suicides in 2019 and 903 in 2020, those numbers obtained from research published 2020 in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Pediatrics. If we have any questions concerning the reliability of numbers in 1921 and 1922, it seems they would err in undercounting rather than overcounting. The article ruminates briefly on probable causes being intolerable conditions at homes or schools, and considers also child marriage.
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Someone might wonder about the stresses of child labor, reforms were being instituted but the Fair Labor Standards Act wouldn’t pass until 1938. I read of a recent study that found suicides in general decreased during the influenza pandemic of WWI, attributed to the psychological effect of people pulling together, then increased with the economic depression of 1920-1921. I’m not going to guess at reasons for a veritable “epidemic” of child suicide at that time, but I was taken aback that between 1920 and 2020 the population of the USA increased by about 300 percent, but in 2020 there were about the same number of adolescent suicides as in 1922. I don’t recall ever reading about a problem with child suicide in the early 20th century. I don’t recall it ever being talked about as a problem at all.
Who was the author of the 1923 article? A Harry Marsh Warren who started the first suicide help-line. He was a hotel minister who realized there was a problem and started giving out cards telling people to contact him if they were thinking of suicide, and who started support networks, such as the Save-a-Life League. There’s an entry in Wikipedia on him.
Harry Marsh Warren’s father was first cousin to my Reverend Daniel Warren whose son Joseph wrote about how severe he was and how joyless was his childhood. They were both born in Rochester, Vermont, then Harry Marsh Warren’s father moved to New Hampshire while the Reverend Daniel would die in Rochester. Harry Marsh Warren was second cousin to my Henry Daniel Warren, son of the Reverend, a second cousin once removed to my great-grandmother Jennie Warren. Harry Marsh Warren was seventy-nine and living also in New York State when his extended relation, thirteen-year-old Jackson Warren, shot his father and mother then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide.
Thank you Harry Marsh Warren for trying to bring public awareness to suicide and assist those in need.