Family Skeletons

The purpose of this blog is quite simple. I hope that by sharing stories and personal essays about my family –and perhaps yours if you care to participate- we can all learn more about where we came from. By doing that, maybe we handle our present day problems in a manner that will enable us to become better people.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Was it murder?

My great-grandfather, b. Feb 5, 1848, married his second wife in 1892, two and a half years after my great-grandmother died giving him his ninth child. Little information has come to light during the time from 1892 and 1913.

Apparently, he spent most of his working years alternating between farming and the railroad. That kind of split occupation wasn't all that surprising in the family, partly due to farming being totally reliant on God and the weather. If you have a bad crop or bad year, you need some way to bring in some money. The railroad provided that way. It's not an unreasonable assumption that it also appealed to the wanderlust that so many in the family had ...and still have..., giving them a chance to ramble and make money doing it. Same comments would apply to those who became builders or carpenters.

In 1913, if his death certificate is to be believed on that point, my great-grandfather and his second wife moved to Memphis, Tennessee. He would have been 65 at the time, with his wife being 48. According to my mother, they opened a boarding house. His wife ran the boarding house while he was off working for the railroad. On March 20, 1916, my great-grandfather died in Memphis, Tennessee and was buried on March 22, 1916 in Tupelo, Mississippi. That much is known and can be supported by documentation. But there is far more to the story.

According to the story my mother heard (presumably from her mother), my great-grandfather returned home from his railroad job one evening and was about to enter the house. His wife allegedly made a statement to the police that she thought a burglar was trying to break in, so she picked up a pistol and shot the 'intruder' who turned out to be, of course, my great-grandfather. The story, to this point, has more than a few holes in it (besides the hole or holes in my great-grandfather’s body).

For starters, why did his wife fire (apparently thru the door or wall) before identifying the intruder? If she already had the pistol in her hand, she could have certainly waited the extra few seconds needed to identify the intruder...or at least to make sure it wasn't her husband.

She most certainly was used to his unscheduled comings and goings that would have been an ordinary part of railroad employment. Then there's the matter of her boarders also moving about at all hours. She would scarcely have been huddled in her locked boarding house, jumping at every little noise.

This tends to suggest that she wanted her husband out of the way for whatever reason and took advantage of the opportunity when it presented itself. The precise reason will have to remain pure speculation, but consider a couple of points. It's a virtual certainty that my great-grandfather knew of his wife's probable illicit activities (see point 2 below). Whether he condoned that behavior, simply turned a blind eye to it or was an active participant in the business will never be known.

His death certificate is loaded with discrepancies and contradictions. One or two errors is not uncommon, but the number and combination of the ones on this death certificate leads inexorably to certain conclusions.

Consider the following:

1. Stated name of his mother is wrong. This can be supported with documentation.

2. The doctor attended him from Dec 12, 1915 to Mar 20, 1916, according to the certificate. That may or may not be true, as you will see later. Diagnosis of mitral regurgitation is open to question because of something I learned when my mother died. The physician who certifies the death frequently has never seen the deceased.

Beyond that, unless an autopsy is performed, whatever is listed as a cause of death is literally an educated guess. Since mitral regurgitation refers to a mitral valve in the heart that doesn't fully close, it's usually a chronic condition. Yet the doctor allegedly had only attended him for just over three months.

If there was a conspiracy to cover up the shooting (My mother specifically stated that her father and one of his brothers made several trips to Memphis trying to prove that the woman deliberately shot my great-grandfather.), the death certificate would have been a total fabrication. Whether they proved it or not, their trips to Memphis definitely supports the statement that my great-grandfather was gunshot. And keep in mind that a gunshot could have inflicted damage of a sort that would have
wound up involving the mitral valve prior to his death. In this way, my great-grandfather would have died from mitral regurgitation as an immediate cause of death, but the instigating cause would have been a gunshot. As to why the incident would have beencovered up?

According to my mother, my great-grandfather’s wife was known to her patrons as Road House Red. Given that, there's a definite possibility that she ran an operation that was more than just a plain boarding house. Bordello is one name for it, or House of ill Repute if your delicate sensibilities require a gentler term. If some of her clients just happened to be Memphis cops, city officials or county officials, then you have the reason for a coverup.

3. Finally, check out the various dates, especially the date and location of his burial. He died on March 20, 1916 at 4:00 p.m. in Memphis, Tennessee. Incidentally, he died in their boarding house at 1231 Latham Avenue. The death certificate was signed on March 21,1916. He was transported, presumably in a casket and by train, from Memphis, Tennessee to Tupelo, Mississippi, and buried on March 22, 1916. That's a distance of 100 miles. From the time of his death to his interment was less than 48 hours, which is awfully cottonpickin' fast for that time period...unless you've got something to hide. Hmm-m-m-m?

There are two other problem areas on the death certificate. The doctor signed it on the 21st of March. However, normal practice (as with my mother’s) is for the doctor to sign it only after the deceased has been buried. Why did he sign it the day before the burial? And the last point that is really strange. The registrar recorded the death certificate on the 21st of March...the same day the doctor signed it and the day before my great-grandfather was buried! My mother’s death certificate wasn't recorded until the 15th of July, 2002, which was the same day the certified certificate was issued and three weeks after her death. Death certificates can't be issued until they're recorded and they can't be recorded until final disposition of the body is known. In other words, where it's buried.

Based on the discrepancies just discussed, the bottom line is this: My great-grandfather was probably murdered by his wife and the death certificate was more than likely a complete coverup that included the police, doctor, county registrar and no telling who else.

If that isn't enough, his wife spent the next twenty years submitting letters, testimonials and affidavits to the Confederate Pension Board in an attempt to receive his civil war pension. What's interesting is that she claimed a right to the pension as his surviving widow. Since she had substantial supporting documentation (the marriage license alone would have been enough, you would think), it makes you wonder what else the Pension Board knew.

At this late date, there's probably no way to be absolutely certain that this analysis is correct. Every person involved has been dead for decades (and over a century in some cases), so it's basically a question of getting the historical record as accurate as possible. However, I think you would agree there's at least an eighty per cent probability that she did, indeed, murder my great-grandfather and escaped prosecution as the result of a coverup by public officials.

Could you get a conviction in a court of law? Absolutely not, because you would need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But civil court is another matter. A preponderance of the evidence is all that's necessary and I'd suggest there's more than enough evidence to meet that criteria.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

But they had a telephone.

My mother was born in 1905 in a log house (not a cabin) that sat at the top a hill between two pine trees. It wasn’t their house, of course, but belonged to a relative. I haven’t been able to find out the exact relationship yet, but they were fairly well off. At some point in time, the house burned. Whether while my mother was living there or not, I can’t say.

At any rate, my mother’s entire family wound up living in the country outside of Amory, Mississippi. As I’ve indicated in previous posts, their house left a lot to be desired. No screens on the windows, no running water, no electricity, coal oil lamps for light and a wood fired stove for cooking. Also a fireplace, which was used for cooking and provided light and heat to boot. But they had a telephone.

On the face it, that sounds strange. But if you stop to think about it, it wasn’t. Electricity required two lines and a high voltage. A telephone, on the other hand, only took one line and it was low voltage. To make a call, all you had to do was pick up the earpiece, stand in front of the mouthpiece and crank the handle mounted on the side of the housing. Before very long, the operator came on the line with that classic phrase “number puhleeze!”. You told her who you wanted, she connected you and then it was your turn.

By the way, if you’ve never experienced a telephone conversation on one of those early wall phones, or heard about it from someone who had, you’ve missed something. Let’s see if I can give you an idea of what it was like.

To begin with, once you had your party on the line, you had more than a few hangers on. Frequently the whole town plus the operator. All you had to do was pick up the phone and you could hear what anyone else was saying, a true party line. They say there are no secrets in a small town and those telephones were one of the reasons.

The early wall phones helped build your lungs, too. You have to remember, this was new technology to most people and they couldn’t get it into their heads that you didn’t have to raise your voice if someone was five miles away. Conversations went something like this: Edna? EDNA? CAN YOU HEAR ME, EDNA? And Edna would say: ROXIE? I CAN HEAR YOU ROXIE. CAN YOU HEAR ME? I HOPE YOU CAN HEAR ME WHEN YOU’RE SO FAR AWAY!!

Not only could you hear her, you ran the risk of blowing your eardrum out from the volume. But that’s the way they thought you had to talk because they were calling LONG DISTANCE.

Despite many conversations occurring at the top of their lungs and many people simply being afraid to even touch one of those evil things (yes, it was considered the spawn of the Devil by some), all it took for them to be accepted was for a child to survive measles or pnumonia or an accident where they fell in the fire because a phone was available to call the doctor.

My mother and her family may not have had what we consider the comforts of home, mainly because of a philandering father (my grandfather) who refused to properly provide for them, but they had a telephone.

Monday, July 24, 2006

It wasn't brain fever.

For most of my life, I was under the impression that my mother had brain fever when she was seven years old. I’d heard the story a thousand times. As it turned out, she didn’t. But what she had was just as bad.

According to her, one morning she didn’t want to go to school. Her mother made her go, telling her to just go on, she’d feel better when she got there. So on to school she went, feeling worse by the minute. Finally, in the afternoon, she asked the teacher if she could go home early. Bad request. That got her slapped across the face by the teacher.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering how a teacher could get away with that, remember that the year was 1912. Teachers were the absolute rulers of their classroom and got away with almost anything. All too often, if the parent found out that the teacher slapped or whipped their child, it was assumed to be justified and the child got it even worse from the parent.

Anyway, my mother made it to the end of the day and started walking home. Between her and the house was a park. Keep in mind that this wasn’t a park such as the ones we know today. No, this was basically in a natural, heavily wooded state with some cleared areas that had large barbeque pits dug into the ground. They also filled with water whenever you had a heavy rain. I know this because my mother talked about falling into one and her brother pulling her out by her hair (it was quite long) before she drowned.

Whether or not the pits were filled with water that day she was trying to make it home, I don't know. It really didn’t matter. If she’d even fallen into a dry pit, she’d died before anyone found her. As it was, she managed to make it thru the park and all the way to the house before she passed out. Her mother found her at the bottom of the steps.

Unconcious and her tongue clamped between her teeth, her mother got her to bed and called the doctor. When the doctor arrived, they finally managed to get her tongue back in her head, but then she clamped her teeth together, which made it impossible to give her any medicine orally, never mind food.

The doctor gave my grandmother a tongue-lashing for not having screens on the windows, telling her that he told her this was going to happen. Having made the obligatory health speech, he went back to tending my mother. Apparently he stayed at the house most of the time for the next two weeks. Since her teeth were clamped, the only medicine he could administer was Quinine injections in the hips. My mother said that her mother told her the doctor told her he hated to do it because my mother probably would never walk again.

Doctors are frequently wrong and he was wrong this time. After two weeks, my mother came to and started asking for something to eat. She never had any problem walking.

However, very late in my mother’s life, when we got to talking about that episode, I finally figured out what it was she had...and it wasn’t brain fever. You have to remember that in northeastern Mississippi you’re living in a very humid environment, in a house with no indoor plumbing, no electricity and no screens on the windows. Mosquitos and who knows what other insects and assorted critters could flit right into the house anytime they wanted. What my mother contracted...and you’ve probably gotten ahead of me...was pernicious malaria.

Figuring out what she had was the easy part. What I never have figured out is why none of the rest of the family ever came down with the disease. The only thing that makes any sense is that by living under those conditions, they developed an immune system capable of resisting most of the illnesses that were rampant in those days.

And that, in turn, brings another very interesting question. Is it possible that the reason we now have so many allergies and are so sensitive to disease is because we no longer are exposed to the dirt and what we now consider to be unsanitary conditions that were part of daily life for our ancestors?

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Toughness depends on your environment

Every generation has it’s own form of toughness and much of it is the direct result of the environment in which you live. For example, those of us living today would consider my half-great-granduncle and great-grandfather to be incredibly tough because of what they endured in 1863. But the truth is that what they did was considered normal in those days.

Let’s move downstream a little bit to Mississippi in the 1905 - 1915 period. My maternal grandfather was a farmer, builder and railroad man. As a farmer, he left a lot to be desired from what my mother said. Don’t know much about his railroad activities, but apparently he was a very good builder.

When he went on building jobs, he walked...and his tools went with him. He had a carpenter’s box (which I assume he built) that all his tools were in. You’ve seen them. Long, with drawers or compartments on the bottom, an open top and a long handle at the top (basically a very thick dowel). Just the mere thought of picking up that box (and God knows what it weighed) is enough to make me weak in the knees.

My grandfather not only picked it up but carried it (for miles sometime) as he walked to whatever job he was working on that day. And of course, he repeated the process when he walked home in the evening. Now if that ain’t enough, he did all this while suffering from rhumatoid arthritis. If you’re not familiar with that particular variety, it’s the one that causes the legs to bow.

Once he got home, his day still wasn’t finished. According to my mother, he wouldn’t put his tools away til all of them had been cleaned and the blades sharpened for the next day. He must’ve been a pretty good builder because I was told that he built most of the big homes or mansions in Amory, Mississippi. Also built the school and when it burned, he built it back.

Of course, just like the cobbler who’s children had no shoes, my grandfather’s family apparently lived in a rather basic house. I got this idea from a story told about how my grandmother kept wanting a kitchen. My grandfather must’ve had an attack of goodness because he got busy and built one out in the yard, just a few feet away from the side of the house. When finished, he shoved it up against the house, connected the two and the family finally had an inside kitchen. How they cooked before then I can’t say, though most likely it was a combination of the fireplace and an outside fire.

By the way, if you’re sitting there wondering how the man shoved that kitchen up against the house, consider it more evidence that he was not only tough but strong. In those days, particularly with no inside plumbing, Saturday was the day you took a bath...unless you wanted to go swimming in a pond or jump into the nearest creek.

My grandfather would sit a #1 washtub (for those of you who don’t know what a #1 washtub is, they’re big enough for a grown man to bathe in) on the ground next to the fire. Water would be heated, then poured into the washtub and the process repeated til it was full as desired. At that point, my grandfather would pick up the tub by the handles (one on each side), hold it straight out in front of him and carry it up the steps, into the house and sit it down in front of the fireplace.

Finished with his bath, he’d pick up the washtub full of dirty water, carry it back down the steps to the outdoors and dump the water. At that point it was ready for the next person, but you can be sure he wouldn’t carry the tub for them. What they did, I don’t know. Bathed outside, I guess.

That kind of toughness and strength was considered pretty much normal in those days. Makes you wonder just how much we’ve lost, doesn’t it?

Monday, July 17, 2006

They were tough in those days.

Today, we consider ourselves having a hard time if the air conditioning goes out for twenty minutes. Anyone who manages to go an entire two days before they can get a compressor replaced is considered to be tough because they could put up with the hardship. Well, let me tell you about a few people who were truly tough.

For example, my half-great-granduncle fought for the Confederacy. So did one of my great-grandfathers. As it happened, both were captured by the Yankees on July 4,1863, but the outcome for each was poles apart.

My half-great-granduncle was just an ordinary, illiterate farmer who ended up fighting with the 39th North Carolina Infantry. Where was the 39th fighting in early July, 1863? Gettysburg. The 39th N.C. Infantry was, in fact, the unit that was assigned to attack Seminary Ridge that was defended by the 1st U.S. Brigade (known as the Iron Brigade).

With the Iron Brigade holding the high ground, the 39th attacked straight into the teeth of withering defensive fire and defiladed cannon emplacements that were firing everything from cannonballs to chains and scrap metal at the oncoming Rebs.

What their losses were I can’t say, but the 39th not only made it to the top of Seminary Ridge, they actually drove the Iron Brigade off the ridge. My half-great-granduncle? He survived the attack unscathed. But on July 4, 1863, with the Confederates in retreat, he was wounded and captured. For the next two years, he was bounced from Yankee hospital to Yankee hospital and even survived a smallpox ward. He was finally repatriated at the end of the war, returned to Richmond, Virginia where he died in a Reb hospital.

When you consider that hospitals during the War of the Rebellion were frequently hospitals in name only, the fact that he lasted two years is a testament to his toughness.

As for my great-grandfather, he endured the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Yanks couldn’t take Vicksburg, situated as it was on the bluffs above the Mississippi River. But they could lay siege to it with guns mounted on barges. Most of the population wound up holed up in caves. Finally, on July 4,1863, the city (and my great-grandfather) surrendered to the Yankees. Faced with a major logistical problem (where do you put the population of an entire city if you take them prisoner), the Yanks chose instead to offer them parole.

Parole, in this case, meant that you signed a paper swearing that you would go home an not take up arms against the North again. My great-grandfather signed a parole of his own and I have a copy of it.

Of course, the Yankees must’ve known that none of those Southeners considered the parole they signed to be worth the paper it was written on. My great-grandfather was undoubtedly typical. He signed his parole, went home, dug another gun out of the woodpile, or the woods, or wherever it was hidden, and went back to the war.

Two relatives. One died two years later, one didn’t. One suffered imprisonment, one didn’t. But they were both tough as nails, refusing to give in as long as there was a breath in their body. In my own way, I’m just as tough as they were, though I certainly can’t match them physically. But mentally, emotionally and just plain pure-dee stubborn? Absolutely.

So if you wonder why you have some of the attitudes you have, take a look back at those family skeletons.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Am I really an only child?

I grew up an only child. Good thing, considering that I was constantly sick as a child, never went to school more than two weeks at a stretch and had to drop out of high school in my second year due to health. I was the only child my parents ever had together. But was I the only child my mother ever had?

One day I got into a discussion with my mother (who was in her eighties) on family history, going thru some documents at the same time. One of’em happened to be my birth certificate. On it were two questions, the answers to which were normally provided by the father.

The first one said “Number of other children by this mother who are living”. To which my father accurately indicated 0. It was the second question that got my attention. That one asked “Number of other children by this mother who are not living”. Just as plain as day, my father had entered the number 1. 1?! I asked my mother about it and her response was that my father was just confused. Well, my father might have been a lot of things, but confused over a simple question like that wasn’t one of them. Anyway, no further information was forthcoming, so I had to let it lie.

Ten years or so later, after my mother had entered a nursing home, I was going thru boxes of papers and discovered her employment record for the time she worked at AT&T. She started in 1922 and ...as far as I knew... worked for them continually until she retired from them in 1955. Come to find out, she didn’t.

There was a period in the late ‘20s when she resigned from AT&T ... and then returned to the company eight months later. That, in itself, doesn’t mean anything you say. And you’re right. But there’s more to the story that creates a very interesting pattern.

You see, she was the sole support of her mother and younger sister. Her mother never worked and her sister was still going to school. They were living in Memphis, Tennessee and renting an apartment. Without my mother working, there was no way to pay the bills, buy groceries, school books for her sister or anything else. All of which immediately raises two very interesting questions. Where did the money come from to pay the bills and what was my mother doing for eight months?

Another reason for reaching the conclusion I have is the societal attitudes of the time. Women who were “in a family way”, (in other words, pregnant) especially unmarried women, simply did not work at AT&T. They basically stayed out of sight til the child was born and the situation taken care of (meaning the child was informally adopted, placed in an orphanage or sent to live with a distant relative).

The next piece of this puzzle is the relationship she had with a man for six years. Not only was the man’s family crazy about my mother, she was over at their house for dinner constantly and they were also planning on getting married. That never happened, of course, but I have reason to believe that each one of them carried a torch for the other for the rest of their lives. But that’s another story.

What I suspect, but can’t prove, is that my mother became pregnant by her boyfriend (or lover, if you prefer) and had a child who was either stillborn, or was taken by her boyfriend’s family. Her boyfriend also provided all the financial support for the eight months my mother was away from work. The child was either raised to adulthood without ever knowing who his (or her) real mother was or died at an early age from some illness. I’ll never know for sure, but the pattern described above certainly supports the theory.

These kinds of secrets are the ones that are buried so deep that it takes a bulldozer to find them. And when they do surface, usually accidentally, you never know the whole truth. Instead, we seem to be ashamed that our ancestors, particularly our parents, could do something like that.

Well, hey, I hate to bring this up but our parents were just as capable of making mistakes and messing up their lives as we are. It doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with them, anymore than it means there’s anything wrong with us. Just human.

Finding out that your mother may have had a child out of wedlock doesn’t tell you anything other than the cold facts. What’s important is why. Learn this and you gain a deeper understanding of the kind of person your mother really was. In my case, it tells me how deeply she loved and cared for another person. The only thing that bothers me is that, assuming my analysis is correct, she felt she had to keep it a secret from me.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

A contradiction in terms

If mankind is ever to rise to the level we claim to aspire to, our hope will lie
in that small kernel of goodness that seems to exist in almost everyone, no matter how bad they are. Hitler is obviously an exception.

Take my grandfather, for example (my mother's father). Born in 1867, he was (to repeat myself) a product of his time. Hard, an abuser, womanizer and eposodic alcoholic, he also had an element of goodness and tenderness buried way down deep in his soul.

For example, when he was bushwhacked, he was lying in the road with two bullets in him. His assailant (who he knew) walked up and stood over him. He told the guy "You don't have to shoot me any more. You've already killed me." The other man went ahead and emptied the pistol in him and left him for dead.

Only my grandfather didn't die. He lay in the mud and near-freezing water all night. Then came to and drug himself home (which was about a mile or so). His wife (my grandmother) came outside and accused him of being drunk again. He pulled his hand, covered with blood, out of his coat and said "Roxie, I'm not drunk. I've been shot." They called the doctor (doctors made house calls then), who came out, patched him up (which must have been quite a job considering that he had six slugs in him) and said if he got pnumonia he was dead.

Not only did he not get pnumonia, he recovered fully. The sheriff had his attacker in jail with plans to hang him if my grandfather died. Since he didn't die and didn't press charges, they turned the guy loose. Later, according to my mother, the two met on a downtown street. Instead of the expected gunfight, they shook hands and went their merry way. Go figure.

Whether before or after he was ambushed I can’t say, but one day he, my grandmother, my mother and two or her brothers were sitting at the dinner table. What happened I don’t know, but words were said and my grandfather slapped my grandmother across the fact. Both of his sons (my uncles) jumped up to defend their mother. My grandfather grabbed an iron poker from the fireplace, hit my middle uncle across the back with it, kicked him out the door, threw his clothes after him and told him to get out. Only about 14 years old at the time, he left and never returned. Wound up in New Jersey eventually, where he died at the age of 75.

Another time, my grandfather (who had a reputation for being cruel to his animals) was coming out of the barn and accidentally killed a kitten. Believe it or not, the man picked that dead kitten up in his hand, held it in front of his face and cried like a baby.

Even though he was a womanizer, after my grandmother kicked him out and moved to Memphis, my mother tracked down the women he was seeing at the time (incidentally, my grandparents never got a divorce), went up and banged on her door. When the woman answered, my mother looked at her, said "I just wanted to see what floozy would take my daddy away from his family" and then turned around and walked off. If nothing else, my mother had all kinds of fire and toe.

According to what I heard, when my grandfather found out what my mother had done, he quit seeing the woman and apparently never bothered with another one. He didn't get back together with my grandmother or have anything to do with his family, however.

Finally, when he died in 1936, no one would have known what happened to him if one of my uncles hadn't accidentally found him. My grandfather had signed himself into a nursing home in Ft. Worth, Texas under an assumed name, too proud to let people know just how far down he'd fallen.

Pride, shame, tenderness, adultry, gentleness, cruelty, toughness...he had it all. Makes you wonder what he'd been in modern times.

That's one reason I love genealogy. If you don't know your past, no matter how brutal or cruel, then you can't do anything about the present. It's been said that we learn from our mistakes. But if we don't know what those mistakes are, how can we learn?

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Hatred and racism: From the typical to the extreme.

Another story about my mother tells you she was way ahead of her time. When she moved to Memphis, she was 17 years old. Ridgidly enforced segregation was the rule at that time. One day, she got on a bus and the only seat left was in the back. Being completely naive about segregation, she trotted on back to the back of the bus and sat down where all the blacks were sitting. The bus driver actually stopped the bus, went back and brought her up to the front of the bus. She asked him why? He said because you're not supposed to sit back there. She asked why. He said because whites sit in the front of the bus. She asked why. I don't suppose she ever got an answer.

If there's one great truth to be gleaned from all these stories, it's that we are shaped by our surroundings for good or ill. It takes a strong person to rise above them. And, as you've already figured out, my mother was a strong and wonderful woman. Did she have her problems? Absolutely, but nowhere near what they would have been if she had followed her mother's path.


Despite being a bizarre concept, officially sanctioned segregation existed in Texas all the way into the 1960s. When I first came back to Ft. Worth in 1961, they still had segregated rest rooms, segregated drinking fountains and segregated lunch counters. Never could figure out what made the water different that came out of the black fountain as opposed to the white fountain. And when I started voting at the age of 21, I paid a 50 cent poll tax. While no one said so, the purpose of the poll tax was to keep the poor blacks who couldn't afford 50 cents from voting. If there was anything good about the segregation in Ft. Worth, it was that it died with a whimper and not a bang.


But just when you think there’s more good in humans than you’d been giving them credit for, you run across stories like this one. My mother's oldest brother (born in 1893) was probably the worst of the entire family when it came to racism. By the way, I'll warn you right now that some of you are going to find the rest of this story highly offensive, brutal and/or even repulsive, both in language and action.

Now that I've warned you, I continue. Somewhere around 1919 or so in Mississippi, a white girl was kidnapped, raped and left to die. The man who did it, a black, took off running but knew even when he was raping the girl that he was going to get caught. Knowing that, why he did it in the first place in anyone's guess. But the important thing to remember in this is that he was absolutely, totally, undoubtedly guilty.

Well, they caught him. There was no trial and since he was undeniably guilty, it would've been a formality anyway. So, the plan was to execute him on the spot. Aside from the fact that they were actually getting ready to commit a lynching, you would have thought they planned to hang him. But that was not to be.

Instead, they drove a post into the ground, strapped they poor guy to it, stacked kindling and wood around him and lit it off, burning him alive.

My uncle came on the scene, presumably too late to help, but had absolutely no objection to what they were doing. In fact, he stood around and watched the guy burn until the last drop of grease sizzled into the flames. Then he went home and told my mother about it.

She was, as you would expect, horrified. "How could you stand to watch something like that?" she asked him. His response, which was so typical of his generation, was "What's the problem? He was nothin' but an old nigger."

Sadly, you will still find that attitude in existance today. It's just been covered up with a veneer of civilization. I'd like to think that the kind of hatred evidenced by this last episode will eventually disappear, but considering human nature, I'm not holding out a lot of hope.

What about the other grandparents?

My maternal grandmother was the only grandparent I ever knew. Both my mother's father and my father's mother were dead long before I was born. Same for my mother’s three sisters and my father's sister. But what about my paternal (my father’s father) grandfather you ask? Well, he was a classic domineering, controlling old world Italian with a violent temper who planned everyone's lives, could basically be described as a brass-plated *** and who I never met. At least I don't remember it since I was only 9 months old at the time.

Interesting story about him. When I was nine months old, we all went up to the family home to visit. My grandfather (his name was Luigi) had ALREADY put me in his will, established a college fund for me, figured out what I would do in life, where I would live, who I would marry AND what my mother would be doing in the interim. The way Luigi had it planned, we would all move into the family home, my uncle's wife (who had been doing all the housework while the men enjoyed the fruits of her labor) would then cease doing the housework and sit back and relax. Who would take over? My mother (after she resigned from the phone company where she had been working since 1922) would then take care of all the housework.

This was not an unusual practice for him. One reason my father left home when he was 18 in 1926 was that his mother died. The other is that Luigi had also planned HIS life, just as he had mine. In this case, Luigi went so far as to tell my father where the house would be built and who (Luigi) would build it. But I digress. Back to the plans that were being made for me.

As you might expect, my mother being a stiff-necked, defiant, stubborn Southener, born in northeastern Mississippi, had a one-word answer: No. Luigi said if she didn't, he'd take me out of his will. She didn't. He did. That has a lot to do with why I've always had to scrounge and scrape most of my life to get by.

The upshot of all this is that I've never had the pleasure of being doted on by loving grandparents.

But I'm in one piece and thankfully no more bigoted than my parents were. Do I have my biases? Sure do, but we're all biased to some degree about something. That's part of being human. If we could eliminate all biases, prejudices and hatred, we'd be perfect. But that's not possible so long as we're human beings. So we do the best we can and some do better than others.

My grandparents (all of them) grew up in a time period and culture where hatred and racism were endemic. They were a product of their environment. Fortunately, my mother was able to break out of it. So did my father. I’ll be forever greatful for that.

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Grandmother was a racist

The more genealogical research I do, the more I have come to realize just how dysfunctional my family was. I say was, due to the fact that my mother married late, had me late (she was 37 when I was born) and I've outlived every close relative.

Take, for example, my grandmother. That's my mother's mother or, more accurately, my maternal grandmother on my mother's side. She was born in 1874 in Arkansas. Her father died when she was nine months old. I know very little about my great-grandfather aside from the fact the he died at the age of 38 and was very good looking. That I can say due to having a photograph of him that was taken in 1874 or maybe a year or two earlier. He was, of course, a farmer. The day he died, they were packing a covered wagon in preparation for traveling to Indian Territory (later to be known as Oklahoma) where they were going to prove up a claim for a section of land (640 acres).

They never made it because my great-grandfather walked down to the garden, pulled up a turnip, peeled it with his knife, started eating it...and then dropped dead from acute indigestion. It was acute alright. Obviously, he had a massive coronary. Considering the fact that everything was fried in lard that was rendered from hogs and bears, plus churned butter that was so yellow you could've used it for a traffic light, I'd have sure hated to have seen what his cholesterol level was!

Interestingly, my great-grandmother (who was at least half Irish) never remarried and didn't die until 28 years later in 1903. Definitely unusual for that time period. More often than not, a woman with children (especially when she had a 9-month-old infant to care for) would be remarried within a few months or a year at the most.

Anyway, my grandmother wound up marrying a man (my grandfather) who was a weird combination of abusive, tenderhearted, tough, a womanizer and an episodic alcoholic. She eventually threw him out and she, my mother, one other daughter and one of my uncles wound up in Memphis, Tennessee in 1922. From the stories I've heard, my grandmother never liked blacks and had the typical attitude of so many that blacks were beneath her and needed to stay in their place. It was fine for them to be servants, but that was as far as it went. As for marrying a black (or out of your race), that was totally unacceptable. It also didn't help matters that she couldn't or wouldn't differentiate between ethnicities and races. As I'm sure you know, there are only three races on this planet, but there are as many ethnicities as there are nations. Essentially, ethnicity and nationality are synonymous.

At any rate, in 1940 my mother married a full-blood Italian who was actually born in southern Italy. Didn't look it and in fact had an appearance more along the lines of a high-born Spaniard. Well, in 1942, when my mother learned she was expecting me, she told her mother. Was my grandmother happy? Not hardly. According to the story my mother told, my grandmother basically considered my mother to be no better than a bitch dog that would whelp puppies in the back yard. Oh, yeah, my grandmother didn't believe in having a dog in the house or taking the animal with you when you moved, either.

My grandmother lived with us, out of necessity, until she died when I was ten years old. To the day she died, she did not like my father (even though he wore himself out being nice to her). His own mother died when he was 18 years old and he would've carried my grandmother around on a satin pillow if she had let him. Any gifts he made for her (he was very creative) were simply put away and never seen again. As far as her relationship with me, we were never close. My only memory of her is a bitter old woman who existed simply to take care of me and tell me what to do...or not do. In the last few years, I've finally figured out that she considered my father to be of a different race (apparently didn't understand that Italians belong to the Caucasian/White race) and I was just that poor little mixed race child that she had to care for. In other words, the cross she had to bear. As far as I know, my mother was the only one in her entire family (and she had six brothers and sisters) who wasn't a racist or bigot. How she managed that I'll never know.

That's probably enough for now. If you want to know about how twisted some families can be, and how you can rise above it if you're willing to learn about the ugliness, stick around. There's more to come.

Welcome to Family Skeletons

The purpose of this blog is quite simple. I hope that by sharing stories and personal essays about my family –and perhaps yours if you care to participate- we can all learn more about where we came from. By doing that, maybe we handle our present day problems in a manner that will enable us to become better people.

One thing’s for certain. All of our ancestors made mistakes, and some of them were so bad that they were hidden in that dark closet with the hope that they would never see the light of day again. But history has a way of opening closet doors, even when you try to keep it closed. That's one reason genealogy is so popular, though many researching family history are trying to keep the secrets hidden.

Still, the bottom line is if you don't know your past, no matter how brutal or cruel, then you can't do anything about the present. It's been said that we learn from our mistakes. But if we don't know what those mistakes are, how can we learn?