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.

Saturday, March 31, 2007

You can't sit in the back of the bus!

In 1922, my mother, her mother, sister and youngest brother moved from Amory, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee. To say that it was culture shock would’ve been an understatement. They went from living in the country to the mysteries and regulations of the big city.

The differences were manifested in many ways. For one thing, my mother (who was a very tender 16 years of age) had never seen milk in a bottle. She wound up working at the phone company (AT&T) and made it back and forth to work by doing what most people did. Riding the bus.

Keep in mind that my mother was the only member of her family who was not a bigot or racist. How she managed to escape that mindset I will never know, but she did. Throw in ignorance of city ways, combine with a huge dose of country girl naivete and the result was almost totally predictable. Or if you prefer to look at it another way, she was about 35 years ahead of her time.

At any rate, one day she caught the bus. Whether to or from work I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. When she got on, she found that the bus was packed. The only seat left was at the very back of the bus. So, she trucks on back to the remaining seat and sits down.

In case y’all are wondering why any of this is unusual, you have to remember that we’re dealing with Memphis, Tennessee in 1922 in the Deep South. Segregation was the rule of the day. White peolple sat in the front of the bus and blacks sat in the back. That was the way it was and no one ever challenged it. But then they hadn’t run across anyone like my mother, either.

It didn’t take long after she sat down for the bus driver to pull over and bring the bus to a stop. He gets out of his seat, walks back to where my mother was sitting and told her she had to move up to the front. Keep in mind there were no seats in the front, but she still was ordered to move up front.

Her reaction to the driver? “Why?”

His response? “Because. You can't sit in the back of the bus.”

Her retort? “Why?”

The bus driver. “You don’t belong here.”

Her. “Why?”

I don’t know how long the exchange went on, but she finally moved up front. It was a very small episode and as far as I know, she never tried to sit in the back of the bus again. That’s just the way things were in Memphis at that time and you followed the rules. But I would suggest that was one of those very tiny ripples that eventually culminated in the Civil Rights movement some 35 years later.

Monday, March 26, 2007

She Was Not An Indian Princess

The second wife of my maternal great-grandfather was a lot of things. Irish, small, petite, two-time widow, probable Madam and bordello operator, boarding house owner and likely murderess. But one thing attributed to her she absolutely was not. An Indian Princess.

If you don’t think genealogy creates ‘history’ cut out of whole cloth, think again. All too often, people don’t like what they discover about their everlovin’ ancestors. After all, their ancestors would never do anything illegal or immoral. All of their ancestors were refined, educated people who they can be proud of. Uh-huh.

The truth is that we all have more than a few skeletons in the closet. In spite of that, we still keep trying to gloss over the rough spots. Even those who have researched their family history for years can be guilty of it.

But back to my great-grandmother. One researcher who has spent years focusing on my family line started making the statement that great-grandmother was a Chickasaw Indian Princess. Despite the fact that there is absolutely no truth to the story, it’s wound up on the internet and has now become set in cement. How you stop it spreading, I don’t have a clue.

The best thing I can do is to provide the truth. To that end, consider the following:

Where the story got started is most likely due to the fact that her first husband was a Chickasaw Indian and the son of the last chief of the Northern Mississippi Chickasaw. Throw in a little bit of romance and the fact that Pocahontas was referred to on occasion as an Indian Princess and...voila...my great-grandmother was an Indian Princess.

While that all sounds glorious, the fact of the matter is that American Indians did not and do not have Princesses. I even asked a full-blood Chickasaw Indian that I had occasion to meet about that. When he quit laughing, he confirmed the statement. Beyond that, my great-grandmother married an Indian. That didn’t make her an Indian any more than it made him a white eyes.

Great-grandmother was a full-blood Irishwoman with a maiden name of McCollum. If that ain’t Irish, I ain’t half Italian! What’s really more interesting than the Indian Princess fantasy is what happened to her first husband. She was only 27 when she married my great-grandfather...and she was already a widow. Since it’s likely that she murdered my great-grandfather (see my post titled Was It Murder?), it makes you wonder if she had anything to do with her first husband’s demise.

So, to cram this entire Indian Princess thing into a nutshell, the following points need to be understood:

* Great-grandmother’s maiden name was McCollum.
* She was Irish.
* She married a Chickasaw Indian
* Her first husband died...or she killed him.
* She married my great-grandfather.
* She probably ran a bordello and was most likely a Madam.
* She probably murdered my great-grandfather.

But there’s one thing about my great-grandmother that is absolutely, positively, irrevocably and demonstrably not true....

She was no Indian Princess.