Looking Back to Find the Past

I was born in the early 1950's in a city in the deep south. Over the years I've tried to get at least a few facts about my parents' lives in the hope that their personal issues might be more understandable. I've always believed, to some extent, that if I could just understand how my parents got so crazy, my own history might be more bearable. It's been a difficult process. The answers are few and far between and, as time passes, those facts become mythic in nature. Stories get repeated, frequently by people who have a vested interest in how they're interpreted. I'm not always certain whether they're true...or if it even matters.

My paternal grandmother apparently grew up in Mississippi. When she was a young woman, her parents were killed in a fire. She may have lost one or more siblings, too. She did have one remaining brother, whose name was Ernest. People tell me they were very close, I don't know whether that's because everyone else was dead or there was just some natural affinity between them.

After the death of her parents, she and her brother were placed in an orphanage. I can only imagine what that must have been like. It must have been profoundly damaging. She and the other orphans were required to work--presumably to earn their keep--in conditions that were probably very harsh. She met my grandfather while she was working on the farm of a local, somewhat well-to-do couple. I gather she was very young when they married. There are also vague stories about my grandfather being disinherited. If I had to guess, I'd say that's where the trouble started within my family. Though I have absolutely no proof, experience leads me to believe that my grandfather probably selected her precisely because she was so young. Later on, he sexually abused several of his children. My grandmother must have just gotten too old to be of interest to him.

I asked my grandmother many times to tell me about her life. She was the most stoic person I've ever known, bar none. My own mother is the second most stoic person I know and, according to people who know me, I may be a close third. To say she wasn't forthcoming is an understatement. Whatever stories I came to hear about her all came from her children. Since a fair number of her children were just crazy as loons, I can't always count on their veracity.

My grandmother started having babies at a breathtaking pace. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth child, my grandfather struck out for greener pastures. He disappeared. It wasn't all that unusual in the Depression for men to go off in search of work. People in the family believe that he had a job or a series of jobs, but he never sent money back to his family. My grandmother and her children were forced to do whatever they could to survive. I think they were sharecroppers, but they may have only been employees of wealthy farmers. It was a hungry life and a life of great hardship. My father and his brothers and sisters picked cotton for a living. I heard many times about how the stickers on the cotton would just rip through flesh. Even though they worked, they frequently didn't have food.

None of this did much for my grandmother's disposition. According to my father, she was very abusive. His ears were deformed his entire life because of her habit of grabbing an ear and twisting hard when she wanted to make a point. She was also known to hit kids with whatever was readily available at any given moment...a cast iron frying pan, a stick of stove wood. From my own experience with her, her vocabulary of profanity was extensive. She was also known to drink. I believe vodka was the drug of choice, but I think any alcohol would do in a pinch.

My father told me he'd gone into his mom's house one day when he was young and overheard her plotting with her daughter to kill my grandfather. True? Beats me. He also said that he walked in on his mother having sex with someone other than her husband. He told my mom about that and she told me. Here again, I'm not sure it even matters whether those apocryphal tales have any truth to them. The important thing was that it colored everything my father did as an adult. I guess that's how it always is with parents; you spend your entire life trying to avoid living your parents' lives. Unfortunately, that generally means you're still having a crappy life, you're just having a different crappy life than your parents.

Here's the quote of the day:
"History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth." ~ E. L. Doctorow

America Held Hostage Day 1910
Bushism of the day:
"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." —LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

Website of the day: Jain History
http://jainhistory.faithweb.com/