Old letters 1

I am a genealogist.  Well, a sort of lapsed one.  Like a person who isn’t shaking at the moment is a lapsed Malaria sufferer.  I suppose that someday I’m going to have to actually sit down and write about doing this—this ancestor hunting that takes me into dark basements for hours at a time and probably has ruined my eyesight, what with the peering into microfilm-reader dimness and the deciphering of dangnably awful clerical handwriting (what’s the point of writing something down if you’re going to make it illegible?)—which is probably why I now own fifteen pair of reading glasses and can’t ever find any of them.

I blame the wrinkles around my eyes on my ancestors.

So my life is peppered with these genealogical moments.  Some miraculous.  Most of them head-wall bashing.

(I know I am repeating myself.  I just know it.  Do I tell the same stories over and over already?) I spent five years in the basement of the BYU library and in the shadows of the Salt Lake family history library reading endless films of the Abbeville, SC equity court records.  I’ll explain why some other day.  But I’ll explain this now: equity courts are the courts where they take care of things like divorce settlements and land settlements and estate settlements.  Also some law suits.  Guardianships.  Stuff like that. 

Dull, you may think?  Au contraire.

The stories I read.  Umm-umm-ummmmm.  I wonder if I could get a gig writing early nineteenth century soap operas?

The reason I’m bringing this up is because I’ve finished the book I did about my dad’s life and ancestry.  Now, I’ve got to set up my mom’s book.  And pursuant to that, I had to read through a shoe box full of old letters.  I mean OLD letters.  And that, my dears, is the heart of my tale.

I remember reading along in the equities and thinking, “Holy cats!  Did any of these people stop to think that two hundred years after the day when this whole thing was The Most Important Event on the Planet, somebody would be digging up all this self-righteousness and greed and racism and nastiness: that somebody would be saying, “Whoa.  What a witch this little cat was.  Bet he’s sorry her married her.”

Sheesh.  I wouldn’t want anybody peeking into my life that way.  Reading my words and sitting there in judgment.  Not me, boy.  Exposing myself in public like that.

Oh. Wait.

(To be fair, there were also tales of great kindness and integrity—like the man whose will not only freed his slaves, but left all his property to them.  It was contested hotly, of course, by the nephew who had been cut out of the will—with the argument that it was against nature for “Negroes” to own property.  The whole spectrum of human character all in one several page document.)

People like to talk about a “legacy” these days; the legacy evidently being something you leave behind—so that other people can berate you with it later, down the road. For some people, this means a cure for polio or a big beautiful bridge, or some kind of awesome monument.  For the rest of us, it mostly means “how my kids turned out.”  I mean, all those people in those court cases?  Their farms are long gone, covered with houses and parking lots.  Their crops?  Long since eaten and sold.  The horses dead.  The neighbors scattered.  Not much did they leave behind for future generations.  Only kids and their kids’ kids and their kids after that—to prove the ancestors were ever really alive in the first place.  Kids and/or words.  The paper trail.

And either of those “legacies” can earn you a pretty bad rep.

Like the letter from a certain uncle of mine—writing his mother from college about all his adventures settling in.  At the end of the first paragraph, he writes, “Mom—send me a blank check.  I’m completely out—I can’t even pay my house bill.”  And then goes on to tell her about last night’s dance.  He ends with this P.S.: “Don’t be surprised if I write very little between now and the time you see me again. I’m going to be studying continually.”  Uh-huh.

I found several sweet, homely letters from my grandmother’s mama, Maggie.  When I picked one out of the small pile and began to read, I found these  lines, buried in the middle of a mother’s concern for her children and the minutia of domestic life: “Papa is not here, but will give him the socks when he comes.  Haven’t heard from him since he left.  Launa writes that Joe has been sick . . .”  But I didn’t go on to worry about Joe being sick.  I went back and re-read the Papa-is-gone part.  Nobody ever told me that my great-grandfather had run off from his family.  In the same letter, she mentions that she is going o have to give up the house, and that the girls will have to go out and get an apartment on their own.  Maggie simply lays out the facts; there is no complaint in her voice.

A month later, she writes, “Well, your Pa didn’t come home Christmas.  I haven’t heard a word from him since he left.  But have heard where he is—a lady from here saw him in Selina.  Also a man saw him there.  So I suppose he is all right.  I am keeping his presents you sent for him.”

All out of order I found another letter, not dated, but in an envelope postmarked a month before the first one.  As with the others, most of the letter is concerned with hope that my Nana might come home to visit her family and with the business of the other sisters and their kids and husbands—life as it rolls on.  Maggie reports that her son-in-law had gone squirrel hunting and bagged a bunch.  “gave me two.  Well, your papa has gone, left Friday.  Said he isn’t coming back.  But he will.  We had it out before he left.  He denied it all.  Says it is a put up story on him.  He is mad with you and Conway for writing such terrible letters to him – says he will never for get it.  I won’t write you all he said.  I have lost my girls (boarders?).  Hazle and Teddie. They have rented a room to do light housekeeping. I was going to ask them for the room (anyway—but) I hate loosing the money. . .  Did I write you that Albert lost all his corn, in the back water the negros lost theirs too.  So they are in a bad fix as they owe the cotton money. Poor Conway works hard.” [all sic]

In the same envelope, another slightly later letter.  She talks about making lunch for one of her daughters who’d dropped in to visit, and about not feeling well (Maggie was having what sound like TIs), and again asking when my grandmother is coming to visit. (I wonder if she ever did make it?)

 “Well, your papa came home Sunday night . . .” He only came because he was riding with a work friend who had to come see his own wife.  “He is trying to go back.  As he says his business needs him.  Is making a living for (himself)[her parentheses]. That is a help, though.  I want to ask something of you.  When you come home, I want you to speak to your papa.  Even if he has done wrong, he is one in a million.  To do wrong.  It has been going on for years, so I hear.  We all just now finding it out.  Of course it hurts, but he is hurting himself more than any one else.  It made me sick at first but mean to hold my head up.  And want you all to do the same.  I am looking for the pillow slips you said you would send . . . “

Maggie died a year and a half later.  Her husband evidently never did come home.  I had heard a whisper over the years about how my great, great grandmother hated her daughter’s husband, that he’d been a womanizer.  I didn’t think much about it; they were only photograph-people then.  But now I have these letters, and everything has changed.

 My Nana got this letter from her father, Maggie’s husband, a year—almost to the day—after Maggie’s death:

“My dear Margaret and Lucile, I read your nice letter a few days ago and was so glad to hear from Lucile.  I don’t see why you all don’t write me often.  I am always glad to hear from any one of you.  (He fathered nine children in twenty one years.)  He goes on to note that one of his daughters wrote him complaining of back pain, which probably means another baby coming.  “But if I am right I hope it will be a boy and she will name it after her dad—as up to now, not(?) one of the grand children honored me in this way.  Well I am in the hills of Ky. I (?) through a chain of mountains.  I drove around lookout mountain at Chattanogga, Tenn and don’t think but I was scared to death. it was crooked like a snake for miles.  I made it okay with my car. I am some car driver now.  When I get to Louisville I won’t be over 300 miles from Jefferson City, MO.  I might run up and spend a day or so with you all before I get married.  I am (?I think the word is something like sucking) up to a KY widow.  what have you to say old girle about this.  She has about five thousand in the bank and if I can get my hands on this we’ll take the lady.  . .” [again, all sic]

I find that I am disinclined to give him the benefit of a doubt, to assume that he’s just kidding about getting his hands on this woman’s money.  Maybe I’m wrong.  You have to be careful about drawing conclusions, even in real time.  He ends the letter with a loving salutation, but after all that has come before it, I find that it strikes the cynic in me.

And I don’t know – why have I written all of this?  Maybe because I am struck with the trail our choices leave.  That nothing we do stops with us.  And with the odd reality of these people, to whom I somehow belong.  I find questions: obviously, Maggie was a prolific letter writer, but I have only these six or so letters, written in that year and a half period.  Why did Nana keep those, and only those?  Because what we don’t throw away says as much about us as the things we keep, the things we write.   Interesting how I am reading all of this almost one hundred years later, and still taking it so personally.

But I don’t want to end on this note.  So I guess —> to be continued.