What I Knew Then
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Last fall I began writing my history, so that one day my kids may read it and understand me better. I’m sharing that here, in hopes that maybe someone will relate to my story and feel less alone. Since writing this, I have learned quite a lot about my relatives from genealogical research, but this is what I knew as of 2022. If you know me and see inaccurate information here, I will write more entries to reflect information I learned since 2022.
When asked about my “family”, I rarely know how to respond. What is family when they aren’t really? Are they relatives, defined by shared genetics?
Technically speaking, I was an orphan. Defined by the US Immigration office, a child is considered an orphan due to the “death or disappearance of, abandonment or desertion by, or separation or loss from, both parents”. The American Heritage Dictionary definition of an orphan is “a child who has been deprived of parental care and has not been adopted”. My parents abandoned me when I was just three months old and I was never adopted. Because of their choices, I had a bizarre childhood. Because of their decisions on a fateful day, I became part of a complicated puzzle, enmeshed in a lifetime of lies and secrets, and only on rare occasions, just on the surface, the pieces appeared to fit, but I never felt like I fit.
I feel like for any of this to be comprehensible, I need to introduce my relatives, at least the ones I know about. In my opinion, there is a big difference between “family” and “relatives”. Relatives, to me, are the people with whom you share genetic ties. In my case, I consider my biological parents “relatives” because while I do share a biological relationship, I never lived with them and don’t feel like I really have a close relationship. Family is the people you feel close to. You may or may not share a biological relationship or living space, but they are your people.
My Grandmother — Her Parents’ Daughter
She was an attentive daughter to her mother, a living saint to her friends, and a doting mother to her own children. To outsiders she appeared to be caring and selfless, but living with her, I knew that wasn’t the whole story.
My grandmother was born MAL in 1937 in the North Carolina foothills. She was the oldest of 6 children. She was the big sister and “second mother” to five younger brothers, all of them living in a tiny white house on a sprawling farm with a long dirt driveway. It was so remote that the street didn’t have a name until the 1990s, just a route number, I think it was. The house consisted of a foyer (not in the grand way we think of them today, but more like a tiny room you step into from outside, perhaps more comparable to what we think of as a mud room now), a small living room which led into the kitchen which was also the dining room. Off one side of the living room was a bedroom for the adults, and from the other side was a larger bedroom that all of the children shared. They had a handful of farm animals and grew most of their own food. I think they had an outhouse growing up, though there was running water from a well when I visited as a child. I don’t think my great-grandmother ever got heating other than the wood stove in the middle of the living room or air-conditioning. I do remember when my great-grandmother got a phone, but I couldn’t tell you what year it was other than sometime in the ‘80s.
My grandmother, on the weekends we didn’t visit, would call her mother, or the Sunday after we’d been the previous day. And it was long-distance, back in the ancient times when that was a thing. I always knew by where my grandmother sat or stood how long the call was going to be. Standing by the corded phone attached to the kitchen wall meant a short call. Sitting at the kitchen table meant a little longer. If my grandmother sat in the recliner, it was going to be a while.
My grandmother was born in 1937, toward the end of the Great Depression, and her family had never been and still weren’t well off. They had a house and land for growing their own food and some livestock, but I always got the impression they just scraped by. My great-grandmother made their clothes and hand sewed blankets, a hobby she continued for most of the rest of her life. I still have several of these blankets and think of her when I use them. I study her tiny, often uneven hand stitches that keep me warm. She also canned food and would send us home with preserved food from her garden. There was one summer from my childhood I didn’t think I could eat another canned green bean.
My great-grandmother was born in 1919, which would have made her 10 when the Great Depression began. It must have had some impact because my great-grandmother was a “stuff” hoarder. She’d save every bread bag, scrap of tin foil, wire tie, and plastic container. This would later rub off on my grandmother as she got older.
My grandmother’s parents were religious, strict, and adhered to rigid gender roles. Her father and the boys would go “to town” and the women had to stay home. I don’t think they all went to church, but her father would preach sermons to them. Women were not to speak on religious matters, and that expectation of silent acquiescence from women applied to all aspects of life. According to my grandmother, her father was strict, expecting complete obedience, and when the kids disobeyed them, he would send them outside to choose their own switch from a tree. If they chose one that was too small, he would send them right back out there to find a larger one. I never knew him because he died when I was 2.5 years old.
I spent much more time with my great-grandmother and knew more about my grandmother’s relationship with her. Her name was FWL, but we all called her “Mama L”. Though my great-grandmother lived 1.5 hours away, my grandmother would do her grocery shopping in Charlotte and then we would load up the car and drive them “up home” to Rutherfordton on the weekends. Once the groceries were put away, we would have lunch. When I was younger, my great-grandmother would cook homemade lunch, including fried chicken, creamed corn, biscuits and chocolate gravy. My favorites were what she called “funny biscuits” which were the little bits leftover from cutting the actual biscuits. As she got older and stopped cooking as much, we would stop by a fast food place closer to her house and pick up food for all of us. I remember it was usually Arby’s “5 for 5” roast beef sandwiches or the occasional pizza from Pizza Hut after we learned my great-grandmother liked pizza. After lunch, when we were younger, my great-grandmother would give me, and my cousins if they were there too, kitchen spoons so we could go scratch around in that red dirt driveway. Once I was older, I liked sitting by her woodstove and listening to everyone talk. I still remember how her house smelled like that wood stove in the winter. Every now and then I get a whiff of burning wood from our fire place, long after the fire is out, and it takes me right back to my great-grandmother’s living room.
My great-grandmother had no interest in going to the grocery store or any store, I don’t think, though it’s possible that my grandmother never offered as an opportunity for her to do her own shopping. Not knowing what was actually available, great-grandmother would decide she wanted the most impossible-to-find things. A very specific bra, socks with no seams, or a housedress that hadn’t been produced in years. My grandmother, the dutiful eldest daughter, would spend time going from store to store back in Charlotte, trying to find these items that would please her mother the following weekend. Her 5 brothers all lived closer to their mother, some even living on the same property, but it was always up to my grandmother to go on these scavenger hunts. I don’t think my grandmother ever once expressed any irritation to her mother, no matter how many times she rejected the things her daughter brought to her. Thinking back now, I feel a little bad for my grandmother because she was trying so hard to please her mother and never seemed to get it right.
But that was the great-grandmother I remember, which probably partially explains why my grandmother went to college to try to start her own very different life. She went to Appalachian State, which wasn’t too far away, but I’m sure for her in 1955, it was a complete culture shock. According to my research on Ancestry.com, she majored in education, but according to her, she only went to college for a semester before getting married and moving to Georgia. She had her first and second child there in the late 1950s, then moved to a three bedroom brick house on a dead-end street in Charlotte where she had a third child, my mother, in 1961.
My Grandmother — My Mother’s Mother
In her early adulthood it seems like my grandmother was trying to break away from her own upbringing. She was from the country but moved to the “up and coming” part of Charlotte at the time. She and her husband kept a picture-perfect lawn and their house was much nicer than the one she grew up in. She didn’t take up sewing or canning or growing her own food, though it sounds like she did a fair amount of cooking for her growing family. She had at one point dreamed of getting a college degree and having a career as a teacher, but she seemed to enjoy staying home to make a home for her kids and all of their friends. Unlike her mother, she learned to drive. I don’t know if she raised her kids by Dr. Spock’s advice, but she had one of his books on the shelves in the hallway.
They had nice furniture in the living room for guests and a record player with huge speakers and a sizable record collection. The rooms were all small, but nice. The den had a La-Z-Boy recliner and another sofa in front of “lawyer’s paneling” (which was how you you had made it back then) adorned with photos of her children. Every year there were new professional photos of her children, and later on, me. My uncle had his own room with a red carpet that he chose. My mother and her older sister shared a room with olive green carpet. They had a driveway full of new cars, lined from the street all the way to the carport in the manicured backyard.
Like her upbringing, my grandmother’s outlook was very religious. Not in the “church every Sunday” sense, because we didn’t go to church, but “hellfire and brimstone” was a constant theme. She looked up to Billy Graham and held onto her Southern Baptist roots. She also thought women shouldn’t have the right to vote and shouldn’t participate in politics. Her reasoning behind this was that if women didn’t vote the same way and their husband, they were “canceling out” his vote. To this day, I don’t think she has ever voted, even though she is no longer married and her vote wouldn’t negate a that of her husband.
She stayed home with her kids for most of their childhood and according to her stories, they all had the perfect life together. She kept the house very neat and the kids pitched in to help on the weekends. The yard was immaculate and they regularly won “yard of the month”, which was a huge bragging point. The front of the house was lined in pink and white azaleas and there were roses along the fence in the backyard. My grandmother told me that my grandfather would mow, then lie on the sidewalk to look across the front yard to see if he’d missed any blades of grass. He had a broom handle with a nail driven in one end to pick up leaves as they fell so the yard would stay immaculate. She’d cook dinner and bake cakes with vanilla frosting on one half and chocolate on the other so everyone had exactly what they liked. Eventually, once all of her kids were in school, she took a part-time job at a store. I think I remember her calling it the “advance store” but I’m not sure what that might have meant in the late 1960s/early 1970s in Charlotte. I think she was selling tires, but it was before my time and my memory is fuzzy on that detail.
I don’t know what she was really like in the 1970s as her kids got older. To hear her tell it, their life was perfect, but knowing my mother wasted no time escaping makes me question how perfect things actually were. I suppose she kept working and her husband worked two or three jobs so they could have the lifestyle they wanted. They had their perfect lawn, roses along the fence and azaleas in the front of the brick house, a yard full of dogs, and a driveway full of new cars, adding another as each child got their driver’s licenses.
There are photos of Christmas gatherings, full of wrapped presents and when the house was filled to the brim with her kids and all of their friends. Some of the very few photos I had of the man I knew as my father are of him unwrapping some of these presents at Christmastime. In the den you can see the CB radio in the background and they all had bird-related handles. My grandmother’s CB handle was “mother hen” because the house was always filled with her teenaged kids and their friends. I’m sure their life was stressful, especially with her husband working 2 and 3 jobs, but to hear her tell it, those were the happy times.
My Grandfather — Big Daddy
My grandfather, BHH, nicknamed “Big Daddy”, died when I was one, but I grew up hearing from everyone how great “Big Daddy” was. He was a strict disciplinarian, expected a lot from his children, but he was also kind. He was a hard worker, always able to provide for his family. He was proud of his kids. I can see from the few photos I have that he didn’t smile much, but he was always around.
According to my research, I found that he was born in 1936 in North Carolina. In the 1940 Census, his name was spelled differently, and he was the second-youngest of six children. His father’s occupation was “farmer” and they lived in Sulphur Springs, North Carolina. In the 1950 Census, he was listed as being 14 and a part-time farm helper working 18 hours a week. His family had moved to Union, a small city in Rutherford county, North Carolina, which doesn’t appear to be too far from my grandmother’s family home.
I’m not sure how or when he and my grandmother met, but they were married in May of 1956 and had their first child, a son, in 1957, in Georgia. They named him after his father. They then had a daughter in Georgia, before moving to Charlotte, NC and having their youngest daughter, my mother, in 1961.
They lived in Charlotte, and “Big Daddy” worked as a clerk at a transport company, according to his obituary. I vaguely recall stories about him working for a trucking company and possibly also a paper company at some point. Working the types of jobs that he did, it makes sense that they had a CB radio in their den.
I have precious few photos of him, along with a hastily ripped obituary from the newspaper. Those seemed important and I kept those, along with the photos of my father, like puzzle pieces I knew I would eventually need. In one photo, it appears it’s my first birthday in 1981, and he’s in his brown leather chair, holding me up with a big grin on his face. I’m wearing a white dress with pink flowers and bows, white lace tights, and white baby shoes. I have what seems like a fearful look on my face. In other photos from that day, I have the same expression so I doubt it had anything to do with him, but maybe more because of the noise and commotion during my Strawberry Shortcake-themed party. I look tired, with bags under my little eyes.
In another set of photos, it has snowed, just enough to coat the grass, in true Charlotte style. “Big Daddy” is wearing jeans, brown leather bedroom slippers, and a light brown jacket that is perhaps corduroy. I’m wearing what looks like a yellow hoodie, red sweatpants, and Mickey Mouse slippers. He’s gripping my left arm and my grandmother, in her short sleeves and jeans, is showing me the snow in her hand. Again, I look tired and possibly like I am sick. I can only wonder who was behind the camera that snowy day.
There are two more photos of “Big Daddy” before he died, both of my grandfather in his leather chair next to the CB radio, holding me, but neither of us are smiling for the camera. The only photo I have where he is smiling is the one from my first birthday party.
He had a lifelong interest in gardening and even though he was having some health issues that prompted him to see a doctor. He was scheduled to see a specialist on a Monday and despite being told to take it easy, he went out to work in the garden that weekend. I am unsure where this garden was located, but he went with his two son-in-laws. He had a heart attack while working in the garden and died Saturday, May 30, 1981, just eleven days after their 25th wedding anniversary. He was only 45 years old.
He is buried at Holly Springs Baptist Church in Forest City, North Carolina. My grandmother never visited his grave, that I can remember. Oddly enough, in the torn and yellowed obituary I have from the newspaper, my grandmother is not listed as one of his survivors. Just another mystery.
