Inheritance
When I was a child, my paternal grandmother would send my sister and I greeting cards for every major and minor American holiday. Like clockwork, the envelopes with grand cursive handwriting, stickers, and a stamped return address would arrive in the mail several times a year: on Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. The cards were cute but forgettable, and we were always giddy to receive the $2 bills enclosed for us to buy ice cream. My mother, divorced from my father since I was six years old, would dutifully drive us to the Baskin Robbins on the other side of town, my grandmother’s favorite, to get cones of pink bubblegum ice cream. My favorite.
When Grandmother Elizabeth passed in 2002, her funeral was hastily performed with only my father and his wife present in Houston, Texas. My sister and I were not even informed until it was all said and done. About a week after her death, my dad took us on a 4 hour roadtrip to retrieve things from her house. The trip was a surreal blur. One of the things I took, and the only thing that has still moved around with me after all these years, is a ziplock bag full of her stickers that used to adorn all those greeting cards.
After her death, my already tenuous relationship with my father’s white family started to completely dissolve. When making this publication, I uncovered a final email from my aunt, his sister, from 2011. The last thing I ever received was a dense block of family history breadcrumbs, excerpted below. I’ve never been able to verify her claims, so the inheritance feels like someone’s else. By then my father was already long estranged.
When he had the psychotic break in 2020, it also felt like it was happening to someone else. No answers, only questions. Only ghosts remain as an inheritance. Holes and/or abstract shapes where there once was something
Questions to ask about the Williams/Meitzen genes and environment that you inherited: ask about the radical Socialist background of the family (Eugene Debs visited the Meitzens in Hallettsville — the US government shut down the nationwide newspaper published by the Meitzens in WWI) that became subverted into conservative Republicanism in my childhood (because of fear of McCarthyism). How about the Philacrucian sect that the Williams family (through your great-grandfather Ellis’s family) participated in (Texas emigres from Tennessee) — a Christian Sufi-like mystical tradition. How about why Grandma Elizabeth suffered from chronic and severe depression and how that may have affected her children (and it did). How you have a great-great-grandmother who was Cherokee (through the Williams side). How the Frazier family came over the Oregon trail as pioneers in covered wagons. Add that to the richness of the heritage you received from your mother and realize what a unique meeting of genetics and environment you represent — and perhaps a source of your native creativity. Just some suggestions.
