THE FACTS, MA'AM, JUST THE FACTS

I learned at an early age that facts, meticulously recorded for posterity, are not always the truth.  I was eight years old the summer that Seavy Wooten Brinson, Sr. called at our house, researching his book on my father's family history.  I'll never forget that day because my mother graciously invited him in and proceeded to lie to him about my family tree.

I remember Mr. Brinson, whom I met only once, as a dignified older gentleman.  I seem to recall that he arrived in a large automobile that looked rather too important to be sitting in the dusty driveway of our tiny Jim Walter cottage.  He wore a suit, wire-rimmed spectacles, and carried a briefcase filled with research on the Malpass and Brinson families of North Carolina.  It was obvious that he was going about important business, and I was terribly impressed to know that he was writing a book, and therefore was an author, a word which I had trouble pronouncing, but which I, too, aspired to become.

 It was almost certainly summertime on a week day, for my father wasn't home and I wasn't at school.  It is a late summer sort of memory, filled with the kind of light that has a sepia cast as if the day is passing into history before our eyes, which it certainly was.

My mother was expecting Mr. Brinson for he had been gracious enough to telephone before he came.  She had dressed appropriately for receiving a visitor, with every hair in place, and the living room was even cleaner than usual.  I, too, was coerced into my better play clothes.  It was probably my coordinated short set with the red plaid shorts, collar and cuffs, contrasting against a screamingly white shirt which would betray me by showing even the slightest smudge if I even thought about resorting to my usual activates.

Into this readiness and politeness, walked Mr. Brinson with his briefcase which he opened on the coffee table while chatting with my mother, whose smiles and offers of a glass of ice water hid her intention to lie to him. 

            

She should have warned me, she really should have.

            

As it was, I was taken completely by surprise when she rattled off the names of my Grandma Annie and her brothers and sisters.  At the end of this impressive list of eight children, she added my father as the youngest brother.  

            

"But, Mother!" I protested.  She ignored me.  I pulled on her arm.  "Mother, that's not right!"

            

She still ignored me, shifting so that she blocked me from Mr. Brinson's direct line of sight.  He was focused on his papers, carefully spelling our names so that my own Anne correctly had the "E".

            

"Mother, you're putting Daddy in the wrong family."

            

Then my mother turned upon me her famous dark-eyed glare, the one that could turn a kid to stone.   "Be.  Quiet." she said, and I knew that if I persisted that I would regret it most keenly after Mr. Brinson left.

            

So I sat there, in scandalized obedience as it was recorded for all time that my grandmother was my aunt.

            

When Mr. Brinson drove away, my mother reminded me that though it was true that I was my grandmother's grandchild, and not her niece, that some people still didn't like to say so.  A teenage, unwed mother from the nineteen thirties had a lot of shame to outgrow, so for my grandmother's sake, said my mother, it was best to avoid recording her shame forevermore.

            

"Besides," said my mother, prophetically, "We're probably not the only incorrect entry in Mr. Brinson's book."

            

Thus I learned early and graphically that you can't believe everything that is written down.  As I have researched for my own book about my mother's people, Precious Jewels, A Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga, I have kept this wisdom in mind.  Even census records are not necessarily correct, as in the case where my mother's uncle and aunt, Harry and Ruby Denton, are listed as a brother and sister in the Tom Denton household rather than as husband and wife that they truly were.  I would imagine that this was an error on the part of the census taker, rather than the result of deliberate misdirection, but it goes to show that documenting the facts is a perilous journey.

            

Many years after the publication of Seavy Brinson's The James Malpass Family, 1760-1964, I acquired a copy of my own.  The first thing I did was to cross through the incorrect entry and write in the correction so that, in my copy at least, I am proudly Grandma Annie's grandchild.  For all time.

Pictured: Grandma Annie & Me, some years past

BY THE GRAVE OF UNA PEARL

This is where it begins.  The first scene in Precious Jewels takes place right here, when the inscription on the grave stone was new.  It reads "UNA PEARL, Daughter of Jtun Potts & Carolina P. HOLT, and the dates. 

Una Pearl Holt  was born on Valentine's Day 1895, and died in December of the same year.

There is room around the grave for more plots.  but a hundred years later, Una's grave is a lonely place, encircled only by a ragged wrought-iron fence which has the same crumbling texture as the years-old layering of leaves that cover the sarcophagus.

It is clear that her parents intended to be buried beside her someday, but the family was ripped apart at the seams by the events that came in the wake of this child's death.  At this gravesite.

Instead, her father died in Memphis, and her mother died in the wilderness of coastal Carolina.  Her sisters who were born later, also scattered to the winds, one on the west coast, one on the east.

A hundred years later in the 1990s, my husband Kevin and I found the grave, and I took this photograph.  The grave is located in Yazoo County, Mississippi, on Graball-Freerun Road, across the road from Bethany Church where other family members who died later rest in the newer cemetery in their own enclosed Holt Family section, which has seen better care.  Little Una Pearl appears to have been forgotten, until today as we move aside the brambles and brush aside the leaves, and speak her name. 

Who would have dreamed a hundred years ago, as the young parents mourned beside this same grave, that their great-granddaughter would trace their footsteps to this place?  Would they be surprised to know that their stories mattered so far in the future?

And what about me, I wondered.  Will my life matter later on?  I have no descendents to trace my steps on a sacred journey of discovery a hundred years from now -- but neither did Una Pearl have descendents.  Her life wasn't a year long, yet she changed my entire family history.

Those who change history aren't always the prominent, obvious people, nor those with droves of descendents.  A person whose life impacts future generations could be anyone -- it could be you.  It might even be me.

Which Pharaoh? Which Tunnel? The Problem with Context for Handed-down Stories

A problem with stories that have been passed down orally is their tendency to lose their context.  We often hear these stories as children or as distracted adolescents who don't wonder about the wherefores.  By the time we wonder about the supporting details, the storytellers are gone.

A prime example of this are the Bible stories which were passed down orally for generations.  By the time someone decided to record the Bible stories on something less porous than human memory, some pertinent details had fallen out.  We who write down these things are left with the problem of context.  We know that Moses grew up in the court of a Pharaoh.  The annoying question is WHICH PHAROAH?  Was it Thutmose, whose name resembles that of Moses?  Long answer short: We don't know. 

One trick of the skilled storyteller is vagueness.  In order to tell a story that is no longer complete, we improvise.  So Moses grows up in the court of Pharaoh who has no other name.  His story is so powerful that it transcends the detail.  Most of us don't care who Pharaoh was.  It is Moses' story that grabs us and holds on, and a nameless Pharaoh still serves his purpose by being the antagonist who spurs the Israelites to follow Moses into freedom.

This was my challenge with my grandmother Grace's miracle stories.  Grace, daughter of the star-crossed Jtun and Pearl Holt, believed in miracles in our time.  I grew up hearing Grace's first-hand stories of angels and deliverance.  But if she ever told me where they happened, I wasn't paying attention and neither was anyone else in the family.

In chapter three of Precious Jewels, we come to the first of Grace's miracle stories.  In this story, she encounters an angel in a tunnel when she is a little girl.  As I started pulling the details together to write the book, I realized I didn't have much information beyond the bare bones of the miracle story. 

Where exactly was Grace's tunnel? 

Through census records, city directories, and Seventh-Day Adventist publications of the early 1900s, I was able to trace the steps of the young, headstrong mother and her two little girls, from Yazoo City to Vicksburg to Jackson, Mississippi.  These locations weren't exactly a land o'tunnels. 

As I continued to get online "hits" on Pearl, Ruby and Grace Holt, I found the greatest number to be in Jackson.  Could I convincingly place a tunnel in Jackson, Mississippi?

I feared not.  It seemed an insurmountable problem until I began thinking out of the box.

I pulled up Google's streetview feature and virtually prowled the streets of present-day Jackson with an open mind.  I prowled in the neighborhood where they had lived and attended church, and where Grace's sister Ruby married her red-haired Yankee.  Most of the neighborhood is now an urban wasteland, but as I passed derelict houses and vacant lots, I discovered the W. Pearl Street train trestle.

Large enough to accommodate several train tracks, it is supported by rows of arches disappearing into the dark center.  It looked like a tunnel to me, and I could well imagine the fear it inspired in a little girl nearly 100 years ago, a little girl who had already formed the habit of turning to God when she was afraid.

I sat transfixed in my chair with a goofy grin all over my face.  Maybe rediscovering the location of Grace's tunnel wasn't a cool as seeing an angel, but it felt mighty fine!

So Rudely Interrupted

Tornadoes have ripped through my part of the country, something we aren't accustomed to having.  Eight days without electricity has put me behind and made me irritable even as I counted my blessings -- my loved ones are ok, my home is ok, and the weather is neither too hot nor too cold.  After the storm, most of those 8 days during which I lived like Grace and Ralph in Precious Jewels, were blue-sky days, the sort of days where one can sit on a front porch hammock with a very dear friend, while birds twittered (tweeted?) in the trees, while we waited for rescue.