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