My new-found cousin, Sandy Moore, arrived at my house one sunny spring afternoon.
Sandy, relentless in her search for the truth about our family history, came across a query I had left on a genealogical website ten years before.
“Esther Lee Corley Stewart, born January 4 1899, Chipley Florida to unknown mother. Father: Benjamin Franklin Ganey. Any information about who her birth mother was would be greatly appreciated.”
“So how did you find me?” I asked Sandy.
She smiled. “That’s mother’s story.”
Her eighty-year old mother’s eyes filled with tears. “I used to sit in my English class at Bay High School and look at your mother and think, I wish I could tell her.”
“Tell her what?” I asked.
“That she was my first cousin. That our mothers were sisters.” The words she’d sworn not to utter decades before burst forth, rattling the windows of my world.
*
Clarence Thomas became a Supreme Court Justice.
Anita Hill didn’t allow this defeat to ruin her life, nor her career. She went on to become a distinguished Professor of Social Justice at Brandeis—one of the most prestigious universities in the country.
My great grandmother, Minnie Clara Bertha Brocksch Gilmore did not allow the shame that must have been heaped upon her head for a sin she did not commit keep her down. She went on to reclaim the land snatched from her by the corrupt sheriff of Chipley, and by the sweat of her brow and the fruit of that land, she raised seven healthy, happy children.
Two precious objects, passed from Minnie’s children, to grandchildren to great-grandchildren remain.
Minnie’s reading lamp, and the German Bible she read every night before she slept.