Blog

For the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with wonderful writers at the Panama City and Port St. Joe public libraries. How much fun it is to hear the family stories of local heroes and saints. 

If you would like to read about the workshops, please click here.

I love teaching a workshop called Memoir to Fiction–one of the tricky things that happens when you are writing about your family is that you sometimes uncover truths that no one wants to talk about. Therefore, you turn it into fiction! In this way, you can change names, orchestrate events and smooth rough edges, or, do the opposite–imagine “what if.” Since very often we don’t actually know what happened, we have to imagine what could have happened. In the video below, I share some family photos and talk very briefly about the family secrets that led to my writing Annie Laura’s Triumph.

“I want to come home, Mama,” his letter said. Dated April, 1916, this poignant letter from my grandfather to his bride, and the mother of their infant son, was not from the battlefield of World War I.

It was from a battlefield of a very different sort.

By the time my grandfather was two years old, he had lost both of his parents. A kindly aunt took him in, but she had many children of her own to feed. At nine, my grandfather had to quit school to make his own way in the world.

Because he was tall, and older than he looked, he took up work in the lumber camps. How long he stayed I don’t really know.

Peonage labor. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, hundreds of poor men—both black and white—worked in the lumber camps of North Florida and South Alabama. Lumber barons wanted the old growth forests clear cut—the money was good, and the more quickly the massive pines and oaks—many the diameter of a good sized car—the more money poured in.

The work was hard, and the labor pool was scarce. The heavily populated centers of the country were northern rather than southern. Therefore, an incentive to keep the workers was necessary– the workers were kept in virtual slavery. Bonded to their bosses by the money they “owed” for food, clothing and board, most were unable to leave.

I don’t know the circumstances of my grandfather’s lumber camp. He never wanted to speak about it.

In Annie Laura’s Triumph, James (the character based on my grandfather) does not show up for his wedding week. Annie Laura hunts him down, and finds him in a peonage labor camps, a virtual slave. Her quest is to free him and bring him home so that the child that was taken from her at birth—James’s fiancée — might have a chance at a happily ever after. It’s all fiction, of course.

At least as far as I can tell.

I met my cousin, Sandy, nearly a decade ago. She has become my inspiration–the blood of our great-grandmother is strong in her. Sandy is good and kind, and she is relentless in her pursuit of the truth about our family.

She has searched out long-lost cousins for family reunions. There, family members are able to share stories passed down from their mothers and their mothers before them, stories that would be lost if not for the telling.

Annie Laura’s Triumph, takes place fifteen years after Minnie’s child was taken from her. Storytelling at one of those family reunions gave birth to my book.

One of my new-found elderly cousins was a very young girl when Minnie was alive. She remembered Minnie going to Panama City to meet with her lost daughter, my grandmother, Esther Lee Corley Stewart. My cousin couldn’t remember the year, nor anything else.

What happened at that meeting? My grandmother never shared.

My grandmother had a strange habit that embarrassed her children. She wrote on the inside of her closet walls. She filled the clean, white walls with words, then painted over them and wrote more.

The compulsion to write, to understand, to be remembered is the very heart of a writer.  My grandmother’s silence, fueled by the shame of being an illegitimate child, closed a door on the truth that I will never be able to open. If I could go back in time, I would read the writing on those walls. All of it.

I hover around my grandmother’s closet door. I yearn for access. And as I hover, I, like my grandmother, scribble. The words I scribble are books, and this book, Annie Laura’s Triumph, is a book of my heart–my own truth about that secret meeting.

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.