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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.

I heard Anita Hill interviewed yesterday. It has been twenty-five years since she and other women testified to the sexual harassment perpetrated by Clarence Thomas. Even after her testimony, Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court by George Bush in 1991.

Anita Hill, now a Professor of Social Policy, Law and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University sees hope in the changes in the law since those dark times. “Victims brave enough to come forward and speak of their abuse empower others who have been abused.”

One bright, hot summer day in the early twenties in Wausau, Florida, my great grandmother, Minnie Clara Brock Gilmore worked in her hard-won fields alongside her daughter, Viney.

At some point during that day, she paused.

Her words must have gone something like this. “There is something I need to tell you. I don’t want you telling anyone else, but someone needs to know.”

I’m sure Viney must have stopped dead in her hoeing or picking or whatever it was she was doing. Her mother’s tone must have been frightening.

What was it that she needed to know? Maybe she stood there and wished her mother would pick someone else to tell her secret to.

But she didn’t. Her mother chose Viney.

“When I was 22 years old, my mother died. Some say my father killed her, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Soon after her death, all of my father’s equipment for casting and making his cooking stoves, all of it was stolen. My father was so overcome with grief over the death of my mother and the loss of his livelihood that he went away and died.

Soon after he died, the county sheriff seized all of our property. I was forced to make my living working on someone else’s farm. My baby sister, Eva, was kidnapped away from me while I was out working. I never saw nor heard from her again. My sister, Annie, was adopted by a kindly woman.

The family I worked for had two sons. One was very kind and good. The other was not. He took advantage of me one day in the north field. My baby girl was taken from me soon after she was born. I grieved myself nearly to death. Your father found me and helped me, and we married and had all of you. Later I found out my first-born was living down in Southport with her adopted parents.

I tell you this so that one day you might meet your sister and love her for my sake.”

 

 

(Continued from August 9)

“My mother told me a story she told me never to repeatl. But I am eighty years old, and I can’t leave this world without telling you the truth about your great-grandmother.”

Was this some sort of trick?  How had she gotten my cell phone number?

“Your great-grandmother was German. Her hair was really thin. So thin that she used to save the extra hair from her brush to thicken her bun.”

This tiny detail made me laugh, but it also made a  lump in my throat and told me she might be telling the truth. Thin hair ran on the female side of my family.

But my father’s pragmatic skepticism grew in my belly. Never trust a stranger.

“My daughter, Sandy, has done a lot of genealogy research. That’s how I found you. She’s a retired teacher from Rutherford High School. She taught math.”

I could Google the truth of that statement pretty quickly.

Still, that didn’t explain how she knew my cell phone number.

“Sandy would like to meet you.”

What harm could there be in meeting a retired math teacher from Rutherford and her mother? My husband and I had experienced so many dead ends in our search for my great-grandmother, that I tried hard not to get my hopes up.

But, I really wanted to hear that story.

I laid down my doubts and invited them over.

Sandy and her mother showed up that very afternoon.

I had a creative writing teacher once—Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler—who chastised us if we defended “truth” in our writing by saying, “but that’s what really happened.”

“Truth,” he said, “is often more absurd than fiction. No one will believe it. Your job as a writer is not to tell the truth. Your job is to create believable fiction.”

The harrowing story Sandy and her mother told made me understand the truth of his statement.

 

Illegitimate–the stigma my sweet grandmother carried with her for her entire life. Her shame fueled my quest.

For nearly two decades, I searched for the truth about the circumstances surrounding her birth. Who was her mother? Why did she give her up for adoption?

My relatives knew nothing. Those who had been living at the time of her birth were long dead.

My husband and I searched every courthouse in the tri-county area for a clue. (This was before Ancestry.com). We leafed through crackling pages of marriage and death certificates. We waded through Spanish-moss cradled graveyards, contacted historical societies, scoured the genealogy section in the local libraries, and made numerous phone calls to relatives and friends.

Each was a new dead end.

My real great-grandmother had been washed away by the sands of time.

But one day, over a decade after my search had begun, my phone rang.

“I have some information about your great-grandmother.”

My heart pounded. How could this stranger possibly know? How did she find me?

Courting in 1915

As a mother of five children—three girls and two boys—I have sent them off in their finest to proms and dances, heard their heartfelt concerns over relationships both good and bad, and given two daughters to fine young men in marriage.

Dating rituals down here in the Florida Panhandle have dramatically changed since my grandmother was courting in 1915. For my grandmother and her friends, courtship came only after the man asked permission of the woman’s family. Once he had the family’s approval, he could court his chosen girl, but they could never be left alone. There was always a chaperone, usually an elderly aunt or family friend who tagged along to keep a close eye so that nothing “went amiss.” The thought was that in this way a man and a woman took the time to get to know each other emotionally and intellectually first before they married.

Annie Laura’s Triumph ends with the fictionalized wedding day of my grandparents. In real life, they, too, courted with a chaperone. Their marriage lasted seventy-one years.

I wonder if we might need to rethink our modern dating rituals?

You can read the fictionalized version of my grandparents’ wedding day in my novel, Annie Laura’s Triumph, published by Mercer University Press.