My birthmother was born within a day of 4 years after my Daddy. Just the thought of her shaped my life possibly more than anyone (arguable). An invisible force in my childhood with an abusive mother, I could imagine her to be anything – but mostly I though of her as someone who would one day come sweeping in and saving me from the mother who was raising me.
I was told she was an unwed teenage mother, who got pregnant in high school and had to “give me up” as was the custom of middle-class people of the time. The truth was so much darker.
The 7th of 7 children, Joyce was born to a father born in Judsonia, Arkansas in 1895. He somehow escaped the draft of WWII, but he’d served in WWI at age 23 back in 1918. Pictures of him at the time show a dark haired, lean man with sharp features and a truly piercing stare. He worked as a painter in one of the car manufacturing plants (Buick) of Michigan. A hard drinker, he was rarely at home. He died on a cold February day in Flint about a month from his 48th birthday from either 1) being hit by a car while walking in the middle of the road one morning on his way to work, or 2) being in an auto accident. No one living can recall the exact circumstances. His second wife, Beulah, is reported as deceased on his death certificate. His first wife, Agnes, was still living at the time. What haunted him throughout his life is lost to time.
Joyce’s mother, my maternal grandmother, was born to a half-Cherokee woman named Vashti who had rejected the land grants of the Dawes Rolls in the late 1800’s, not trusting white people, but needing to pass for one herself. Vashti was also desecended from west African slaves and we all have the ability to tan deeply when exposed to sunlight as a result. Vashti would marry several times and I don’t know what events led her children astray, but astray they went.
Agnes was a very serious alcoholic who lost custody of all her children shortly after my mother was born. The 6 girls and one boy went from foster care, to State care, to Catholic orphanages, and everywhere in between. None were adopted and my conversations with Joyce about it were typically met with “I don’t want to talk about it.” Joyce met Agnes for the first time in 1951 when her mother was dying of breast cancer and the State of Michigan saw fit to release my 18 year old mother from “the system” to care for her. In the middle of all this, my mother met and married a man almost immediately after leaving the orphanage. Her son, my half-brother, Neil, was born 2 weeks after Agnes died.
The family says that neither Agnes nor Vashti could settle in and find a place in a world that rejected both Native Americans and African Americans, but both are listed as white on their birth certificates. This is likely because Vashti never got one until she was in her 40’s and was on husband #3 or so by then. Agnes drank her way through it. Vashti, on the other hand, married her way to Chula Vista, CA where she died at the ripe old age of 89.
The backstory is obviously more complicated than even this summary, but my biological father and my adoptive mother probably bring even more drama to the table starting in 1935. I’ll go there next time.