Tuesday – A Branch In the Shadows
Jul. 20th, 2010 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
.
.
Finding the an old family photograph of my mother and her maternal grandparents last week got me thinking about family trees and the branches that grow off of them. My mother once told me a story about a branch of her father’s family tree – or at least the rumor of one – and how she may have brushed up against it one day when she was a teen-aged girl. My mother liked to collect stories, and she liked to tell these stories to her children. On a few occasions I asked some of my cousins if they had ever heard about this particular story, about this possible forgotten (severed?) branch of the family, and none of them had. Their mothers were not like mine, though, and even if they had heard the story they would not have told it to their children since it involves what would have been a scandal at the time it happened.
The story is that my grandfather, Henry Clay Harding, had an uncle who fell in love with a woman the law said he could not marry because he was white and she was black. My grandfather was born 1902, and if I am to assume that his uncle was born within a few years of his own father, I would also have to assume this romance blossomed either in the 1890s or 1900s, when miscegenation laws were solidly on the books in Texas and other Southern states. Undeterred, my uncle and his beloved took up residence with each other. Since she was not allowed to live amongst his family and friends, he moved in amongst hers.
“He called her his wife, and she called herself Mrs. Harding,” my mother told me, “and their children were also given the Harding name.” Her relatives called these offspring yard children, a term I’ve never heard anywhere else but the meaning of it came to one day like a light bulb going off over my head, when it occurred to me why they were called that by their white aunts, uncles and cousins and why it didn’t apply in their case. At one time, there were certain branches of my family that had money, and before the Civil War in the 1860, those branches owned slaves. Not unlike the case of Sally Hemings’ children in Thomas Jefferson’s household, there were two classes of children: those children of the master’s wife (“house children,” if you will) who looked like the master, and those children who also looked like the master but whose mothers were slaves. These were children that you saw in the yard as you approached the home, but never inside of it.
My grandfathers’ cousins, though, were not yard children and should not have been called by that name: they lived the house with both of their parents. They were simply their father’s children, whether his relatives wanted to accept it or not. My mother was told that her father played with his mixed-race cousins as a child, though as an adult he would deny they existed and get angry at anyone who suggested they might.
“But I trust the people who told me this, and I heard it from more than one person, so I think it was probably true,” she said. She never told me the names of her sources, or how they were related to her.
She thought she may have brushed up against this branch of the family one day when she was about 14. She was in a store in the city of Bryan, Texas one day and also in the store that day were three black teen-aged girls, who were apparently sisters. Her ears perked up when someone addressed the three girls by their last name…which just so happened to be the same as my mother’s – Harding. She described the sisters as light skinned and “very, very pretty.” If I were to show you pictures of my mother and her sisters as young women, you would notice that “very, very pretty” was a Harding family trait as far as its young women went.
My mother wondered that day, for the rest of her life, if these young women might have been her second cousins. If she had been 25 or 30 when the encounter had happened, I think I knew my mother well enough that she would have approached them and found a way to ask. But at 14, living in segregated Texas in the 1940s, she wasn’t yet confident or bold enough to do that. For one thing, there was the scandal about their grandparents – if they were who my mother thought they might be - living together without being legally married. My mother was raised in a fire-and-brimstone Baptist church that makes your typical conservative Baptist church look as easy-going as a Methodist one.
Decades later my mother still struggled with whether or not this was okay, and in the end she reconciled it this way: “Since he loved her and considered her to be his wife, and since she loved him and considered him to be her husband, and since the only reason they were not married was because they law wouldn’t let them be, I guess they were married in God’s eyes.”
And so, long after he and his wife were dead and their children and their children’s children were forgotten from the bloodline, my mother blessed her great uncle’s marriage even though the state of Texas never did.
I am the heir of my mother's stories, musings, and curiosity. When she was growing up she heard a rumor that this branch of her family existed, and she passed it along to me before she died. I figure I might as well write it down now that social mores (and laws) have changed and the world is passed caring about such scandals. I also inherited her curiosity about the three sisters she encountered at the five and dime store in downtown Bryan, Texas, circa 1947. I wonder if they might have filled in the gaps of this tale, and perhaps shed some light on an old family story. By now they would be women in their 70s or 80s or, like my mother, long dead. What was once so scandalous that my grandfather exploded in a burst of anger at whoever brought it up is now a curious footnote ending in a question mark, and nothing more.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
.
.
Finding the an old family photograph of my mother and her maternal grandparents last week got me thinking about family trees and the branches that grow off of them. My mother once told me a story about a branch of her father’s family tree – or at least the rumor of one – and how she may have brushed up against it one day when she was a teen-aged girl. My mother liked to collect stories, and she liked to tell these stories to her children. On a few occasions I asked some of my cousins if they had ever heard about this particular story, about this possible forgotten (severed?) branch of the family, and none of them had. Their mothers were not like mine, though, and even if they had heard the story they would not have told it to their children since it involves what would have been a scandal at the time it happened.
The story is that my grandfather, Henry Clay Harding, had an uncle who fell in love with a woman the law said he could not marry because he was white and she was black. My grandfather was born 1902, and if I am to assume that his uncle was born within a few years of his own father, I would also have to assume this romance blossomed either in the 1890s or 1900s, when miscegenation laws were solidly on the books in Texas and other Southern states. Undeterred, my uncle and his beloved took up residence with each other. Since she was not allowed to live amongst his family and friends, he moved in amongst hers.
“He called her his wife, and she called herself Mrs. Harding,” my mother told me, “and their children were also given the Harding name.” Her relatives called these offspring yard children, a term I’ve never heard anywhere else but the meaning of it came to one day like a light bulb going off over my head, when it occurred to me why they were called that by their white aunts, uncles and cousins and why it didn’t apply in their case. At one time, there were certain branches of my family that had money, and before the Civil War in the 1860, those branches owned slaves. Not unlike the case of Sally Hemings’ children in Thomas Jefferson’s household, there were two classes of children: those children of the master’s wife (“house children,” if you will) who looked like the master, and those children who also looked like the master but whose mothers were slaves. These were children that you saw in the yard as you approached the home, but never inside of it.
My grandfathers’ cousins, though, were not yard children and should not have been called by that name: they lived the house with both of their parents. They were simply their father’s children, whether his relatives wanted to accept it or not. My mother was told that her father played with his mixed-race cousins as a child, though as an adult he would deny they existed and get angry at anyone who suggested they might.
“But I trust the people who told me this, and I heard it from more than one person, so I think it was probably true,” she said. She never told me the names of her sources, or how they were related to her.
She thought she may have brushed up against this branch of the family one day when she was about 14. She was in a store in the city of Bryan, Texas one day and also in the store that day were three black teen-aged girls, who were apparently sisters. Her ears perked up when someone addressed the three girls by their last name…which just so happened to be the same as my mother’s – Harding. She described the sisters as light skinned and “very, very pretty.” If I were to show you pictures of my mother and her sisters as young women, you would notice that “very, very pretty” was a Harding family trait as far as its young women went.
My mother wondered that day, for the rest of her life, if these young women might have been her second cousins. If she had been 25 or 30 when the encounter had happened, I think I knew my mother well enough that she would have approached them and found a way to ask. But at 14, living in segregated Texas in the 1940s, she wasn’t yet confident or bold enough to do that. For one thing, there was the scandal about their grandparents – if they were who my mother thought they might be - living together without being legally married. My mother was raised in a fire-and-brimstone Baptist church that makes your typical conservative Baptist church look as easy-going as a Methodist one.
Decades later my mother still struggled with whether or not this was okay, and in the end she reconciled it this way: “Since he loved her and considered her to be his wife, and since she loved him and considered him to be her husband, and since the only reason they were not married was because they law wouldn’t let them be, I guess they were married in God’s eyes.”
And so, long after he and his wife were dead and their children and their children’s children were forgotten from the bloodline, my mother blessed her great uncle’s marriage even though the state of Texas never did.
I am the heir of my mother's stories, musings, and curiosity. When she was growing up she heard a rumor that this branch of her family existed, and she passed it along to me before she died. I figure I might as well write it down now that social mores (and laws) have changed and the world is passed caring about such scandals. I also inherited her curiosity about the three sisters she encountered at the five and dime store in downtown Bryan, Texas, circa 1947. I wonder if they might have filled in the gaps of this tale, and perhaps shed some light on an old family story. By now they would be women in their 70s or 80s or, like my mother, long dead. What was once so scandalous that my grandfather exploded in a burst of anger at whoever brought it up is now a curious footnote ending in a question mark, and nothing more.
