I come from a
long line of strong, independent, defiant, flawed women. I see myself in all of
them, all the way back to my great-grandmother.
Bertha Gifford, my great-grandmother
Bertha
Gifford, born Bertha Alice Williams, was my mother’s grandmother. She married a
man much older than she, and he was unfaithful. When he died, she married a man
much younger than she. She could, because she was beautiful, but also because
there had to be something—I mean, I never met her—but for a man of 20 to love a
woman of 30, and pursue her, and marry her—there had to be something more than
just carnal lust. Unless she was the one pursuing him, in which case, knowing
these women as I do, he never had a chance.
But Bertha
and Gene were together for decades, faithfully, each committed to the other.
Even when Bertha was accused of poisoning people she had cared for as an
untrained “volunteer nurse” in their community, Gene remained loyal to her. And
even when Bertha went to trial and was subsequently remanded to an institution
for the criminally insane, Gene stuck by her for years, driving down
the long, slow gravel roads of Missouri to see her as often as he could… until
he finally took up with another woman. (Lucky for him she was incarcerated….)
Someone in
their community told a snoopy reporter that Bertha once chased a man off of
their property with a butcher knife. This story was offered as evidence that
Bertha was insane and capable of murder. Was she, though? Because I have
questions about that. Where was Gene when this happened? And for what purpose
had the man come on their property? Because this is what I know about some
men—starting with my stepfather and including men I’ve worked with and men with
whom I once attended church—some men believe that they can take what they want
from a woman, that it’s their role to dominate, her role to submit. Bertha
strikes me as a woman who didn’t cotton to that, a woman who stuck up for
herself, and yes, a woman who would grab a butcher knife from the kitchen when
threatened and stand up to a man and say, “Touch me again and there’s going to
be blood shed and it isn’t going to be mine.” Because I have said these words
to a man, although I did not have any sort of weapon in my hand when I said it.
Is this proof of my own insanity? Am I capable of murder? I will answer a
resounding yes to that, given certain circumstances.
My grandmother, Lila Clara Graham (West/Parrack)
Bertha’s only
daughter was my grandmother, born Lila Clara Graham. Lila, a child from
Bertha’s first marriage, married a Missouri man, but they soon moved to Detroit
so her husband could get in on the growth of this new technology, the
automobile. The marriage didn’t last, but Lila provided for herself by running
a boarding house. Okay, full disclosure, this is what I was told when I was
young. In my thirties, after Lila had passed, and I began to ask some critical
questions of my mother while researching Bertha’s life and alleged crimes, my
mother explained that, well, yes, the establishment was actually a “blind pig,”
the boarding house being a cover for the illegal sale of alcohol during
prohibition.
“A lot of
different people would come and go,” my mother said, “and it wasn’t the best
clientele, if you know what I mean. That’s why my mother sent me down to
Missouri to live with my grandmother. She didn’t want me to be exposed to the
kinds of people who hung around there.”
It wasn’t
until many years after my mother’s passing that I learned from her stepsister
that the “boarding house” was neither hotel nor blind pig. In truth, Lila ran a
brothel. Thus the shady clientele. Thus the need to shield her daughter from
what was actually going on with all those folks quite literally “coming and
going.”
My
grandmother saved enough money in the 1940’s to move to the West Coast. Got
herself a cute little apartment in Los Angeles and took a job as a cook in a
bar. She did this on her own, no man in sight. And this was the grandmother I
knew, the one whose daily uniform, whether at home or at work or visiting our
family in Lakewood, was a comfortable cotton dress with short sleeves and a
full skirt to accommodate her large, round body, covered always with a clean,
ironed apron. She made her own clothes, and she made clothes for me and my
sister. She came to visit often, sitting at the kitchen table with coffee or a
cocktail, snapping green beans or shucking corn, gossiping with Mom about the
neighbors or talking shit about the men in their lives. Until Mom told her to “stop spoiling” us, she
always brought gifts for us kids—coloring books for the girls, those little
balsa wood airplanes with plastic propellers that wound up with a rubber band
for the boys, cinnamon raisin bread, and hugs. Big, soft, laughing Grandma
hugs.
Lila laughed
a lot, clacking her dentures closed so they wouldn’t fall out of her mouth. She
taught me my first Spanish words and phrases— con leche, mañana, café—when
I was Kindergarten age. Because when she came to L.A. and worked in the bar,
she had Spanish-speaking customers. So she learned to speak as much of the
language as she needed to in order to serve her customers. Imagine that.
Lila, my
grandmother, never spoke of Bertha, her mother, never gave a hint that she
lived with this secret… that she lived with so many secrets. When her marriage
ended and she was alone in a big city, she found a way to survive. And when she
could, she pulled up stakes and struck out for the Pacific Ocean, reinventing
herself again. She didn’t have a single relative living in California when she
came here. I wish now I could ask her why she came, what her dream was. I wish
I could ask about her mother. Mostly I just wish I could hug her again and
thank her for my lifelong love of cinnamon raisin toast.
My mom, in uniform
My mother,
Arta Ernestine West, was born to Lila and her husband in Detroit. But she
thought of Missouri as her second home, loved life on the farm with Bertha and
Gene, loved fishing in the Meramec River, loved her horse, Babe, loved school
and winning spelling bees. (I never once beat her at Scrabble, but Lord knows I tried.) She loved James, her uncle, Bertha and Gene’s son, who was four
years her senior. They were hanging out together the day the sheriff drove up
and took Bertha away to jail, the day my mother’s life changed forever and
became one of shame and secrets. Mom had just turned ten.
At twelve,
back in Detroit, she was sent to live with her father and stepmother while she
recovered from an illness.
“Ernestine
was very, very sick,” her stepsister told me. “I hope it’s okay to tell you
this; she had syphilis.” (Years before, a doctor had confided to me privately
that he was treating her for tertiary syphilis. In a terribly awkward
conversation, I tried to explain to my mother, in her late eighties by then,
why he was prescribing certain antibiotics. The conversation did not go well.)
Apparently
one of the customers from the so-called boarding house had… Well, there’s no
need to elaborate… just… more shame and secrets.
My mom left
school and married the first time at age 15 and was divorced a year or so later.
In her early twenties, she roamed around the country, picking up gigs as a nightclub
singer. In 1943, at the age of 25, she enlisted in the branch of service known then
as the Women’s Auxiliary Air Corps, where she learned to drive and service the
large military vehicles used in WWII.
Until my
adulthood, I had no idea Mom had been married three times before she married my
dad. I also didn’t know how bad their marriage had been until a family friend,
a man who’d been the kid down the street from us in the 1950’s, told me the
story of how Mom and Dad had been at the neighbors’ house for a cocktail party
one night and had exchanged heated words. Mom sassed him, and my father slapped
her, at which point my mother grabbed an empty beer bottle and said something
to the effect of “Come on, Pete, come at me again.”
Shades of
Bertha, no?
My father
died in 1963, and my mother, with the GED she earned while in the service,
found a job working as a clerk for a school district. Somehow she managed to
feed four kids and keep us in clothes until we were old enough to care for
ourselves.
As I said, I
come from a long line of strong, independent, defiant, flawed women. And I am
grateful every day for that strength of character, that defiant independence,
that willingness to do what needs to be done in order to survive. When I
divorced, and my husband abandoned his children, refusing to pay child support,
I went to college, earning my degree in four years while raising four kids on
my own and living at the poverty level. People sometimes ask how I did it. This
is what I learned from these women: We do what we have to do to survive.
What I
learned further from these women is that no good comes from carrying the weight
of shame and secrecy. Unlike them—and because of them—I try to live my life in
such a way that my children and my grandchildren can ask me anything, and I can
tell them the truth.
No more secrets.
No more shame.
And because I
believe in life after death, I know that these three women are with me always
in spirit and in power. Lordy, I just wish I could hear what those old gals are
gossiping about now.
