My mysterious great aunt has an official archive, apparently. While trying to get my hands on it, I’ve run up against some of the microfilm problems Nicholson Baker detailed in Double Fold.
 

Some background: In November, I learned that Maude Newton Simmons, my great-great aunt and (self-given) namesake, was a teacher, an architectural drafter, and a dealer of King Midget cars. The 1977 Delta Democrat-Times profile I unearthed even included a photograph of her, at 92, looking out the window of her vehicle. (That Newspaper Archive subscription was so worth it.)

Shortly after posting about the article, I typed her full married name into Google — you’d think I would’ve done this before — and discovered that Maude was also a writer of sorts. No wonder the family was so cagey about her.
 

Astonishingly, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History maintains a “Maude C. (Newton) Simmons collection” devoted to a newspaper column that she published from 1960-1970.

This collection consists of two 35 mm, positive microfilm rolls of newspaper articles, newsclippings, and correspondence of Maude Newton Simmons. The materials are generally not organized by date or format.

The majority of the newspaper articles by Simmons are typewritten and undated. However, there are a few handwritten articles, and several articles are annotated with her corrections. Her “Drew Doings” articles contained a number of subheadings that varied with each issue. Each article in the column concerned a variety of subjects, including births, deaths, church and school news, politics, sports, topics of community interest, visitors, and poetry composed by Simmons or published authors.

So essentially these are church supper bulletins, but also Civil Rights-Era dispatches from the Mississippi Delta.
 

I’m nervous to read what Maude had to say, but of course I called the library immediately. After several letters back and forth, and a check that was mailed and returned, I’ve learned that the microfilm is badly eroded, and that there are too many pages for the library’s research staff to photograph.

Short of hopping on a plane to Jackson, I’m going to need to purchase copies of the microfilm reels themselves, from an independent vendor, to the tune of a couple hundred bucks. Then I’ll have to figure out the best way to read them. The good people at Ask MeFi had some excellent suggestions. If you have any to add, please drop me a line.

Maud is a nickname now, one most of my friends call me, but it started as a pen name. I chose it years ago as a sort of homage to Maude Newton, my great-great aunt, a woman nobody wanted to answer questions about.

For the longest time, I only really knew about her marital separation by peppering. Then census data told me her husband’s last name: Simmons. And in a letter earlier this fall, my granddad’s cousin mentioned that Maude was a schoolteacher.
 

Now here she is, above, at 92, in her King Midget, The World’s Lowest-Priced Car. The photo is taken from James Dickerson’s May 1977 story for the Delta Democrat-Times.

Apparently Maude had seen the company’s ad in National Geographic and called up to say that she’d like to be the Midget Motor Corp dealer for Sunflower County, Mississippi. The top brass were amenable.

When her first King Midget arrived on the train from Athens, Ohio, more than 12 years ago, Mrs. Maude Simmons, 92, of Drew said that Main Street was filled with curiosity seekers.

“It was my first car,” Mrs. Simmons said. “And I couldn’t drive an inch. The man who taught me was a driving instructor at the local school, and he taught me all I needed to know in about two or three days.”

Although she got a deal on the car, which cost her $500, Maude told Dickerson “it was not an easy decision to make.”

“‘My family didn’t want me to do it,’ she said. ‘So I listened to them for about a year. Then I wrote the company anyway and told them to send me a car.’”
 

As for the King Midget itself, Dickerson reports:

Not everything has worked out the way she planned, though, over the years she has been unable to sell a single King Midget…. But there are also advantages of a unique sort.

“I ran off the road once,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it, when some fellow came along and helped me out. It wasn’t any trouble at all. He just pulled it out of the ditch by hand.”

The article also reveals that Maude’s house was filled with books and magazines, and that she met Simmons in Indiana, where she had a job in an architectural office. “‘I learned how to do house plans there,’” she explained. “‘In fact, I did the plans for this very house I’m living in right now.”
 

She also remembered teaching in southern Mississippi “‘when we had Halley’s Comet.’” “‘That was 1910, the year Mark Twain died,’” she adds. “‘When the comet came over we all went outside to have a look.’”

Twain was born shortly before it passed, and died the day after its return. “It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet,” he reportedly said. “‘The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”

Like most people, Maude, who was born in 1885, got to see the comet only once. She died in 1981, at the age of 97.
 

I always assumed this caginess was limited to my little branch of the family tree, but recently I tracked down my granddad’s cousin, now 83, to see if he could verify that Jesse Newton, Arkansas spiritous liquors retailer, is in fact our ancestor. He could not.

“We had the same problem that you had,” he told me. “We just could not get anyone to give us information — it was as if the Newton family started with Minnie.”
 

He theorizes that we’re related to the Newton Boys, “America’s most successful bank robbing family,” which would sort of delight me, actually. A recent (fascinating) article in Hill Country Magazine describes them this way:

By the time they were captured (after a $3 million train robbery near Chicago in 1924), the “Newton Boys” had netted more loot than the James Gang, the Dalton Boys and Butch Cassidy combined. During that time, they had never killed anyone, and (in their rare daytime crimes) were famous for the courtesy with which they treated their victims.

But while their family was descended from a Jesse Newton of Arkansas, and mine probably was too, they’re not the same man. So far I haven’t found any tie between our lines, just similar names and close proximity.

Pretty Boy Floyd (above), on the other hand, appears to be my 8th cousin on my dad’s mother’s side.
 

Knowing my Newtons, I can’t rule out the possibility that they were cagey about their background not because they actually had anything to hide, but because they feared their ancestor might be mistaken for someone disreputable. Which is kind of funny given that their mantra was always loyalty to blood.

When I severed ties with my dad, my grandparents froze me out for a while. First my granddad sent a warning. “What’s happening up there?” he wrote. “Are you changing your e-mail also? It must be serious to cause you to cut your roots. Better think about it long and hard.”

I am, Grandpa, I am. Just not in the way you intended.
 
 

In honor of Cousin Pretty Boy: At his blog about WPA writers, David Taylor recently posted about the “1930s outlaws who capitalized on the unpopularity of banks to boost their popular support. You see reflections of that atmosphere in the WPA guides and in the stories the WPA writers gathered.” He ends with a quote from that Woody Guthrie song.

An aggressive vaccination campaign began in the region around the same time, but perhaps it took a while for word to reach the provinces, or maybe traveling for the shot seemed too cumbersome or securing it was too costly.
 

The year was 1932. The Great Depression was in full swing and abandonment was on the rise. Bonnie’s parents had already divorced a few years before, leaving her to live as a boarder, apparently in the house of a family friend or a stranger, by the time of the 1930 census.

It’s unclear who was caring for her toward the end of her short life.

Judging from studies of children’s living conditions at the time, Bonnie’s predicament was not terribly unusual.

By 1930 most states had passed compulsory school attendance laws for those under sixteen, established public high schools (although many were segregated), and placed restrictions on the industrial employment of young people under fourteen years of age. In addition, medical science had made great strides in treating and preventing childhood diseases such as diarrhea, rickets, and diphtheria.

Child welfare experts attending President Herbert Hoover’s 1930 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection pointed to the progress that had been made for American children. In his opening address, Hoover waxed sympathetic about the value of children, but there were few positive results from the 1930 conference. The Hoover administration seemed to turn a blind eye to the worsening economic conditions for youngsters and their families. Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, a medical doctor, argued in 1932 that the economic Depression could actually be good for children. Families with less money to spend, Wilbur concluded, would be forced to depend upon each other and live a more wholesome home life.

It was obvious to many others that a growing number of American children and their families were living in miserable conditions during the worsening economic crisis. By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933 it was clear that children were experiencing some of the Depression’s worst consequences. While the national divorce rate did not rise, desertion became more common. Although infant mortality rates had continued to fall during 1931 and 1932, they were climbing again by 1933 for the first time since such data had been collected in the United States. With unemployment rates at 25 percent, many families that had been middle-class during the 1920s slipped into poverty, contributing to rising incidence of hunger and malnutrition among children and adolescents. Psychological stress on adults resulted in domestic violence and child abuse. School districts ran out of money, classrooms became more crowded, school years were shortened, and many young people dropped out of school to seek work. Cash strapped business owners and parents ignored or intentionally violated existing child labor laws. Franklin Roosevelt noted that one-third of America’s citizens were ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. Of those, the majority were children.

For more, see Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters From Children of the Great Depression. I was also interested to read this 1930 Atlantic article on high medical bills and poverty. Amazing how little progress we’ve made.

The image at the top of this post, obviously, is part of a public awareness campaign for polio. I haven’t been able to locate any older diphtheria posters online.

A few months ago, I re-posted some of my Texan grandmother’s expressions. Since then, my sister and I have thought of a few more that circulated in our family. Two or three are Granny’s, but more are our mom’s:

You sound like a dying cow in a hailstorm. Said to a whining child — i.e.,, when I was a kid, me — or, in the third person, about someone who can’t sing well. One of my mother’s favorites.

Looks like they had a real rip-snorter. Means a large, fun event or occurrence, but often (at least when Mom said it) used sarcastically.

He blinked at me like a frog on a lily pad. Said when someone is acting smug or cagey. Also Mom’s.

She couldn’t find her butt with both hands. Another Mom classic. Pretty self-explanatory.

Don’t that just take the rag off the bush? I.e., isn’t it appalling? (I never understood the derivation of this one, but found an explanation online: people used to dry laundry on hedges, and occasionally people stole the rags.) This was Gran’s saying, not Mom’s.

We had a real toad strangler. A bad rainstorm.

He’s all hat and no cattle. A show-off or big talker, with nothing to back up the bragging.

Don’t just sit there looking like a tree full of owls. I.e., don’t look so surprised. Said to a group.
 

More from readers’ email and comments left beneath my Facebook thread on the subject:

Greg Wicker reminded me of “Shit fire and save matches!” In my family, used as an expression of surprise and often abbreviated as “Shit fire!” (“Fire,” incidentally, is pronounced “fahr.”)

Michael Schaub, who recently moved from Austin to Portland, sent in a couple that are new to me but quintessentially Texan in formulation and tone: “My grandfather, from San Antonio, used to say about someone he didn’t like: ‘If I ordered a whole trainload of sons of bitches, and they only sent him, I’d accept the shipment.’” And another from his grandpa, “about people who kept doing things incorrectly despite being taught otherwise: ‘You buy ‘em books and you buy ‘em books, and they just chew on the covers.’”

M.E. Parker reminds me of some I’ve definitely heard from the mouths of Dallasites: “I swear, that boy could talk a dog off a meat wagon.” “Hell, she couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.”

Lyrissa Lidsky, also a Texan, says, “My father always talks about people who are educated beyond their intelligence, which is pretty much self-explanatory but very useful in my line of work.” She also gives a shout out to the ever-popular “That dog won’t hunt,” popularized by LBJ.

Jack Pendarvis’ Alabaman granddad used to say, “‘He was grinning like a mule eating briars.’ It doesn’t refer, as you might think, to a fake or forced grin as of someone in pain (briars are sharp). It just means a big, toothy grin. When a mule eats briars, it rolls back its lips so they don’t get jabbed. My grandfather used it to mean a giant, open smile.”

Reagan Arthur’s grandfather, who lived to 101 and was from Maplewood, NJ, but spent much of his adult life in Bethesda, “had a wooden board on which he’d carved the following: ‘Just enough fleas is good for a dog to keep him from thinking on being a dog.’”

Brent Cox says “my family’s (from WV) really memorable ones dealt with obscuring the TV — ‘you been drinking dirty water/cain’t see through ya’ and ‘you make a better door’n ya do a windah.’”

Dan Leo offers this one “from Philadelphia, PA, where they boo Santa Claus”: “Of an extremely ancient senior citizen: ‘Some guys you gotta beat into the grave with a stick.’” And “another one from the city of brudderly love: ‘He’s so lazy he shits in bed and kicks it out with his feet.’”

Lisa Peet writes: “Variant on #3 — my long-ago boyfriend’s grandmother used to say ‘Shit in one hand and wish in the other, and see which one fills up fastest.’ I kind of like that one better — rather than saying your wishes are shit, which is debatable, it’s more about shit being a whole lot realer than wishes, which is inarguable. I still use that phrase all the time, much to everyone’s dismay.”

From Marco Romano: “If I put his brain in a gnat’s ass, it would fly backwards.”

Chris Bryson’s Illinois grandmother used to say, “He’s running around like a man with a paper asshole,” but he’s not entirely sure what it means.

Anne Fernald’s favorite Iowan-ism: “He walks like he’s got a cob.” (“Of corn,” she explains. “Where you’d guess.”) And another from one of Anne’s uncles, apropos of a classmate, “It’d be like making love to a knothole.”

Peruvian Ana Lucia Nieto writes: “We say ‘He/she thinks he/she’s the last slurp of the mango,’ meaning someone believes him or herself to be super cool.”

One of Kate Guttman’s Maine-isms: “Hard tellin’ not knowin.’ This is pretty self-explanatory. It means you’ve got no earthly clue but don’t want to say.”

Sommer Hixson offers a couple pithy and concise classics that were some of her (Northeast via Midwest) mom’s favorites: “Shit or get off the pot.” (Gran loved this one) “It’s happy hour somewhere in the world (with Rob Roy in hand, straight up with a twist).”

Alicia Gifford says, “A one-time BF told me he was ‘hornier than a two-headed goat.’”

From Cathy Gleason: “A good drink ‘goes down like sweet jesus in satin panties.’”

Grant Cogswell recalls a great-uncle from Topeka who “worked on the line at Freuhauf Trailer in L.A., and frequently mispronounced words he’d absorbed into his vocabulary from his voracious reading. He’d always say, ‘I ain’t but seen it wrote.’”

Amy Griggs brings us the classic, “They were so poor, they didn’t have a pot to pee in,” from her Alabama Memaw. My mom’s family said “piss”; a Chicagoan I know says “wet.”

One from Tim Brown’s veteran father: “He was shaking like a dog shitting carpet tacks.’ — He was trembling severely from fear or cold.”

Okie Kim Cox writes in with some old standards: “He’s up the creek without a paddle” (he’s screwed); “Ain’t worth a hill of beans” (said to mean “something is of no account”); “she’s in tall cotton” (“in her element”). Also: “Whenever I used to get between my dad and the TV, he’d always say, ‘Your Daddy’s not a glassmaker.’” Gregory Luce knows the cotton expression I’m familiar with: “shittin’ in tall cotton” (i.e., got it made).

At Twitter, 5redpandas contributes “‘You’re eating with cousin tonight.’ Means you’re a mooch. Taiwanese, courtesy of mom.” Bloomsbury Press offers up the old “Sorry don’t mean a thing.”

Poet Susan Ramsey opens up her grandmother’s treasure chest, and send these: “‘Not all old maids are women.’ Spoken primarily of (so help me) Homer Clisby, married to Aunt Hetty, who ‘would stop to iron his shoe laces on the way to a fire.’ ‘No laughing matter, but no matter if you laugh.’ ‘Plain as a mud fence.’ ‘Melted and poured,’ to ‘describe someone in too-tight clothes.’ ‘Better to burp and be in shame than not to burp and be in pain’ (said of a polite woman with gall bladder issues). ‘Only an hour’s difference between a good meal and a poor one.’ (And she didn’t mean in the cooking. Also worked on the theory that as long as the gravy was hot it didn’t matter if some other elements of the meal had had to wait.) A fussy person was ‘like a hen with one chick,’ and the dilatory were ’slower than molasses in January.’ (Again, surely these are common? Or are they disappearing?) My mother frequently and without heat would suggest that if we didn’t ’straighten up’ she was going to ‘break off our arm and beat us with the bloody stub.’ No offense meant, none taken. My grandmother would only suggest we might get ‘what Paddy gave the drum’ (which I didn’t understand at the time, though the message was clear.)”

There are a few more in the comments at Language Hat.
 

Ben Ostrowsky recommends the book Like We Say Back Home. And Jag Bhalla has collected idioms from around the world in I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears.

Finally, Daniel Radosh was intrigued by “Rich enough to burn a wet dog,” one of my grandmother’s favorites, and did some Internet research. He writes, “Only found one explanation, in a radio podcast. ‘Enough money to burn a wet dog (or mule)’ = you need a lot of tinder (paper money) to get the fire hot enough. From the 1880s.”
 

My great-grandmother, Alma Kinchen Johnston, stands at the far left in the image at the top of this post. I’m guessing part of her family had gathered for a funeral when this photo was taken, but I don’t really know.

Although my mother was his only child, her father said he had another during his first marriage (of thirteen). He led Mom to believe that the baby died as an infant.

In fact, I discovered this weekend, the little girl lived nearly six years.
 

Nettie Mason was sixteen and Robert Bruce was seventeen when they wed in May, 1925. A year later Nettie gave birth to Bonnie Katharine Bruce, and three years after that, just months before the start of the Great Depression, Nettie and Robert divorced.

The announcement below appeared in the July 26, 1929, issue of the Dallas Morning News.

By the time of the 1930 census, three-year-old Bonnie was living as a “boarder,” apparently without either parent or any other relatives, in a house in Arcadia Park, a section of Oak Cliff.

Two years later she died in Denton. Of what, I don’t know. Neglect? Starvation? Tuberculosis? I’ve requested a full death certificate in hopes of finding out.
 

Previously in Robert Bruce lore: his thirteen marriages, including the wife who shot him in the stomach and the one he cheated on my grandmother with; the adultery letters; his careers as union president and garment cutter, mechanic, and Phoenix real estate agent; his obituary, and his early and final last will and testament.

I’m not sure what it means when I fixate on genealogical research, as I have been recently, but I have learned to recognize flare-ups of ancestry.com obsession as a warning sign.

Normal people are not awake after midnight, scouring the 1800 U.S. Census for clues about one Jesse Newton, born in North Carolina, who later bought land in Drew County, Arkansas, and was “granted a license to retail spirituous and vinous liquors.” Especially if they’re not even sure that Jesse Newton is their ancestor.
 

Worse, although I thought I was done feeling anything in particular about my dad, I’ve been Googling him. As my sister points out, combing the Internet for information about your estranged father from your day job desk at 7:30 p.m. is a sure sign that you are not over it.

Apparently he bought a house for $2.6 million the day after my birthday. Probably the timing was a coincidence. Like the having a wife with my name, and the now-dead-girlfriend with my sister’s.
 

I was surprised at how much seeing his McMansion, complete with poolside statuary (pictured above), hurt. Although I’ve never been a beneficiary of his fortune, I knew he’d been amassing one. Accumulating wealth was his greatest priority throughout my childhood, back when he used to spray the toaster with Raid before making my breakfast, when he relied on my grandmother to cover my doctor bills, when he promised to pay for all of my law school education if I attended the cheaper, less well-regarded state school, instead of the private one, and then reneged after I did it. Etc.

Do you think he’ll give his new kids different names, or just stick with the ones he knows?
 

I’ll try to refocus soon. Meanwhile, here’s a post I wrote years ago about my dad and the house where we used to live: Unpleasant (and disjointed) recollections of my father.

Although I’d do the translations a little differently now, I promised Allison I’d put the piece up here. (Thank you, Internet Archive, for keeping copies of everything.) Seems like a good way to ease back into the occasional weekend family post.
 

Favorite Expressions of My Deceased (and Beloved) Texan Grandmother, with Explanations
 

1. He looked at me like a calf at a new gate.

Translation: “Even though I said something patently obvious, and explained it three or four times, he was too stupid to understand. He just blinked and looked at me blankly.” Evidently a calf is unable to recognize a new gate in its pen until it is led in and out a few times.
 

2. She’s really shittin’ and flyin’ now.

Translation: “She’s nouveau riche and ridiculous and has just bought or done something that proves it.” To the best of my understanding, shitting while flying, as a pigeon would, is glamorous to anyone who would wear a mink coat and drive a Corvette to go grocery shopping.
 

3. Shit in one hand, want in the other.

Translation: “Your desires are the equivalent of your shit,” or, “No, I won’t buy you that ice cream cone.”
 

4. Get down from there or you’ll fall and bust your head open.

Translation: “Get down from there or you’ll fall and bust your head open.” Actually, this is self-explanatory, although it can be adapted to nearly any activity, regardless of the actual risk of head-busting, e.g., “Don’t dive into the pool or you’ll fall and bust your head open.”
 

5. He cleans up real nice.

Translation: “He has shown that he can be a respectable boy when the need presents itself.” Used liberally to describe any boyfriend of mine, regardless of attire or grooming habits, who called my grandmother “ma’am” or “Mrs. Alexander.”
 

6. Ain’t neither one of them got a lick a sense.

“Lick” apparently translates to “bit” or “iota”, though I’m uncertain of that etymology. Usually used in reference to my parents.
 

7. I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.

Translation: “He is a worthless human being undeserving of the slightest mercy.” Reserved exclusively for my father.
 

8. He’s meaner than a junkyard dog.

Ditto.
 

9. He’s rich enough to burn a wet dog.

When used in reference to my father, usually followed by “but he can’t pay for your goddamned college.” I guess a person would need to buy some sort of expensive lighter fluid or special torch to ignite wet dog hair. Does that seem far-fetched?
 

10. He’s more skittish than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers.

To translate this one, you need to know that “rockers” are “rocking chairs”. If you were a long-tailed cat, you’d understand this perfectly.
 

William Charles Bruce, otherwise known in la casa de Maud as the great-grandfather who killed a man with a hay hook, has always been one of the most compelling characters in my personal deck of Notorious Ancestor Playing Cards. And now he’s the second forbear — his wife Rindia being the first — to whom I owe an apology.

June 1916 articles from the Dallas Morning News, Dallas Times-Herald, and Dallas Dispatch confirm that Bruce really did kill his former friend George Grimes — and with a hay hook. But the “difficulty” arose in a feed store, not in a bar. And Bruce was acting in self-defense.
 

“It is said,” according to the Dallas Dispatch (below), “Bruce’s testimony in [a trial in which Grimes was sentenced to five years for 'mistreatment of a female relative'] caused the bitter feeling between the two. Grimes was pardoned after less than two years, and since then has threatened Bruce’s life.”

Evidently Grimes lunged at Bruce, who fended him off with a hay hook jab to the intestines. Grimes brushed off the puncture wounds, “which had not appeared serious at first,” and carried on as usual until peritonitis set in.

Bruce was arrested and charged with murder, but in the end a grand jury ordered his release. I think he died sometime between the 1920 census and Rindia’s remarriage in 1929.
 

(Bruce sired my mother’s charming lothario father, Robert, who reportedly married thirteen times, and was shot in the stomach by one of his wives.)
 

My mother didn’t know most of the women her dad married, but in email last year casually referred to a shooting. Of her father. By one of the wives.

Next (I think) he married a woman named Evelyn, and, believe it or not, they lived on Daniels Avenue on SMU campus right down the street from my sorority house where I lived for 3 years while in college. She may be the one he was married to when he was shot in the gut and nearly died. I think she shot him but don’t know for sure. Daddy led quite a life: women — perferably ones with money, which he took and made tons more with. However, he was an alcoholic “rounder-hellraiser.” All the money the ladies had he used to fund various business ventures. At one time he was the best auto mechanic with a full-repair location in Dallas. Then he was a true master grocer of privately owned grocery stores. Granny met him when she worked for Justin McCarty (one of the top clothing designers/mfrs in the country — even up till the 70’s). He was their most outstanding designer and pattern drafter. He had other talents but those are the ones I remember. Mr. McCarty would say of my dad that he was a real genius of the business and would go far if he would leave the bottle alone.

It occurred to me the other day that newspapers love a domestic meltdown, so I went fishing in the Dallas Morning News archives. Sure enough, I found a brief item (above) dated July 24, 1950.

According to the story: Robert Bruce, 46, was indeed shot by his wife. The shooting “apparently followed an argument” (you don’t say), and the couple “had been married only a few weeks.” Bail was set at $2500. ($21,959.85 today, according to the inflation calculator.)

It’s hard to track down Dallas Times-Herald archives — the paper ceased publication in 1992 and consequently hasn’t been digitized — but with the help of the Dallas Public Library I intend to check those, too.

Her mother being a second-generation Texan atheist, my mom was raised in a godless fashion. When her conversion came, though, it was swift and feverish.

She accepted Jesus into her heart at the direction of staid Presbyterians. Five years later she’d cast off the training wheels — the catechism, the silver-haired minister, the stained-glass windows and velvet pews — and was pastoring her own Charismatic church in a warehouse just off the Palmetto Expressway.

Among Miami’s Protestants, she was a laughingstock, and a pariah: A woman preaching is an aggressive act. I was then, as I am now, embarrassed, proud, and protective of her, in equal measure. (Oops, I forgot enraged by.)
 

All these years later what’s most remarkable to me is that the religious zeal and leadership that seemed in my childhood to spring up out of nowhere has echoes in my mom’s family line. Rindia, the great-grandmother I wrongly accused of murdering an infant (that was one of the other great-grandmothers, you see), and one of her sons, were “very devoted Pentecostal ‘holy rollers’ who lived at church,” according to my mother. Mom knew this growing up, although her dad’s family was something of an abstraction.

And she didn’t find out until a few years ago, long after her own place of worship was shuttered, that her maternal grandmother Alma’s sister Virgie and niece Alma Honor “voluntarily started and pastored the only church in Stockard for many years until they finally got a man to come in from somewhere and take over.”

I learned all of this last year and found the news oddly soothing. It makes my terror of an eventual religious conversion seem maybe not so irrational, after all.
 

According to my mom’s notes, the woman pictured in the photo above is probably Alma Honor. In another (Xeroxed) photo that I’ll scan in some other time, Alma Honor’s mother and co-pastor, Virgie, wears the same coat.

Kathleen Kent’s first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, evokes the fears, diseases, and petty grudges of the witch trials era with an eerie, visceral concreteness. The book was inspired by Kent’s ancestor, Martha Carrier, who was jailed, tried, found to be a witch, and hung. To her dying breath, she refused to confess, or to beg for leniency.

Below Kent answers my questions about the book and Carrier’s legacy.
 

I read in the Dallas Morning News that you first heard of Martha Carrier as a child at your grandma’s house, when she and your mom were gossiping about relatives. Was there a sense that Martha and her cruel treatment resonated in the present?

What I mean is: In The Heretic’s Daughter, Martha and her daughter, Sarah, are forceful, prideful, and far too independent by the standards of their day. Did any of your relatives — particularly the women — seem destined to continue this legacy by bucking convention and refusing to defer to people in power?

I think one of the most remarkable aspects of the family stories about Martha Carrier was how present she seemed to me growing up. There was hardly a family gathering when her name wasn’t brought up. My mother’s family was very much interested in American history, as well as personal family history, and so there was a great awareness of the events leading up to the Salem witch trials.

Even though it was my grandfather who was the Carrier, my grandmother was the repository of all the generational legends and she was not only fiercely proud of the courageous stand Martha took against her accusers, but very gleeful of the fact that her outspokenness earned her the moniker “The Queen of Hell,” the name given to her by one of the most famous theologians of the day, Cotton Mather. There were quite a few ferocious, independent women in the Carrier family including my grandmother, who smoked at a time when it was considered scandalous, rode wild horses (and a few cows), and was a dead shot with a rifle.
 

There’s nothing like a ferocious Texan woman. (One of my most cherished photos is of my Dallas-born grandmother saluting with a double-barrel shotgun — and she wasn’t even the one who shot my mother’s father in the stomach.)

In The Heretic’s Daughter, you chose to tell Martha’s story as fiction, through the eyes of the angry, somewhat estranged Sarah, and the results are remarkably textured and often very moving. Were you drawn to the novel form from the outset? Or did you ever think about writing a more factually-limited family history?

It was always my intent to write fiction. In the first draft, the narrative was in the voice of Martha, but, as there was so much of the family story left to tell after her death, I decided to shift it to Sarah’s point of view. I felt it would give the story greater emotional tension to see the horrors of the witch trials from a child’s perspective. I also felt that the struggle for understanding between a mother and daughter is a universal theme. Sarah’s character is based, in part, on my grandmother’s reckless and unconventional personality.
 

Early in the book, shortly after the family moves to a new town and is, after some debate (and intervention by the town elders), allowed to stay, one of the children is felled by smallpox. Sarah and her baby sister are shipped off in the night to live with their kind aunt and their entertaining, but falsely pious, drunkard uncle.

This section of the story is crucial, both structurally and thematically, because it immerses the reader in a more conventional Puritan household — where fears of God and disease determine so much of the way days are spent — and presents this alternative way of life from the young Sarah’s idealized perspective. When the girls are thrust back into their mother’s care, the reader feels as uncertain and unsteady as they do. Did you do much research, or mostly rely on instinct, in differentiating these households?

What a lot people are accustomed to imagining about Puritans, I believe, is a result of the idealized and romanticised influence of the Victorian ideal; the prim and proper settlers of New England who were industrious, God-fearing and righteous. And they were these things, but they were also, according to the local records, contentious and libelous, full of supersitious dread and malicious gossip. The biggest surprise for me in doing the research was in realizing that the Puritans in character were closer to the Elizabethans than the Victorians.

From this stew of religious repression, fear of the native people, and their mistrust and intolerance of their own neighbors, I built up the two families, the Carriers and the Toothakers. In contrasting the day to day life of these separate and distinct families, I hoped to reveal Sarah’s growing understanding of the harsh and difficult life into which she was born.
 

At the end of the novel, Sarah learns a secret about her father. I was surprised by this plot twist and am still digesting it. Did you know his background from the beginning? Is it, like Martha’s, based in fact? And is this the set-up for a sequel?

Thomas Carrier according to family legends was over 7 feet tall, died at 109 years old, and fought for Cromwell’s army during the English Civil War. Ben Franklin’s paper “Poor Richard” reported in 1735 that two coffins has to be fit together to bury Thomas as he was so tall. These, and other legends about the patriarch, were told with as much enthusiasm as the stories of Martha. I am currently at work on the second novel, which is a prequel to “The Heretic’s Daughter, and it explores the life of Thomas and his involvement in Cromwell’s army and the execution of King Charles I of England .
 

It’s amazing that these legends have been handed down intact through the generations. Julie Barer, your agent and a friend of mine, told me that the girls in your family weren’t allowed to dress up as witches for Halloween because the awareness of Martha’s persecution was ever-present. Do I have that right?

As my mother made most of my Halloween costumes, she had the final word on what I got to wear. It’s not that she forbade me, or was humorless about it, but she actively discouraged it. She felt it trivialized the suffering of innocents and promoted stereotypes of the Salem witches as evil Devil worshippers.
 

A principled and well-reasoned objection. (At my house there was no Halloween, only “Hallelujah.”) Many thanks, Kathleen.

It doesn’t surprise me that Sarah Vowell, a refugee from the Pentecostals, is obsessed with the Puritans. After all, John Winthrop’s vision of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city set on a hill” figures as prominently in the catechism of American fundamentalists as the section of the Beatitudes that inspired him.

Vowell spent several years researching and writing The Wordy Shipmates, her new book (out 10/7) on the subject. I’ve been skipping around rather than reading straight through, but one thing she does well here is to trace the view of Americans as God’s new chosen people (sorry, Israel, your job now is merely to hasten the arrival of the Anti-Christ) all the way back to the Mayflower.
 

In 1630, the Reverend John Cotton delivered a farewell sermon in England, just before the voyage set sail, that infused the journey with a sense of purpose. “What Cotton [tells] them,” says Vowell, “is that, like the Old Testament Jews, they are men of destiny.” Sexy stuff Puritan doctrine is not, but a great deal of this country’s history can be traced back to its original perception of itself not just as special, but anointed by God. And woe betide the Puritan nonconformist.
 

My mother used to say demons lurked in every corner, every throw pillow, every stranger’s hand. They were waiting to leap the moment I showed weakness, however small, however accidental. Accepting an owl figurine or falling asleep with the TV on could leave me vulnerable; I might be possessed by foul spirits and not even know it.

Maybe this is why the Salem witch trials — the stories of women drowned for allegiance to Satan — have always been a particular source of fascination for me, and why I was so sucked into Kathleen Kent’s first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter. The book evokes the fears, diseases, and petty grudges of the witch trials era with an eerie and visceral concreteness. It was inspired by the the author’s ancestor, Martha Carrier, who was jailed, found to be a witch, and hung. I’ll be doing a Weekend Ancestry conversation with Kent in the next week or two, so keep an eye out for that.
 

Reading The Heretic’s Daughter prompted me to investigate the life of Mary Bliss Parsons, my own 9th great-grandmother, who beat witchcraft charges — twice. (Longtime readers may recall that the Parsons family isn’t exactly overjoyed to have me as a cousin.)

Joseph Cornet Parsons, Mary’s husband, moved his family to Northampton, Massachusetts, when his wife couldn’t get along in Springfield. She was beautiful and opinionated, with a “harsh,” “often accusatory” manner, and she was given to “fits” that incited Joseph to lock her in the basement. According to the authors of Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England,

She and her husband were frequently and notoriously at odds with one another. During part of their time at Springfield he had sought to confine her to their house. (Otherwise, he said, “she would go out in the night … and when she went out a woman went with her and came in with her.”) When this tactic failed, he locked her in the basement. It was then, she claimed later on, that she had first encountered her “spirits.” There was at least one quite public episode — again at Springfield — that amounted to a family free-for-all. Joseph was “beating one of his little children, for losing its shoe,” when Mary came running “to save it, because she had beaten it before as she said.” Whereupon Joseph thrust her away, and the two of them continued to struggle until he “had in a sort beaten [her].”

Witchcraft accusations surfaced against Goody Parsons shortly after the family moved to Northampton. Mary gave birth to a healthy baby boy — Ebenezer, her fifth child — and the following year a neighbor’s newborn died. Sarah Bridgman, the grieving mother, claimed Mary had cursed the baby.

Joseph tried to spare the family’s good(?) name by going on the offensive. No stranger to the courtroom, he initiated a defamation suit against Sarah Bridgman, the neighbor who started the rumors after her own baby died. This was a tricky approach. While the “immediate outcome of these actions was usually favorable to the plaintiff,” the “long-range effects were mixed.”

Sure enough, Joseph prevailed at trial, but suspicion and ill-feeling roiled until new witchcraft claims landed Mary in court again 18 years later. This time she was the defendant. Most of the evidence from the trial has been lost, but the indictment remains:

Mary Parsons, the wife of Joseph Parsons, … being instigated by the Devil, hath … entered into familiarity with the Devil, and committed several acts of witchcraft on the person or persons of one or more.

Ultimately the jury acquitted Mary, but her case is seen as a precursor to the Salem Witch Hysteria of 1692.
 

On a personal level, what interests me most is the way Mary’s behavior and the suspicion against her have echoed down through my mother’s line, from mere nonconformism to madness, the seeing of “spirits,” and accusations of Devil Worship. When I was a child, the Presbyterians and Baptists all but called Mom a Satanist as they showed us the door.

The legacy of loudmouthed, intractable women might run back generations in the other direction, too. By all accounts Mary’s mother Margaret was prickly and litigious. The image at the top of this post is a reportedly a transcription of Margaret’s testimony in Mary’s slander trial.

It’s not as if anyone is clamoring for more family photos, but I figured I should mention that from now on the ancestry posts will appear intermittently, if at all.

For a year and a half, all of my photos and newspaper articles and official documents must remain sealed, along with my composition notebooks and paperwork, in these giant Ziplocs. If you don’t know why someone would have to sequester her papers like this, I hope you never find out.

Recently I posted a 1914 Dallas Morning News article about a dead woman found on a Galveston beach whom an old family friend misidentified as my great-grandmother, Alma Johnston. I planned to follow up with a couple photos I unearthed of Alma standing in and in front of the waves in Galveston, but those shots have gone missing.

Instead here’s a picture of my Newton grandpa (above, right) living it up with a buddy in someone’s backyard. Hope your weekend was equally good.

Whatever I paid to search the Dallas Morning News archives last month allowed me access to something like 50 articles, but only for 24 hours. So after I found what I was looking for (confirmation that one of my mom’s father’s wives really did shoot him), and had exhausted all possible searches on the subject, I typed in other Texan ancestors’ names for the hell of it.

Lo and behold, I learned that my great-grandmother Alma’s relatives once spent a couple days trying to figure out — from afar — whether she was the woman found dead and battered on a Galveston beach. (Clipping from first story pictured above.)
 

According to an article dated July 22, 1914, Alma had sent her mother a card saying, “This is Monday a.m. We are ready to start for dearer Dallas.” But when word of the murder reached Dallas the following week and Alma’s family hadn’t turned up — likely as not, because Great-Grampa Zone was off chasing tail — her kinfolk must’ve gotten worried. A childhood friend viewed the battered corpse, identified Alma, and fainted.

Fortunately mother Martha Caroline and sister-in-law Gertie back at home weren’t too worried. Some of the authorities’ details about the corpse didn’t really point to Alma. For one thing, the deceased didn’t have gold teeth.

“I feel,” said Gertie, “that it is not she.” (Pause for appreciation of correct pronoun usage. Gertie, I should add, was Zone’s sister. This was a family where, according to my mom, everyone, including the women, “carried a can around to spit in and after a meal we all would sit in the living room and each one would spit from time to time and argue and fight.”) And indeed, it was not.
 

This is so my family, I can’t even tell you. Okay, maybe I could, but I’m off to Newport, Rhode Island in the morning to celebrate the hitching of some friends.

Hope you have a great weekend planned, too.

Depression isn’t something my dad’s family ever talked about, but in the last few years I’ve learned that my granddad suffered from it.

My aunt and I unearthed his meditation on February (below) when I was in Tennessee last summer.
 

Until reading these notes, I never particularly thought of him as a religious guy.

I’m amazed at how radiant and kind-faced Gran Newt, my great-great grandmother on my dad’s father’s side, looks in this photo, considering she raised her children in a house without a ceiling. Her son told the Drew, Mississippi newspaper it was so frigid on winter mornings that “when papa would walk through the hall to the other side of the house his mustache would freeze.”

I wish I had a tenth of her fortitude. My drafty railroad apartment has a (sometimes leaky) ceiling and (sort of) working radiators, but when the wind chill dips to zero, out come the fingerless gloves and turtleneck, and, while typing at the kitchen table, I start to look a lot like another great-great grandmother, Martha Caroline. That kind of frown has a way of becoming permanent.

After today, the weekend ancestry posts go irregular.

This shot of my mom’s father in front of Honolulu’s Ilikai Hotel is undated, but I tell myself it’s one of the last photos taken of him before his death in Phoenix, in 1970. I like to think he went out partying.

My grandmother always claimed he died of cirrhosis of the liver. My mom, as I recall, disputes this.

The obituary (below) is no help at all.
 

In 1944, in a fit of passion, my grandfather wrote out a will leaving everything to my mother, his only child.

When he died a successful real estate broker in 1970, though, his plans were a little different.