My Marion
I was an adult before I ever saw the picture. But even as a girl, I
knew there’d been a lynching in Marion, Indiana. That was my
father’s hometown. And on one of many trips to visit my
grandparents, I heard the family story: the night it happened back
in 1930, someone called the house and spoke to my grandfather, whose
shift at the post office began at three in the morning. “Don’t walk
through the courthouse square tonight on your way to work,” the
caller said. “You might see something you don’t want to see.”
Apparently that was the punchline-which puzzled me. Something you
don’t want to see. Then laughter.
I now know that, in the 1920s, Indiana had more Ku Klux Klan members
than any other state in the union-from a quarter to a half million
members-and my grandfather was one of them. Learning this after he
died, I couldn’t assimilate it into the frail Grandpa I’d known.
Couldn’t assimilate it at all and, for a long time, didn’t try. He
was an intensely secretive man, and certainly there had been other
obfuscations. He always said, for example, that he was an orphan,
that his parents had died when he was three. I accepted this, but
the grown-ups knew better. After Grandpa’s funeral, my father
discovered a safe deposit box and hoped at last to find a clue to
the family tree. Instead he unearthed this other secret: a Klan
membership card. All my father said later was “I never saw a hooded
sheet. He’d go out. We never knew where he was going.”
Much of this story is about shame. My grandfather was illegitimate,
a fact that someone born in small-town Indiana in 1886 would rather
die than discuss. And so he did. But if that particular humiliation
seems foreign today, what about the other secret? A lot of us who
are white come from something we would rather not discuss. “That’s
in the past,” we like to say, as if that did anything but give us
another hood to wear.
I was in my late twenties when I first came upon the lynching photo
in a book: two black men in bloody tattered clothing hang from a
tree, and below them stand the grinning, gloating, proud, and
pleased white folks. I couldn’t believe that this was my Marion, the
lynching referred to in my family, a tree I’d walked past as a
child. I looked anxiously for my grandfather’s face in that photo.
Didn’t find it. That was some relief. But he too had gone to the
square that night. There’d been something you don’t want to see.
Then laughter. And as I began to tell people this story, that was
one detail I left out, because it shamed me: there was laughter.
My Marion. As a child, I loved the town. And one thing I loved most
was the fact that it had a past, unlike the various midwestern
suburbs where I grew up. Directly in front of my grandparents’
house-tall, dark green clapboard with a black stone porch-stood an
iron hitching post, a black horse’s head with a ring through its
nose. It was no decoration. They’d just never taken it down. They
lived with history. And every visit gave me a chance to ask Grandma
for the family stories, to page with her through the family album.
Somehow I never noticed that all the stories and pictures were my
grandmother’s. My grandfather had none.
During one summer vacation when I was nine or ten, I found a brittle
yellow newspaper clipping in a desk drawer at my grandparents’
house. The headline said josie carr, and parts of certain lines had
been cut out with a razor blade. I walked it into the living room
asking, “Who’s Josie Carr?” No one said anything, but Grandpa took
the clipping from my hand and left the room. Someone explained then
that Josie was his mother. I had just found her obituary. We’d been
told that she had died about 1890 “from tuberculosis.” Or perhaps
she had died “from grief,” said Aunt Ruth, my father’s sister, who
liked brooding on the mystery. For all those years my grandfather
kept the obituary, certain facts trimmed out with a razor blade.
Then that day he took it from my hand, and no one ever saw it again.
We didn’t know who Grandpa’s father was or why he abandoned Josie.
Nor did we know when she died, what killed her, where she was
buried-nothing. My grandmother knew everything, of course. But she
said, “We don’t talk about it. It makes your grandpa feel very bad.”
So we waited till my grandparents were out of earshot before
discussing our slender clues.
Aunt Ruth would take the tintypes from the old beige Nabisco box.
Many of those pictured were strangers to us. Uncle Rad? Aunt Pet? We
couldn’t ask Grandpa. We relied on Aunt Ruth to find the images of
Grandpa’s mother: “This is Josie before the tragedy. This is Josie
after the tragedy.” Aunt Ruth showed us in the later picture where
clumps of Josie’s hair had fallen out. “Maybe someone poisoned her,”
my aunt mused. “Maybe someone was trying to get rid of her.”
Aunt Ruth held both possessions of Josie’s that came down to us. One
was a locket with a handsome young man’s picture, a date-February
11, 1883-and the words “All twisted up. N” Or was it W? Or H? The
other was a letter in different handwriting addressed to “Josie kind
Josie” from a P.W.H., Bluffton, Indiana-October 28, 1885. A letter
full of nonsense about a dog and “I have no time to write you.” Why
had this one letter been saved? She must have received it around the
time she became pregnant. My grandpa was born in July 1886.
My aunt was both guardian of these artifacts and the one who most
needed to know what they meant. She had a recurring dream about the
family mystery-that she and Grandpa were in a mausoleum, watching
someone pull out a casket. In real life, of course, Grandpa did his
grieving alone. My father and my aunt recalled from childhood that
on every Memorial Day he rode the interurban to Gas City, just south
of Marion, taking three geraniums to the cemetery. We guessed that
Josie must be buried there. He, of course, never said.
Aunt Ruth would tell us the story about applying for a job in a
Marion furniture store, how Grandma had warned her, “They’ll only
want to talk to you about your family.” And sure enough, the man
interviewing her said, “Young lady, do you know who your grandfather
is?”
Then Aunt Ruth would recount the words of her long-dead auntie Mame:
“Could you ever forgive us for what we did?” But Aunt Ruth never
knew who “us” referred to or why they needed her forgiveness. “I
guess I was brought up not to ask questions,” she said.
We had a drawing my grandfather did as a child-a palatial sort of
Victorian mansion. At the bottom he had signed his initials: E.R.
His name was Earl Carr. He’d taken his mother’s last name. But
clearly he’d known from boyhood who his father was, and he’d
imagined taking that identity. Young Mister R.
Finally on his deathbed Grandpa told us, “They cheated me. I could
have had ten thousand dollars.” That was all he ever said about his
secret: They cheated me.
This is Josie before the tragedy. This is Josie after the tragedy.
My grandpa was the tragedy. In the first picture we have of him, he
is paying for this sin in sad eyes three years old. He was raised by
Josie’s mother, his grandma Carr, who ran a boardinghouse in Marion
at 18th and Adams. As a boy, my grandfather sat on the lap of the
star boarder, Eugene Debs, the great American socialist who
organized on behalf of railroad workers. Grandpa loved Debs enough
to name my father after him. But he said very little about his
childhood. I picked up hints that the grandmother who had raised him
was less than kind.
He was always so quiet, so remote. It was part of the family lore:
he had never smiled in one photograph in all of his life. He hated
cars and never learned to drive. I don’t think he liked what the
world had turned into. He took long walks for recreation, one time
all the way to Jonesboro and back. Twenty miles. He never let my
grandmother have any money and did all the grocery shopping himself:
tongue, mush, hominy, green tomatoes to fry, the fatty cuts of meat.
He would get up at two a.m. to be at work by three. He worked at the
Marion Post Office from 1908 to 1956. There he accumulated a record
one thousand days of sick time and gave it back to the government.
“To act tough,” said Aunt Ruth.
For a hobby he studied railroad timetables and knew which trains
rode on what tracks, every track in America. A little rack of
timetables sat next to his favorite chair. I used to see him study,
then refold them. He was always walking to the tracks to see a
train. I often wondered why he hadn’t worked for the railroad, why
he hadn’t simply hopped one of those trains and left Marion. I think
he felt obligated to the family that hadn’t abandoned him. And what
I finally understood was that he would not take a risk.
Grandpa wore a necktie and long-sleeve dress shirt with cufflinks
every day of his life, even in the hottest weather. He owned a
single necktie and would wear it till it wore out before he bought
another. Such peculiarities made him a figure of intense interest to
me as a girl. The way the pleasures had been carefully measured out.
Every year he took the family on the same vacation: one day in
either Cleveland or Chicago to window-shop and ride the elevated. If
we offered him an iced tea or juice, he would specify just how much.
“Two fingers,” he’d say. Maybe three. He was a teetotaler who did
not allow liquor in the house. Every now and then he made us kids
some little milk shakes, served in jelly jars.
He had one living relative, his cousin. We called her Great Aunt
Catherine, and I remember how very old she was, how very old her
dog, how steep the stair leading up to the ancient house. She had
been to Josie’s funeral when she was maybe three-so Aunt Ruth
said-but Catherine recalled nothing except being at a church in the
country.
Great Aunt Catherine had been like a sister to Grandpa. He dropped
out of school after eighth grade to work for Catherine’s father, his
Uncle On. That’s how I heard the name, though really his name was
Alonzo or Lon. I liked having someone in the family named On. He was
Josie’s brother and ran a grocery store in downtown Marion. He’s the
one who said of Josie: “When all the other girls were riding
sidesaddle, she rode astride and her hair blew in the wind.” It’s
the only thing anyone remembers that anyone said of her.
Aunt Ruth didn’t even know her grandmother’s name till she went to
see a fortune-teller during World War II, and the fortune-teller
said, “I get a Jo or a Josie.” So Aunt Ruth reported this to one of
the relatives, who snorted, “Oh, she mentioned that one, did she?”
That one. Still unmentionable as the world changed, as Grandpa
became a grandpa, as he stooped ever lower with Parkinson’s disease
till he was bent nearly double. He shook uncontrollably, and his
spine curved. All twisted up. This is Josie before the tragedy. This
is Josie after the tragedy. Soon there would be no one who
remembered the tragedy.
When Grandpa died, I was seventeen, old enough to see how
not-knowing had hurt my father and my aunt. What if my grandfather
had realized that, decades after his death, his silence would still
reverberate in all of us? I’m not sure even that would have moved
him. As he lay dying, I remembered how I’d found that obituary, thus
ensuring the loss of our only real clue. I hoped that my grandpa
would speak, but all he ever told us was, They cheated me. Lying
there in the hospital, he was no different than he’d ever been. Born
old in the other century, already a tiny shaking grandpa, he would
die still fatherless.
So I had that life for proof, that you could die and still not fix
it. And as I grew older, I saw that this, in fact, was the usual
story: A life of things unfixed. A whole history of things unfixed.
My father felt free to look for the truth after my grandpa died. It
was 1967. For a while he drove to Grant County every weekend,
searching for Josie. He never found her. Cemeteries didn’t always
keep records in the old days, he’d tell us. Hardly anyone bothered
with death certificates. No one knew when she died-or for that
matter, when she’d been born. My father found no evidence that she’d
ever existed. But it had been there in that clipping, the one cut
with a razor blade. My father went to all the little newspapers to
look at back issues, but there was no obituary for Josie Carr. In a
Gas City graveyard, he found the brother and sister who’d preceded
her in death, their names on two sides of the obelisk that marked
the plot. We speculated that Josie was there too but unmarked. My
father checked all the cemeteries. He talked about getting
caretakers to stick long steel rods in the ground. He explained that
if they hit an air pocket, a body had been there once, in a pine
box-both turned to nothing now. “Might have been her,” my dad would
say. I didn’t ask him how he’d know the right air. He wasn’t really
looking for the dust she’d become. He wanted her story. And if he
got just the very last page-the scene with the preacher’s
incantation and the coffin lifted slowly from the back of a
wagon-that would have been something. He could have said, Here’s
where they stood once: my family, my great-greats, the people who
knew all the things that were kept from me.
It was Great Aunt Catherine who finally told us something. My father
and my aunt had assumed that she wouldn’t. They’d known her all
their lives, after all, and she’d never said a word. But when Aunt
Ruth finally blurted out “Who is our grandfather?” the old woman
replied, “Don’t you know that?”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Our Town
by Cynthia Carr
Copyright © 2006 by Cindy Carr.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Crown
Copyright © 2006
Cindy Carr
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-517-70506-0
