Marcella Goheen grew up in Indiana. She was the youngest of 10 children. She was, as most children are, curious by nature, always questioning, imagining. This capacity to create within herself many worlds would serve her well later in life, though she learned early that the imagination is not necessarily refuge and what it offers is not always comfort.
Her mother had been orphaned as a toddler. The question of what happened to her parents, Goheen’s grandparents, was not something anyone ever talked about. There were stories. Not even stories, really. Fragments. A car accident, some act of violence that took them away. Goheen’s mom and her two siblings went into foster care, and over time they were separated. Her mom, a resourceful woman, a resilient woman, put herself through nursing school.
Goheen was still a child when her mom offered her yet another fragment. She’d heard that her mother, Goheen’s grandmother, had been murdered. But she was not to speak of this. So was passed to Goheen not simply a secret but the shame that cloaked it.
“I did what I was told,” Goheen says. “I held the secret. But I would have nightmares. I would imagine this woman. Why did it happen? How did it happen? This idea of a murder was in my head, a family murder.”
Others could have tucked away that story, dismissed it as another myth sprung up to fill the silence. Goheen was not such a person. A secret, long-held, has a way of calcifying, taking on weight, reminding a person of its existence.
I knew none of this when Goheen first contacted me by e-mail several years ago. I have only a vague recollection of her message. She was researching her family history and had come across the name Griego. She remembers I told her we were not related but wished her luck.
Luck was not what she needed most. Courage was. Goheen, now in her 30s, wanted to break the silence. To find answers, no matter what they might be. She wanted to strip away the shame now carried by three generations of women in the family.
When Goheen first broke her promise not to tell, she was 16 and she confided in one of her brothers, who said the whole thing sounded nuts. She tucked the story away again, but her questions remained. Who were her mother’s people? Where were they from? What did they know?
What are we, she would ask.
And her mother, resistant to this line of questioning, would say, “We’re Irish.”
About eight years ago, Goheen began the search in earnest. “We need to know the truth,” she remembers telling her mother. “We have to look the monster in the eye.”
For the next several years, they looked together, posting queries on the Internet, seeking out leads in various states. They found one of her mother’s brothers. “I’d last seen him when I was 7 or 8 years old, but he hadn’t been in contact with the family for years. He’s brilliant. He’s like Buddha.”
In Denver, finally, they found cousins, her grandmother’s best friend, and a relative who took one look at Goheen, at the shape of her eyes, the color of her hair, and said, “Oh, my God.”
They showed Goheen the first pictures she’d seen of her grandmother. “It was as if you were looking for something and then you finally find it, and you say to yourself, ‘I knew it.’ “
Here’s the thing about a journey like this. People possess bits and pieces of a story, and each holds some truth. Her grandmother was Spanish and Hopi. She was married to a Spanish immigrant, a man who came to work as a miner in Trinidad. She followed him around the country. She died by his hand. It was during the Depression. The extended family could not afford to take in the children, and over time the connection was lost.
But what is also true is that the shame that veils the death of a woman becomes the shame that hides her life. It denies her existence. It robs her of voice. A secret, Goheen realized, whether it be domestic violence or childhood abuse or abandonment, reverberates over generations. It suffocates people.
“It becomes stuck in time, and then it becomes folklore, and then it becomes mystery, and then it becomes stuff, painful and inhibitive,” she says. “If it were to be released, it might change your life. It might be liberating. The human experience is huge and colorful, and it involves pain and joy and sorrow.”
Goheen is telling me all this, in part, because she is a solo theater artist now living in New York, and she has taken her journey and turned it into a one-woman play. She will perform here in Denver the week of Aug. 23 at the Bindery Space.
She is telling me this, too, because our lives intersected for a moment and this is what happened afterward.
She wishes to celebrate her grandmother. To acknowledge her life and the lives of women whose deaths were followed by silence.
Her grandmother’s name was Maria Salazar, Goheen tells me. She was a beautiful and much-loved woman. When she died in 1931, she was 26 years old.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
