The sins of the fathers may indeed be visited upon the children, and upon the children’s children, until the third and the fourth generation, but there is more to inherit than that.

My grandmother, Irene, whom I grew up calling “Big Mama” was born 1902 on Dunbarton Plantation (or was it Stonewall?) in Holmes County, Mississippi, the eldest of eight daughters of a not-rich cotton planter—whom, I have been told by elders outside the family, was regarded as somehow not quite socially acceptable. His wife, my great-grandmother, was born into one of “good” families of the Delta, and had married, as they said back then and maybe still do, “down.”

And whatever constituted that judgment, my grandmother still bore the tender sting of it by the time I came on the scene, some seventy years later. My grandmother attended a couple of years at a Methodist college, worked at a doctor’s office, and then at twenty-one, after an earnest lunchtime courtship in downtown Jackson’s Smith Park, she married my grandfather, a telegraph operator for the Illinois Central Railroad who left school after the eighth grade.

The decade afterward was a haze of babies being born: all were girls. My mother Gloria was designated to be the “boy,” although my aunt Billie, the change-of-life baby born later in 1939, got my grandfather’s name. The family moved from one rented house to another—including a move from the Delta after the Great Flood of 1927—until they finally landed in Canton, Mississippi, and stayed. [Read more...]