Beverly Burch
Things families don't tell begin to have density, pieces of furniture there but not there. You bump into them without knowing what. Unseen but not unfelt, like the man my mother once worked for whose name she would murmur when she talked about Savannah. A fog of knowing and not-knowing hung in the air. She was telling me something. She didn't mean to tell me. She meant to tell me. I understood later, much later. Then I wanted to know everything, but she was gone. History had flatlined.
The home I lived in, were we on the brink of trouble, what was at risk? Was I at risk?
My father was the risk. Anxiety about money, but plenty there. Or enough, or just enough. His ways with women, telling without telling. Who was this man who reached out for me, for my girlfriends, said he was being friendly. He didn't say, how could he say, what he was up to. How could we? He travelled during the week, stumbled home late sometimes. Rumors of misbehavior on the road, laughter among the men.
Not knowing tripped me up. I might say the wrong thing. What was the right thing? The ground was less solid than I thought.
Relatives with relative truths. One uncle spoke with an accent. His wife said he came from Austria in 1938 to avoid conscription. Hitler invaded, you know. Why were his parents in Argentina now? Well, why not? He sang in the Baptist choir. There was that side glance in the mirror. He didn't like Christmas. Who didn't like Christmas? What couldn't be said about Uncle Nathan?
Late at night, hushed words, sister to to sister, between the older aunts. Names floated by. Great-uncle Lon, he had hands. Words out of place. Nightgown, no locks on the doors you know. My Grandmother insisting, please don't speak impolitely. Slow drip drip. History got stashed in the attic but leaked up there. Knowledge descending in small hours of the night, taking my breath.
My mind accepted everything but knew nothing. I went along, felt the slippage. I knew I didn't know, didn't have the right questions. Nevermind, go to sleep.
No one liked to speak of Great-Aunt Lucy. If they did, she had been, well, in a delicate condition, you know. My God, she used a hat pin. Hemorrhage, sepsis, my mother said. What was she talking about? It had a lure, danger and excitement, had a warning. What was it?
Family things. They didn't concern other people. How did they concern me?
We had home-cooked dinners, went to church on Sunday. The relatives came over. What a family we had. We laughed, we ate, they drank. We had fun, everyone had fun. Some drank too much, then one lost his temper, then someone else. Someone's anger frightened me, this one, then that one. I went out to play. All the kids in the neighborhood came out to play. Was everyone's dinner good?
I found books with inscriptions my mother wouldn't explain. Books that disappeared. Diaries, boxes of letters. A photo of a man who looked like my father but wasn't.
What a curious child. Poking around everywhere. And an old newspaper clipping, a man murdered in a bar in my father's hometown. What was that doing in there? Dead history.
My mother plus my father. They didn't fit, more than twenty years apart. She was good, he was not. They did fit though, they stayed together, went out together, had fun, seemed to care. Years later a cousin said she knew of that man in Savannah. He was before my father, married to someone else. He looked like my father. A secret that mattered. My mother could have told me, at least after I was grown.
A cousin heard something about the man in the bar, the one killed. That mattered. My father's rage, well, you couldn't keep that secret.
Privacy, secrecy. What was the difference?
Who was this family? Why did people speak in code? Why couldn't things just be said? How did they learn this?
We arrived a long time ago, colonists in this country. Aunt Marilu wrote a book, traced us to Aberdeen and Cork. Olde England. Boring, who-begat-who stuff. Good ancestry, she claimed. Take a look. Some necessity ran through her voice, through the book. We were not trash, our people.
Famine and persecution, I discovered on my own, in those places, at those times. Old trauma passed down silently. Debt, poverty, violence, wild aspiration. Crenellations of history.
One of ours was the first white settler in Oconee territory. Another was killed by native people near Ocmulgee, then three natives were punished across the state line. Blood was shed, land was taken, wrongs. Rights declared. Old trauma passed down. Again. A new cabin, a good crop of beans. Two marriages, one man, two sisters. Twelve births. The family got started.
In the margin of a letter, notes concerning the war. Civil War. Slaves kept up the farm. Slaves. Again, again. Never spoken of. Never acknowledged. I did a DNA test. Trace of Africa in the blood. History was etched in unmemory, jittered through the nerves. Grey sulci of history. Who was it? When? How?
We never talked about race. Nor sex. Undertones and overtones, the talk was never free of them. Fear, shame, excitement seeped into the floorboards.
Late night in the armchair, stray laughs, an out-of-place sigh. Circuitry of not saying took hold. How they talked. How we still talk. What gets lost can't be repaired. It hangs around, haunts, won't stay unburied, won't come to life.
Then what?
Yawning lacunae in myself. Don't we all have them? Everyone needs to tell, compulsively tell. I want to tell. Still, I don't know.