Finding Family Read online

  Finding family

  Tonya Bolden

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  ---------------------------------------

  In memory of my father

  Willie James Bolden

  February 19, 1933–September 18, 2009

  ---------------------------------------

  Prologue

  I was five, maybe six, the very first time I laid eyes on a dragonfly—spellbound by its magical dazzle. From then on, whenever I saw dragonflies, I got as close as I could, making merry in my mind over their shimmershine—red, blue, copper, green.

  All I had was fairy tale thoughts, fancying dragonflies, like butterflies, jewelry for the sky.

  My jumping-jack joy for dragonflies dimmed, then died, after Aunt Tilley told me some folks call them the Devil’s darning needles.

  That night I had the worst nightmare of my life.

  I was cuddled up in the porch swing, eyes closed against a setting sun, when, suddenly, I felt a fluttering around my face, then dragonflies sewing up my lids. I tried to scream—they started stitching shut my lips.

  After that dream, I never closed my eyes when dragonflies were near—and kept my distance. Always would, I reckoned. But little did I know, when I was twelve, that a change was coming as touched on dragonflies. And everything else in my world.

  One

  You have six toes?” spat Viola Kimbrough. This was in the school yard during recess on what was, till then, a peaceable early September day.

  Viola was standing right over Adena Mullins when she asked about her toes.

  Adena was on her haunches, drawing something in the dirt.

  I say “something” because I was off a ways by myself at the picnic table, keeping neat, being meek as a lamb, like Aunt Tilley told me good girls were to be.

  Nothing meek about Viola. Vicious to the bone.

  “I asked you a question.” Viola stamped her foot. “Six toes. Yes or no?”

  Adena kept drawing.

  I wished I had it in me to tell Viola to leave Adena alone. I felt bad for her, especially as Adena was so new to our school. The Mullins family hadn’t been in Charleston long, with Adena’s pa working the seasons and her ma taking in laundry and selling handicrafts. Adena helped out on pickups and deliveries.

  “Take off your shoes!” Viola was louder now. Meaner, too. She shoved Adena, then hollered for other Kimbroughs—“Macey! Charlie! Hold her down!”

  Next, Viola whipped around, eyes daggerlike at me. “Dumb Delana, get over here and take off Adena’s shoes!”

  Lawdamercy! All of me trembled. I could hear my heart thump-thumping. My stomach did a churn.

  “Viola! Macey! Charlie!”

  That was our teacher, Miss Tolliver, in the doorway. Her eyes said a soft “there, there” when she glanced at Adena, then at me, but they were like stone as she beckoned the three Kimbroughs inside.

  I didn’t expect Viola and her cousins to get punished much. Viola’s father was the richest colored man in the county—and the school’s Santa Claus, giving more than even Grandpa. Mr. Kimbrough had just presented our principal everything the school needed to have a brass band, from a tuba to a big, boom-boom bass drum.

  Thump-thumping. My heart was still thump-thumping though the Kimbroughs were gone from the yard. I said a silent Thank you, Father God! for Miss Tolliver. She had come just in the nick of time. Not just for Adena’s sake. Miss Tolliver had been my rescue, too.

  Truth be told, in that split second between Viola’s command and Miss Tolliver’s “Viola, Macey, Charlie!” I was in a terrible tug-of-war—yanked to turn my back on Viola, yanked to do her bidding. Maybe then she’d stop picking on me.

  Thanks to Miss Tolliver, I was spared having to choose.

  - - - - -

  Still, that tug-of-war kept pricking me, like on the afternoon, a few days later, when Aunt Tilley up and remarked that I had a “spacious mind.”

  I started to cry. I thought it was a way of calling me a fool, dumb, or something else bad—like Viola Kimbrough did me.

  Dumb Delana, get over here and take off Adena’s shoes!

  Aunt Tilley must have felt me well up.

  “Oh no, Delana, don’t cry! I’m telling you about your blessing! You are a child of promise!” Then she gave me her sunshine smile.

  We were out on the back porch. Aunt Tilley and Grandpa in rockers by the door. Me off to the side in the swing.

  As was our Sunday custom, we had come outside after dinner to “behold Creation.” That’s how Aunt Tilley put it.

  I was beholding a horde of dragonflies. They were hovering around the blue hydrangea, moving back and forth, side to side.

  At first, it seemed Aunt Tilley was looking at the dragonflies, too, but it was more like she was staring through them as she talked on about me being a child of promise and how she named me Delana because we are kin to Martin Delany.

  “He was born over up in Jefferson County, back when there was just one Virginny. There was no West Virginia like we live in now.”

  I’d learned all about the making of West Virginia in school. About Martin Delany, too, but the most I remembered clear was that he’d started the first newspaper for our people out this way. The Mystery was its name. Now that I knew he was kin, my mind perked up.

  Aunt Tilley was all het up for me to remember everything about Martin Delany as she raced on about how he was a doctor, wrote books, went to Africa in search of a ripe place for colored people to live, then changed his mind when the Civil War broke out. He joined the Union army.

  “First of our race to make major—and on Father Abraham’s say-so!” Aunt Tilley saluted the strange and sultry air. “Knew if I named you Delana, you’d make the family proud like Martin did.”

  Grandpa twisted up his face like he wished Aunt Tilley would hush, then hung his head when she didn’t.

  “Right along with his Missus, Martin Delany had high hopes for their children. Give them names to point the way!” Aunt Tilley exclaimed, then went to squinting like she was sorting through a tin of tiny buttons.

  “Now, Tilley,” Grandpa sighed, “that’s enough about Martin Delany. No need to go on with this.”

  Aunt Tilley kept searching her mind.

  “Alexander Doomas!” she finally cried out, smacking her lips in satisfaction. “That’s what the Delanys named one son. Another one … after that great Haiti man—Two Cent!”

  The dragonflies were still doing a dance with me keeping top-eye open should they swarm nearer to the house.

  The screen door shut. Grandpa had gone inside. To the sitting room, I guessed. To play checkers with himself.

  Aunt Tilley didn’t seem to notice Grandpa had left. “Other children,” she mumbled, face all frantic and scratching her head, “Lawdamercy … names on the run.”

  After a long silence, Aunt Tilley asked, “Picked what you’ll stitch next?” like needlework had been the course of conversation all along.

  “No’m.” I knew she’d pick no matter what I thought.

  “Pink primrose be nice.”

  “Yes’m.”

  When I glanced again at the hydrangea, I saw the dragonflies hover up, then dart away.

  Two

  Time for needlework!” Aunt Tilley was getting more and more twitchy, flitting from thing to thing.

  I had been up in my room, practicing cursive like she told me, when she holle
red up the stairs.

  So I put my pen down and headed to the sitting room, where we always did our needlework: me having to embroider hankies, her only making doilies lately.

  Rounds, squares, rectangles, ovals. Long, short. For dressers, bureaus, tables. For chair and sofa backs. Aunt Tilley made those doilies so fast—sometimes four, five a day—like she was in a doily-making race and the prize was her life.

  Aunt Tilley had even started coming to breakfast with her hook and yarn, forsaking all food and only taking coffee, then letting that get cold as all she did was talk and crochet.

  On the afternoon she called me away from my cursive, I took my place on the sitting room sofa and started stitching. She still had me doing primroses. Periwinkle this time.

  But not for long. Before the clock chimed, Aunt Tilley put down her hook and yarn, eyed me to do likewise with my needle and thread, then yelled, like a house afire, “Time to visit kinfolk!” as she reached behind the sofa for the basket atop the sewing table.

  That’s where she kept the kinfolk now.

  These photographs used to be across the hall in the parlor, on the big lion’s paw table behind the red velvet settee. The tintypes and the pictures Aunt Tilley called “card visits” had been in a little leather album. The bigger portraits, in a keepsake box.

  Used to be we visited kinfolk maybe once a year. And the visits were brief. All Aunt Tilley did back then was point to a picture and say something simple.

  Like a name—“They the Dowds.”

  Or a name plus a tidbit—“Cousin Clare, she’s still up in Parkersburg … Uncle Matthias, down in Madison.”

  Back then, she hardly ever told me if a kinfolk was blood or married-in. One time she did was when she pointed at the woman with a long cross and a yonder gaze.

  “Aunt Viney. Evangelist. Me and your grandpa’s sister.”

  After Aunt Tilley got all twitchy, visiting kinfolk was far from simple. It became a big to-do.

  With the basket of pictures on one arm, Aunt Tilley marched me from the sitting room and across the hall into the parlor. There, she put a different handful of family on display—mantel, settee, windowsills, wherever she felt they fit best. After she had everybody just so, she had us stroll, arm in arm, around the room.

  Sometimes Aunt Tilley talked to a photograph—like “Howdy!” or “Good day!”

  Sometimes she spurned a person, muttering the likes of “floozy” or “danger-life!” at their picture.

  Most amazing of all, Aunt Tilley had started giving me so much more than tidbits about kinfolk.

  On the day Aunt Tilley put Aunt Viney on the mantel, I learned she and her long cross lived on the road, sleeping at a follower’s home in whatever town she had a camp meeting. And she walked everywhere. Never took a train. Never rode a buggy.

  On another day, when Uncle Matthias was propped up in a side chair, I learned he’d traveled all around the nation as a railroad porter.

  “Knowledgeable about hundreds of cities.” Aunt Tilley tapped her temple. “A human telegraph, too! Take a message here, deliver it there. Always generous with information and news.” Her eyes darted around the room, then went narrow. “About other matters, I have my doubts,” she whispered. “I never let myself forget ole Matthias have a wily eye.”

  Just like the dog he posed with in the picture, I thought.

  The day Aunt Tilley had me put aside my periwinkle primrose, Cousin Eula was the feature.

  Aunt Tilley sighed when she picked up Eula from the baseboard.

  I smiled at Eula. I liked how she was framed in the oval and how it was edged with dainty leaves looking as if time had stopped amid a cool-breeze sway.

  “Eula came to a tragic end in Pittsburgh.”

  “How did she die?” I asked.

  Aunt Tilley dropped Eula’s picture, flopped in the armchair, rolled her eyes, lollygagged her tongue, shook like she was having a fit, then froze and said opera-like, “Oh, she died like this!”

  I laughed so hard I got a stitch in my side.

  Hadn’t meant to trigger Aunt Tilley’s new game, but next thing I knew I wanted to ask how somebody else died, because I wanted to laugh again and for us to keep playing “Oh, she died like this!”

  Without meaning to, I thought about my mother, something I wasn’t supposed to do. And we never played the game about her. Or about anybody else real, only made-up people from storybooks.

  Till now.

  Grandpa said we shouldn’t play it at all. “Unseemly.” That’s what I’d overheard him mumble to our housekeeper, Ida Nash. Then he added something about Aunt Tilley “and her foolishness coming like a crop.”

  Aunt Tilley had told me all we had to do was make the sign of the cross after we laughed and Father God wouldn’t mind our game. I didn’t understand how that would work. We weren’t Catholic.

  Still, I crossed myself as I picked Eula up off the floor.

  “Fell down a long flight of mansion stairs. That’s how Eula died.” Aunt Tilley was back to sitting normal in the armchair. “Broke neck, broke back.”

  That wasn’t funny. How awful, I thought as I sat down on the floor by Aunt Tilley’s side. “Somebody pushed her—a bandit out to steal all the silver?”

  Aunt Tilley waved her hand. “Tripped. … This here picture the last we seen of her after she decided to live a lie.” Aunt Tilley’s glance said, I don’t want to say but I want you to ask.

  I idled on why else I liked Eula’s picture. She looked like she was top boss of her world. I wondered what that felt like.

  “Truth will out,” muttered Aunt Tilley.

  I still didn’t ask about Eula living a lie.

  “Shoulda known not to have a child. Soon as her Mister saw their baby browner than two white folks could make … If he wasn’t a powerful white man—banker—he’d a been strung up.”

  So now I knew why Aunt Tilley didn’t shine to Eula. Eula had gone passing—left the race and declared herself a white lady.

  But I didn’t understand the other part. “Aunt Tilley, why you say her husband would’ve hanged if he wasn’t powerful?”

  “Threw the baby out the window! Choked Eula to death!”

  I was even more confused. “You said she fell down mansion stairs—tripped.”

  Aunt Tilley’s nostrils flared.

  I looked away. She didn’t like to be stared at when collecting her thoughts. Worse, her faraway gaze had me scared. More so after I took a hard look at Eula’s photograph.

  It was stamped Des Moines, not Pittsburgh. The message on the back bewildered me, too.

  Had Eula changed her name to Emma?

  And who was Pearlie Bruce?

  Three

  How did she die? Something inside her thought almost-December was July, I guess.

  Had I not been such a heavy sleeper …

  Our rooms were side by side. I would have heard the floorboards creak, peeked out my door, said, “Aunt Tilley, what you doing up?”

  If she didn’t answer, I would have hurried down to The Traveler’s Room and shaken Grandpa awake.

  Aunt Tilley wouldn’t have left the house in a nightshirt and straw hat, all mixed up about night and day.

  She was found down by the Kanawha, leaning against a tree.

  That’s what I heard Miss Ida say. She was in the kitchen with some neighbor ladies come to pay respects and ask what could they do to help with the funeral and all.

  Sounded like Miss Ida was about to speak more on how Aunt Tilley died, when she switched to talking about bread pudding. She must’ve heard me breathing on the other side of the kitchen door.

  I tiptoed away, through the dining room and into the sitting room. All I could think to do was visit kinfolk. Pick through the basket. Wonder who’d be coming and if I’d know them right off. Most of the photographs were old.

  Next thing I knew, snippets of kinfolk stories were swooping and swirling in my head.

  Oh, he was one smart …

  Mind like a sieve, she
had …

  Suffered for years but then …

  Glory to Father God, the lost was found!

  I saw the faces Aunt Tilley made. How she sucked her teeth. Or winked. Or frowned. The way she saved her sunshine smile for favorite kin.

  I was trying so hard to be strong, to not cry, even though Grandpa wasn’t home.

  Earlier that morning, when he was up in my room telling me Aunt Tilley was gone, I started to cry, but then stopped when Grandpa told me to be strong.

  All I wanted was for him to hug me, but he just patted me on the back, jingling change in his pocket, like he always did when out of sorts.

  “Won’t do you no good to work yourself up into a state,” Grandpa said as he left my room. “Be strong.”

  Be strong. That’s what I kept telling myself as I sat in the sitting room with the kinfolk. I didn’t want Grandpa to see my eyes all red and puffy when he returned from the telegraph office, letting family know Aunt Tilley was dead.

  I still couldn’t believe it. Aunt Tilley was dead?

  Soon as I heard Miss Ida say they’d found her down by the Kanawha against a tree, I was sure Aunt Tilley had died at her wishing-place, where she always went to say her dreams. She never took me there, only said it was down by the river beneath a welcoming tree.

  Under that tree was where she and Uncle Dub had their first picnic. And that very day, she wished him to be her husband. After that came true, she always went down to her secret place to wish on things of “holy specialness,” like a child of strong body and mind when she knew she was in the family way. Sure enough, their son, Richard, was a wish come true—strong body, strong mind.

  Years later, she’d gone down by the Kanawha to wish for love more bountiful when she knew she’d be the one to mother me.

  By then, Uncle Dub was with the Lord and Aunt Tilley living in this house with Grandpa. And Cousin Richard, he was away at Storer College with a pocketful of plans that would take him to Pennsylvania. To Huntingdon. That’s where his sweetheart Cora was from and where Grandpa staked him in a printing shop.