This is such a valuable and beautiful book. Never destroy it. I want someone to own it who realizes how marvelous this book is…It is absolutely true.
Mother
Ellie discovered it in a bookcase in my father’s study when we were cleaning out my parents’ home. She’s still processing the shock, as am I.
The daughter of a Confederate soldier, Wilde had been indoctrinated with fierce if misguided ancestral pride. And yet she also took on the cause of a Black child in the neighborhood, teaching him to read, giving him food and my father’s hand-me-downs. There must have been some sort of cultural logic to her contradictions—I’ll never know how she squared the ill-fitting pieces.
Our family tree was blighted with racists. At first glance, there were fascinating characters—my great-grandmother Sallie, for instance, whose mother and two brothers went to New Orleans to buy a piano. On the journey they contracted yellow fever and died; their bodies were shipped home in the piano crate. Because Sallie hadn’t joined them, she survived. I was taken with the gothic quality of her story.
But Sallie was a descendant of the slave-owning Shorter family; her father, Reuben Clark Shorter, was known as an “ethnic cleansing specialist” and “renowned Indian fighter.” Sallie married a cotton broker, Alfred Alexis Couric; their son, A. A. Couric, was also a cotton broker—and a mean drunk who, evidence suggests, participated in a lynching. He was my father’s uncle. I will never be at peace with the fact that I share a bloodline with such a person.
As a child, I was oblivious to these things. My fondest memories were of time spent with relatives in the magnolia-scented South—the Tolkien-like cypress trees draped in Spanish moss and the gracious, pretty women who “bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum,” as Harper Lee wrote.
My mom’s Southern heritage also has its roots in Alabama. She descended from German immigrants, Isaac and Emma Frohsin, who left Germany in the late 19th century and made their way to Alexander City, where they opened the department store bearing their last name. My great-uncle Ralph took over the store, making Alex City his lifelong home. I have vivid memories of picking blackberries in his backyard, pulling puffer fish out of Lake Martin, and eating pimento cheese sandwiches.
When I was 10, we drove to Uncle Buddy’s house in Atlanta for Nana’s 70th-birthday party. We were all hanging out in the family room, goofing around, playing games. At one point, my eyes locked on a foreign-looking silver sculpture nestled high up in the bookcase. A menorah.
My young brain tried to process it. I remember thinking, Wow—they’re Jewish. Quickly followed by Oh my God—we’re Jewish. The suddenly terrifying Tom Lehrer lyrics filled my head:
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants…
And everybody hates the Jews
I guess it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise with names like Abraham and Isaac in the family mix and beef tongue being sliced in the kitchen, two of my cousins fighting over the tip. Going through my mother’s papers, I find plentiful evidence of our Jewish lineage and Nana’s involvement in a lively Jewish community in Atlanta: an invitation to a luncheon at Ahavath Achim Synagogue; a Yom Kippur prayer card; Nana’s wedding announcement noting that Rabbi David Marx officiated. She’d met her future husband, Bert, at a “Jewbilee”—a social where Jews could mingle with other Jews. The homes my grandfather built were in the Jewish enclaves of Omaha. My mom and Buddy were both confirmed at their local synagogue.
They were clearly Reform Jews, putting up a Christmas tree every year. When they asked the rabbi if that was okay, he said sure, “it’s just like celebrating someone’s birthday.” And yet they knew that feeling of “otherness.” In a letter to my mom during her freshman year at Sophie Newcomb, her father wrote, “We would be glad to know if your style is being cramped by association with young folks of your own faith or have you been able to knock down the barriers?”
Jewishness was not something my mother talked about. And I know she suffered a million slights over the years, something I became more attuned to as I got older. When my cousin married into a wealthy WASPy family, the wedding was at a “restricted” country club in Birmingham. When our family went to find our table, it was on the outskirts of the action. We heard there was a big party at the new in-laws’ house afterward—we weren’t invited. I felt so bad for Nana, the grandmother of the groom.