Years ago, my husband drove the few hours from our home in New Jersey to Reading, Pennsylvania to slide his long legs beneath his great-aunt Lil’s kitchen table one last time. He brought his appetite, his curiosity, and his phone, fully charged, to capture every word of their conversation.
Aunt Lil remained one of the final family storytellers and keeper of family secrets. In her old age, she could still recall the name of the woman (Mrs. Crawford) who invited her to Sunday school (Ocean City Baptist Church) and taught her the Bible.
By introducing Aunt Lil to faith, Mrs. Crawford, a faceless memory eighty years later, changed the future of Michael’s family. He inherited a legacy of faith passed down from Aunt Lil that continues to weave itself through the fabric of our family today.
Michael gathered names, dates, and anecdotes as they scattered about the room while Aunt Lil spun stories from her spindle-backed chair. Few stories came fully formed. Aunt Lil knit a few stitches here, tied a knot there, and left lengths of thread hanging loose, but there was enough to create an imperfect tapestry.
She told a story of immigration, of arranged marriages, of tragedy and loss, of joy, and of Jesus. It was Michael’s history and it belongs to our children now. They don’t yet appreciate the value of an old woman’s oral narrative, but they continue to live the story she began decades later.
Not all families have the gift of a raconteur who remembers. I visited my parents recently, and we sifted through boxes of black and white photos of long-gone relatives. Someone on the family tree took an interest in genealogy, and prepared binders filled with small squares, dates, and old-fashioned names: Lillian Richard, Clementine and Ignace Guidry, Leonard and Marie Emilie Gardner.
We can trace both sides of my family back for generations, but we’ve lost many of the stories. My parents tell as many as they can remember, but my mom reminds me, “Life was so hard back then. The women were hard. They didn’t talk about any of it.” I know this is true of many families.
My parents are the first to speak, to weave the few threads they’ve gathered of the past, to tell their own stories of growing up in the deep South to fractured families. They’re the first to change course, to choose a life of committed faith, and this decision has reached into the past and gathered aunts and uncles and cousins into the story of faith, and it has reached into the future and will some day knit itself into the lives of my children’s children.
I’m grateful for what remains from a long line of strong, but silent, women.
We visited Ocean City last week, where my husband’s grandmother, Sophie, grew up and where her sister, Lil, joined Mrs. Crawford at the Baptist Church on Sundays. I stood at the edge of the ocean and looked at the the same vast waters in which she dipped her toes. My shoulders burned with the heat of the same sun. I slept in the hotel where Michael’s grandmother worked as a teen, and I felt the long line of women who came before us holding hands across the span of time: the Sophies, the Lillians, the Clementines and Maries.
I sat on a stretch of sand, and I listened to the salted waves slap the shoreline. The wind ruffled the pages of my novel as I read, and I looked at my daughter, Sophie, stretched out brown and long-legged beside me. A single word drifted into my lap like a gull’s feather: Legacy.
Let me be among the strong women who aren’t silent. Who weave threads together so that the women who come after them know their origin story, so they know the depths from which they’re written.
