Reunion: A Search for Ancestors Read online

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SOURCE NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright © 2012 by Ryan Littrell

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means or stored in any database or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the author. For permission requests, please see the contact information provided at the author’s website listed below.

  ISBN: 978-0-9883410-1-2

  www.RyanLittrell.com

  First Edition Fall 2012

  CHAPTER 1

  EMBERS

  Of all the big questions, “Where do I come from?” is the most elusive. To answer it, you have to go looking for what’s no longer visible, and listen for what can no longer talk back.

  And what do you have to go on? A fossil, maybe, or messages written in a lost language. Coffin air where there used to be breath.

  But go back to some place where you used to live, some place you come from, and things have a sneaky way of reigniting. This house, this street no longer feels like home, and so you can’t help but see it through the eyes you had when it was home: This restaurant wasn’t here, but the house over there looks just the same, and the view down the street almost does, too, and this floor creaks with the same feet.

  The old haunt is starting to haunt.

  This is when you might notice little eruptions of how you felt back then, and how you saw things, and who you were, and who you were with. You might hear some sayings of the gone, or feel the scratch of discarded skin. Comfort zones have somehow stayed in you, traces of an old belonging, so that Robert Graves’ lines about the dead could also be said of past homes: “Blow on a dead man’s embers / And a live flame will start.”

  For some of us, the embers of a place might stay burning even if we’ve never been there. To an American, say, whose parents immigrated from elsewhere, this elsewhere has always been everywhere—in the language and accents she heard around the house as she was growing up, the stories she was told, the habits she was taught. Her family’s homeland isn’t so much a place as it is a part of her, something she couldn’t disentangle from herself even if she wanted to, and if she happens to visit where her parents grew up, it’s not as a stranger, but almost as a native returning from a long absence. The country of her ancestors carries the allure of home, the almost proven promise of home, no matter where she goes.

  Even for her, though, the ancestral homeland isn’t quite home. Korean-American, Polish-American, Mexican-American: Those hyphens suggest to the world that she’s not fully Korean, not completely Polish, not wholly Mexican. Her belonging to that place isn’t immediate, as it was for her parents. For her, it’s at the slightest remove.

  And for someone like me, the remove isn’t even slight. Growing up in Chatham, Illinois, my family’s origins were almost invisible. No stories of voyages had been passed down, no customs or memories had been brought over to be kept simmering.

  Sure, I looked at the names of my grandparents and great-grandparents, and so I could imagine Ireland or Germany or England, but those places were far off. They were just words. There wasn’t much of an elsewhere in the background—history seemed to start in about 1776. It was as if my family had sprung out of the ground in America, grilling burgers and going bowling.

  My mom’s mom, Betty McDonald, liked it that way. If the Census Bureau had come to the door and asked for her ethnic origin, she would have responded with one word: America. She would have said: Why does it matter? You are who you are, you should be judged on that, it doesn’t matter whether your parents came from Pennsylvania or Italy or Eskimo land, or wherever the heck it was. Are people who lived two hundred years ago going to put food on your table? Are they going to give you an education? For all you know, your great-great-whatever was a real son of a gun, so now are you going to take credit for that, too?

  Grandma knew the nice old ladies who didn’t mind letting everybody know that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and served in the Revolutionary War. I can see the look she would have given the Mayflower ladies. It said: You don’t fool me. Don’t act as if you deserve some special honor just by breathing—I know the truth, and you know the truth, so let’s be honest here.

  All right then, the truth is that I can’t think of home without thinking of her. Her voice reading to me for hours when I was too sick to go to school, and her applause at the end of every performance I put on for her, even though I was just running around and acting like Batman. The opening sounds of M.A.S.H., her favorite show, when I ran in from outside, and how she always asked me if I wanted to watch it with her. Her laugh-out-loud laugh, her wry and sly jokes.

  As a girl, she always wanted to run track, but school officials wouldn’t let her be in any of the meets. She decided to practice after school with the boys anyway, and years later, when my mom wanted to play softball and Grandma found out there was no girls’ team in Chatham, she decided to start one, and served as a coach right alongside Grandpa. Ryan, she’d tell me, if it’s what you want to do, and you know it’s right, then you just go ahead and do it, and don’t let them tell you any different, because they don’t know. Just keep plugging along and do your best, and don’t make a fuss, now, don’t make some big production out of it.

  The last time she went to the hospital, I was away from home, about to finish my second year of college. Those first few semesters had been tough, and I hadn’t done as well as I’d hoped. She called to say she’d have to go in for an operation, but everything was going to be fine and I shouldn’t worry. She told me I should just push ahead and study hard and do as well as I could on my finals, and she was rooting for me. Only later did I find out that things weren’t as good as she’d let on. Only later did I find out that she’d decided to take the risk of heart surgery despite her weak lungs.

  So when I came back home a few days after my last exam, and found Mom and everyone else waiting for me, it didn’t matter that my grades had arrived in the mail earlier that day. And as I walked into the hospital room and saw the respirator and the tubes, Mom told me that Grandma’s eyes were closed and she couldn’t speak, but she could still hear us, and she was able to write out whole sentences on a note pad.

  I took her hand. Hi Grandma, it’s Ryan. She squeezed my hand back. I looked over at the machine that beeped each heartbeat. I wanted to tell her: You didn’t have to do what you did for me, I could have come home earlier, I could have figured out a way to take my exams later on. The breathing machine made its sucking, in-and-out sound. I wanted to say: I’ve never understood how I deserved what you did for me all those times. But there were people around, and so I just said: Well, my grades came in,
and it turns out I made it onto the Dean’s List. She motioned for the note pad, and I handed her a pen. She wrote: As long as it isn’t a hit list.

  Even now, she can prick bubbles—her voice is the one I hear whenever I find myself dismissing people who’ve let their fantasies get the best of them. Her voice is the one I hear when I press the mute button as the commercials come on.

  And her you-don’t-fool-me look is what comes to mind when I hear someone say that the land of his ancestors is like home. Right. Never mind that paying a fare and visiting for a while aren’t enough to make you belong there, not just yet, because it takes years of everyday seeing and breathing to be woven into a place.

  Still, the pre-cooked homeland nostalgia is all around. There are the Chinese New Year parades, the restaurants with names like Socrates Diner, the lederhosen and wheat beer in the old German neighborhoods. Perhaps the most finely tuned nostalgia industry is the Celtic one—look no further than the local Irish Pub, showing off its authenticity with copies of old Guinness advertisements, a framed Irish Blessing, maybe a photo of John F. Kennedy. If you don’t act now, you might even pass up the chance to have your very own tartan bagpiper Santa Claus ornament, and Braveheart just might explain why you’re fiercely independent and loyal.

  But when people visit the land of their ancestors, many of them find something more real than the ad campaigns, something they can’t put into words. They come away sensing a tug that surprises even them. Afterwards, they say: It was like some part of me belonged there. Or: Every once in a while, I got this weird feeling that I knew the place already.

  When they talk about the trip, you can hear them saying one thing that they never fully spell out. It’s that the country they live in, no matter how close they are to it, and no matter how devoted they are to it, can’t answer every question they want it to. A part of them needs more than what their country can give. Something older, something beyond “the New World.”

  Most people living in this New World have been chasing the immediate for a long while now, and many of us have the creeping suspicion that after all this time, something is missing. Whole cities grow up in a decade or two, and people move wherever circumstances take them. The brand new houses sprout up to the horizon, accompanied by the same new gas stations with the same new chain restaurants. I’m expected to reinvent myself, as if who I am is just an outfit than I can step in and out of. The constant churn has come to be our norm—the shunting of tradition has become our tradition.

  The thing is, we’re the exception. For thousands of years, most people have seen themselves, not as the creators of their own lives, but as carriers of a tradition, the tradition that made them who they were. Many people throughout the world still think of themselves in the same way, as swatches of a very old fabric, without the clean break of mass migrations, and forced forgettings, and declarations of independence. We might be the first culture powered by the assumption that we can be satisfied by the ever-new, with only a few flashes of something older and encompassing.

  Maybe that’s why a lot of us can no longer deny the old need for groundedness, the need to see that our home and our origin might be the same. Maybe that’s why, in the years after Grandma left, I’d go into a bookstore and find a book with a title like Clans and Tartans. I’d read through the names: Douglas, MacDougall, Gordon, Grant, Robertson. For each one, there’d be a short history, along with the clan’s motto and tartan. Sometimes there’d be images of warriors, wearing their tartan kilts and playing their bagpipes and drawing their swords, ready to fight the English or a rival clan. In some books, I could find a map of the Scottish Highlands that outlined clan origins by pinning names to particular places.

  When I looked for Grandma’s maiden name, I was never disappointed. My family spelled it “McDonald” rather than “MacDonald,” but apparently there was no difference, and so I belonged to Clan Donald—one of the oldest and most powerful clans, according to the guidebooks. By the 15th century, the MacDonalds controlled much of the Highlands and the islands of the Hebrides. The clan was large enough to have several different branches, each with its own tartan, each with its own chief: MacDonald of Sleat, of Glengarry, of Ardnamurchan and others.

  As I got into the history and legends, though, I knew not to take them too personally: I could only trace my McDonald family back to Missouri. What if my ancestors had come from Ireland rather than Scotland? What if one of my ancestors had been adopted by an unrelated family named McDonald? I knew that the name meant “son of Donald” in Scottish Gaelic, so maybe I just had an ancestor with a father named Donald. Maybe, somewhere along the line, there’d been what genealogists gently call a “non-paternity event.”

  But those unknowns only made me want to know more. The drawing of the curtains only made me want to see who was behind them. These people, unnamed, faceless, were hiding out of view, right beyond the beginning of the dark. Just who were my ancestors?

  And with that question, a journey started. A journey that would lead to country graveyards, faded names in old books, and a DNA shock. A journey that would uncover a story of rebellion and survival, and would take me to one ancient place, far away, where I’d find embers burning for me even after all these years.

  CHAPTER 2

  BEGINNING

  HINTS

  The first step should have been easy—ask people what they knew about my recent McDonald family. But Grandma never knew much about them, and neither did her dad, my great-grandpa Lee McDonald. My mom and Aunt Donna asked him the question several times, and his response was always the same.

  “Where did your family come from, Grandpa?”

  “Missouri.”

  “No, we mean before then. Where did they come from originally?”

  “Kentucky.”

  It’s not that he had any reason to be ashamed of his family’s past, as far as we knew. He just didn’t consider family origins to be important.

  And maybe he had a point.

  Just think of a photograph: Nineteenth century, a man and a woman, two of your ancestors. No crinkled eyes or fixed smiles here, no lips saying cheese. He’s wearing a dark suit and tie, and she’s wearing a black or gray dress that goes all the way to her ankles, with a collar that buttons tightly around her neck. Their arms are folded on their laps.

  And when you focus on their eyes, you won’t see much, because the picture blurs when you zero in. You can’t quite see the white around her pupils, or the eye wrinkles he must have had from hours in the sun. You can’t see in their eyes what you see in a friend who trades a knowing glance with you, because these ancestors never had the chance to know you, and so they never spoke of you, they never cared about you. What would they have thought of you if they were around today? Would they invite you in, like you were some long lost grandchild of theirs, or would they be polite and distant, the way they might treat a strange new acquaintance?

  Each of us could ask these questions, but we know that there can be no response. We were never given the chance to know all the ways he would look after us, or how she would smile at us, or how they might have spoken of us, even when it was just the two of them. Our ancestors are never going to return our calls.

  But, spookily, they’re here. Their DNA is our DNA, in us right now, influencing everything our bodies and minds do. We might maintain their traditions. We might pledge allegiance to their flags. Maybe our virtues and our fears are only variations on theirs, written in a different key. Our ancestors populate a no man’s land in us: They’re gone but not gone, here but not here, residing somewhere between absence and presence.

  At least I had one foothold: I knew who my great-grandpa Lee McDonald’s parents were. Their names were William McDonald and Melinda Hagan, and they went by Will and Linnie. My great-grandpa Lee was born in a small town north of St. Louis, but when he was a boy, his parents Will and Linnie moved the family to Chatham, Illin
ois, my hometown, in the middle of the state. Mom and Aunt Donna and Uncle Del remembered Will’s dry sense of humor and his stoic quiet, and Linnie’s unassuming sweetness. But their history back in Missouri was a mystery.

  And there were so many chances for us to try to find out, because when I was growing up in Chatham, my great-grandpa Lee and his wife, my great-grandma Mary, were always around—they’d come over to our house for lunch or dinner, and they were at most of their great-grandchildren’s birthday parties, sporting events, dance recitals. The two of them would sit together at the table after a Sunday dinner, and he’d be telling a funny story, and she’d play along. Everybody always said that if you wanted to find Great-grandpa, you should look for Great-grandma, and there he’d be.

  By the time I got to know her, though, she wasn’t able to be what she was before. Yes, in this picture, where the two of them are holding up a cake reading “Happy 49th Anniversary Mom & Dad,” there’s no sign on her face of any change on the horizon. But within a few years after that picture was taken, gradually, more and more, he’d have to remember for her. If she were wearing long sleeves that day, he’d roll them up before giving her the shots she needed.

  After a while, whenever she made it out of the house, it was only because he took her around in the wheelchair. Now Mary, we’re gonna go see David play baseball, you remember David, your granddaughter Linda’s son. Toward the end, in the nursing home, and then in the hospital, he’d ask her to open her mouth, and eat some of this food, because it’s good for you, and you need it.

  Even after that, even after he lost her, he had a lot of people to take care of, as a grandpa does. After my baseball games, he’d take me over to the ice cream place by the elementary school and buy me a chocolate and vanilla swirled ice cream cone. There was the time he took me to the optometrist because I wanted a new pair of glasses, the time he taught me how to put the worm on the hook.