Part Two: Your Mothers (A Letter to my Great-Grandmother)

This is a photo of my own beautiful mother. 

Dear Sunny - 

John Samuel Stephenson Jr. is born June 21, 1906 in Philadelphia to a wealthy Main Street family. He has two sisters and one brother, but his brother dies when John is young. After his brother's death, John’s mother, Sallie, devotes nearly all of her time to charity work, leaving John with his older sisters and father. His sisters are quite a bit older than the two of you (14 and 15 years older).

Sallie herself dies in 1926 when she is just 59 years old. I don’t know why, or rather from what. John is 20 years old at the time, you are 17, and the two of you have just met. John sounds like such a happy chap, a songbird with a kind, reverent soul. Does his gleeful temperament rattle you with guilt? Or does it soothe you like sunshine in early spring? Do you curse at your gloom so that it might hide in the corner of your broken heart or do you sort of invite it in, give it a blanket and a bed inside your bones, as if you deserve nothing better? John’s mother sounds a wreck, leaving him all day. But maybe that’s why he turns out alright. Perhaps she knows that if she is John's primary caretaker, he will grow up to the sound of her constant weeping and that isn’t healthy for a child. I wonder if Sallie can’t stand to even look at baby John for very long; to hold him or kiss his face. He is her other son after all and he is young and also destined, as we all are, toward death. I hope his sisters kiss his face in her absence and blow raspberries on his belly and play him records and nuzzle his neck and cheeks.

When you are a young gal, Sunny, your daddy is off working long dark days and drinking away his nights, while you are left with your mother and your sisters. I'd guess that the boys, your brothers, are breaker boys, working too - sitting beside conveyor belts all day in a dark cloudy building, separating coal from impurities, arriving home coughing filth and blowing black snot from their noses. You probably help clean the house. Maybe you have a large garden in the back, one you weed, till and harvest. Maybe you have a cow and a small flock of hens for eggs. Maybe you help bake bread in an outdoor beehive oven, churn cream into butter, scrub and wring and hang the clothes, make the soap, boil the soup, run to the company store, gather bits of dropped coal from beside the tipple (the structure above the train tracks for filling train cars with coal), clean out the nasty privy, and gather water from the pump. You squish bed bugs and wait for your Christmas orange. Unlike Sallie, your mother, [who's name is now unknown, forgotten, unwritten, lost (a metaphor that is not lost on me)] has no choices really - for poverty is a kind of imprisonment. She can’t leave you with a governess or a grandmother or with your father even. Sure, your sister Jean could care for you. But there isn't much extra scrip (company money) for fine haircuts in a nearby city or for pieces of delicate lace and silk, anyway. She’s stuck there in that house, in a row of other identical houses, sucking down coke oven coal dust, scrubbing out its grease from familial skin and coarse muslin - unable to hide from you the reality of your destitution.

John is shielded from his mother’s tragedy.

You are not.