Do you know that saying about the only dumb question being the one you don’t ask? Well, I’m going to test that theory here because some people are probably going to think I am an idiot when they read this. There is something I need to understand about my Granny that I cannot find an answer to in books or within my own family. Books all deal with the more distant past or the present. Or, if they do deal with the right time and place, they idealize the things I know the reality of all too well and I cannot take their view point seriously. My family, well lets just say we have a lot of subjects that are off limits and it is kinder to my aunt if I don’t push her out of her comfort zone. The reason I am posting this on the abuse board is because it is about the way my grandmother was treated by my father and grandfather but it might also be about the way she treated herself. It IS about abuse but I can’t fully understand who did what to whom anymore. I know there is no one of her generation left to explain her to me but I am hoping that perhaps there are others out there who remember them and the stories they told well enough to shed a little light on who my Granny was on the inside and what her expectations of life had been as a young woman.

Granny was the one stable influence in my life. She raised me. She loved me. She taught me how to survive. She also lied to me about what was really going on in our family and unwittingly taught me how to be abused because I grew up trying to live by her values. She hid herself from me and that left me very vulnerable to some serious bad problems in our family. I really need to understand her better and for that I need perspective. My family is pretty much scattered to the winds and I have not set eyes upon them since I was in my teens so there are no answers there. Until I found and spoke to my aunt about the subject this spring all I knew about our heritage was that Granny was “a little bit Native American but no one knew what tribe and it really wasn’t something we talked about�? Then I went looking for answers and sort of cornered my aunt and got some of what I needed but it feels cruel to push an elderly lady to remember too much of the past because what I grew up in was bad and I know her childhood wasn‘t much better. The kind of stuff you don’t talk about on a family site and the kind of stuff you don’t ask people to remember if they don’t want to talk about it. Some people tell me I have a right to push but I was raised better than that and I just can’t do it.

Obviously, the drive to assimilate in the rural south played a big part in the whole situation but I need to understand my Granny in relation to who she was. I was born in 1967 so that puts me in an entirely different world from what she must have experienced. I look European while she definitely looked Native American. She would have been born around the turn of the century and was in her late 60s and 70s while raising me. You can see how we were separated by enough time that it is hard to put myself in her shoes with the little information I have. If she were some distant relation in a family history it might not matter as much but this is the woman who raised me and is most responsible for who I am and how I think. I saw the world first through her eyes but now I find I saw it with blinders on because I never really knew her.

I believe deep down she was secretly very traditional but I’m not sure where that ends and the rest begins. I remember her saying things she would not explain because “people will laugh at you and call you a fool if you talk about it�?yet insisting I do things a certain way without explanation. I know she taught me certain ways of thinking, certain values without ever explaining any of the reasons for what she taught. I know she was deathly afraid of any of us kids acting anything but mainstream white yet the values she imparted were at odds with what she seemed to want us to be. I know her through the men she raised in my father and uncle and the woman she raised in my aunt. I see her in the people she raised my cousins and I to be. The drive to be white was so intense with my parents generation. My father and grandfather truly seemed to hate anyone who wasn’t white. I can remember in the 70s when everyone was trying to get a tan being beaten hard with a belt for staying in the sun too long because it would make us “look like Indians�? I heard the same confused message when my aunt admitted to Granny being “completely Cherokee�?and Poppa being “maybe part�? I was thrilled but when I asked if she meant full blood or part blood my aunt could barely get out the words because they made her so uncomfortable. There are many truly shameful facts in my family that are not taboo topics yet this one simple innocent fact is somehow an embarrassment beyond words to her generation. I know how messed up their childhoods must have been and I saw how bad it was for my generation because of what this self hatred did to each generation in turn. My own being left without even a reason for why things were so messed up. Some of us pulled ourselves out of the mess and the rest are so lost in drugs and alcohol that I do not think they even question why. Only my aunt’s children seemed to have an almost normal childhood but even they have been touched to some degree by the way the rest of us lived.

We were a rough family. I’m from the mountains of Appalachia where people still brag about that but I’m not saying it for effect. I remember growing up around the stills of my grandparents generation and the cousins who dealt drugs out of the upstairs bedroom. I remember getting so sick the first time I snuck shine when I was a child that I swore off drink for good. I know who has a police record and for what. (My father included) Guns and violence were just a part of the scenery. From childhood I’ve known to watch your back and what can happen if you don’t. As a child many of my “playmates�?were homeless men my Granny fed. Sometimes they worked for my father when he was felt inclined to open his wielding shop. Mainly he played cards, hustled pool and drank.

That needed saying because I want to be fair and not paint her out to be a saint. She was a part of that world as much as I was as a child but you can live in it and yet be separate from it. She was that kind of woman. She had definite ideas about what was and was not respectable and she adhered to them as if they were the law. She raised all of us girls to be the same. The rules and restrictions for being a woman in our family were like a noose at times but they kept us safe to some degree. We all married the wrong men when we were too young to know better and made the same mistakes but she kept us on the straight and narrow. Other than that and we lived our lives according to some code of behavior we never really understood.

It is that code of ethics that confuses me. Part of it was just what comes from growing up in a family where all the men drank heavily, were suicidal and very violent. Part of it is the general attitude towards women. Men ate their fill first, then women and children had the scraps fleshed out with corn bread and beans or part of a chicken on Sundays. Men tapped their cups on the table and women ran to fill them. Women worked to support the family. Men worked for money to run around and gamble. Men drank and socialized. Women stayed home and tended the children, house and garden. In the end though it was better to be a woman in my family than a man because the women were at least strong but at the time it would never have occurred to us to resent being treated that way. It just was the way the world worked. In the end the same codes of ethics that seemed to have helped the girls of my family eventually have a better life seemed to have trapped my grandmother and I cannot understand why.

She and my grandfather shared neither a life nor any love. He had the upstairs and she the downstairs. She lived hidden away only going to work at the sewing factory and being unwelcome at outside events and by that I mean important ones. My grandfather took his girl friend to see my new born brother at the hospital and my Granny waited until he came home. Your only living son has his first son and the child is near death but you are not allowed to go see the child and you just sit in a rocking chair and wait for permission to see your own blood kin. That is messed up.

You would think she was really a beaten down person and that is the stereotype I stuck on her for years. All this made me go back and re-examine what I remembered and she could not have been that strong and that broken at the same time. There was something more driving her that I do not understand.

I want to know�?make that I need to know�?/P>

Did women of her generation willingly give up their heritage, religion and everything that defined them because they thought it was best for their children and keep everything they believed a shameful secret? Looking back it now seems she played a part in what happened beyond that of being the victim. It almost seems she did that to herself. My father was born in the mid 1920s and was the oldest. I know it was said in another thread that it wasn’t a good time to be Native American but how could it have been any better to teach your son to hate you and thus a part of himself that he could never change? What could be worse than that? Make me understand. The Trail of Tears was a century ago at that time, but what was it like to be Cherokee in the rural south in the 1920-30s.

What did she really expect of her marriage? What did she hope for? Obviously, my family was Dysfunctional with a capital D and there is reality and what people believe should be but what would a woman of her generation have expected to be treated like?

What would she have expected of her children? Other than the constant refrain that we would better ourselves, there were no real answers as to what that meant.

Was it likely that she willingly hid herself away and wore that awful pale face powder of her own free will or was it something my grandfather imposed? Even when time had taken its toll it was obvious she had once been a beautiful woman who must have been pursued by many men before she married. Did she choose him in part because he could pass and then try to play her part by hiding herself away? Did she marry him and then find he changed?

I know there are answers other places about what should have been but this is the abuse board and we all here know what should have been can be very far from real life. I also know that no one can give me any real answers but even best guesses would be much appreciated. I need the hard answers from women who have been there and seen others go through what she lived through. She did such a good job of hiding herself that I grew up thinking of myself as white and I still struggle to see her as she really was. I cannot shake these blinders that I grew up with. I am gradually growing to see my father and grandfather as real men and victims in their own way due to the pressures of the times they lived in instead of “those foul mouthed abusive cracker idiots�?which was honestly how I saw them for most of my life. For the first time in decades I can think of my father as Dad and use the word without it leaving a foul taste in my mouth because I can see the boy who became the man and what his life might have been like to some degree.

Can someone state what should be so obvious to me and teach me to understand her life because somewhere buried under all those lies is the real woman I want to know and I cannot find the keys to unlock the door between us.

PJ