I researched my family history and discovered a secret that had been hidden for a long time. But was I right to say? | Marissa Pate
II’m sitting in my aunt’s retirement home on the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan. It’s not October yet, but for reasons I don’t fully understand, the house is hosting Thanksgiving dinner for residents and guests. I joined my great-aunt June and other octogenarians in stacking their paper plates at the buffet. Then we sit at tables lined with tiny pumpkins, while framed photos of the recently deceased sit atop the grand piano, seeming to look our way.
The early holiday festivities weren’t the only surprise when she arrived in Michigan. I was there to do research for a book I was writing about the history of feminism, and also about my mother, whose life story reflects the rise and fall of second-wave feminism. In 1974, a year after the death of Roe v. Wade, my 22-year-old mother traveled from Essex, England, to New York City and took a Greyhound bus across the country to visit John, who was then living in Omaha, Nebraska. At that time, my mother’s life, as it was for many women of that era, was full of promise. She was the first in her family to go to university, and she came of age alongside the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s. I wanted to know from June who my mother was when anything was still possible. I have been on this journey as a journalist and a daughter. In each of these roles, I wanted to know everything.
June is my grandfather’s sister. It was my journey, a reliving of the same journey my mother took in 1974, with a Greyhound bus ride across the Midwest, when I was 35, that I finally saw his face. He was a violent bully of a man who died many years ago, and my mother would never let me meet him, and I had no desire to. My cousins showed me pictures of him and my grandmother where his face was always written. But on the wall of John’s apartment, there it was.
I knew my grandfather’s story well. Or so I thought, until we were eating slices of turkey, and one of John’s sons, Terry, who had joined us for Thanksgiving lunch, asked me how Paul was doing*. “Who is Paul?” I asked. Terry looked at June. June looked at me. I knew that my grandfather had left my grandmother, but I did not know, until that moment, that he had a second family and that my mother had a half-brother, Paul, who lived in England. John was eager to connect with him. I texted my mom. “Maybe I forgot to mention that,” she replied.
I had come a long way in search of a better understanding of my mother, and here was a compelling clue – an entirely new family, which, from what I could understand from Terry and John, had a very different relationship with my grandfather.
A few weeks after returning to the UK I received a friend request on Facebook. I hit the journalist jackpot – Paul wanted to connect. I was eager to discover my mother’s story from a new perspective, one I didn’t know existed. New branches of the family tree were appearing in real time, pointing like arrows that I should follow.
“Everything is a copy,” Nora Ephron said, and the writer in me felt that throbbing in my fingers. But in this moment, I encountered a more thorny idea of storytelling. Who owns this story? I inherited it, but not completely. The story is not like a necklace – something that can only be worn by one family member at a time. The story is part of who my mother and her siblings still are. It’s ongoing. Its transmission is still in transit, still in the present tense, and there are multiple hands this story passes through before it reaches me. As a journalist, Paul’s discovery was my story. However, as a daughter and niece, I felt betrayed. What right did I have to expose a wound that had been hidden from the light of day for decades?
So I didn’t follow through. My Facebook friend request is still not accepted, and that part of my investigation is over. The daughter in me won out, and I realized it was no longer my story to follow. I haven’t stopped believing in the power of storytelling, but I’ve reevaluated who can be a storyteller. I’ve thought more seriously about the stories we use to understand others, and I’ve gained a new respect for—and acceptance of—what I don’t have a right to know. The pursuit of truth cannot feel like breaking and entering, even if the door is left open. This story may be just a click away, but just because something is within reach doesn’t mean it’s yours for the taking.
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