About the book

The True History of the Loftins

DIG AROUND in your family’s history long enough and you’ll start to find stories behind the names and dates on your pedigree chart. Every family has them—tales of triumph and victory, love and tragedy, tumultuous lives and simple days well lived.

For as long as I can recall, my family has made a habit of telling stories about our ancestors—a way to keep them alive in a world that has long since forgotten them. Because of this, I can’t remember when I first heard of the real Loftins—Alevia VanPelt and William Lynch and their children, Annie (Bess), Virginia, Alice (Mae), Franklin, and Alevia—but I’ve always been entranced by this family of extraordinary artists.

My great-great-grandmother was Alice—Hunter College graduate, educator, and the only one to marry and have children. My grandmother Alevia VanPelt Jenkins Ballard often told me how lovely and kind and smart she was, but she also told me of the others—of Annie the milliner, Virginia the writer, Franklin the salesman, and Alevia the concert pianist. They have each captured hours upon hours of my thoughts, but when I sat down to write a story based on this family, it was Virginia’s voice I heard, a voice I found rather fitting considering her profession.

Not only was Virginia an artist, but in her soul she was also an adventurer. She traveled the world, seemingly unperturbed by the difficulty in doing so at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote several books—mostly nonfiction—and articles for The Bronx Review, painted, taught, organized a women’s suffrage group, and helped establish an artists’ colony in Lime Rock, Connecticut. Though she never married, I’d like to imagine that she would have. Her diaries suggest her interest in a man who proposed to another woman quite without warning. The character of Charlie is fictional, but his profession is roughly based on lithographic illustrator Berhardt Wall. Wall illustrated Virginia’s book Washington Irving Footprints, but their relationship was likely much closer, as evident by his inscriptions in several of his own books to various members of the family. In later years, they both lived in the artists’ colony in Lime Rock.

To this day, no one knows what became of Franklin. The prevailing rumor is that he was disowned for disappointing his parents, possibly for doing something corrupt, possibly for being gay. In my narrative, the latter option was so difficult to reconcile on its own that I decided to create a fictional plot using the murky twentieth-century drug industry. After the blood-soaked clothes were delivered to their home, it was said that Virginia went searching for him, but he was never found.

Though only imagined, the Hoppers, Lydia and Tom, and the society are a conglomeration of the colorful friends, artists, and groups mentioned in Virginia’s diaries and Virginia and Alevia’s letters to Alice. Alevia never sought acceptance in to the Symphony or Philharmonic, though she did make her living both playing for hire and testing pianos at several of the local factories.

The place where the old Mott Haven home once stood on the corner of Morris Avenue and 142nd Street is now a parking lot, but the story of this remarkable family lives on each time it is told, made immortal by our remembrance.