WHILE BASED ON FACT, the story about Rose and Rene is fiction. They were my grandparents. Rose did live on a plantation and was fifteen when Rene, a silk merchant, came to visit. He did wed her and take her back to his house in Brooklyn. He did own two silk-importing houses with his brother. And he was a very wealthy man.
Rose had her first child at sixteen, and for that birth, and every other (she had five children), she went home to her mother and the plantation.
But in the early years of her marriage, she was still a child herself. I heard a story once about her having to be called in from skipping rope to feed the baby. I know she was a great influence on her neighborhood, but through her church, not through civic work. She died in 1961, much mourned, except by those closest to her. Her grandchildren did not know she existed. My mother (her first child) died shortly after I was born, and when my father remarried we were completely cut off from our mother's family.
I first saw Rose in her coffin. I was in the house on Dorchester Road only once, after she died. But I remember it well.
I don't know when Rene died. I only know that it was sometime between the two great wars and that on a visit to South America he was assassinated while going to collect a debt, and they sent his body home to his wife.
Up until recently these two people, who gave me a lot of my DNA, were quiet in my background. And then one day I thought, I write stories about fifteen-year-old, girls all the time, why not tell the one about my grandmother and the first year of her marriage?
So I set out to launch this story. When young people ask me what it is about, I am at a loss to say and usually end up saying, "It is my grandmother and grandfather, as I imagined them to be."
And then I add, "If you have grandparents, get to know them. Ask them questions. And if you don't, ask others about them. For we all have a Rene and a Rose in our lives. And someday you may need to know them."
Beaufort, South Carolina, After the Civil War, 1865–1950. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Beaufort Historic District, Beaufort, South Carolina.
Bridges, Anne Baker Leland, and Roy Williams III. St. James Santee, Plantation Parish: History and Records, 1685–1925. Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company Publishers, 1997.
PBS, American Experience. America 1900. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/1900.
Rosengarten, Theodore, with the journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822–1890). Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986.
Snyder-Grenier, Ellen M., for the Brooklyn Historical Society. Brooklyn! An Illustrated History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
Sullivan, Mark. Our Times, 1900–1925. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939.
Younger, William Lee. Old Brooklyn in Early Photographs, 1865–1929: prints from the collection of the Long Island Historical Society. New York: Dover Publications, 1978.