I don’t know why I signed up to take that genealogy course. What I knew about my family I didn’t like, and what I didn’t know—a lot—only frightened me. But maybe I was looking for something redemptive in my poisoned family tree, one little twig of goodness: someone who prayed, something that might reassure me that cursed blood didn’t run through our veins. I had always been haunted by that notion.
At the first class, the teacher gave some tips on how to search family histories online. But what really helped was pure analog.
“If you have an old family Bible with some information,” she said, “names, birth dates, marginalia, you’ll be way ahead of the game.”
An old family Bible. I actually did have one. I’d hardly opened it since my grandmother had given it to me when I was twenty-one. Faint handwriting chronicled mysterious births and deaths and marriages. The pages were faded and brittle. They’d felt as if they would disintegrate in my hands if I wasn’t careful. I’d thought it was better to leave the Good Book on the shelf. Maybe it was the only good thing about my family.
Yet that first class lit a kind of fire in me. I ran a dustcloth across the leather cover and the embossed words: Holy Bible. I could remember very clearly the day my grandmother, Mom’s mom, had given it to me. She had a little apartment a couple of miles from our home in Southern California. I had dropped by to visit, and that day we were having lunch. She knew I was interested in developing my faith. She lifted the book from the mohair sofa and put it in my hands, saying, “This rightfully belongs to you.”
I had long since moved out of my childhood home. My father was an alcoholic. He died of cancer when I was a teenager. I’d had enough of being told by my mom that I was stupid and worthless and would never amount to anything. Mom was still intoxicated by her own anger toward Dad, toward her life. I wondered sometimes why my grandmother never intervened, but back then I didn’t know—and wouldn’t know for years—how she too had suffered.
All I had was the Bible she had given me. I married a godly man, and the two of us went into ministry, preaching, teaching, bringing comfort to many. We moved a thousand miles away, and I managed to forgive my mom and maintain a civil long-distance relationship with her. But my questions about family were met by stony silence. The message was clear: you don’t want to know.
Except now I did. I wanted to know everything. I turned the Bible’s faded pages and studied the names. I copied them down and started doing some research.
What I discovered shocked me. A newspaper article from the 1920s revealed the terrible truth about my mother’s family.
“Mom,” I said, after getting her on the phone, “you never told me that your father had another family before you were born and what happened to them.”
“I don’t care about that,” she snapped.
No wonder. Her father was a murderer. He had four children with his first wife, but when he discovered she was having an affair, he killed the other man. Tried and convicted, he served only a brief term, his sentence reduced because of his wife’s infidelity. This was the 1920s, remember. He fled the state and married a younger woman, my grandmother, who found herself trapped in a marriage with a cruel, bitter man. So it wasn’t surprising that their daughter, my mother, turned out the way she was. It didn’t excuse her behavior, but it helped me understand her better.
I kept digging, asking questions and searching online. It just got worse. Mom’s grandfather abused his wife so badly that she ran for her life. He wouldn’t allow her to take the children and soon turned his rage on the ten of them, beating them bloody, including his son Ewing. Looking further back, I discovered that my four-times-great-grandfather owned seventy-three slaves—I think he was a slave trader. There were bootleggers, criminals, murderers. No matter which family line I researched, I found scenes of violence. Had they reverberated down through the generations to my childhood?
I regretted my research. What more evidence did I need that this was something in my blood, something inescapable, no matter how stable my life seemed now? I was ready to give up. Then I was talking to a cousin and heard about another relative to track down. My great-aunt Maybelle, who had been married to Ewing. Her name wasn’t in the Bible. I looked her up. She was still alive at ninety. I packed my bags and went to visit her.
Maybelle was lovely, a pianist and a preacher. “Your uncle Ewing would have loved to meet you,” she said. Ewing, she told me, had his own battle with rage. When he was sixteen, his father gave him a beating and left to go work in the fields. Ewing grabbed a rifle and chased after his father, determined to kill the man. Yet one more tragic story. But Maybelle went on: “When he stormed out, he heard a voice that said to him over and over, ‘Don’t. Don’t do it.’ He put the rifle back, left home for good, and gave his life to the Lord. He attended seminary and preached the gospel the rest of his life. He was the biggest-hearted man you would ever know. Love won out, not anger.”
Maybelle pointed me to other good family members: circuit-riding preachers who took the gospel across the hard terrain of the Appalachians; relatives who gave up fortunes because they believed God’s call for charity. That slave trader? His son, my great-great-great-grandfather, grew up to be an ardent abolitionist.
I studied the photos of my great-uncle Ewing in his prime. “I wish I’d known him when I was a kid,” I said.
“Oh, but, Vikki, he knew you,” Maybelle said. “He learned all about you from your grandmother. He prayed for you by name his whole life long. He never stopped.”