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Family Stories

I was only minding business
Letters and notes from my mother.
We are talking more these days,
Knowing I have been given a task,
The responsibility of remembrance
Of the family's past.

It makes me cry.

How my grandfather died,
No one really knew.
Except that he was in a Model A
Traveling home with some man
He hardly knew.
The man had hitched himself to my
family's destiny in a bad way.

He had been driving actually.
Like it is often,
The drunk survives.

And then
My mother, just last night,
Remembered she was reading Walpole,
My grandmother was somewhere-

When the voice came in through the door and cried.

"Jim's gone."

My Uncle Jack.

Who taught me how to ride and forced
All the cousins to pick cotton for free
So we would at least have some empathy
Know what it was like for our grandfathers
And great-grandfathers before them,
To grow up
Tenants on a farm.

Last summer I sat with an old friend,
She the keeper of the family secrets:
In her buttery voice
She broke a code,
Something we never knew.
There was a story around town when Jim died
She later said.
And her father loved him dearly.
They thought he was murdered.
Working on a corruption case,
Which sounds like the man
I have tucked away
In a legend safely cornered.
The lawyer who grew up with nothing
Believed in the common man,
Took on cases no one would,
And had a laugh
that forget every sadness,
Every lack Of fine things,
Even the fact there was not much
To cook for supper again.

From her father,
My mother learned to be a son
Before he died he taught her,
Uncannily,
Everything she would need to know.
How to drive at age 9.
How to change the oil,
How to be responsible
For more than one can bear sometimes.
How to survive unforeseen events,
Called family tragedies.

Learn more about this author, Ninian Williams.
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