Pamela Jean Owens off-line

Possible titles:

Generations

The Clay Women

More than Survivors

PROLOGUE

Ginny sat very still in Daddy’s old recliner, barely balanced on the edge of its soft brown corduroy seat, suddenly paralyzed –  transfixed by a clarity of heart that floated above the confusion of  thoughts cluttering her mind.  She turned the familiar 1908 postcard over and over in her hand, and again she read the message.  Reading the words, surely for the umpteenth dozen time, but understanding them now, finally, for the very first time. And with her new understanding, Ginny felt deep in her soul a kinship with her great-grandmother she’d never dreamed she had.  Most likely, it’d been plain as day all along.  Plain as the nose on your face, Mamaw would have said.  And undoubtedly Gramma would have said the same thing.  Ginny had just never heard it, until today.

Lawd, chil’, of course we Clay women are all alike.  Didn’t you know your Mamaw?  How many times haven’t you told someone your Mamaw and Papaw were romantics?  Where’d you think she got it from?  Off the turnip truck?  Not likely.  She came by it with her birthright, just the same as I did.  We’re borned with it.  The longing.

Ginny read the words again, wondering how she had been deaf to them for so long.  How many times, since she’d found the card in Mamaw’s boxes of photos years and years ago, had she read the words, more or less as an afterthought?  How many times had she read, but not heard, the message that was, in the end, the only part of this treasured heirloom that really mattered?  Here was her life, but it was written a hundred years ago.  Ginny’s own life, written by a Cherokee woman with one eye, little education, a dozen children, and a wayward husband.  A woman she had always longed to know better than she’d had the chance, and now, suddenly, who she felt like she knew as though they were sisters.

1908

To:  Mrs. F. M. Clay

San Angelo, Texas

Dearest Mother,

I hope all is well with you.  This card leaves us finding everyone well.  Benjie has never come home.  I wish he would.  I do miss him so.

Though the card was not signed and its words ran almost off the edge in their effort to be contained, Ginny knew the writer was her great-grandmother, Fanny Mary Clay Irby, who preferred to be known as Francis Marie. She knew the card had been written to the writer’s own mother, a shadowy figure known to the family now only as “Mrs. F. M. Clay.”  Mamaw never knew her own grandmother’s given name – she was simply “grandma” in the years of Mamaw’s childhood.  Was that grandmother of her grandmother also called Fanny Mary? Or did Ginny’s unknown great-great-grandpa’s name make her “Mrs. F.M.”?  Ginny had never known for sure, never done the genealogy research at the Federal Archives in Fort Worth that could surely give the answer, because it didn’t matter all that much, the name, or even the tribal registration and surely not the “blood quantum.”  Ginny knew who each of these women had been, and what she represented in the family line, and that was what mattered.  Or she’d thought she knew.   But now, in a flash, all of what she’d thought of as truth was not so certain.  Had she made assumptions about her Grandma Irby that were unfounded?  Was she, Virginia, the “modern woman,” more like her great grandmother than ever she would have dreamed, across the generations?  In ways so obvious, she’d looked right through them as though they weren’t there?    Had she just not been listening to what Grandma was saying about Benjie, that wayward husband who she missed so much?  How could she have so completely missed Grandma’s message across the generations, missed it for all these years?

*****

The picture side of the card was a stern portrait of a little black haired girl – by the date on the card she was 4 years old – she was sitting cross-legged on the grass, or on a bed of leaves – the sepia tones of the card disguised the details of the ground which framed the little girl.  The photographer must have stood above her, pointing the camera downward, for the face in the photograph stared firmly upward, chin tilted back, with not the slightest glimmer of a smile crossing her lovely lips.  And they were indeed lovely, for the little girl was a real beauty, just as Ginny knew that little girl had been when she became a woman, and as she was even until her death at 96, in the first year of a new Millennium.  Even at four, Bessie Neva Irby showed in her expression the Cherokee grit and determination, even stubbornness, that was the legacy of the generations from which she came, the legacy she passed on to daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters.  And soon, Ginny thought, it will be passed on to another generation, for the next woman in the line was soon to be born to Ginny’s youngest child.  And once again for the descendants of the Clay women, the first-born of the family line would be a precious little girl.

The legacy, as it had been articulated to Ginny, was a legacy of survival.  But Ginny was ready for more than survival.  As she read her great grandmother’s writing yet again, and as she recognized her grandmother in that determined little girl, Ginny knew deep in her heart that merely surviving was, for her, no longer an option.  She deserved more.  She deserved to thrive.  She was ready to thrive.  She was ready to fly.  It was time for the legacy of the Clay women to be fulfilled.

*****