FEST Writing Group

Hi All,

This is an early chapter in my memoir that is meant to be a case study of the child most focused on in the family who grows up in a weak position. I lead a weekly memoir writing group locally. But I am especially interested in any comments from those of you who may have time to read it this week. (It’s long, about 4 pages single spaced.) How can the writing or story be improved? Is it consistent with Bowen theory?

This is a story of loss, lostness, and resilience over four generations of family. I start with my great-grandmother and two grandmothers, all of whom I knew well. It is not possible to go back into the past to redeem loved family members, or myself. Or to express my gratitude for the endurance through great difficulty. The closest I can come is to seek to understand the forces each faced in the family and the larger world.

My grandmother, Fannie McLean

Fannie McLean, my grandmother, was born into a privileged class. Though her father was a preacher, and her family lived modestly, she was descended from slave owning wealth that had opened doors to education and leisure. Her mother had owned her own little girl slave when she was a child. Her father as a youngster had jumped on a horse to follow his older brothers to fight for the Confederacy, returning home after being shot in the leg.

When Fannie McLean’s grandmother, Martha, as a young mother walked out of her home near Nashville one day in 1864, she faced the beginning of a horrific battle. She asked the opposing armies to move away down the road from the house. They agreed, and the battle took place without harm to her home or the children within it. Few stories of the Civil War remain in my family. That we remember the humanity of both sides of the war, forgetting our resentment, has contributed to our resilience.

In my family after the Civil War, there could be no celebration of heroes of a war that destroyed a way of life that could not be justified, though generations of family who had lived it had tried to justify it by aligning with other educated and well-off families who thought well of themselves. What was once considered by them and their neighbors as socially acceptable and even upstanding was revealed through history to be abhorrent.

When a family is struck down through some combination of circumstance and their own doing as these families were, then the stress of loss, shame, and the sense of personal failing are distributed unequally in the family so that some suffer more than others. The roots of this unequal distribution of stress and lack of agency, how it came to be in each generation, I hope to explore more fully as I write the details of the story, as I know them.

I start with Fannie McLean as the youngest of 8. The boy born right before her had Down Syndrome, which changed Fannie McLean’s sibling position. She grew up to be like an older sister, as she protected, defended, and guided her older brother. As a child, she would have felt intense love and empathy for the boy who would never have the abilities or opportunities of his brothers.

It is likely that her mother, Mary Frances, would have leaned on Fannie McLean to comfort and guide a boy she found difficult or even frightening. At the time of Walter’s birth, Down Syndrome was only in the process of being identified as a condition, and it was not well understood. The children were called imbecile or idiot. Parents often abandoned a child with Mongolism, as it was known, and it was believed that the parents must be descended from Mongols. Shame and fear likely accompanied the birth of any child with Down Syndrome. As he grew, Walter was frequently bullied, including by his older brothers.

Fannie McLean, a bright, eager child, and as young as a toddler, assumed a responsibility for her brother. It is as though she was born to fulfill a need in her family as his caretaker and champion.

The early position of defender and caretaker in her family was carried over to her later functioning as an adult, including her compassion for others and her devotion to making sure low-income children, both black and white, had shoes and attended school in Dyersburg, Tennessee. She also cared for their mothers, giving them advice and support. She energetically  helped others, especially those she perceived as weaker than herself.

Dark-eyed and dark-haired Fannie McLean met her blond, blue-eyed husband, Lawson Hughes, at a lake party. They lived in a rural area of rolling hills outside of Nashville not far from the Cumberland Plateau, which ran between Nashville and Knoxville. At the time, Nashville was considered a center of literature, classical music, and the arts. Fannie McLean’s and Lawson’s families enjoyed the beauty of the hills, as well as a fair amount of education and leisure. A wedding picture of Fannie McLean suggests an elegant upper-class dress and hat.  For the wedding a complete set of beautiful porcelain china was shipped from France. Another photo shows Fannie McLean dressed as a man and Lawson as a woman, a frivolity of 1920s upper class. Three of the couple’s children were born near the Nashville area. Only the last child, mother, was born in West Tennessee, where the family had been forced to move due to financial losses.

After having three children, with another one on the way, Lawson lost his store that had been part of his inheritance around 1927.  “Lawson was too kind-hearted and gave too many people a break.” As a result of the loss, the family was forced to move to Dyersburg, near Memphis, the only place where Lawson was able to find a job, and it was as a high school math teacher. The family disliked the flat landscape and always planned to return to the Nashville area.  Memphis was known as an uncultured river town and compared unfavorably to Nashville. In the novel, A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor describes how people from Nashville at that time looked down on Memphis. The family lived modestly in Dyersburg and never returned to the Nashville area.

With the move to Dyersburg, Fannie McLean underwent a change in position, both in her family and socially, in a loss of social status in the move to West Tennessee. Fannie McLean showed a fiercely independent pride in herself. She came out of a social class that looked down on people of lower social status, and she was critical of ways of life that she saw as beneath her. Calling someone or someone’s behavior “common” was her expression of disdain. Once when we were walking together in downtown Dyersburg, a young man passed us. “Look at the way he’s walking in those tight pants, as though he is trying to walk out of them,” she commented. Her views and attitudes toward lower social classes doubtless changed through her later close contact with people.

The class issues explored in Jane Austen’s books are relevant, as generations of Fannie McLean’s and Lawson’s families lived in well-off social circles in the British Isles before immigrating to North America for opportunity. In the Nashville area, Fannie McLean would have participated in traditions of taking food and clothing to those in need, would have enjoyed highly romantic poetry and novels, and on Sunday would have attended church.

Now living in West Tennessee, in a modest home with a high school teacher, as opposed to the gentleman of property she had married, along with her lower status compared with her sisters, Fannie McLean faced a situation.

She turned to religion, especially the stirring teachings of Jesus. She talked to me about Jesus and his love for the poor.  She gave me a small New Testament in which Jesus’ words are printed in red. Inscribed in the front was “The greatest of these is love.” She had been raised as a Christian and later watched Billy Graham on TV as an adult with her sisters, but it was in Dyersburg that her Christianity took hold as a way of life. She was limited in income and social position, and she found meaning in life by committing herself to Christianity, as she understood it.

She became formidable. Inspired by the teachings of Jesus, she devoted her life to making sure that all children in Dyersburg had shoes and attended school. Her early attachment to her brother with Down Syndrome, the first vulnerable child she had known, was assumed to form a basis for her empathy for children. She became a champion of the poor. She pushed over the gambling tables at the county fair, as she saw gambling as harming the poor. She joined the Temperance movement for the same reason. She taught piano, and in opposition to her white neighbors who objected, she insisted on teaching piano to children whether white or black in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s until her death in 1965.

She played piano in her church, and she chose a church attended by the poorer white social classes, rather than a church of congregants of higher social standing. She explained to the family that by attending a small church that was more fundamentalist she could have a bigger effect. It also offered her a status she would not have had with her peers. I went with her to the small church, and she used her coat to make a nest for me beside her. One Sunday the preacher walked the aisle near our pew. He held up a silver dollar. “Who will come and take this silver dollar?”

She often read the Beatitudes of Jesus, and she resonated with the teaching that those who were the lowest among us would become the highest. Blessed are the meek, but Fannie McLean herself was not meek. She believed in her own superiority of understanding.

She connected with educated, liberal thinking people outside of Dyersburg, while she had a presence with her neighbors and her church. She could be described by some as a religious fanatic, but her work was highly respected for the practical results she achieved. The town of Dyersburg eventually created an official job for her as truant officer to pay her for her work to be sure all children had shoes and attended school. I remember her as tireless in helping families with whatever they needed. She was available to step in at any emergency. She took me with her to meet a newborn baby in a home created with cardboard that refrigerators were shipped in for walls and a well-swept dirt floor. She was gracious and genial in her congratulations and greeting the baby and the several women there, wearing her long-skirted dress with her hose.

She was invited to Washington, DC to meet with lawmakers and others from around the country who had been identified by their commitment to the wellbeing of children. A mission still exists in Dyersburg that came out of her life work to assist children and adolescents, as others had been inspired to join her efforts. Her former next-door neighbor, artist Josephine Flowers, took me as an adult to see the mission with a large photograph of Fannie McLean on the wall years after she had died.

Fannie McLean was considered by some to be a saint, and perhaps saw herself as a saint. Mother told me that her mother was a saint, and I grew up believing it. (Mother also told me that she only knew of three perfect marriages, hers, her mother’s, and her older sister’s. I was an adult by then . . .)

There were also detractors. Some of the people Fannie McLean helped became angry at her for being too pushy. In one case, a woman hit her in the face and broke her glasses. Edna Hughes, a highly educated social worker who worked in Washington, DC on policies for children and was a cousin of Lawson Hughes, Fannie McLean’s husband, might have viewed Fannie McLean as a kindred soul. Instead, she was put off by her “rigid ways of thinking,” as she told me.

Fannie McLean developed the fervor and enthusiasm of a social activist. She helped many, but she was more comfortable guiding and directing rather than being open to learning from others. Though she worked on behalf of many people, she herself was limited by staying in a position of superiority to others.  Her important, defining relationship with her older brother that inspired her in a lifelong effort to inform, direct, and exhort others, was part of what gave her life vigor and meaning, yet she was caught in a position of strength that weakened some of the people she loved most and limited her own development as an adult.

Like everyone in my family it seems, Fannie McLean thought she was more important than the world thought she was. As she faced the limits of her own life, she turned to her sons, to make them important, but all that is for another chapter.