Vignettes of a Family, Part 1

Memory and Hearsay

I never liked my father’s mother and I believe that she never liked me. My clearest memory of her is at dinner. The specifics of when and why she was visiting are hazy. When I close my eyes to remember it feels like summer and she’s most likely visiting before we all go off to church camp. It’s the early aughts and I’m somewhere around age nine, joyously disappearing a bowl of Kraft mac & cheese con salchicas. Abuela Ana comments in her Caribbean Spanglish that she wasn’t aware she had an animal for a granddaughter. I understand that I should be insulted but instead I respond with even greater glee as I finish up my meal, the final touch being my finger wiped all around the bowl and sucked clean. It’s quite possible that I was spanked later. When I’m alone, I still eat my mac & cheese that way.

I never knew my father’s father, for a time neither did he. It’s 1970-something, my dad is a kid and he’s riding a bus in Panama City, running errands for his mother, grandmother, and the Jamaican man who does fatherly duties around his grandmother’s house. On the bus, a man from Barbados approaches my father, they talk and part ways. By the time my father is back home he has questions for his mother about the man from Barbados who happens to be his father. I grew up hearing my father tell this story with more details from the pulpit over the years. I never understood its narrative function for the purpose of drawing souls to Christ but I always found it more fun to listen to over Bible stories on Sundays and maybe that was point.

I never knew my mother’s father. Though his memory persists. Born in 1930-something, he was a Cancerian with a love of books, a penchant for writing, a taste for nice things and displayed quite the temper. He worked as an engineer with a soft spot for Marxist-Leninist atheism and a heavy chip on his shoulder because his Genovese father wanted to give him money but not his surname. That Genovese had once been a young man living with his family in Caracas. Supposedly, this young man’s father was a Count and something to do with holdings in the maritime industry had brought him and his family to Venezuela on business. There were certain things that this young man was expected to do and none of those things included taking an interest in Isolina Ventura, a young woman who was the help. When this interest was discovered, business was cut short, the family returned to Genova. Nine months after, Isolina birthed Carlos who would one day become my mother’s father.

Decades later, that young man from Genova returned to Venezuela as a man well into middle-age, searching for his son. It’s 1960-70 something. My mother remembers her mother obsessed with the kids looking their best and frantically cleaning for weeks in anticipation of this meeting between her husband and the man who would break his heart. That man showed up and asked to see his grandchildren, examining their fingers and shedding tears upon seeing that the eldest girl and both boys all had his noble family’s tell of certain slightly crooked fingers. He turned to Carlos and offered him a deal: he would fund their life, put all three kids through the best private schools and universities, he had connections, whatever they wanted to do he could facilitate, but they could never contact him directly and Carlos could never have his surname. My mother’s father was irate, could this man not see how well he had done for himself on his own? His children already went to private school. He owned their home in the country’s capital. This wasn’t about money; he wanted the family name. No name, no deal — which had been dead on arrival. That man was never seen again. And yes, I know the surname.

I am told that my father met Carlos over a short stay after my parents were married and had just moved into what would become our family home in Virginia. It’s 1990-something. That visit ended early when the two men came to blows. My mother tells it one way, my father tells it another way, my Abuela Rosalía never spoke of it. As with most of these memories, I wasn’t around but I suspect this fight comes down to Carlos not liking that his son-in-law was legibly black.

That week, my mother’s father took an early flight back to Venezuela. His wife, Rosalía, said that she would fly back during their originally selected flight. She never got on that plane. He never returned to the states. His loss, my gain.

Part two arrives to inboxes next Friday, July 24