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MANY YEARS AGO during a drinking dinner at the house of the sociologist Howard Higman in Boulder, he refused to serve me dessert until I had heard him explain the difference between the European and American ideas of family. In Europe, he said, one’s family roots went down, down, into the past. In America, they went out, out into the society. “An Englishman knows who his great-great-great-grandfather was,” Howard said. “An American knows who’s on his bowling team.”
By his definition I am an American. I didn’t realize until I began to write this book how little I know about my ancestors on either side of the family. It is a custom that all memoirs contain a chapter about the author’s descent from long lines of Italian aristocrats and Mongolian yurt-dwelling camel hair jobbers, with an American bootlegger or Nazi sympathizer thrown in. I will disappoint.
I was a late child. My father was forty when I was born, my mother thirty-one. On my father’s side, my grandparents died before I was born. On my mother’s side, there was one grandmother. My father had three sisters. Two of them died spinsters, and from the third descended all my cousins. My mother had two sisters and three brothers, who together produced two children. I have three first cousins, which a European would find inadequate.
My father’s parents appear in America from Germany in the late nineteenth century, leaving no memories. I never heard a word about my German relatives, nor do I know the names of my great-grandparents. My mother’s Irish grandmother, known to me only as Grandma Gleeson, sailed to America during the potato famine, and my cousin Ethel Doyle produced a mimeographed record of Grandma’s memories, with photographs mounted in it, which I cannot find. The only oral history I remember is that her sailing ship was blown back to shore by fierce storms six times, or eight. No Irish immigrant ever had a pleasant crossing.
My grandmother Anna Gleeson married a Dutch-American farmer named William Stumm, who was adopted and possessed no blood ancestors he knew about. He knew about his adoptive parents, but I don’t. He must have had the spark of wit, because in my aunt Mary’s family album I find a small display ad from September 12, 1901, reading: “W. H. STUMM. The game of billiards is brain-food for the over-worked businessman; an invigorator of the system that is exhausted thru studious attention to the routine of worldly affairs. East Side Billiard Parlors.” This shred suggests he had a gift for drollery.
Anna had a sister I knew and visited, my aunt Ida in Chicago. Her daughters Ethel and Blanche lived with her, and died spinsters. Anna had other brothers and sisters, but none I remember meeting, except Uncle Charlie. I remember visiting his house in Taylorville as a little boy. He stood on the front steps and played “Turkey in the Straw” on his fiddle. After his death he wasn’t much mentioned. When he was, his name was used as if everyone knew who he was, but I didn’t. There was also an Aunt Mary Magner, but I believe she was an honorary aunt. She lost her only son when a two-by-four fell off a truck and flew through the window of the car he was driving, beheading him. He was an exemplary son who remained faithful to his pledge to his mother never to smoke or miss Sunday Mass, “although he was such a good man that he always carried a pack of cigarettes in his pocket so he could give them to friends.”
On that side of the family I have two first cousins, Colonel Tom Stumm in Virginia and Marianne Dull in Colorado, who I see from time to time. Tom and I met in South Bend to bury his mother, Margaret, and I’ve visited Tom and Gloria in Virginia. Marianne and I have met when I’ve been in Colorado, and Tom’s daughter Kathryn, an assistant district attorney and now a teacher, lives in Denver with her children. Many second cousins in the Stonington and Taylorville area were well known and frequently visited by us, and I am in touch with Tom Stumm and his children to this day, but distantly: weddings, a funeral, a Thanksgiving, a Fourth of July, Christmas cards. Tom’s children and some grandchildren came to visit in Michigan. We like each other and are happy when we meet, but we have gone our own ways.
On my father’s side, there are also two close cousins. I was raised with Jim and Karol Ann Pickens in Champaign-Urbana, and Jimmy inflamed my envy at family gatherings by playing “Lady of Spain” at breakneck speed on his accordion. Their mother, Reba, was the daughter of my father’s sister Mame. This would have been on Christmas Eves at the Ebert family home on Clark Street, where my aunts Hulda and Wanda still lived. Karol Ann married Dwayne Gaines, and they had Tim and Shelly. Karol Ann helped run the University of Illinois Employees Credit Union, which her parents Glen and Reba had founded. Dwayne, Karol Ann, and Tim were heroic in the care of my mother, Annabel, in her later years. This often involved expeditions into dangerously drifting snow to carry her to hospitals or department stores. Dwayne has spent years restoring a Ford Coupe to such perfection it can hardly be risked to exposure at auto shows. I have good contact with Tim, who is the only person on either side of the family who can be called a movie fanatic, and thus can make good use of his old cousin. Jimmy Pickens spent his life as the town pharmacist in Watseka, Illinois. He and his wife, Bev, have four children, Todd, Susan, Steve, Kristin, and with them at last we strike gold in the reproduction department. They produced so many children and grandchildren that a photo taken at their fiftieth wedding anniversary looks like a church social.
In general, however, my grandparents on both sides began a population implosion. This fact, and age and geography, have resulted in my sense that I grew up pretty much alone in the world. I had warm relations with my mother’s sisters Martha and Mary, and her brothers Everett, Bill, and Bob, but they were more than usually older than me, and after Bill died twenty years ago there was no one left.
Fortunately, it was at about that time I married Chaz Hammel Smith, or as she later became, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, because an American can have a double-barreled last name but there is little practice for a triple-barreled one. By marrying an African American, I was suddenly propelled from a void with few relatives into a world with relatives without number. Some months before my marriage, a reader wrote me about African-American families, “What you won’t be prepared for is the relatives. The entire extended family is in continual communication, and it is a slow year without at least three weddings and three funerals.” This is true. My white family valued and kept in touch with what few relatives they had, but in moderation. Chaz and her family are living genealogists. I once heard her on the phone asking about how Sharon was. I know two of her cousins named Sharon, and asked her which she was asking about. “Neither one,” she said. “This Sharon is the daughter of a former neighbor of one of my brother Andre’s girlfriends.”
Many of her family have become my own family. I love and am loved. There are no strangers in her family, and as a member of another race I have without exception been accepted and embraced. Her children and grandchildren are mine. The grandchildren have six living grandparents. These people are good and kind to such an extent that I am on warm terms with Chaz’s first husband, Merle Smith, and his wife Donna. Chaz’s niece, Ina New-Jones, is greatly valued by me because she’s one of those rare people who always think I am funny. A bad comedian would never learn the truth from Miss Ina. She and I can instigate laughter in each other almost to the point of unconsciousness. I have spent most of my life perfecting the skills and compulsions of a very funny guy, and Ina is the only person who always agrees with me.
Chaz’s family transcends time and distance to stay in touch. Road journeys between Minneapolis, Chicago, and Atlanta are undertaken not only for weddings and funerals, but for birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations from college, high school, grade school, and kindergarten. At the other end of the age scale, there are retirement dinners and testimonials not to be missed.
My two families overlapped just barely. After my grandmother’s death in 1960, Martha and her lifelong friend Jean Sabo continued to live in a house at 807 West Clark with Martha’s brother Bob. After he moved to the Champaign County Nursing Home, crippled by emphysema, my uncle Bill retired from teaching and with Martha and Jean bought houses in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and later in Wapella, Illinois.
Bill, Martha, and Jean came to live in my guest cottage in Michigan during the summer of 1988. “I love you and I don’t have much time left,” Martha explained. She had a heart attack on the evening of Bill’s Thanksgiving dinner in 1988 and died in a nearby hospital three days later. On her deathbed she desperately tried to tell me something but failed, and shook her head “no” when I tried to guess. It wasn’t “I love you.” It was something very important. The two of us looked more alike than anyone else in the family, and I wondered if she was trying to tell me she was my real mother. That would have been unlikely. I have my birth certificate and a photo record of myself in my mother’s arms beginning on the day of my birth. All the same, haunted by her urgency, I asked Jean if she knew of any family secrets she could share with me. “Not that I can think of,” she said.
At Martha’s funeral Mass in Wapella, Father Richard Brunskill, their next-door neighbor, noticed that as a lapsed Catholic I remained in my pew, and walked over to me. He held up the Host and said, “Take this for Martha.” The village held a crowded potluck dinner in the church basement, and Martha was buried in the plot she and Jean had purchased in Wapella. Then Bill and Jean moved into separate retirement homes.
My uncle Bill and aunt Mary attended my wedding. Mary, learning I would marry a black woman, asked me, “Honey, that’s never been done in our family, so why do you want to start now?” I said I loved Chaz and wanted to make her my wife. “Well the good lord knows you’ve waited long enough,” she said, “and it’s better to marry than to burn.” At the wedding, Mary and Bill sat with Chaz’s mother, known universally as Big Mama, and enjoyed their celebrity.
Aunt Mary had a childless marriage with John J. O’Neill, a former state trooper who became the Champaign postmaster. Tall, jocular, a glad-handing Democrat with a patronage job in a Republican city, he ganged up with my father against Uncle Everett the Republican at family gatherings. He and Mary moved house at least every two years. “Johnny has Mary work like a slave to fix up those places, and then he sells them,” my father said. “She loves it,” said my mother, who may have been right. Some people enjoy being in eternal interior decorating mode.
Uncle Bill, a lifelong bachelor, was a retired high school agriculture teacher who taught in Elkhart, Indiana, and Elkhart, Illinois. Bill and Mary visited us in Chicago frequently, and we often drove down to Urbana. Bill and Mary by then lived in the Clark-Lindsey retirement home, where both remained alert until the end, although Bill in his eighties began counting on a visit from Ed McMahon with a $1 million check from Publishers Clearing House, and after his death we had to cancel his subscriptions to Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy.
Bill came to visit in Michigan many times, Mary only once. As I proudly turned into our wooded dirt lane, she shrank in her seat and said, “Oh, honey! Cut down these trees! They’ll never be able to get in here to get you out!” Mary slowed in her later years because of emphysema. All those cigarettes. Bill was still planting tomatoes and cooking family dinners into his nineties. Every summer in the 1980s, he and Martha and Jean Sabo would take long road trips with their close friends Dave and Dot Sparrow of Kenney, Illinois, near Wapella. It was Bill’s bitter disappointment that they wouldn’t allow him, at eighty-six, to ride a mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He dismissed their fears. “The mule isn’t about to fall. Just strap me to the saddle and I’ll get there one way or another.” He was very serious, and there was lingering resentment over the issue. At the very end, on his last birthday visit to Michigan, he said he thought his brother Everett had died and yet there he was sitting at the table big as life. He was looking directly at me. Dot Sparrow said, “Well then you’d all better have some cake and ice cream!”