My father's family

My grandfather, father, and I were all named Charles. Granddaddy was the only one who was called Charlie. A lot of people, including my mother, called him Mr. Charlie. My father was called Kenneth or Buddy, and I ended up as Kenny, now Ken.

None of this has much to do with life in Saint-Aignan, except that it's my life and that's the one I'm living, here in Saint-Aignan.

One of Mr. Charlie's grandmothers was a Cherokee woman named Sabrina, I learned after his death. Nobody in the family ever told us about her. It was my father's youngest sister's husband, an Irish-American from Chicago named Johnny Doyle, who did the genealogical research and told me about it all. That was in the early 1970s. Uncle Johnny said he hadn't succeeded in tracing the family name back any farther than that.

Miss Daisy and Mr. Charlie in the early 1950s

I remember that Granddaddy kept chickens in a coop in his back yard. He also had a couple of pear trees that produced good fruit, and a grape arbor. He and Grandmama lived just three blocks up the street from us. At one point, they had a two-tone, red and white, 1957 Chevy.

Grandmama's name was Flora Bell Gaskins. They called her Daisy, or more properly, Miss Daisy. Some of her ancestors were native Americans too, my mother says. I don't know anything else about her family. She did have sisters named Thelma and Nellie that I remember knowing, and a brother named Billy who ended up living in Louisiana. He was in the shrimping business.

Grandmama always kept bags of hard candies in her kitchen cabinets. All of her grandchildren knew it, so when she wasn't looking we would climb up on the kitchen counters, reach for a bag, and steal a few candies, which we took outside to eat in secret. I liked the butterscotch ones. She died in 1977. She seemed lonely after Mr. Charlie's death in '69.

My father and me in about 1951.

I was living either in France or in Illinois when she died. I've been in France when a lot of big family events took place. Weddings, births, and deaths kept right on happening, in my absence. I was the one with wanderlust. Here I am again, except that I don't wander much any more.

I don't know much about Granddaddy's family either except the name of the town where he was born. It was about 75 miles inland from my home town. Mr. Charlie and Miss Daisy had five children. All but two are now deceased, including my father, who died in 1990. There were 16 or 17 of us grandchildren.

In 2005 I went "home" for a couple of weeks. While I was there I went to see my father's surviving older sister. She was 82 or 83 by then. Her name is Geneva, and at that point she had a house full of paintings that she had done or was working on. She has since moved to Florida to live closer to her daughter.

Aunt Geneva showed me a painting of the house that she said Mr. Charlie and Miss Daisy lived in when their children were growing up. She had painted it from memory, she said. The house had been was a few miles west of town and down on the shore of Bogue Sound. Aunt Geneva said they were very poor, and the house was built of rough boards and never painted. Poor people lived on the shoreline back then; people who had the means didn't want to live that close to the water. That certainly has changed!

Aunt Geneva said that when Kenneth was growing up, one day a week he had to stay in the house because his only set of clothes got washed and hung out to dry that day. He didn't have anything else to put on.

I asked Aunt Geneva how it was that Mr. Charlie had come to live in our town on the coast. She said he met Miss Daisy when she traveled the 75 miles inland by train to visit cousins in the town where he lived. He saw Daisy in church and ended up asking her to marry him. If I'm doing the arithmetic right, they must have been in their mid-20s when their first child, a daughter named Juanita, was born.

After their wedding, Charlie and Daisy lived for a short time in his home town, but Daisy missed her family too much. They ended up moving back to the coast, and stayed there for the rest of their lives. Geneva said her father's parents were also desperately poor. A lot of people were, back then. I don't know what Charlie did for a living before World War II.

Life in Saint-Aignan reminds me a lot of life as it was in my little town in North Carolina forty or fifty years ago. It certainly very different from life in other places I've lived since 1970: a big Midwestern university town; Washington DC; Paris; and San Francisco. In many of those places, hardly anyone was a native. We mostly came from elsewhere and didn't have family ties.

In 1961 we took a car trip to Washington DC and New York City.
My father must have taken this snapshot of my sister,
me, and our mother on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
Can you tell that those were the Kennedy years?

The people I've met here in Saint-Aignan have mostly always lived here, with a very few exceptions (including some British immigrants). Some moved to Paris or another big city when they were younger and had a career there, but now they've come back to live out their lives in the place where they grew up. I guess I did the same thing, on some level.

If there were a pattern to life, I suppose I would end up living out my second "retirement" (if I get one) back in North Carolina, where I had my first "growing-up." Right now I'm working on the retirement that corresponds to my second "childhood" — the one I had here in France in the 1970s.

Why France?

It was the mid-1950s, the years when I was between 5 and 10 years old.

The United States still had military bases in France. World War II had ended less than 10 years earlier. De Gaulle finally closed down the U.S. bases in the 1960s and all the Americans came home, or were "re-deployed." France no longer wanted to be occupied.

Before the bases closed down, a man from my home town was stationed in France and married a young French woman. When he was discharged from the service, he and his wife, Colette, went to live in the small town where I grew up in North Carolina.

Colette and her husband had two daughters. The older girl, Patricia, might have been born in France. The younger one, Debbie, must have been born after the move to N.C. Patricia was several years younger than I was.

I remember knowing that Colette was from Verdun, in France. That meant something to all of us, because my Uncle Henderson (that's what we called him, though his first name was Rudolph) had been in the Army during World War I and had fought at Verdun. We knew that there had been a fierce battle there. That was exotic and exciting.

And then Colette and her husband separated, as often happens with bi-cultural couples. I'm not really sure how long she had been in N.C. at that point, or how long she lived there in all. Not very long, I think.

A picture Colette sent us after she moved back to France.
This is her with her mother and her daughters,
in the late '50s or early '60s.

When she was "single" again, Colette became good friends with my mother's younger sister, who was also single and in her 20s. They spent a lot of time together, going to the beach and double-dating, my aunt says. Colette also became friends with my mother. My sister and I got to know the French woman and her little girls.

Colette spoke French to her daughters. I think the girls spoke English too, but it's hard to remember. I was fascinated with the fact that they spoke a language other than English. I got it into my head that I had to go to France one day.

Then, just a few years later, Colette went back to France and took her daughters with her.

When I started high school in the mid-60s, I had to choose between taking French classes or taking Spanish classes. French was a four-year program, but Spanish was limited to two years. I wanted to go to college (there were language requirements for admission back then) and I wanted to go to France, so I chose the four-year French program.

I was good at it. French was fairly easy for me. My mother said I inherited the interest and ability from one of my father's Huguenot ancestors. I wasn't embarrassed to try to make the funny sounds and lip movements required by French because I knew that it was really spoken that way by real people. Starting at age 14, then, France and French became an integral part of my life.

I didn't actually get a chance to go to France for the first time until I was in college, but I was determined that one day I would. That was 37 years ago. I spent a semester in Aix-en-Provence in 1970 and it was everything — more — than I had thought it would be. Something really "clicked" in my brain that semester, and really started speaking French. The sound and the rhythm of the language became real to me. My accent was good. I needed to be in France.

I ended up living in France — mostly in Paris, but also a year in Rouen, in Normandy — for about 8 years as a young man, working as a teacher. I like to say I grew up twice — once in America as a child, and again in France when I was in my 20s.

When I was in my mid-30s, I worked as a French-English translator in Washington DC. It was as close to living in France as you could get without living there. All my colleagues were French (well, francophone) and I spoke French every day at work. My French got better, and I learned more from the man who hired me for that job than I had ever learned from anyone. He is a good friend still.

Then I moved to California in the mid-'80s. I felt a little cut off from so many things I loved. I thought San Francisco would feel like Paris, but it didn't. They didn't speak French there, after all. I loved it anyway, for other reasons, but not enough to forget France.

By 1988 I started coming to France as often as I could wrangle some vacation time out of my managers and employers. I'm sure I have flown across the Atlantic close to 50 times in my life. Finally, in 2003 I quit my job in California and relocated myself "permanently" to the Loire Valley. (It is always a good idea to put the word "permanently" in quotes, don't you think?)

All thanks, on some level, to Colette, Patricia, and Debbie. And to some good teachers, professors, and editors, as well as some good friends in France.

* * * * *

After writing this yesterday, I looked at the French phone directory on the Internet and found an address and phone number for someone who might well be Colette's daughter Debbie. The last name is right, and the first name is spelled Debi. This person lives in the part of France where we last heard that Colette was living (but that was 35 years ago).

Now I wonder if I am going to call this Debi person. I know my mother and aunt would love to hear that Colette is still living and let her know that they still think of her. Then again, she would be in her middle to late 70s, so maybe she is deceased.

Debbie (or Debi) must be about 50 years old now. She was such a little girl when they left N.C. that I'm sure she won't know who I am at all. But her father and paternal grandparents stayed in North Carolina, after all, and she must at least have known about them as she was growing up. When I say North Carolina, she will perk up if she is the same Debbie. Should I call her?

My mother's family

My mother just "celebrated" (c'est le terme consacré) her umpteenth birthday, and I will be observing my énième anniversaire (French for the same expression — it's number "N") in a couple of weeks. That has gotten me to thinking about family.

I was nosing around in the files on my hard disk this morning (so much stuff!), and came upon a batch of old pictures I scanned about 10 years ago.

Ann, Aunt Liz, and Mary Allen (my mother) in the early 1940s

My mother was brought up during her adolescent and teen years in large part by her great Aunt Elizabeth, known as Aunt Liz or "Ear" (for reasons that have never been clear to me). Aunt Liz was 88 years old when she died in 1948. That means she was born in 1860. As the Civil War began.

Ear was my mother's grandmother's sister, I believe. They say she smoked a pipe, and what she smoked in it was not always tobacco! She died about a year before my birth, so I never knew her, but I feel like I did.

Ida was one of my great-grandmothers,
and her sister Elizabeth was Aunt Liz.

My mother's father had died when she was nine years old and her little sister, Ann, was just three years old. So I never knew him. He lived to be just 39 and was born around 1900.

Ben and Ida, my great-grandparents, on their front porch
in our little town on the coast of North Carolina

After her husband's death, my grandmother's health declined rapidly. She was only in her 30s but she was no longer able to take care of her children. At that point my mother and aunt were taken care of by a great-uncle. It was a responsibility he shared with his wife and his Aunt Liz. He was called Uncle Gene, or just "Uncle," and he was virtually a grandfather to me.

My grandmother (l.) and a cousin of hers
in about 1923. Her name was
Mary Daniels Willis — "Mary D."

My grandmother, Mary D. as they called her, died one month after I was born, so I never knew her either. I just know stories.

Uncle Gene and his wife, Aunt Ethel, had five children themselves. Their children were all about 10 years older than my mother, and they were already setting out on their own when Gene and Ethel "adopted" their niece Mary D. and her children — my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt. All of Uncle Gene's and Aunt Ethel's children, who were like aunts and uncles to me, have passed on now.

Joe Miller and Mary D. on the front porch of their house
in South Carolina, where my mother (also in the picture) was born
at the beginning of the Great Depression. Photo from about 1934.

My grandfather, died at home of peritonitis caused by a burst appendix, by the way. He was a young man still. He didn't want to go to the doctor, they say. He was sure he would just get better.

He, Joe Miller from South Carolina, was 6'6" tall (that's 1m98) and Mary D. was 4'11" (about 1m25). They were an odd couple but according to legend were devoted to each other. She was never the same after he died.

My mother at about age 5 in South Carolina,
during the Depression

All this petit monde ("this crowd" is the expression we would use in our N.C. dialect) lived out their lives in the first half of the 20th century in a town of about 3,000 souls on an isolated section of the North Carolina coast. The family has lived there since the 1780s. I was born before 1950, so my life started there in the first half of the 20th century too.