In Pieces(5)

This is where the story goes from one of plain ol’ hardship to something else altogether. Joy had always thought her father was Grover Bickley, the same as her sisters’. But he was not. When Mimmie was nineteen, she’d run off with the local schoolteacher. After she returned home, claiming she’d been married by a justice of the peace, it was then discovered that whatever had happened, legal hadn’t been a part of it. It was also discovered that several other young women in town had fallen under the spell of the dark-eyed devil, and as the story goes, the scallywag was then run out of town with a pack of yapping dogs on his heels. Who knows what truly happened, but what can’t be denied is the fact that my teenage great-grandmother was now pregnant and had no husband to show for it. As a result, Mimmie’s mother—who had by then given birth to eleven children—kicked her oldest daughter out of the house. And though Grover, a young farmhand who had always fancied Mimmie, swiftly married her, it wasn’t enough to erase the taint that now enveloped the jilted young woman. Mimmie never set eyes on her mother again.

Before receiving Bynum’s letter, Joy had never wondered about her mama’s family or why she’d never met them, and maybe she never thought to ask. I can’t imagine the impact it must have had on her when she finally put the pieces together. Not only had she grown up in an orphanage and felt the humiliation of that, but she was now shamed with the sudden knowledge that she was illegitimate. Be that as it may, she was still curious enough to take that train trip to Chicago (presumably with her voice) and meet the rascal of a man she would forever after refer to as her father. Joy would cover her face and actually giggle when she talked about him, always making sure I heard the fact that, though he had a mistress, her successful father—who had by then become an educated lawyer—never married.

During that trip, Bynum invited his daughter to live with him. Joy declined the offer, choosing to travel back to Texas—a decision she would chew on for the rest of her life. But she never lost contact with him, visiting several more times. She did accept Bynum’s offer to pay for her tuition to secretarial school, and soon my grandmother was making enough money to bring Mimmie to Texas to live with her, along with her sisters Perle and, most especially, Gladys. It was there that Joy met and married my grandfather, Wallace Miller Morlan, and on May 10, 1922, it was there—in Houston, to be exact—that Margaret Joy Morlan entered the world with a full head of black hair and huge dark eyes that matched both her mother’s and her grandfather’s, the dark-eyed devil she would never meet.

At the bottom of an old mildewed storage box—one of the various containers that were left with me—I found a crumbling leather diary of my mother’s, written in 1935, when she was only thirteen. By this time, she and her family, which included Mimmie, had been living in California for about six years. I know she wouldn’t have wanted me to read it, but I did (sorry, Mom).

Besides a lot of little-girl chitchat, she writes about her daddy losing his job, writes about money worries again and again, always ending with the fear that they will have to move out of their home. The diary stops there, but I know that not long after the entry was written, everything changed when Joy was awarded a small inheritance from the last will and testament of James Bynum, her father. And that small allotment allowed my grandmother to purchase the cottage that still lives in my heart, Joy’s house.


The day my grandmother passed away I was cowering in the corner of the hospital room where she had been taken three days before. I kept my eyes on the hypnotic bouncing line of the heart monitor, afraid to look death in the face as Joy hovered, not in this world and not eternally in the other. Now in her early nineties, she’d been hospitalized only once before, had stayed a week to regulate her heart rate and was released to my mother by the medical staff, who said that they wouldn’t keep my grandmother any longer, complaining that she spat on the floor and refused to be touched by any of the male nurses.

A few months after her first episode, she was back in the ICU, disoriented and declining. It was late evening on that third day of waiting, of my mother and I whispering and pacing, frequently laughing at nothing, always trying to be respectful while Joy lay suspended, the beeping of the monitor getting slower and slower. Suddenly, without warning, my gentle mother moved close to Joy, leaned down to her face while boldly grabbing her arm. “Where are you, Joy?” she demanded in her ear. “Tell me where you are.” I couldn’t understand what my mother was doing, much less why. But when Joy’s eyes immediately fluttered, and she calmly replied, “I’m with Bynum,” we looked at each other, chilled. That night my grandmother stayed with her father, forever.

I have never stopped thinking about that moment. At the time, I know we were both charmed by Joy’s response, felt that it was romantic to think that in death Joy had looked for her father to come and take her away. But right now, as I try to understand how all of this fits, I am struck… finally seeing the truth. This man, the “scallywag” who took what he wanted without any consequences and left my great-grandmother’s life irrevocably changed, had forever remained a dashing figure, a hero in his daughter’s eyes. Yet it was that woman, Joy’s mother, who had struggled her entire life to be beside her child. Who is the dashing figure in this scenario?


I went back into my mother’s things, and in another box I found a short typewritten account of a conversation she’d had with Joy at some point. In it my grandmother tells how angry she stayed toward Mimmie. How as time went on, Mimmie had slowed her visits to the orphanage, eventually coming only once a year, saying it was too hard for her to witness the conditions in which her daughters were forced to live. And though, as a child, I never picked up on any of that, never perceived my grandmother’s complex feelings toward her mother, I can see in my memory how Mimmie was always hovering around the edges of her daughters’ lives, not completely ignored but never invited into their center. As I put it all together, I wonder if Mimmie spent her life seeking their forgiveness for the things they never talked about. And Mimmie must have felt no small amount of fury toward her own mother as well, the mother who abandoned her, who shut the door in her pregnant daughter’s face. All of them with wounds that wouldn’t heal because no one acknowledged they were bleeding, and yet each of them needing the other to be near. And that—I realize—is how this story fits into my life. These generations of women, weaving a pattern into a lifelong garment, unconsciously handed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter to me.