Turtle Rock

Jeanette confirmed that she and her dad had performed the swab test on each other. I explained the possibility of cross-contamination and how it could affect the results. Compounding the problem, she didn’t identify the second swab as being that of her third cousin, making it clear that she now had to call the lab and disclose what she failed to do initially. Unfortunately, in the end, the man she believed to be her biological father, was not, and neither one of them could be more disappointed over it. Wishing to change that, he asked her what he could do now when she jokingly replied that he could adopt her. And so he did! A few months later, all the legal processes were complete and Jeanette was once and for all legally Haywood’s daughter.

The Y-DNA results revealed that Jim and I we were not biologically connected, meaning that the man I had always known to be my dad was not my biological dad at all. Of course, I didn’t need a DNA test to tell me that my mom and dad were or were not my mom and dad. They are the ones who provided for me and cared for me when I was sick. To me, they will always be Mom and Dad. In my mind, this was all about having the one thing I always longed for. And that was better than I ever could have imagined as I now had not one, but five sisters. I even knew who my biological mother was now, even though the identity of my biological father remained unknown. That didn’t matter. Unlike myself, however, Jeanette wouldn’t be fulfilled until she knew who her biological father was.

I’d like to take a moment now to recall what was going on prior to that first phone call from Mr. Tonker. The economy had been bad following the housing collapse. Businesses were closing, people were losing their homes and their jobs. My commercial production business was in the red as I struggled to pay the bills. It was a very depressing time. Anguish began to set in as I wondered what could possibly be in store. I had begun to anticipate the worst when an “in His own time” act of divinity wiped it all away when the phone rang. Mr. Tonker was about to initiate what would forever change my life even though I didn’t know it right away.

Jeanette and I exchanged photos via email. I studied hers closely. As disappointment began to set in, I called Pam into the room. I showed her the picture and told her that I didn’t see any resemblance before asking if she saw any. She obviously saw what I couldn’t and said that she was without a doubt my sister.

In Virginia, Jeanette called her sisters and told them she had something to tell them but not over the phone. Darlene lived only a mile down the road from her, and while she was in the middle of preparing dinner for her family, she promised to come over later. About two miles or so away was Cheryl, the older of the two youngest sisters. She drove right over. Upon walking through the kitchen door, Jeanette told her that she found their brother. A bit aggravated, Cheryl said, “well I thought something was wrong with Mike (Jeanette’s husband), the way you were talking!” After they talked a little more, she asked Jeanette, “why would you want to bring him into this family?”

When Darlene and her husband arrived, Jeanette exclaimed that she found their brother. Pleased with the news, Darlene immediately said, “I knew that’s what you were going to say.” When Jeanette showed her my picture, Darlene gazed in amazement before softly saying, “he looks just like Uncle Bullpuncher.” Uncle Bullpuncher was Sugarloaf’s younger brother.

After researching my biological family, having traced my roots back seven generations, Carol believed she had narrowed the search for my biological father down to two people – a man named Dodson and a man named Powell.

According to Jeanette, Powell was a local country doctor in Madison. He, in fact, had been her family’s doctor since she was a little girl. The last time she was in his office, a number of years back, Jeanette left with a rather uneasy feeling. She told Granny that she was never going back to him again, explaining that while he had never been out of the way with her, she just didn’t feel comfortable with him anymore. She further explained that after completing his examination, he began asking personal questions including how things were are at home and what kind of car she was driving. When she asked him how much she owed him for the appointment, he said, I’ll catch you next time” and he had said that to her the last few times she was in his office.

“He never accepts money from me,” she said.

Granny told her that maybe he has a guilty conscience, revealing that she knew for a fact he was one of the men that Sugarloaf had been “fooling around with back then and you know what they say. When you go through the briar patch, you never know which one stuck you.” Shocked by Granny’s uncharacteristic metaphor, Jeanette knew exactly what she meant. Granny’s favorite saying was, “there’s a lot of truth in a joke.”

After we had confirmation of the DNA tests, Jeanette began telling me about my new-found family. Among the first things she shared with me was that Pam was the name of her oldest daughter, the only child from her first marriage. Astonished, I told her that was my wife’s name too. Then she told me that her middle name was Denese. I couldn’t believe my ears. My Pam’s middle name was also Denise. Different spelling, nevertheless, so surreal.

This hair-raising name game, as I call it, gets even better. Sugarloaf’s younger sisters have since assured me that I was born in Madison County, not Albemarle County. Ohmer had a sister named Paige. About five years before Jeanette found me, my first grandchild, Madison Paige was born.

They say that opposites attract. That couldn’t be truer than it was between Granny and Ohmer. Everyone who ever met or knew Granny will tell you that she was a kind, God-fearing woman. She could always be found singing hymns while working around the house and rarely missed an opportunity to go to church, often playing her harmonica during the services. By the way, I’m so very grateful to have been gifted that very harmonica by her daughter, Suzie, which I proudly display next to a photograph of her playing it during a tent revival. Ohmer, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. Working as a logger when there was work, he mended fences, bartering with the man who owned the house in the holler where they lived. What others did not know about him was that he had a devilish mean streak, often abusing Granny and Jeanette, and when he got drunk, no one knew when and if he might go into a rage and terrorize his family.

Granny took care of the domestic chores around the house that had no running water and no electricity. She even did the laundry in a galvanized metal tub with a washboard on the porch, weather permitting. Each of the girls had their jobs as well, one of which included hauling buckets of water to the house every morning before school, from the nearby spring. They were mountain folk, poor and every bit as proud! Ohmer also made moonshine for extra cash. He was as slick as anyone could be while evading the ever-frustrated revenuers. He did have a loving side which only Dinah and Darlene ever witnessed, a stark contrast to the way he treated Jeanette.

Jeanette then continued by telling me about Sugarloaf, our mother, and how like her Aunt Paige, she loved to dance, and Sugarloaf often attended the local dances with her second cousin, Haywood. He was looking forward to getting out of the army when his enlistment was suddenly extended and then he was shipped overseas to fight in the Korean conflict but not before he and Sugarloaf attended one last dance.

Haywood hadn’t been in South Korea long when he received a letter from Sugarloaf informing him that she was pregnant. While out on maneuvers shortly after reading that letter, the tank he was driving ran out of fuel leading to his capture by the enemy.

Back in the states, Sugarloaf had met an army sergeant at a local dance and following a quick romance, they married. Within a year, Jeanette was born. A year or so later, her husband, Gordon, was transferred to Germany while Sugarloaf remained stateside. It was during his absence that she became pregnant with her second child before going to live with Gordon’s family in Indiana while never letting on that she was pregnant.

As the time neared for her to deliver, she sought the seclusion of her family’s mountain home to quietly have her baby. After nine months, she still wasn’t showing and no one was aware of her condition. When the time had come, Sugarloaf quietly went to the outhouse. Upon hearing a commotion from within, her siblings rushed to her aid. Pulling her from the outhouse, they took her back to the house, upstairs to the bedroom where much to everyone’s surprise, I was born.

Sugarloaf soon informed Granny and Ohmer that she wasn’t going to keep the baby, upsetting them both. While talking to their neighbor Dot, at the bottom of the mountain, Granny told her that her daughter just had a baby and decided not to keep it. Dot shared the news with her younger brother, a sailor stationed a few hours away in Norfolk. He immediately took this news to one of his shipmates and his wife of nine years. They dearly loved children, but were unable to have their own. Dot also knew the couple as they had accompanied him during numerous weekend visits.

His shipmate and wife became very eager upon hearing the news. Things moved quickly as Dot arranged the exchange at the bottom of the mountain, adjacent to her home. Two weeks after her baby boy was born, Sugarloaf walked down the mountain with Virgie, her best friend at her side. Nearing the bottom of the mountain, they could see a lone car parked on the side of the road. Approaching that car, Sugarloaf handed her baby, wrapped in a blue baby blanket, through the window to complete strangers without a single word being exchanged. Turning around, she slapped her hands in an up and down motion as if to say that takes care of that! Virgie silently stood just a few feet away, in tears, as she wanted to keep the baby but didn’t have the means.

It was during that time that Sugarloaf had learned that Haywood had been freed and was coming home from Korea. He went directly to the house on the mountain where Granny made him his first homemade meal in more than three years before he and Sugarloaf went out dancing to celebrate his return. Not long after that, shortly before Jeanette’s third birthday, Gordon also returned home from Germany.

Sugarloaf and Gordon quickly found a house to live in. With their relationship on the decline, Gordon began drinking a lot. It was during one of those times that Gordon, took Jeanette by her tiny hand and led her into the basement and raped her. After finishing, he carried her unconscious body back upstairs before returning to clean the area up. When she regained consciousness, she too had been cleaned up and he was sitting there staring at her. He proceeded to tell her to never tell anyone what had happened. The sexual assaults unfortunatly, continued for a long time afterwards.

Sugarloaf soon had a second daughter and while pregnant with her third she had been working at The Occidental Restaurant near the U.S. Capital as a coat and hat check lady. One day, Vice President Nixon came in and noticing she was pregnant, struck up a conversation with her, asking if she would name the baby Darlene if it was a girl. Before leaving, he wrote “Darlene” on the menu and signed it before giving it to her.

The relationship between Sugarloaf and Gordon had become volatile, as they were now frequently engaged in physical confrontations. Sugarloaf eventually decided to leave him. Taking Jeanette, Dinah, and Darlene back to the mountain, she dropped them off with Granny, asking if she would watch them long enough for her to find a place to stay. She left and never came back for them. She did however come back once in a while to visit. Knowing that Granny and Ohmer didn’t have the means to take care of three more, she nonetheless never gave them anything to help them provide for her girls.

It was then that Granny noticed something different about Jeanette. She had become quiet and withdrawn. Being the loving woman she was, she took Jeanette under her protective wing. Ohmer, on the other hand neglected Jeanette and even physically and emotionally abused her but never violated her, all the while being unaplogetically very loving to Dinah and Darlene.

Ohmer often sampled his own ‘shine when he made it, sometimes staying drunk for days on end. During one of those occasions, he had an altercation with Granny. After he told her to stay right where she was, he exited the house saying he’d be right back. Jeanette pleaded with her to leave as she was sure that this time he was going to do something to hurt her. She did as Jeanette asked and shortly afterward, while Jeanette hid under the table where she could see him when he returned, he came back so drunk and angry that he beat the stove pipe with a crow bar thinking it was her.

On a different occasion, Jeanette came home from school and showed Granny where the sole of her shoe had separated from the top. Ohmer told Jeanette to go to the barn and “fetch” his pliers and a handful of pig rings. Upon her return, he used the pig rings to go around the outer portion of the shoe, clamping it back together while telling her she would wear it like that until next year when she, along with the others, got their new shoes prior to school starting.

The following morning, preparing for school, Granny told Jeanette to take a note she had written to the neighbor’s house and they would take her to get her a pair of new shoes. That neighbor walked Jeanette over the mountain, into Wolftown to buy her a new pair of shoes. On their way back, he bought some ice cream which they both enjoyed at the top of the mountain.

On yet another occasion, Jeanette was in the barn while Ohmer was doing some chores. He told Jeanette to do something and she said no. Grabbing a leather strap, he swung it around and slashed her abdomen open. Running out of the barn, into the house she showed Granny the wound. She told Jeanette to run to the barn and get a handful of cobwebs to bring her. Upon her return, Granny applied the cobwebs to the wound, stopping the bleeding.

Then it happened. After school one day, at the age of 12, Jeanette boarded the bus and a classmate named Billy, rushed to sit next to her. As she scooted over to give him room, he told her that she had a brother out there. Brushing it off, Jeanette said, “Billy, you say the dumbest stuff!” When the bus arrived at Jeanette’s stop, she got off and stood there a moment watching as it drove away. Walking back to the house, a one mile journey from the road, she thought more about what Billy had told her. Arriving home, she asked Granny about it, trusting her to tell her the truth as she was sure she had never lied to her before. With a tear in her eye, she told Jeanette that her mother did have a baby boy that she gave away. She explained that she and Ohmer had tried to convince her not to, “but you know your mother. Once she makes her mind up to do something, nothing can stop her!” She said that Ohmer told her before she walked out the door that even an animal don’t give its young away. That was the beginning of Jeanette’s enduring journey to find the half brother she never knew without even knowing his name.

More to come