When my father was in first grade, they took the bus in winter down Rabbit Ears Pass, frozen highway and slipping tires, into Wyoming and then down through Utah, through the Nevada desert and over the Cajon Pass, onto Route 66, the way all seekers arrived. They stayed with Hazel first in Echo Park, and later, in Ontario, California.
Robert Straight was legend. Awful legend, in Colorado. He fought with his family, with neighboring ranchers, with strangers, with people he met accidentally in towns or on highways or other ranches. He was relentless and wiry and his anger knew no bounds. My father says he witnessed his father beat men to near death many times, and these pages are not the place to recall even worse.
My father’s older brother, Robert Jr., and older sister Beverly were teenagers who left home early. His older sister Audrey, who had a heart condition, had been sent to California to recover; at fourteen, she took the train home, collapsed onto the station platform in Laramie, Wyoming, and died, in front of her mother, Ruby.
But each time Ruby took Richard to California, her husband—contrite, charismatic, frightening, her legal-wedded spouse—came to take them back. The last time my grandfather came to Ontario, he got a job as a foreman in a cement plant. My father was fifteen, in high school. After another night of violence, Robert Straight left for Fraser, and inexplicably, Ruby followed him. She abandoned my father. He was homeless, and his voice still tore ragged the few times he told me about it, when he was already in his eighties. He slept in the kitchen of the fast-food restaurant where he worked. He slept in cars. He rented rooms. At seventeen, he signed up for the military.
My grandmother Ruby chose her husband over her son, and that changed everything for him, and for us—his natural children and stepchildren—because my father never trusted anyone in his life. When I got into college, he wasn’t happy for me; he said people who knew nothing of work would ruin my brain. He’d never even gotten to graduate from high school. For a freshman assignment, I asked him about my grandparents, and he said, “That’s none of your damn business.” I knew only the ice, the snow, and the grizzly bear. To me, he had been a child cowboy who was never a cowboy again—but always poised to flee, in his beloved 1970 Mustang.
Ruby was told by doctors never to live again at high altitude because of her weight, high blood pressure, and constant stress. But in 1950, Robert took her to Loveland, almost five thousand feet above sea level. My father was nineteen by then, married, with his first child—a son, named for him—and when he came home on leave from the Air Force, he and his wife Jean traveled to Colorado to show Ruby the baby.
They pulled up into the long dirt driveway of the house in Loveland, where my grandfather had been born. Ruby came outside to meet them, and my father handed her his son, and she collapsed onto the ground.
He has told me several versions of this. The cousins in Nunn have told me other versions of this, from their own mothers—Ruby’s sisters. Ruby had been alone, in the mountains, with Robert. Who knows what had happened in the days before? My father grabbed the baby, gave him to Jean, and they called for medical help, a long time coming to a remote area in the Rockies. Sometimes, my father said that his mother already had bruises. Sometimes, my father said that he bruised her chest while he tried CPR.
Ruby’s sister Vara’s children say the bruises were the same as they always had been, since the beginning. They are resolute in their belief that her death was caused by her husband. Their mother, and the other Triboulet girls, lived very long lives, into their eighties and nineties. They were thin-faced, strong-willed, very religious women who preached, taught Sunday school, did not drink or smoke or dance, put up with nothing from their men once they decided that was it, and devoted their lives to their children.
Ruby had died almost instantly, in the gravel of the road that overlooked a beautiful vista of the Rocky Mountains and the pine forests and the steep, sheer drop of a cliff toward the river below.
There is not a single physical item anywhere in the world I have ever seen, or held, that belonged to Ruby. Not a small table or scarf or hairpin or recipe for cake, not a Bible or bracelet. I have her blood, and so do you, but we have nothing else.
My stepfather gave us this immense and insatiable wanderlust. As my friend Nicole says jokingly, You all are just bagavonds.
Our last trip with your father was 1997, when we went to Oaxaca. The day before we were to leave, we found out Rosette, at eighteen months, was too young for inoculations against cholera and yellow fever, so she stayed home with my mother. But Delphine, you had carried mononucleosis and a terrible throat infection from kindergarten to Mexico, and you were feverish and nearly unconscious by the second day, when we carried you down the historic streets of Oaxaca City to a doctor we didn’t know. That night, I went with women I’d met to a nearby church for the patron saint of Oaxaca, La Virgen de Soledad, her black gown severe and triangular and scattered with stars. With the other women, I crawled up the cobblestones toward the face of the church, prayed for your recovery, and lit a candle. The women told me in Spanish who they were praying for—unborn babies, babies never arrived, babies who had died, babies who were ill at home. I told them about you. They told me to swear to La Virgen I would not drink alcohol—this was the land of mezcal—or smoke—my girlfriends were into fancy cigarillos then. (I didn’t drink or smoke for twenty years after that night.)
Two weeks later, we celebrated your sixth birthday in a two-room cement-block house in a small village outside the main city in Oaxaca. It was named Santa Maria de Atzompa, where we’d met a mother with two girls your age. The four of you ate chicken with mole amarillo and mole colorado (yellow and red sauces) and then ran up the dirt alley to a backyard where two women made fresh tortillas on a heated comal, to buy another stack.
I carried home in my suitcase a two-foot-tall ceramic Virgin de Soledad, made in Atzompa, her gown covered with the distinctive green and blue flowers of the village. She has remained in my bedroom, along with the thread bracelet you wore then, and the candle I lit at that church, for all these years. Every night, I reiterate to her and all the other beings that I would sacrifice whatever required, for the three of you.
I tried to give you the world before the rest of the world took you from me. We went to Francis Ford Coppola’s lodge in Belize, where I taught for ten days; you swam near the waterfalls, saw Mayan ruins and caves, learned about the Garifuna people, who were African, Mayan, Spanish, and spoke Creole.
The last two times we went to Switzerland, you hiked the Niederhorn and the Niesen, my mother’s favorite childhood mountain, among bell-chiming cows and goats. You ate pizza in Thun near the Aare River blue-green as old turquoise, roaring under a bridge built in the 1600s, near a castle where your grandmother Rosa’s sister Frieda’s stepdaughter Lydia Staudenmann took you to see an exhibit of medieval china chamberpots, which made me think of all of us, the women.
You went to a farmhouse in Zwisselberg where your true great-grandmother Frieda’s cousins still live, in the Alps. The village is near Wattenwil, where Frieda Leu’s bones are lost now in that cemetery. The chalet was built in 1840, and three generations of your cousin’s family live there, raising cows and pears and apples, harvesting wild honey, cooking you a four-course meal on an old woodstove. We all held hands around the lace-covered table while they sang grace in ancient Swiss-German dialect.
That is your blood. You can speak a little Swiss-German, some French and Spanish, and the language of Cuddyland—“Look at him! Cuddy still drivin’ that old hooptie, ain’t made no ducats this year. I remember when he had a new El Dog and them whitewalls would blind you.”
You were all about clan. You gave up your beds for cousins and friends. You gave up your clothes and your money and your nights. As my mother had taught me, I taught you to make chocolate chip cookies, and they became Gaila’s specialty, cookies far better than mine, the ones she made for everyone to say thank you, to say I hope you feel better. Rosette was very young when she decided she wanted her o
wn cookies. She made lavender shortbread, with the three kinds of lavender—French, English, Spanish—we grew in the garden. Dough rolled on wax paper, flecks of purple in the rounds. She delivered them to a neighbor who had cancer.
Delphine’s talent is the perfect gift, and she is the most bagavond of all of us. She brings silver hoop earrings from Mexico City, flowing pants from Thailand, olive oil from Umbria. She works everywhere, and when the cousins see my earrings, they say, “Where them girls now? Why they always gotta be so far away?”
You love to find the smallest villages. You know that the world thinks villages like our ancestral places—the driveway on Michael Street, the dirt lanes in Cuddyland, the ghost town of Nunn, Colorado, the family compound in Aeschlen—are not as important as the cities. But you know how kin keeps people like us alive.
Your father says he wants to be cremated, and his ashes taken to that Swiss Alp somewhere in the Bernese Oberland, the summit of Hausie’s mountain. That would take our California blood to Switzerland forever. Hans Erb and Dwayne Sims.
We’d better find out where it is.
32
Bring Me Your Smartest Girl
Riverside, California, 2008; Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1925
Dear Gaila,
You always said if you ever had a daughter, you’d name her Callie. You know this story—because you are the historian. You are the legacy.
In the spring of 1924, General Roscoe Conklin Sims went to visit Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa. “Show me the smartest girl you have in this school,” he told the principal. “I want my children to be smart.”
The principal obligingly brought to the office Callie Rollins. She was thin, with the round-shouldered posture of her time, with large cautious eyes and full lips, with wavy hair parted on the side and pressed down along her head. She was very pretty, and seventeen. I tell you this again because she is your blood legacy—you are the echo. Your great-uncle John Prexy Sims told us about Callie, his mother: “Her greatest love was learning. Her idea of a great time was spending all day in bed reading.”
That is you, my eldest daughter—you read in bed, under the table, in a tree, just like Callie, just like me.
General Sims was twenty-five. Though his father, Stanford, had been a teacher in Muskogee, General liked farming and building. His mother, Minerva, clearly preferred her lighter-skinned son Lanier, who lived in the city of Tulsa. But General was determined to make his farm work.
Callie was in Tulsa because her half-sister, Jennie, had taken in Fine, Callie, and James, after Zach Rollins died in Texas. Eventually, Fine rented a small house on Latimer Street. Callie had excellent grades, and was headed to college in the fall.
Imagine what it must have felt like to be in the principal’s office, looked over by this stranger: short, self-possessed, and judgmental. A farmer. Callie Rollins refused his offer, probably with immense politeness. She went back to class. In the fall, she went off to Langston University.
Langston was near Guthrie, about one hundred miles from Tulsa. Originally called the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University when it was founded in 1897, it’s the westernmost historically black university in America. It was renamed for John Mercer Langston, who was born free in 1829 to a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman of African–Native American heritage whom he freed after she bore him a child. At fourteen, John Langston enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio; his brothers were the first black students admitted to Oberlin, in 1835.
Callie did well in her classes at Langston, that fall of 1924. But the deal she’d worked out fell apart. She had deferred tuition payment. Fine had been expecting money from the sale of the land in Denton, but by January, there was still no money for college. Callie came home after that first semester. She married General Sims.
He took Callie out to his land in Fry Township, near Rentie Grove, where he was farming sweet potatoes, watermelon, and cotton.
Callie had five children—Minerva, Stanford, Robert, General II, and John—between 1925 and 1937. General worked the children hard on the farm, but no matter what they did, he beat them. He worked himself even harder, plowing and hauling until he gave himself a hernia. He had what he’d wanted—five intelligent, handsome children—but he mistreated them and himself all day on a piece of land he was determined to conquer, during the Depression.
In 1937 he had an operation to repair the hernia, and was told to go home and rest. In the morning, he got out of bed, beat one of the children, went outside, beat one of the mules, and began to plow. The stitches ruptured, and he died.
Callie, the smartest and prettiest girl, picked cotton, worked fields, cleaned houses, and went hungry so often trying to feed her children that eventually she was near death. She was thirty years old. Her children were shooting wild game and collecting wild plants, and still it wasn’t even close to survival. The older boys plowed with the mule until the mule had to be sold; then they plowed with their own bodies, drawing furrows in the earth. Callie collapsed, eventually, and was taken to the hospital. She was probably severely anemic, close to starvation.
Her mother-in-law, Minerva Sims, had moved to Callie’s home by then, according to the 1930 census. She decided that the children should go to orphanages. It didn’t seem likely that Minerva Sims would plow, but why she didn’t try to send the kids to relatives in Rentie Grove or Tulsa is a mystery.
One morning, while Callie was in the hospital, Minerva took her five grandchildren to two separate institutions. Robert Sims told us, “They gave Sister a doll, gave me skates, and gave us some cookies. We were so hungry.” Sister was the only name ever used for the eldest daughter, Minerva Kathryn, named for the very woman who took her only granddaughter to an orphanage and left.
That night, when Callie’s mother, Fine Kemp, came home from work to her house in Tulsa, she was told that her grandchildren had been given to the state. Fine was near sixty-five then, still working. She had been a small girl taken from her home by strangers, beaten and hungry and not a single human to rescue her. There was no chance she’d let her only grandchildren spend a single night believing the same.
Fine’s oldest daughter, Jennie, never had children. Fine’s son Mack had been buried back in Denton. Her son Floyd had served in World War I, contracted tuberculosis in the military, and died when he came home. (Fine was given by the United States an American flag so big it covered her tiny front porch when she flew it on Memorial Day.) James remained disabled, and died at thirty-five.
Fine went immediately to find Callie’s children. She retrieved them so quickly that Robert remembered they were still holding the doll and skates, though they had to give them back. He remembered the taste of the cookies. General II remembered the fury on Fine’s face. She took all five children back to her house on Latimer Street, and then she got her gun and went to find Minerva.
She told Minerva that if she ever tried to take Callie’s children away again, it would be over somebody’s dead body, and that body was not likely to be her own. She had more than a bullet in her head.
You know that today Callie would have been the kind of woman who went back to school. Callie was forty-five years old when she came to Riverside to live near your grandfather General II. She did domestic work. Years later I met a teacher who loved and praised Callie for watching her own four children while she was at work. I bit my lips, thinking Callie would probably have become a teacher if she’d graduated from Langston. What were her favorite classes? Would she have been a historian, like you?
Stanford Sims, Callie Sims, General Sims II, Riverside, California, undated
You wanted to go to Kenyon, having worn that T-shirt since you were one year old, and you did so well on the SATs (having begun practice at nine) that you got into several universities. We went to visit Kenyon, but no—when we went to Oberlin, that was it. “The first college to admit black people and women,” you told me, excited. “So it seems like a good place for me. You know—as a black woman.”
&nb
sp; John Mercer Langston, as an adult, led countless slaves along the Underground Railroad in Oberlin; you took your father, who spent many childhood hours with Callie Sims, to Langston’s house. You both walked some of the Underground Railroad Trail. Freshman year, you tutored kids at Langston Middle School. I put your graduation portrait next to Callie’s graduation photo from Booker T. Washington High School. Bring us your smartest women, every time.
You were the first girl we sent off into the world. You received a summer research fellowship from Caltech, one of the few nonscience students there, and wrote about the journey of the Sims family in 1950s Los Angeles. A year later, you wrote your Oberlin honors thesis on the black men in Walter Mosley’s novels—who reminded you of your father and uncles. You exist in the world because of Fine’s indomitable loyalty, and Callie’s devotion and pain. You were our pride.
Gaila, Delphine, and Rosette Sims, Arcadia, California, 2018 (Photograph by Cassandra Barragan)
33
Kin—White House #1
Los Angeles, California, 2009 (Tulsa, Oklahoma; Riverside, California)
We were three generations staring at the white bungalow home on Twenty-First Street, just around the corner from Central Avenue, in historic South Central Los Angeles. This house was just inside the boundaries of the original “rancho city lands of Los Angeles” on an historic map, established in 1869. We were making the young woman who stood at the wrought-iron fence a little nervous. She stared at us, and we waved.
It was July 2009. Dwayne stood with the two surviving Sims brothers, Robert and John Sims. Uncle Bobby wiped his large red freckled face with a handkerchief. Maybe sweating. Maybe a little tearful. His wife, Lee Myrtle, watched from the car. Toni Sims Scott, John’s daughter, my age, a renowned artist, was there, elegant with straightened black hair, pink lipstick, and amber skin. Gaila, just turned nineteen, Delphine, just turned seventeen, Rosette at thirteen, and me—the short white woman who probably looked like a random real estate agent, except that my hair wasn’t styled well. This house wasn’t for sale. It had once belonged to Jennie Stevenson.
In the Country of Women Page 23