Stories of My Life

I may have been shy in most public settings, but at home, as the middle child of five, I did whatever it took to get my share of attention, and sweetness didn’t do the trick. Worse yet, if there was any opportunity at home, at school, even at church to show off, I would—much to Grandmother’s distress. Ladies, even small ones, did not show off.

Grandmother had no home of her own in those days. So her daughters’ homes became her homes. From the time I was nine until I graduated from high school, Grandmother lived with us for four months out of every year. We children dreaded these visitations. Our mother would become more and more tense as our family’s turn drew near, because I wasn’t the only person or thing Grandmother would begin working on as soon as she walked in the door. She’d start by rearranging all the pictures and whatever furniture was light enough to move, and then start trying to rearrange Mother and the five of us children.

The only person spared criticism and improving instruction was Daddy, whom she adored. He could do no wrong. She became almost starry-eyed when she talked to him, and she basked in his attention. Daddy couldn’t resist teasing her. We’d watch with fascination the exchange between them at mealtimes. Surely, Daddy had gone too far with his joking. Grandmother couldn’t possibly appreciate his wry sense of humor. He’d surely hurt her feelings, she’d stop worshipping him, and then we’d really be in trouble. We were wrong, of course. At first she’d look puzzled, and then she’d break into a coy smile. “Oh, Raymond,” she’d say, “you’re teasing me.”

By the time I reached the last years of high school, Ray was in the navy and Liz was in college. So I was suddenly the oldest child. During my junior year, we moved to Charles Town, West Virginia, and were living in an upstairs apartment. Daddy was traveling for the mission board and wasn’t there to help with anything, much less Grandmother’s visits. Until Barbara and I became close friends, I was totally miserable in Charles Town. Often I would come home from school, and, without even taking off my winter coat, throw myself down on the living room floor to read my current book.

The particular day I remember best, I was totally engrossed in A Tale of Two Cities. I guess I was vaguely aware that my mother was sweeping the floor around my prone body, but I was too lost in the book to care until I heard my grandmother’s voice, weary with the burden of having failed to make me over, “Sweep, sweep, sweep,” she said. “You are going to kill your mother.”

I’m sure I should have felt guilty. I was simply annoyed. Grandmother should have been proud to have a grandchild so absorbed in a classic that she ignored the world around her. My mother loved to see me read, and I was quite sure my reading was not going to kill my mother, whatever Grandmother might say. And if you’re guessing that I had the grace to get off the floor and give my mother a hand, you’d be wrong. It was at about this time that Grandmother seemed to accept the fact that improving me was a lost cause, announcing sadly to Mother: “I’m afraid Katherine is a lover of luxury.”

But I started this by saying that I have never been fair to my grandmother. She was a remarkable woman, and I have stories to prove it.

After the difficult birth of her third daughter, Grandmother “enjoyed ill health.” Mother recalled countless afternoons when she came home from school that she was hushed by the African American housekeeper with the warning that her mother was resting. But Grandmother didn’t spe

nd all of her time abed. She was, apparently, noted in Rome, Georgia, for her good deeds. There was a tiny apartment connected to the house, and Mother recalled that it was nearly always filled with some pitiful person or another who would otherwise have been homeless. Every month she sent money to Dr. Harry Myers, a friend who was a missionary in Japan. Dr. Myers wrote that her gift was being used to support a penniless student named Toyohiko Kagawa.

Kagawa went on to become known worldwide for his work with the poorest of the poor in the slums of Kobe and Tokyo. He was imprisoned on a number of occasions because of his activism on behalf of labor and because he opposed the Japanese military, going so far as to apologize publically in 1940 for Japan’s crimes against China. He was a prolific writer, often using his time in prison to write, and was nominated both for the Nobel Prize in literature and the Nobel Peace Prize. After his death, the Japanese government, which had so often opposed him, awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure, its second-highest honor. Dr. Kagawa died soon after I arrived in Japan, so I never met him. But I was in Tokushima Province when his widow brought part of his ashes to bury them in his hometown. I was able to tell her about my grandmother’s pride in having played a part in her great husband’s life.

After her daughters had all grown up and left home, Grandmother wanted to be useful. She ceased her role as a Victorian semi-invalid and moved to Baltimore, where, I was told as a child, she became a “missionary to the Jews.” The word “missionary” was not a derogatory term in my family, but “missionary” is a misleading description of what she actually did. It seems that the Presbyterian Church was very concerned for the immigrants in Baltimore, many of whom were Jews, who in the 1920s and ’30s had fled Europe and settled in the city. Grandmother’s job was to teach English to a group of Jewish women immigrants. I think it was a volunteer position, rather than a paid one. One remarkable thing about my grandmother was her ability to manage on very little money.

She grew quite close to the women she worked with. One of the rare lovely memories I have of my grandmother is listening to her describe her Jewish friends preparing for Passover. She was awed by the way they approached this sacred rite—the beauty, the purity of it. She’d never seen anything like it in her own church. She was sure, she said, that the Holy Spirit was present with these wonderful women.

Often she would take my mother’s letters from China and share them with her friends. She remembered that awful time when she had been in too big a hurry to read the letter first, had simply opened it, only to find herself reading aloud my mother’s account of little Charles’s death. If my grandmother was broken-hearted, so were her friends. “How can God let a little baby die so far away from his beloved grandmother?” one of them cried as they wept with her for her husband’s namesake that she would never know.

I think Grandmother left Baltimore about the time we moved to Winston-Salem. Perhaps if she’d stayed and been nourished by her friends and the work she did there, she and I would have had a different history. I’ll never know.

Grandmother lived to be ninety-six, but in 1955, when she was eighty-seven years old, she was living with my aunt Anne in Alexandria, Virginia, and running about visiting sick and elderly friends in Washington, DC. Anne often said, “Mother, you have to watch for cars in the city. You aren’t careful.” To which Grandmother would invariably reply: “Nobody is going to hit an old lady.” But, one day she stepped off the curb and somebody did. Her hip was shattered. A skillful surgeon put it back together and she was able to walk again, but something happened to the grandmother I knew in the process.

After the operation, the iron lady that had frightened and judged me for most of my life simply disappeared, leaving the sweet granny I’d always longed for. I went to see her before I took off for Japan. She seemed particularly fuzzy that day, so I said, “Grandmother, do you know me?” She peered at me closely. “No,” she said, settling back in her chair, “but I know you’re somebody nice.”

My older sister Liz thought she saw Grandmother in Louise’s grandmother in Jacob Have I Loved, but I really didn’t. Louise’s grandmother is closer to the mother-in-law of one of my friends, who in her dementia was cuttingly cruel. Until her accident that softened her personality, my grandmother was not demented. She was stern and used Scripture to bolster her arguments, but she was not intentionally cruel. To hint that she was would have been totally unfair to that remarkable woman.

An example of the brass buttons from the Confederate uniform.

Two Brass Buttons

By now you will have realized that my relatives were all Southerners. My father’s grandfathers Womeldorf and Clements were Virginia farmers and never owned slaves. Grandfather James Clements (sometimes spelled Clemens) was the younger brother of John Clements, who left Amelia County for Missouri and became the father of Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. Which makes me in Southern relative counting, the first cousin twice removed of Mark Twain, if the family history is to be believed. Grandpa Clements lived past his hundredth birthday. He was not a Union sympathizer, but he did not believe in either slavery or war, so he paid someone to join the Confederate Army in his place.

My mother’s grandparents, coming from Georgia and Alabama, were Confederates through and through. Great-Grandfather Daniel was a slave owner, although my grandmother told me that he granted them all freedom in his will. Which sounds nice until you consider that he made sure he had their service all his life. Since I have yet to meet an African American named “Goetchius,” I don’t believe my other great-grandfather was a slave owner, but one of my favorite “kitchen sink stories” comes down from Goetchius family lore.

Slave owners or not, the fact remains that all my ancestors were from the South and some even fought and died for the losing side. Perhaps that’s why I was long resigned to my failure to publish. Southerners are much more comfortable with losing than winning. It seems more romantic, somehow. And now for one of my favorite family stories.

My grandfather Goetchius’s two eldest brothers, John and Edward, were both killed while serving in the Confederate Army. This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry.

I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett’s Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863. Actually he was mortally wounded very close to Cemetery Hill on July 2 the day before that tragic charge. He was carried by unknown hands to a Union field hospital, where a chaplain, who was ministering to the injured, realized that the young man was dying and asked him if there was any message he would like to send to his loved ones. John asked him to cut two of the brass buttons off his uniform and take the flags from his lapels and send them to his parents and his sweetheart.

He lived long enough to give the chaplain his name—John Goetchius—but died before he could tell the kind man where his home was.

For many years the chaplain carried the two brass buttons and Confederate flags around in his pocket to remind him of his unkept promise. Then one day he happened to be boarding a ferry boat somewhere in the South and heard the African American ferry boat attendant greet an elderly gentleman as “Marse Goetchius.” The name was so unusual that the chaplain immediately approached the stranger. He introduced himself and asked if by any chance Mr. Goetchius had lost a relative in the Battle of Gettysburg. Yes, the old man said, one of my sons died there. The chaplain produced the buttons and the flags, and later accompanied my great-grandfather to Gettysburg. They found the trench where the dead Confederates were buried, I was told, because the corn was so much greener there. How long it took, I have no idea, but they found my great-uncle’s body, identifying the remains by the dental work, and took them home to be buried in the family plot.

My mother was born more than thirty years after her uncle’s death, but she remembered John’s fiancée, who carried the brass buttons with her always and reminded the Goetchius girls that she should have been their aunt.

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Article in Episcopal magazine about Maud Henderson.

Courtesy of the Archives of the Episcopal Church, USA.