Florida Incest and the Search to Find My Children’s Missing Ancestry
My Struggle Deciding What to Tell My Kids When They Ask About Their Real Paternal Lineage
The names in this story have been changed for privacy
When I first met Ellen in 2008, I was an excited 17-year-old newlywed. I was married to her only grandson, Ryan, a handsome and manipulative child-groomer over a decade my senior — with whom I shared a lovesick trauma bond. Her son, Donald— my father-in-law — was her sole heir, the last and only bastion of hope in an aging woman’s attempt at immortality.
Ellen was an upper-middle-class Floridian from the Silent Generation, complete with the entitlement and overconfidence of a wealthy slave driver. The only thing on her head that stuck higher into the air than her bulbous nose was the brittle brown-haired poof that was religiously tucked into a shampoo-and-set each week without fail. In retrospect, she was clearly a racist, but she hid her bigotry and controlling nature quite well under a thick blanket of saccharin. I was far too naive at that age to notice the extent of her manipulations, and much too weak at setting healthy boundaries even if I had.
At her bequest, I accepted my duty to wake up at 5 a.m. during the prelude of our 10-year marriage to “put on my face”. I needed to be “dewy and glowing” for my husband and to always come when called. Ellen, or Meemaw, as I came to know her, often kept tabs on what meals I prepared for dinner, the growing size of my waist, and even took note — with a deadpan stare — the single time she saw me without wearing my wedding ring. I never realized how much control those pudgy, liver-spotted hands held a grip over my decisions until much later in life.
In my mind’s eye, I can recall ever so clearly her tapping each long, merlot-painted nail in succession on the table in front of me — her bright and gaudy gemstone rings leaving indentions on nearly every finger — as she judged my decisions as a wife. Tap. Tap. Fucking tap….
There was no doubt that Ellen had many old-time and oppressive views of what was expected of a good woman. However, unlike the conservative consensus of her day, she was adamant about a lady making her own way in the world. In all the years that I knew her, Meemaw was very boastful about her personal accomplishments and seemed to view home-makers as leeches, living off the effort of their more accomplished hosts. She had attended a prestigious charm school in her youth, and from there she worked at Publix — naturally — where she spent many years and eventually held thousands of “dollas” in stock. She was quite a successful businesswoman in the company — and gained valuable experience that she used in all facets of her life —which she felt alleviated her need of a formal education. Truth be told, she was a real-life, rags-to-riches success story considering her humble beginnings from extreme poverty in rural Florida. Because of this, she was very quick to reprimand anyone for daring to infer that she rode in on her husband’s coattails.
Edward — or Peepaw, as my husband Ryan called him during his formative years — was a short, stout, and jolly man, with dark, marble eyes that hid in his plump, tan, and clean-shaven face. I’ve heard many a tale of Peepaw’s happy and flirtatious disposition, and his deep, booming belly laugh that appeared to rock the mauve corduroy recliner that to this day still bears his imprint. As a younger man, Edward worked for many backbreaking decades in the citrus groves, earning much of his income from its sales. He was a decorated WWII veteran, an owner/operator of a successful feed-store in their small farming community, and an experienced cattleman. As a parent, he was hard and strict, often forcing his son Donald to work long hours tending to the family business and castrating bulls in the blistering summer heat.
When I joined the family, Ellen was newly a widow. From what I gathered, she was more relieved than bereaved and happy to spend her hard-earned money following her husband’s lengthy demise. She never once showed any pain or vulnerability at losing Edward, at least to me anyhow. Moreover, she was immensely proud of the years she selflessly nursed and cared for her ailing and eventually bedridden spouse who had left her a physically broken dowager. Meemaw spoke of her uterine prolapse as a badge of honor, the only recognition or reward she ever received for years of repeatedly hoisting Edward alone into the tub on bath days. Nevertheless, the pressure and expectations she placed on me as a wife to her own emotionally neglectful grandson weighed heavier than her decrepit Peepaw ever possibly could have.
Despite her shortcomings, Meemaw was not all bad. She was affectionate and involved in our day-to-day lives, and for that I was grateful. She could be thoughtful and present and I interpreted her insufferable need to rule the roost as an act of caring. On the day she learned of her first impending great-grandchild — a boy — she softened considerably, and I felt hopeful.
That week she showered me with gifts and support. More importantly, we actually connected, and I confided in her some very deep wounds. I told her that I was feeling isolated and lonely, struggling to find my place in the world. Suddenly I was a wife and expectant mother, and I hadn’t even graduated high school yet. I felt as though this had somehow forged a bond between us, like I was finally understood. For the first time, she approved of me, and saw my worth. I was becoming a part of her family tree.
But that tree’s roots were much more twisted than I could have ever imagined.
When I was a young child, I was fascinated by my rich Southern heritage. During those days all the distant relatives would gather at my great-grandma’s, and while the cousins were content to play outside in the dirt, I was at the rummy table listening to old tales of the quaint mountain folk that preceded me.
My mother is an avid storyteller, and I recall with great delight many of the memories of her own childhood that she has shared of family long since passed. Some of the best: how her Daddy Dempsey used to bore a hole in an orange and drink its juice through a peppermint straw, or how beloved Grandpa Jack built her very first clubhouse with his bare hands— it even had electricity. Or the sound of my late Uncle Paul’s lucky green dice that he kept in a coffee can — they were rolled so often that they were nearly spheres. Or my favorite: the one where Grandma Betty fell ill with mastitis and resorted to breastfeeding newborn puppies to feel any bit of relief from all the pressure. And though in these stories I didn’t even exist yet, the memories are still very much my own, and paint a beautiful picture of my simple origins. The Appalachian way of life might seem backward and commonplace to some, but the very thought of it all elicits such a visceral and emotional response from me.
As an adult, I’ve grown close to my cousin Wendy, our family historian. I have loved seeing all the details and photos which make up our family tree that she has spent decades growing and unearthing. I am comforted knowing that these humans — my humans, the people whom I owe my very existence — traversed this life before me, and it makes me feel as though I am not alone. Heritage matters to me because knowing where I came from has enriched so much of my life, and I want to hand down that same feeling to my children.
So when I found out in a passing conversation that my father-in-law Donald had actually been adopted by Peepaw Edward, and was of no genetic relation to him whatsoever, I was completely shocked and bewildered. Why had I never heard this before? After all, I was completely ingrained into this new family and was sure that I knew all there was to know about Donald’s past — at least as far as it pertained to my own family unit. This meant that the surname I signed onto each of my children’s birth certificates on the day that they were born, never even truly belonged to them. Suddenly there was this giant void in Donald’s lineage. In Ryan’s lineage. The lineage of my children. I had to know more.
As I began to poke around for answers, I was immediately stonewalled by my husband. “Meemaw doesn’t like to talk about it. Just drop it.” But what was Ellen hiding? Who is Donald’s biological father, and why are his origins shrouded in so much mystery?
The truth will stand when the world’s on fire.
The facts as I know them are limited, and yet I am haunted by the implications of what I was told. I will fill in the blanks as best as I can; so much of this story has been lost to time, to old age, to the grave.
The trigger warning begins here:
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Donald always knew he was adopted by Edward. In fact, Ellen had been married once before to an abuser, and for all of Donald’s young life — and well into his adulthood — he believed this absent man to be his biological dad. Whether it was pride, shame, or a trauma response that led Ellen to allow Donald to grow up believing this lie, I’ll never know. Even his own recollection of the events is a fog now, victim of an aging mind riddled by dementia. And while there is no good way to tell someone that their entire understanding of who they are and where they came from was built upon quicksand, certainly anger was a less than ideal way for the proverbial beans to be spilled.
“I had more money than I even knew what to do with,” Donald would say. The South Beach nightclub craze had found its way to his neck of the woods, and after dropping all of his savings into a new building, he found himself running the hottest joint in town. Eddie’s nightclub was an overnight sensation, and Donald finally had the means to pull away from his dad’s feed store. He would frequently come home with hundreds of dollars in his pocket — a lot of money for the 1970s — still buzzing like the neon signs that adorned his discotheque. He was a young man then, early twenties, and the world was his oyster.
In the small hours of the morning, after a particularly wild night at the club snorting cocaine and living high on the hog, Donald stumbled into the family bungalow where he lived with his mother. She was waiting for him with an ultimatum — months of his late-night revelry had frayed her final nerve. And like any young person ambushed by an emotionally charged intervention, Donald pushed back.
She wanted him to slave away for the family business, not start his own. He would never amount to anything if it wasn’t for Saint Ellen pulling the strings. For once in his life, he had built something by himself, and he was going to defend it to his last breath. In a mouth-foaming fit of rage, Ellen exposed the most sobering truth of her life, and it sucked the air right out of the room.
You’re a bastard, you know that? A bastard! I wish you had never been born. You don’t deserve to live! You ruined my life!
If the truth can cut like a knife, Ellen wielded it like a goddamned broadsword. In the cold and ephemeral moment that followed, his mother released decades worth of bottled-up bitterness and resentment, and there was no going back. Donald’s conception was so vile and perverted that he would spend the rest of his life coming to terms with what he now thought himself to be: an abomination.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never be unsaid.
Donald was the living, breathing proof of the man that had manipulated and defiled his mother when she was only a 15-year-old child — a monster that shared the same genetic makeup — her own cousin. Her family. Donald was the product of incest — of rape — and on the day he was born, his mother’s wings were clipped. From that moment on, this knowledge would frame every human connection he had, even coloring the relationship with his own son, thus creating a ripple through the generations.
Meemaw would spend the remaining half-century of her life dodging all of Donald’s questions. And because most of the family blamed her — the victim — for the “affair”, Ellen wanted nothing to do with them, and it made the veil of secrecy easier for her to maintain. Through the years, however, Donald would manage to milk small details from his mother. The ghost of a man who had haunted Donald had a name, and he finally uncovered what it was.
Last year, I supported my grieving children from afar as they laid their Meemaw to rest. At the time of her death, Ryan and I had been divorced for several years, having endured our own grief that our marriage never recovered from. Still… when I heard the news, I riffled through my old shoebox of tattered photographs and thought of her — and the fleeting moments of sincerity between us. For the first time, I saw the similarities we shared, and wonder if that played a part in her obvious disdain towards me; she wanted better for her grandson than the woman she thought herself to be. To be sure, my heart aches for the pain that she endured, but that could never overshadow the anger that I feel for the subsequent trauma she inflicted on her son. A man that I genuinely cared for. A man who once called me daughter.
I’ve seen Donald periodically at football practices, or the occasional handoff with the kids over the years. I have slowly watched his physical body decline from grief, multiple strokes, and the latent stages of dementia. I miss the man that he once was, and feel a deep sadness that he carried around such unreconcilable torment. I regret all of the things I never said to him when I was his daughter-in-law, either because I felt it wasn’t my place or I didn’t want to dredge up painful memories. It was not your fault. You are not him. Your paternity does not define you.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t wonder how all of our lives might have been different if Ellen had worked at healing her wounds instead of hiding them. And despite all my years of searching, I regretted that I could never find the rapist that had fathered Donald— a shadow of a man whose deplorable actions gave me, at least in part, the existence of my own children.
Or had I?
One evening, as I went down the ancestry rabbit hole as I am wont to do, I yet again felt a pang of sadness at my children’s severed paternal family tree. I rummaged through the census records for the umpteenth time, searching for him. Looking for any details to shine a light on decades of darkness.
Finally, for the first time in nearly 12 years, I found a lead. This little green leaf had the potential to fill in so many gaps as to where Donald had come from. Before I knew it, the entirety of Ellen’s family tree was laid before me, and almost as if he was never hidden, I saw him — cowering there among the branches, exactly where Meemaw said he would be.
Sixty-five years ago Walter Roy Wilson died; and with him the opportunity to stand trial for the destruction and defilement of his 15-year-old cousin, Ellen. At the time of his crime, Walter was 26, married, and had already fathered two children. Not only was Ellen forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, but she also had to birth and raise this unplanned child by herself, branded a whore by the only family she ever knew.
Donald has siblings — one still living — and what has gutted me these past few weeks is that he lived his entire life as a lonely single child, shouldering the weight of shame and lies no one would ever understand. Now in the twilight of his life, his mind is far too gone to contemplate reentry into some semblance of family.
“How do you reenter a family that didn’t even know you existed?” — Michele Merritt, My Blue Origins
And, yes, I can see it; the creep — whose very blood runs through the veins of my children — bears a striking resemblance to the man I once loved and married. The way he stands, the way he holds himself, that jawline, the knuckles, the face structure…I have found myself fixated on this photograph more times than I would like to admit. I regret that I have also wondered what insidious traits this man may have passed down to his great-grandchildren. No, I refuse to let this malignant infection run rampant through yet another generation. It ends here. Full stop.
Not so Dear Walter,
Although your casket may be closed, your face will remain uncovered so that the world knows what you have done. Rapists do not deserve the respect of anonymity, and for the first time since the day you impregnated her, the finger of shame is finally pointing at you, where it belongs. When my children ask about their paternal lineage, they now have an abundance of rich history that spans the centuries. YES, they will learn the truth of what you have done, as is their right. They will also learn the age of consent and that anything less than an enthusiastic “Yes!” is an emphatic “No!” They will learn that their bodies are FUCKING SACRED TEMPLES and no one has a right to touch them unless they are cordially invited; that their anatomy will NEVER be used as a weapon to inflict pain upon another human being. You? You will a footnote in their story: a villain they wiIl never resemble. You were nothing but a handsome and manipulative child-groomer over a decade Ellen’s senior — with whom she shared a lovesick trauma-bond.
— A.J.
