“never should have come back to oklahoma”

family lore

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My great great aunt Josephine was, as far as I know, dead before I was born, but I grew up with her legend. She was a not-quite black sheep. I’m not sure there are any black sheep on that side of the family, but if there are it’s probably the guy who went prospecting and sent back (I believe) a lump of fool’s gold with a note that began brother, I know I done wrong and ended with a request for money.¹ What wrong he done, I couldn’t tell you. I just know he done it. I also can’t tell you if he got the money. Really the only two things you’d want to know, I guess.

So if Josephine wasn’t a black sheep, what was she? Let’s call her a sheep that had been raised by goats and never really knew how to be a sheep, even though it wasn’t a goat, either. She was raised separately from the rest of her family because her mother, who was, coincidentally, also named Barbara, went temporarily insane after either her birth or the birth of one of her siblings. So Josephine—and only Josephine—was sent away. Reunited with her siblings, she seems to have been a little unapproachable. She cared a lot about clothes. She was family, in every practical sense, but also not exactly family, emotionally speaking.

There are pictures of her from around that time. She always looks glamorous but a little like she doesn’t want to be there. Though my favorite picture was one of her reading in a hammock, and there she does look, in fact, entirely at ease.

The stories I grew up with about Josephine revolved around the way she was unpleasable and embittered. If you bought her something, it was the wrong color. If you asked her how she was, she’d say: worse. When I got older, the legend expanded. Josephine had been engaged for twenty years; Josephine ran away with a married man from Oklahoma (where her family lived) to California. In California, she rode on some variety of exotic animal, like an elephant or an ostrich. (Can one ride on an ostrich?) Not all the time (obviously) but at least once. I’m told there’s a picture, though I’ve never seen it myself. When things with the married man went sideways, Josephine became a school teacher in Arkansas. There she, like her mother, lost her mind for a little while. Her siblings found her and brought her back to Oklahoma.

For the rest of her life, she lived with her sister, and was prone to saying oh… I never should have come back to Oklahoma to no one in particular. Her family did not really like her because they felt she was insufficiently grateful to her sister for taking her in and also because as she got older she seems to have been a very unpleasant person. It would have been easy to drop Josephine after she crossed a clear social line and bolted the state. But they took care of her because, after all, she was family.

I don’t identify with Josephine really, though I have from time to time imagined adopting “worse” as my response to how I’m doing. She’s always represented to me what I find interesting about my mother’s side of my family from a narrative perspective—this unwillingness to drop anybody combined with gaps and silences. I should say that this silence is a part of the loyalty, not the cost of the loyalty. You keep your mouth shut because that’s other people’s business, not because it’s embarrassing. That is not really how loyalty works for many people now. Loyalty is about saying things in public. Keeping your mouth shut is not legible as an “action,” thus it demonstrates nothing. Loyalty would be proclaiming: I love my absolute disaster of a sister, Josephine, even though everything about her life is a mess. What, are you so perfect?

And I call this story the legend of Josephine because it’s pieced together from what I remember of what people told me. Even here you can see improbabilities (engaged for twenty years?) and unanswered questions. And the older I get the more I also see the stories around this story—like, for instance, what it meant for Josephine’s family (which is also my family) to be living in Oklahoma at all. But I also call it that because endowing her with this mythic quality feels like my own way of respecting her privacy, even though she’s dead and everybody who could possibly care is also dead. I’ve often wanted to write about her—I mean at length, researched, whatever—but in a way that somehow respects this privacy. That might be impossible.

Or maybe that’s just “fiction.” The Josephine that exists in my head is certainly a fiction. I imagine an uneasy young woman who always had one foot out and one foot in, who insisted on social rules and on dressing well because they were ways she could objectively be doing things “right,” who dragged out an engagement she really didn’t want to ludicrous heights until she decided to blow up her life to see what happened. And what happened was, she landed right where she started. I’d be bitter too.

But that’s just one Josephine. Who knows what she was really like.

I’m on the road today and probably can’t be very active in the comments. Don’t do anything Aunt Josephine wouldn’t do (and maybe don’t do some things she would).

1. I’m writing all these stories from memory without checking, for reasons that will also become clear I imagine.