I met my cousin, Sandy, nearly a decade ago. She has become my inspiration–the blood of our great-grandmother is strong in her. Sandy is good and kind, and she is relentless in her pursuit of the truth about our family.
She has searched out long-lost cousins for family reunions. There, family members are able to share stories passed down from their mothers and their mothers before them, stories that would be lost if not for the telling.
Annie Laura’s Triumph, takes place fifteen years after Minnie’s child was taken from her. Storytelling at one of those family reunions gave birth to my book.
One of my new-found elderly cousins was a very young girl when Minnie was alive. She remembered Minnie going to Panama City to meet with her lost daughter, my grandmother, Esther Lee Corley Stewart. My cousin couldn’t remember the year, nor anything else.
What happened at that meeting? My grandmother never shared.
My grandmother had a strange habit that embarrassed her children. She wrote on the inside of her closet walls. She filled the clean, white walls with words, then painted over them and wrote more.
The compulsion to write, to understand, to be remembered is the very heart of a writer. My grandmother’s silence, fueled by the shame of being an illegitimate child, closed a door on the truth that I will never be able to open. If I could go back in time, I would read the writing on those walls. All of it.
I hover around my grandmother’s closet door. I yearn for access. And as I hover, I, like my grandmother, scribble. The words I scribble are books, and this book, Annie Laura’s Triumph, is a book of my heart–my own truth about that secret meeting.