Crossroads

American poet and essayist Mary Karr described a dysfunctional family as any family with more than one person in it. A chapter from my family’s tale:

No extant photos, no living witnesses, no marriage certificate to be discovered.

This is the story of my maternal grandparents, Irwin and Jessie Semerteen Bass.

Irwin Bass arrived in Wayne County, North Carolina, during the first World War, the eldest of six children born to this hardscrabble branch of the family tree. Generations before Irv appeared red-faced in his suggestion of a town, his people came from England. By the early 1900’s they were sharecroppers, poor as the dirt they lived barefoot upon, farming tobacco and cotton to line someone else’s pockets.

There is a single, mended photo of Irv as child – wearing raggedy clothes, he smiles shyly over a book. He loved that picture, the only school portrait he remembered having taken. His formal education ended at age 12.

Jessie Ethel Semerteen was born in 1918 in Wilmington, Delaware, a geographical midpoint between grandparents from Philadelphia and those from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her mother’s death from tuberculosis when Jessie was 5 marked her, belied by 1920’s smiling faces outside the family’s tidy brick home.

Then the gap – in both documents and family stories. Jessie disappears in her teens. Irv is recorded as marrying a woman named Dorothy in 1937, appearing on the 1940 North Carolina census with a baby daughter in the household. How did the paths of these disparate young people intersect?

Jessie ran away to escape her stepmother’s strictness. She became “Dorothy” at 19, a common name that made it easier to get lost for a girl who did not want to be found. She met Irv promptly upon arrival in North Carolina in 1937. In 1940, after working through the tobacco season, they moved to Delaware, transported by an old Buick and a wave of despair. Irv needed reliable work - found as a mechanic. Jessie, expecting my mother, Jean, longed for family and home.

Irv headed back to North Carolina in 1943. He came and went from the family, the ebb and flow of his presence carried by the tides of fortune and sobriety.

No family survivors understand how this desultory union held.

They divorced in 1956, before I was born. I grew up considering my grandparents a married couple. On reflection, I recall that Jessie was gone for extended periods of time. Mother’s youngest sibling confirmed that as his sisters left home, the family dwindled to just he and Irv for years. Jessie moved to California, coming home summers when grandkids were out of school - appearing as precipitously as she’d vanished.

I once viewed a solitary color photo of Irv in a suit, Jessie in a fancy dress and corsage. Family lore is “vows renewal” - I believe they remarried that day. Irv quit drinking and they lived together in a rented home, running a small fix-it shop in an outbuilding.

They made a life even when they could not make a living.

For over fifty years, ‘til death did them part, this rabbit-and-hare couple ran their tangential laps, fueled by black coffee, cigarettes, and regret.

 

 (Illustration by the author in acrylic paint and ink.)