Grits & Gumbo

In September 1883, smallpox came to the bayou town of Plaquemine, Louisiana when my great-grandmother Marie Philomène Barbay (1872-1957) was 10 years old. It infected her family, claiming the lives of her mother Marie Aurélie Hotard and her two baby sisters. She and her brothers survived the disease: younger brother Preston was left with scars on his face, while she and brother Roland were left unscarred. Her father Émile somehow escaped the disease, only to die less than three years later.

Thirteen-year-old Philomène was taken in by her aunt and uncle in Grosse Tete. There she found love, acceptance and eventually a husband, her first cousin G. J. A. Bush Jr. But that was years after this tintype portrait of her in a mourning dress was taken. Her face is unscarred, but her eyes show the devastation.

About Photo+Story: Inspired by a competition at the RootsTech 2018 genealogy conference, the series distills family stories to a single photo plus 150 words or less.

In a few short months, my sister Patty will become a grandmother. She’s as prepared as she is excited: she’s ready to fly to Atlanta to help my niece the first-time mother, she has cribs waiting in both her home and her beach house, and most importantly, she has her grandmother name picked out: GiGi. What it stands for is an inside family joke, but I think the name suits her well.

I can’t see Patty or any of my sisters choosing to be called Grandma, like we called my father’s mother Grandma Sue. And we have no name for my mother’s mother who died when my mother was eight years old, long before she became a grandmother.  Her name was Mary Ernestine Bush Bergeron. Would we have called her Grandma Ernestine or Grandma Bergeron, like we called our grandfather? Or use Maw Maw or Mémère in the French Louisiana way? Since we never knew her, my sisters and I usually just speak of her as Momma’s mother.

The scant bits I knew about her came from my mother: she was from down the bayou in Grosse Tete; she had green eyes and was taller than my mother (5’4″); she was a schoolteacher just like my grandfather; and that she died of pneumonia at age 38, leaving my mother and her three brothers at 10, 8, 4 and 2 years old.

My mother kept a framed photo of her as a young woman on the wall. I’d study her with her bob haircut (short like mine) and imitate her in the mirror, tipping my head the same way. I’d ask, “Momma, do you think I look like her?” “Yes, I can see it,” she said. I suspect she would have said the same thing to any of my sisters.

One day when I was in my late teens, I found an old cardboard box in the attic labeled “Grosse Tete pictures.” Continue reading “The Grandmother With No Name” →