Novelle

My Mother remarried when I was 6 to a wonderful, loving, kind, and jolly man named Jef. My biological father, Beau, had left my mother when I was 2, while she was ill and in the hospital recovering from brain surgery. 

The night I met Jef, a.k.a. Daddy, was very unusual.  It is one of the very few times I have heard the Gods voice outside my body.  I was sitting behind my mom, combing her hair, at her then boyfriend’s house.  Daddy had just come in and was sitting down drinking a beer.  I was looking at him, when the room stopped, and time stood still.  I heard a woman’s voice say, “This will be your father for the rest of your life.” And then everything just clicked right back in.  I figured well, I guess she must be right.  I walked right over to him and said, “I’m Ilsa.  I’m 6 years old.  Can I comb your hair?”  He said yes and I jumped up in his lap.  Don’t ask I was into hair at that age.  I have no idea why. 

Daddy tells the story that he had met mom at the Dairy Queen in Logansport.  She and I had walked in one day and he was sitting with his buddy, who turned out to be a mutual friend.  The friend introduced them.  Daddy says, “I thought, now who is that beautiful woman in those maroon jeans and with that cute little girl.”  He could not stop thinking about her.  He found out she was dating a friend of his and decided to pay him a visit, with the express thought of stealing her away from him.  It worked.  They met and married within 6 weeks.  They’ve been married for 30 plus years now. 

I immediately began to call him Daddy.  I was instantly accepted into the family as one of theirs, accept by Novelle.  She was a mean and evil woman.  She always saw me as a step-grandchild, even after being legal adopted by Daddy, having my name changed, and beginning to study Daddy’s family’s genealogy.  Nothing I could ever do for her ever pleased her.  She always saw me as lesser than. Things would just be going along fine, and I guess she felt she needed to knock me down a rung, and then she would start her shit. 

She would berate me on a regular and public basis.  I remember many, many family dinners after church where she would sit and tell me how fat I was, and was I going to eat all my food.  NO ONE stood up for me.  Not my parents, my cousins, my aunts or my uncles, none of them.  I was forbidden to defend myself or say anything to her by my parents.  In fact this treatment from her continued until my teens, where I would drive to family functions in my car.  If she insulted me, I would quietly pick up my plate, place it beside the sink, and leave. She never did this to her other grandchildren, some who were bigger than me.  I believe she did this because I was her step-grandchild, and she always, until the day she died, saw me as such.  I am still listed in the family bible as a step-grandchild. 

The other thing she loved to do at dinner was ask me when the last time I saw my father was.  I responded with, “He’s sitting at the end of the table.”

“No I mean the real one.” She said coyly.

Now I had not seen Beau, my biological father since shortly after my 6^th birthday.  And she knows this, she knows this, but she just has to stick the knife in and twist it to get a rise out of me.  With no one to stop her, and being forbidden to say anything to her, I just had to sit there and take it.  I would go home and be in tears, just so upset.  I would tell my parents and they would say, “She is your Nanny.  You have to love her!”  I’d already been down this road with Grandpa.

This all comes to a head in August of 2002.  I am drinking coffee with the old men down in Kickapoo, trying to get inspiration for my upcoming “Prodigal Daughter” article, I was writing at the time in the local paper.  She walks in. I run up to her, calling her name.  I say come over and meet my friends.  She is furious with me.  She says, “you need to come away with me now!”

“Why?”

“You need to come away with me now!  You don’t disturb men while they are working!”

I am confused.  They are just drinking coffee.  I kind of dismiss her words, and start introducing her.  When I say, “Y’all this is Novelle, my grandmother.” 

She says, “Hump!  I’m not her Grandmother!  She’s Jef’s adopted daughter!”

I am in shock.  It’s been twenty years since my parents married.  Most of the men in that room did not know I’m not Jef’s.  She does this to me in front of a District Judge, the Sheriff, and several Police Jury Members.  I am public humiliated and disowned.  I run crying to the bathroom. Eventually I get in my car and drive, crying, 15 miles to where Maddie is working.  I collapse in her arms a crying, sobbing mess.  I had nobody else.  I had not met Jay yet and my parents are working in Oklahoma.  I was just devastated.

Now you have to understand I come from a very small community.  I have been told all my life that my biological father and his family are nothing but white trash, nasty people, and don’t care for me.  Jef’s family is well respected, has connections, and at one time long ago had money.  At this point in my life I have tried to down play my biology, at times wishing I could rip out my biological fathers brown eyes and change them for Jef’s blue ones.  Wishing to change my very DNA and not be Beau’s daughter.  But his damn brown eyes keep staring back at me from the mirror. The secret, of who I really was, that I had been trying to keep under wraps for many years was blown apart by a woman who said she loved me. From that day forward I never called her “Nanny” again.  She lost that right.  Even now, years after her death, I still call her Novelle. 

But I one upped her.  She tells all of Kickapoo who I really am, fine, I go on and tell the whole parish.  My “Prodigal Daughter” article is due.  Late that night I write it and the opening words are, “I have been living a lie.  I am not who I claim to be.”  I go on to detail who my birth father is, how he left, the fact he has had no contact with me, and how Jef has been the only father I have ever know.  I finish and pick up the phone and call Daddy.  It’s the middle of the night.  He steps outside the trailer for a cigarette and to listen.  When I am done, there are tears in his eyes and you can hear over the phone he is choked up.  I later frame it and hang it in his bedroom.  When the article goes to copy, I lay the paper across Novelle’s car.  Checkmate.

I have a few more contacts with her.  I cuss her out one day not long after the article comes out and tell her she is lucky to have a granddaughter like me, who loves her, who cares about recording the family’s history.  She should count her lucky stars I have had not illegitimate children or been on drugs, as that might disgrace the family.  She should be lucky that the only thing she can find wrong with me is that I am drinking coffee with the old men.

Once Christmas I go to her house to get my present.  My parents are desperate to get me to see her, and want me to forgive her.  Momma Muriel and Jay are waiting there at my parent’s house when I return.  I burst into tears and weep for a long time with my head in Momma Muriel’s lap.  I am inconsolable. 

The last time I see her, she is giving away some of her things. Dad goes with me. I go in and get her pictures that are in her trunk.  You know the old ones, the dear ones.  I also get the recipes that are in the little green box she keeps on the counter.  As I am leaving she says, “You know I love you Ilsa.”  I tell her, “save that shit for someone who believes it.”

She dies in October of 2008. I start singing, “Ding dong the witch is dead!  The Witch is dead!” My hatred for her is still so strong I tell my best friend, “You best come with me so I don’t spit in this bitch’s coffin!”  Thankfully she comes with me and I restrain myself. 

There is however a strange post script to this story.  For years I have refused to put her, or my grandfather for that matter, on my altar, even though her husband, her son and lots of her family are on there.  I refuse to work with someone that I know was a horrible person and I did not like in this life.  I felt for a long time that Novelle was in Purgatory.  That she was learning what an awful person she had been to some people.  Now she was not just evil to me.  I remember one day sitting at her table and she told me, “I’m trying to break up your Uncle’s marriage so he will go back and marry his first wife.”  He was on wife number three.  WHAT!  What kind of crazy, manipulative person does that!  And to her own kid!

I had a dream about her, a vision more like.  She came to me and wanted to tell me how sorry she was for the way that she had treated me in this life.  She said, “I am sorry I did not understand.  I did not understand what kind of grandmother you needed me to be.”  And then she sat down and read me a story.  Something she had never done with me as a child.  I have forgiven her, in a way.  I feel she has moved on and is no longer in Purgatory. 

Ilsa