Finding Family by Tonya Bolden

Author:Tonya Bolden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Published: 2010-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Ten

Tears were streaming down my face.

In my outstretched hand was the envelope with my mother’s photograph and Ambertine’s letter.

“By the tree outside your window,” Grandpa mumbled, looking a little dazed. Then, slowly, he took the envelope from my hand. “What is this?” He frowned, opening it.

Grandpa glanced at the letter, eyes skitterscatter. When he focused on the photograph, it was like he had the wind knocked out of him. “Joline,” he whispered.

Grandpa put a hand against the door frame to steady himself, then, slowly, went inside.

When I followed, I found Grandpa in the sitting room, in the rocker by the fireplace. He was holding the picture like it was a robin’s egg.

I sat down across from him, on the sofa.

“Where’d you get this?” All the snap had left his voice.

“Cousin Ambertine.”

“Ambertine?” He squinted.

“She was here. The day of Aunt Tilley’s funeral, after everybody left. When you took Cousin Richard to the depot.”

“Ambertine, you say?” Grandpa looked addled. “Jake and Mamie’s daughter?”

“Yes, Grandpa, and … what Ambertine told me and what Aunt Tilley told me about my ma and pa—things don’t match up.”

“This here letter from Ambertine?”

I nodded.

He looked at the letter, as if beholding a whirlwind, then handed it back to me. “What it say?”

Whenever Grandpa had me read him something from the newspaper, or Aunt Tilley a passage of Scripture, or Lawyer Sanders a document, I figured Grandpa wanted to see if I was a strong or weak reader, that he liked the way Aunt Tilley put drama in a verse, and that all lawyers read important papers aloud before people signed them.

Now that I thought about it, other than a hymnal at church, the only book I’d ever seen Grandpa handle was a ledger in which he did sums and such. I hardly ever saw him in the library. The few times I did, he looked lost in a forest.

“Dear Delana …” My voice trembled as I began reading Ambertine’s letter. “Your mama had this picture taken years ago when she was up in Wheeling …” I paused now and then to read Grandpa’s face.

He nodded when I read about Bethany and Miriam Rice and the freedom festivities.

After I read, “Up in Wheeling, that’s where Joline met Jordan,” Grandpa winced. And his eyes were glistening when I finished the part about my mother aiming to marry my father and have a vivid life.

“Ambertine said I should decide what I want, then signed off with ‘Watching Over You.’”

“Watching over you?” Grandpa was riled up again.

“Before my mother died, she wrote Ambertine … asking her to watch over me. Ambertine gave me that note.”

Now that envelope was in my outstretched hand.

Quickly, I pulled it back.

“From Joline?” Grandpa was squinting again.

“Yessir.”

“Let me see that.”

I hesitated. He still had her picture. What if he never gave it back—kept her note, too?

But the anger was gone from his eyes.

I handed over the note. “It says, ‘Keep watch over my baby girl.’”

He ran a finger over the purple maypops up top.

“Grandpa, Ambertine said my folks had a powerful love.

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