Hillbilly Gothic by Adrienne Martini

Author:Adrienne Martini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2006-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Sadly, no such treatments existed in West Virginia during the early 1900s. Crazy mothers had no place to go and would frequently vanish when the psychological burdens became too overwhelming. One such woman was my great-grandmother Elizabeth Flowers Hender-shot Cain, who abandoned her three kids—one of whom was Nell, my grandmother—under mysterious circumstances. We’ve never known much about Elizabeth. We know that she had Nell, the middle child, in 1912, which would have made Elizabeth sixteen years old then. The first child, Ruth, must have been born when Elizabeth was thirteen or fourteen, which boggles my mind. At thirteen, I was still playing with Barbies.

The only picture that anyone can find of Elizabeth shows a big-eyed woman in an even bigger flowered hat. A tall blond man wearing a suit, a striped dress shirt, and a tie stands behind her. There are two little girls—maybe ages five and eight—in the foreground. They have on white dresses, white tights, white hair bows, and black boots. One of the little girls looks like Nell, and by extension, then, also looks like my mother, my daughter, and me. Judging by the clothes, I’d pin the year somewhere in the late 1910s or early 1920s, which would be about right. Elizabeth would have been in her mid-twenties, then.

But here’s the real kick in the head. I can’t promise you that any of this is true. The picture is undated and unlabeled. My mother found it in a box with nine dozen other snapshots, which were discovered after my grandfather died a few years ago. The people in this picture could be almost anyone, despite the fact that one of them looks like a relation. And, importantly, the youngest kid, a boy, is missing. He may simply have not been alive when the photo was snapped, in which case my dates are probably off. Or it may be that this photo is of someone my granddad knew at the dairy or in Colorado or is something he bought at a thrift store for a nickel because he liked the lady’s hat. It’s all a big mystery.

While every life has meaning to someone, Elizabeth wasn’t the kind of woman who made much of a mark on the larger world. Given that no one in my immediate family even thought about this great-grandmother until a decade ago, after my cousin Julie had her first child and her first bipolar episode, we have made remarkable progress discovering information about her. The little information we have scraped together at this late date is all we’re ever going to get.

No one even knows where Elizabeth is buried, or what she did before she died, or where she spent most of her life. My mom and the sisters knew only that she had died in 1955 or ’56, and that information was only gleaned by remembering how distraught Nell had been when she received a letter from home that mentioned that her mother had died. No one ever talked about Elizabeth before then or, truth be told, much after that.

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