I grew up in a rural "community" of mixed-race people. A good many of them were distantly related to us. There were three families of 'winners': the School Superintendent, the 'Boss Bootlegger', and the
'High Yellow' Black family who owned the plantation, at the back of which sat our home - an abandoned sharecropper's shack.
And there were a few white ladies, who'd drive in from elsewhere, to work at the school. Not sure I'd characterize them as 'winners': I mean, they bought their little diamond chip jewelry out of a catalogue from a place in Memphis - on installment plans. But I wouldn't call them 'losers', either.
The rest of the community
were a bunch of losers. It was a world of Camaros, Trans-Ams, trailers with tires on the top, chain-link fences, blacklight posters, lavalamps, paintings-on-velvet, drug use, alcoholism, acquaintance rape, molestation, wife-beating...
My Great-Grandmother had chosen to have babies by a peddler who'd come through the community every now and then. He was a newly-arrived Russian Jew, with an IQ roughly double that of the other sperm donors in the vicinity. About half her kids were by him. The other half were by locals. Except for my Grandmother, the kids with the
good genes
(uncles), fled the state as soon as they were old enough. They ended up in places like Atlanta, and got rich. But they were gone from our lives. I didn't know about them, until years after I'd, myself,
gone for good.
So, there was I, an unusually ugly kid, in a tarpaper shack without running water, with a dying Great-Grandmother, a dying Grandmother, and a substance-abusing Mom. I waited on them, and took their belittling comments, as soon as I was old enough to walk. Then, there were the relatives scattered across the woods. While most of the guys in the community were shapeless lumps, or scrawny, swarthy,
'Ricky types' (a 'Ricky' is a Redneck who isn't all-white), my cousins tended to look like Channing Tatum
(a part-Indian from our region) http://media2.intoday.in/indiatoday/...1612111932.jpg or like Gary Taylor, another fitness model from a place not too far from our home
http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs70/f/20...is-d5ihjey.jpg
My cousins were in on the "initiating" of girls, out in the woods. The boys, football
"heroes" all, would do the deed, while the older girls would hold clothes over the
initiates' mouths, to muffle their screams. I'm sure it was
cousin-on-cousin, at times, given the interrelations in the neighborhood. Lucky for me, I was the poorest and the ugliest, from the most wretched household. I was "left-out".
But my extended family had the looks to get into all the trouble they wanted to. And their contempt for
me knew no bounds. Not only was I ugly: I'd been the sole beneficiary of a second
genetic jackpot. My
'Real Daddy' was a Sicilian who'd known my Mom, from her brief moment as the prettiest hooker at the Tivoli Hotel, in Biloxi.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...tel_Biloxi.jpg He had gaming operations in the area, and he'd swing by. Not that I ever knew him: but he was smart, aggressive, and ambitious. Personality traits are highly heritable.
So, I was ridiculed for being ambitious - for being smart - for digging old
Town & Country and
New Yorker magazines out of the garbage of the two 'rich' houses in 'Town'
(the intersection of two rural highways). And I was ridiculed for sneaking out to the woods to read them. One of Mom's tricks had dragged an old Buick Electra out to the woods, so she'd have a place to work. And when she wasn't there, I'd use the car for homework, and to read my magazines. I figured I'd never be rich. But the more I learned about those rich people out there -
somewhere - the closer I'd come to being able to work for them, or be near them, or
something.
Family never encouraged me. Instead, when I'd let it slip I was thinking about college, I'd hear.
"Gal... you ain't goin' no-whur but ta tha Crazy House. You ain't goin' ta no "college".
But my family wasn't counting on the nice white ladies
up ta tha school. It was they who took it upon themselves to get me IQ-tested, and to point out that while my grades were pretty bad, my ACT score was the highest in my class, and as a Native American, I was eligible for all sorts of financial help.
So, one day, I snuck out to the road, carrying a paper bag with a few belongings. One of the white ladies from the school was there, with a suitcase she'd bought me, filled with what little in the way of basic toiletries and such she and two other white ladies could afford to give me. And she drove me up to College.
And that was the end of my life as "that ugly skag". I somehow managed to major in Economics
(despite having never heard of 'majors'), and somehow had the moxy to request a bodybuilding course, first semester.
(I was supposed to take "Health"). I wanted to look better, and knew the rich ladies lifted weights at 'Spas'.
And there HE was: surrounded by all these gorgeous blond jocks was the ugliest boy I'd ever laid eyes on - every bit as pitiful and poor and swarthy and rural and ridiculed for being smart I had been. One thing led to another, and I was pregnant and married. And after a few months of improved nutrition, vitamins, and bodybuilding
(and love), neither of us was ugly, anymore. In fact,
he had a late-onset growth spurt, and turned out to be
stunning.
We got good degrees, then more degrees... usual upward trajectory... and ended up moving from the richest town in Mississippi, to the richest town in Oregon.
Germane to this thread is the fact that I left that shack without saying goodbye. And I stayed gone - stayed out of touch. Call it
'desertion'. Call it
'heartless'. Call it
whatever. DH and the kids have never been to the part of Mississippi where I grew up. They've never met any of those relatives. I did not want there to be any chance of their becoming infected with the worthlessness of the people I'd left behind. I did not want the poisons from those people damaging those I loved.
I'll go back, for funerals. But I take a bodyguard, not my Husband. I hear there are whispers about the
"strange men" I'm seen with.
"Thur's another one of 'em, evur tahm she come up here. I hear she has ta pay 'em. Yeew know she used ta work for that ol' Bootlegger, back when she wuz little. Used ta count tha money for him. Looka that kowhr they done drove up in. Now, I guess she's doin somethin bad, over in Jackson." (I sure don't tell them I live in Oregon, now...)
The point is that sometimes you have to make a clean break. And sometimes you have to protect those you love
from those to whom you are merely related.
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