Who Am I? - The Hokum Of Genealogy

Muffy Potter was a cute girl of ten, precocious in many ways, backward in others; but the thing of it was she didn't resemble either mother or father in any way.  For all intents and purposes, she was a genetic orphan. 

 

She was particularly good with numbers and as a young child was always counting things, asking about mileage and height and by the time she was in third grade, she was way ahead of her peers in arithmetic and was even at home with mathematic abstractions. 

At the same time she was an obstreperous, stubborn, nasty little girl with none of the good manners of her father or demureness of her mother.  She could be a demented fiend if she didn't get what she wanted, and her tantrums went on forever, followed by hours of sulking sullenness.

'I wonder where she came from?' her father mused. 

'Not from me, certainly', said her mother. 

And from there the family tree was parsed - Grandfather Hiram, Great Aunt Beulah, and Great Great Uncle Silas who had come over from the old country fleeing the Cork police and went on to become the Mickey Finn of the East Bridgeport Old Eire gang.  He, surmised Muffy's mother, might have something to do with the obstreperous side, but the aptitude with calculating was a mystery. 

'Don't let's confine ourself to math', said Muffy's father. 'Think general intelligence'; but that was a non-starter since both sides of the family had been intellectual duds except for a distant cousin on her mother's side who worked in a bank. The fact that their daughter was so much smarter than they was a source of pride and shame, for the little girl, combining obstreperous and precocious side often said, 'Daddy, how could you be so stupid?'  Yet, if she kept up the math, the way she was going, Harvard was not out of the question. 

 

There was no reprieve from the nasty side, and as she went through middle and secondary school, she left a trail of wounded behind.  Always quick with a cutting, unmanning, bitchy remark, her classmates preferred to keep their distance rather than chance a remark which would trouble them for days, for Muffy had an uncanny sense of character weakness - something like a feral animal on the hunt - and given the frail egos all around, she had no friends.  

Only the math teacher could put up with her, for algorithmic abstractions were neutral territory; and if the truth be known, he found the young woman very attractive. Only a rather stern upbringing - his family was the latest in a long line of Calvinists descended from Cotton Mather and if anything had added fire and brimstone to their patriarch's brutally penitential message. 

The math teacher had always resented his upbringing, and was reminded of its uncompromising severity every day of the year since a gallery of 17th century Puritan ancestors hung on the walls of the living room.  He at one time pondered whether he suffered from bad genes - the Salem prosecutors were all mean, selfish, censorious by nature - or by the imperatives of history. I

n his Second Epilogue to War and Peace Tolstoy explained his determinism - all human events, predicated as they are by random incidents, parentage, and accident, are worth nothing in and of themselves - so perhaps in the closed circle of Puritanism, their famous moral insistence was simply copied, imitated, adopted. 

In any case, the math teacher reflected on all this when faced with his desire for Muffy Potter - a double edged sword, wanting and not being able to have, saved and sinner all in one thanks to the witch hunts of Massachusetts. 

 

By the time she hit puberty, Muffy was a stunner, and absolute beauty; but because of her absolutely nasty temperament, her loveliness went unfulfilled, admired especially by her parents who were exceedingly proud of her Hollywood looks although flummoxed again because no one in the close family had even a trace of physical allure. 

No one could call Mr. Potter ugly, at least not to his face, but there was no doubt that he was - a doughy, droopy-eared sad sack of no beauty whatsoever - and that family trait was universal, and every Potter had at least one of their relative's unfortunate features. 

At a recent Thanksgiving dinner at his aged Aunt Tilly's home, Muffy's father looked around the table and saw himself in one rubbery, sagging form or another, each avatar gobbling up the sweet potatoes, dark meat, and gravy like there was no tomorrow; and he hated Darwin for it. 

There was no mitigating or offsetting beauty on Mrs. Potter's side of the family either, generations of old maids, plain schoolteachers, and homely clerks; so the remarkable beauty of their daughter again challenged paternity. 'Where on earth did she come from?' Mr. Potter again said with pride and not a little suspicion. 

It was during this time that genealogical research became popular, and the technology had rapidly advanced to such a degree that accurately defining ancestry was increasingly accurate and families were eager to find royalty, genius, beauty, or renown in their past. 

One famous story was of a college professor who had heard rumors in his family that there was slave-owning in their past.  Both sides of the family had come from South Carolina for many generations, and were prominent in banking, commerce, and agriculture, and it was not beyond the realm of possibility that there was a grandee or two on the family tree. 

 

While this might be incidental to most people concerned only with their present destiny, it was of prime importance to the professor who had based his entire career on progressivism, especially the rights of the black man.  He had become a champion of minority rights, had spoken publicly about white systemic racism, and had been as close to the black community of his college town as any.  There was a no white man who was more black than he. 

So, if it was found that he was the direct descendant of slave owners, he would have a lot of explaining to do; but on the other hand if traces of black blood were found in his veins, his dream of final empathy would be realized.  

As bad luck would have it, he was related not only to a slaveowner but to the most feared, ruthless, and brutal grandee in the state, responsible for the worst crimes against humanity - beatings, castration, hanging, and exile to the malaria-ridden plantation of Mississippi. 

He had two choices - either to come clean, make a clean breast of his pass, and face the music; or keep mum, pretend it all never happened, and continue to live the lie. The decision was obvious until a right wing cousin leaked the results, and the professor had some fancy stepping to do. 

Other families who had heard about British ancestors related to royalty were more often as not disappointed to find that not only did they have no royal blood but were of solid peasant stock, no more than Irish potato farmers. 

In any case, the Potters were content with pouring through family records, old Bibles, Thanksgiving dinner anecdotes, and unconfirmed but not outrageous rumors.  There was no clue as to where their young harridan daughter came from, and they let it go at that. 

Until one day an article appeared in the local paper about the Civil War battle of Gettysburg, a story about the heroism of one of the town's ancestors; and lo and behold, there was a picture of Hiram Potter and his wife Abigail, a woman who was the spitting image of their daughter.  Despite the graininess of the daguerreotype there was no mistaking the resemblance.  Puzzle solved, perhaps, but what kind of a woman was she? Was she a good person? A talented one?

It turned out that yes, she was a Potter relative, and no, she was not at all a good person, but one who was convicted, tortured, and put to death for a series of poisonings and infant drownings.  And her daughter was no better, a member of a travelling 'apothecary' business, snake oil and bloodwort, arrested in Carson City, but bought her way out for sexual favors, a godsend in disguise, for that interlude launched her career as The Silver Queen, a reference to the mining which made Carson City famous. 

Of course the Potters wanted no part either of the antique mother or daughter, put genealogy to rest, and in a que sera, sera moment finally accepted their own daughter for what she was.  So what if she didn't turn out as hoped, she was their flesh and blood.  And so what if Mr. Potter came from a long line of doughy, sagging women; or  if Mrs. Potter was as dumb as a rock like all her relatives except when it came to mince pie, of all things.

Fate, destiny, determinism, God? None of it mattered.  Little Muffy, the mathematical genius and cunt was what they got, and so be it.  

Society being what it is, the combination of beauty, brains, and an insufferably blunt and unforgiving character gave her a leg up.  Colleagues stepped out of her way, loved the way she walked, and left her to her equations, so before long she was at the top, a feared, unpleasant woman but of intellectual merit, for the last attribute of which she will be remembered. 

She never married (who would have her, no Petruchio in the wings), never had children, so the genealogical guessing game ended with her.  So much the better.  That line of inquiry never came up roses no matter what.