A Secret Gift (40 page)

Even when her own shopping was done, she liked nothing better than to go out among the crowds on Christmas Eve and bid strangers a merry Christmas.

From out of the Great Depression, Elizabeth carried with her a faith that things would work out but also a determination to help them along, to conserve and make use of whatever was at hand. Her children recall being deployed each spring to gather up the dandelions in the yard. She would mix them with vinegar and bits of bacon and it would be dinner. “She could make dinner out of nothing,” recalls her son William. And during the Depression, nothing was often all there was. Like so many of her generation, she was frugal and insecure about the future. Two years after she died, son Bill removed a huge painting of sunflowers from her living room wall. Behind the painting, he discovered a twenty-dollar bill taped to the back.

And yet, when it came to Christmas, the purse strings came undone. Son James can still reel off the Christmas gifts that spanned the years: a Schwinn bike, a Lionel train, an Erector Set. And it was not only her own family that concerned her. She wept to read in the newspaper of children who endured hardships. For years, her son James and she arranged for a Christmas turkey or ham to be taken to a needy family and she prided herself on learning the names of their children and having small gifts for them.

Elizabeth Bunt Haren’s last Christmas was in 2005. Stricken with pancreatic cancer, she insisted on celebrating the holiday as she had every year. She died on October 20, 2006, at the age of eighty-eight. To her son James Haren she left her Christmas china decorated with holly berries. At her funeral a niece named Laura read a letter in which she spoke of Elizabeth’s singular passion for Christmas. As they sat there in St. Louis Catholic Church listening, Elizabeth’s son and others say they imagined Elizabeth sitting on a sofa, surrounded by her family and handing out presents one by one, making sure no one was left out. That was quite a feat. When she died, she left behind her husband, two daughters, five sons, a sister, twenty-two grandchildren, thirty great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren. None of them ever wanted for a gift.

J
ust outside of Canton, on a tumbledown farm, lived Edith May, her husband, James, and their three young children.

“Mr. B. Virdot,” thirty-nine-year-old Edith May began her letter, dated December 18, 1933:

Edith May was one of a half dozen African Americans to write to Mr. B. Virdot. But her story begins far from the cold of the Midwest and far from the hardscrabble farm where she and her family scratched out a living in the winter of 1933. Her story begins in 1925. Edith May—then Edith Thompson—was a thirty-two-year-old Jamaican teacher and governess, the daughter of a teacher and one of seven sisters, all of whom worked in the classroom. For many months, she had been pen pals with an American named James May, eight years her junior and the grandson of Virginian slaves. Over time, they shared their lives in letters, exchanged photographs, and imagined a future together. In October 1925, twenty-four-year-old James May went to Kingston, Jamaica, to meet this intriguing older woman with whom he had already shared much. They married there, and though James returned to America, it was understood that his bride, Edith, would soon follow.

Two months later, on December 11, 1925, Edith May boarded the SS
Santa Marta,
waved good-bye to Kingston, its sunny climes, and a life of relative comfort, and headed first for New York and then the Midwest, where her husband, a farmer, awaited her. She arrived in America on December 17, 1925, and made her way to Ohio.

Even in the best of times, their lives were difficult, but by the time the Depression descended upon Edith and James May and their little family, there was no margin of error, no buffer to keep out the cold and the hunger. Felice May, their daughter, remembers the wind whipping the snowdrifts and burying the narrow lane that led to their rented farm. She remembers her father hoisting her upon his shoulders and carrying her for a mile to where the school bus stopped. She remembers him chopping firewood and loading it into the back of a Model T and driving off to sell what he could to the few who could afford to buy it. The vehicle’s canvas roof was torn and leaked, and icy water spilled down upon him.

And she remembers how the smell of skunk was the smell of money. He would trap skunk and sell the pelts for food, clothing, and feed for the animals. “We could smell him coming because he had a skunk in the back,” recalls Felice. “Back then a skunk hide was worth a lot of money. The smell would sting your eyes in the house if they got him good. One time his eyes were all shut and he wanted my mom to get a pan of water to wash his eyes out. He came in the house half-blind and the house was permeated by the smell.”

What lessons Felice May learned from the Depression and the farm did not prepare her fully for what existed beyond its confines. She knew she was “colored,” but she did not understand what barriers that would create for her. An A student in high school and a voracious reader, she applied for many jobs for which she was qualified, but never did she get a call back.

Instead she resigned herself to working as a live-in housekeeper, and after graduating from high school in 1948 she did just that, working for eight dollars a week. But as rough as her time was on the farm, she gravitated back to a country lifestyle, and the pattern she chose for herself—or perhaps that was chosen for her—was the same, often harsh struggle on the land. She worked for years heading a nutrition program for the elderly, but even today she has supplemented her living with the same resourcefulness that her mother and father exhibited. For years she trapped animals—raccoons, fox, mink, possums.

Today she has a bakery called Mom’s Kitchen, and each Saturday she takes her banana and honey wheat breads, cookies, and cupcakes to shops and fairs. And at eighty, she still traps an occasional raccoon at her rural home outside Bowerston, Ohio, and sells the pelt. Nor does anything get thrown away. Old clothes become rags to keep the draft out of the barn. The daughter of a teacher, she remains an avid reader. In winter she reads scores of books.

The life of James May, Edith’s husband, never did get any easier. A swarm of yellow jackets stung him in the leg, which turned gangrenous and had to be amputated. He died in 1975 and is buried in Canton. As for Edith, she developed diabetes and went to live in California with one of her sons. That is where she died in January 1975 and where she is buried.

There was some irony that Edith May could not afford even a postage stamp to mail her letter to Mr. B. Virdot: her aunt Grace was the postmaster of Kingston, Jamaica. How different her life might have been had she remained there. A taste of that other life arrived in the mail from time to time—a box of cashews from a sister.

The descendants of Edith and James May have many memories of hardship and struggle, but they also have memories of mutual support and pride and of triumphs large and small. From her Depression-era childhood, difficult as it was, Felice has one memory in particular that is almost magical. It was the week before Christmas 1933. She was to turn four years old on that December 23. Ordinarily, neither Christmas nor a birthday would have been occasion for much celebration. But something unexpected happened that day. It was dark and the farm chores had been done, but instead of turning in early, Edith and James May piled the family into their rickety old car and drove into the town of Massillon. The streets were brilliant with Christmas lights, and Edith and James May ushered their daughter into a five-and-dime.

“My eyes bugged out,” remembers Felice. “I had never been in anything like that before and she took me back in that toy store and she said I could have my choice between the horse on a board that you pulled with a string or a doll. I chose the horse.” It would become her most prized possession. “I pulled that horse up and down the lane.”

“I’ve loved ponies all my life,” she says. Even today, at eighty, she has fifteen Welsh ponies that she raises and intends to sell, and she likes nothing better than to ride in her horse-drawn cart.

A check from a stranger named B. Virdot bought that little pony and made such a memory possible. It changed a life.

B
y March 8, 2010, my research into the B. Virdot letters was complete. My book was finished; the manuscript was edited and in my publisher’s hands. I had cleared my desk of the mountain of papers—a ritual of mine upon completing a project—and had, at last, begun to tidy up my office. I had conducted more than five hundred interviews. I had sifted through thousands of pages of deeds, marriage licenses, census reports, obituaries, and death certificates. Together, they filled six drawers of a file cabinet.

Still, I felt that there was something yet to be done. I had focused on scores of letters and successfully tracked down the descendants of all but one of the writers, a fourteen-year-old girl named Helen Palm. She was the one writer whose life narrative had managed to elude me. With a few minutes of free time, I decided to try once more to locate her descendants. What exactly I hoped to find, I can’t say. I just felt a need to close the circle. With the help of the genealogy staff at the Stark County Public Library, I located her parents’ obituaries. Her father, Ralston Palm, had died in 1973; her mother, Carrie, in 1984. One of Helen Palm’s daughters, Janet, seventy years old, was said to be living in nearby Magnolia, Ohio. I called her to learn what had become of her mother in the years after her letter to B. Virdot, and to fill out the particulars of her life—marriage, children, work, date of death, place of burial. I was not prepared for her response.

Helen Palm was alive.