Last night I took to the kitchen. I put a chicken in the slow cooker, set the oven to 400º, cut and cleaned kale, mustard greens, and sweet potatoes, grated ginger and ground cardamom, greased pans and set dough aside, diced onions and poured honey. The oven saw bread rise on a stone, kale dry out in a tray, potatoes roast in a skillet, while the stove sautéed greens and the cooker stewed. And all the time I thought of family.

Sunday, my mother called to tell me that Aunt Esther had died. I never knew Aunt Esther. She was 97 when she passed; she had been my maternal grandfather's younger sister. That grandfather had been a brutal man. More evidence of his brutality surfaced on Aunt Esther's passing. For close to 80 years, Aunt Esther kept a secret:

I had always known my mother's father had had a sister named Esther and a sister named Viola. My mother knew her Aunt Esther and her Aunt Vi, who died long ago. She never told me about Aunt Ida and Aunt Irene (and no one has yet to mention Aunt Mary, though we learned this past weekend that there was an Uncle William and that he died in infancy).

On Sunday, my mother asked me if I had time to hear a tale. Just before Aunt Esther died, my mother, Dale, and her sister, my aunt Didi, received a letter from three first cousins they did not know they had. The letter began: "We Are Your Cousins."

As a child, my mother knew she had aunts that she was not allowed to meet, though the why was never given. My mother's father was a violent man. He beat his family and no one questioned his authority. He made a lot of money and many people attended his funeral in 1958, but no one remembers him fondly. The only son of Italian immigrants, he was given authority over the family when his father died. He was fifteen at the time.
His older sisters, Ida and Irene, married African American men and so he turned on them. He excommunicated them. As it turns out, he really excommunicated himself, his children, and his grandchildren (me and my only cousin, David).

I can imagine Aunt Esther capable of keeping this secret had she not known her sisters' children and their children's children, but all this time she knew both branches of the tree. My grandfather died in 1958. Aunt Esther kept the family apart for another fifty-five years. What was her logic? Or had her brother been as brutal to her as he had been to his daughters? Had he committed acts of violence against everyone? Had everyone internalized the fear? Was everyone split on the inside the way the family was split from itself?

I am ecstatic to discover this family I did not know existed. On my mother's side, there have always been secrets. I have gone after them over the years and some have yielded, though not in accordance with my schedule. I had been told as a child that I had French ancestry, but pressed my mother on this in my teens and learned that her father had covered his Italian heritage with a false French identity. Aunt Ida and Aunt Irene's husbands were not good enough for him, but apparently he was not good enough for him, either. His wife and daughters were not good enough; and no doubt, had he lived to meet me, I would have been inferior since my father was a Jew.
This is the beginning of the retelling. There are more family stories, but they are not mine to tell. Legacy is a tricky beast. This week, I am hopeful and I feel a bit of triumph over secrets and evil and ill-will. I want to thank my Cousin Audrey, Cousin Bobbie, Cousin Phyllis for facing potential rejection and tracking down my mom and my aunt, my cousin Dave and me. We were lost; and now we're found.