A heavy 1937 Underwood typewriter perches on a dedicated shelf in my office. Steel levers and margin stops, iconic round brass keys with letters stamped into their centers. Its presence is regal. For years, my grandmother used it nearly every day, even to type a short grocery list. When she passed away, the typewriter passed to me. This vintage machine is a physical reminder of her.

Formidable.

She stood four-foot and ten-inches tall in her stocking feet. Short, silk-fine, light-brown hair with a wave. Sharp, laser-focused eyes, like a judge’s or a general’s, offering her brand of wisdom—wanted or not. Righteously Lutheran. Put no stock in the Age of Aquarius or being a Capricorn, born on January 18th.

My grandmother and my godmother.

The significance of and has played out in in my life in multiple ways. Much of which, I didn’t appreciate until after her dream took her away. Funny how a dream can be foreshadowing in the face of all current evidence to the contrary.

Who was she, really?

My family lore, repeated only in hushed tones, speaks of an orphaned baby. Her father, said to have been the second son of a prominent New Orleans Jewish family, was a doctor. Her mother, a Catholic Cajun housemaid, worked for the family. This couple married against religious, cultural, and economic tides in a time when keeping with tradition kept souls afloat.

The story continues with her mother passing way at childbirth. Her father, having lost the love of his life, ostracized by his faith and cultural community due to his marriage, committed suicide.

My father said Grandma B, which is what we called her, was adopted by her mother’s uncle, Alfred Leonce Guidry of Terrebonne Parish, and his wife, the daughter of German immigrants, Elizabeth Metz Guidry. They resided in Mandeville, a little town on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain.

Grandma B once told me she had no formal adoption papers. According to her, a Catholic nun told Mrs. Guidry she could be Blanche’s foster mother. And that was that. No paperwork, no signatures, no records anywhere.

I inquired further, wanting to know how she knew that tidbit. That and other questions pressed on my inquiring mind, craving answers. However, her walls went up. She responded, “They’re not your people. You don’t need to know.”

Her words stung. Left me with a feeling that I was less-than. Less than her granddaughter. Less than her god-daughter. Less than worthy. Less than a part of my American heritage and my Cajun culture.

My curiosity grew the longer my questions about family remained unanswered.

Secrets told by the Angel Lady?

Shortly after my fortieth birthday, a group of women invited me to their meeting with a woman known as the Angel Lady. She suggested Blanche L. Guidry was not an only child, just the youngest of several. After the passing of her mother, her father put all of the children up for adoption through the Catholic Orphanage in New Orleans.The Angel Lady suggested my great grandfather’s name might have been a “C” name, maybe Charles.

The search for answers about my ancestry isn’t much different from putting a thrift-store jigsaw puzzle together—something I do whenever I visit my father, who’s known as the Puzzle King. It’s about matching up colors and lines. It takes time, patience, and ultimately perseverance. But with a thrift-store purchase, the puzzle may be complete or missing a few pieces. You pay your money and take your chances.

Therefore, I paid my money and took my chances on a different avenue to try to find my answers: Science.

The DNA test results suggest evidence of Grandma B having siblings. I learned from my “matches” that a second cousin on my Irish grandfather’s side also tested—my dad’s cousin’s daughter. That information provides me a way to delineate between my familial matches. Any match she and I share means that person is from my grandfather’s side of the family. The non-matches with this cousin are from my grandmother’s side.

When I received my DNA results, the ethnicities were pretty much aligned with what I believed to be true. In big chunks, I’m 50% Japanese. 30% French. 20% Irish. The only little, and I do mean little, surprise is that I’m .05% Portugues. History, I discovered explains Portugues sailors shipped-wrecked on the coasts of Ireland often stayed.

Ghosted.

I bubbled with excitement when I discovered a close relation on my grandmother’s side of the family; a woman—second cousin—living in Baton Rouge. Her son is an attorney and evidently handling her DNA genealogy account. At first, he said he would exchange information with me, but alas, he reneged. Ghosted me.

My only goal is to chart the path of my family leading up to me. I am not seeking a relationship. I am not seeking money. I am not seeking to stab at old wounds. I am seeking clarity about the identity of my ancestors and how I came to be me.

But grandma’s formidable façade never relented. Whatever she knew, she refused to share. Her constant refrain became, “They’re not your people.”

Formidable. Firm. Fearless. These words describe my grandmother.

I have wondered if she was always this way. In New Orleans, she attended Soulé Commercial College & Literary Institute, graduating in 1926. I know she worked for Maryland Casualty Insurance Company for a few years after college because she mentioned it in passing when I told her I had been offered a job in the company’s Tampa office a few years after I graduated from college.

She changed jobs and landed at the New Orleans Police Department, working there as a secretary for more than twenty years. She retired an Honorary Captain at age seventy. Daily, she typed criminal reports about the doings of the underbelly of the Big Easy.

Formidable.

In 1926, she married my Irish grandfather, a riverboat captain. He had been a friend of her father.

This is supposition on my part, but I believe my grandfather’s betrayal and their subsequent divorce—back in the 1930’s when the church and society treated divorced women like disfigured aliens—caused her extreme pain and humiliation.

Yet, she persevered.

In 1957, my fifty-year-old grandmother paid cash for a duplex on Filmore Street. She lived in one side and rented the other side. Into her eighties, she made as many of her own repairs as she could handle, even laying new tile on the bathroom floor.

She never got over my grandfather’s disloyalty. To my surprise, I learned she remarried when my father was a teenager, but that marriage ended on the honeymoon. My dad said she discovered the churchgoing, hymn-signing, dapper man was no gentleman. She divorced him.

And again, she persevered.

Only this time, the post-World War II era, afforded women more freedom, and morals and values had become a bit more open, less harsh.

I have a couple of very vague memories of my grandfather, my father’s father, and Grandma B’s first husband. The photographs memorialize our relationship of outings on his shrimp trawler, walking down crushed oyster-shell paths, sitting on the steps to his camp.

He was tall, thin, quiet. Other stories I’ve heard about him paint a different picture of his personality. However, that’s often the way of things. We show different people different aspects of ourselves.

Unseen Monster.

I so clearly remember the last time I saw my grandfather, and it remains the only time I ever saw both my grandmother and my step-grandmother together. I was five years old, yet remember the situation with utter clarity. The cliché, “tension so thick you could cut it with a knife,” so well describes what my five-year-old-self experienced. I wanted to hide from the unseen monster sucking the life out of the adults. Back then, no one had explained to me the ramifications of having a grandmother and step-grandmother.

Whenever Grandma B broached the subject of my step-grandmother, I changed the topic of conversation or I pretended not to hear what she said and replied as if she’d asked a question on an entirely different subject. I refused to engage in that conversation because I loved my step-grandmother, she was a significant part of my childhood. A part Grandma B never understood and I shared little about it with her.

In 1998, my step-grandmother suffered a stroke in New Orleans. I lived in Kansas City at the time. I went to see her. I knew, and was correct, it would be the last time I would see her alive. I made sure she knew how much I loved her.

My step-grandmother passed about six weeks later. After which, I received a call from Grandma B. I was not prepared for her startling intense outburst.

“I know he always loved me more!”

Her words confused me.

She had divorced him—my grandfather. Later, she remarried. He remarried.

It made me understand the immense pain she carried. It made me understand how old wounds can fester and grow. It made me understand age didn’t provide immunity from past hurts. It showed me how someone who believed they lived their life rooted in Biblical teachings still experienced human frailties. It made me understand the importance of forgiveness.

The years since Grandma B’s soul soared, leaving her human form behind, I have continued my quest for answers about my family. I have also come to appreciate the legacy she gave me.

Blanche L. Guidry Brannan’s Legacy

Grandma B became my pen pal as soon as I learned to print large block letters on lined paper designed for children. My mother made sure I put pencil to paper at least once a month and create a letter for my grandmother. Appropriate cards were sent to her for each holiday. My “signature” changed along the way. She told her of her disappointment in my penmanship.

I always enjoyed when she sent me letters and cards. Sometimes letters were typed. Sometimes they came handwritten. But each one addressed just to me gave me a special warm feeling.

The Air Force stationed my father in Japan. There, under my mother’s instruction, I learned to make Japanese dolls. The first one I completed, I sent to Grandma B. (It was returned to me years later, after she died, and I took it to New Orleans and gave it to her best friend—Miss Gladys. Another story for another time.)

As an adult, I still called my grandmother “Grandma B” because it made her happy. However, I thought of her as Blanche L. Guidry. It made the hurt of her unkind words from my childhood sting a little less.

Blanche led an interesting life, creating her own journey. On rare occasions, she’d giggle about something. Giggled! Once, I even saw her flirt with a man. Our family dined at a restaurant owned by a family friend. His uncle happened to be in town from Argentina. Blanche turned into Betty Boop and Marilyn Monroe. It was fascinating and uncomfortable to witness.

Grandma B taught me to make stuffed mirlitons, divinity, and stew fresh figs for preserves.

Fears take Flight.

Though I didn’t understand it as a kid, Grandma B was terrified of flying. No matter where we lived, she always came for a visit—arriving by bus or train. Japan presented a dilemma. She’d never learned to drive a car, why would she get on a plane? Because my father asked her to come. And there is no one in the world she loved more than my father.

Though flying represented extreme danger to her, she took the train from New Orleans to San Fransico and boarded a flight to Hawaii. Changing planes, she later arrived in Tokyo. She beamed, walking around like a glowstick, when we located her at Haneda Airport.

In 2000, Grandma B made a dramatic change. She left New Orleans. Moved to Florida to live with my parents. At ninety-two, she had her first knee replacement surgery. Followed by the other knee surgery. She needed daily physical therapy following the surgeries, so she stayed at a rehab facility a few miles from my parents’ home.

Dreams. Dreaming. Dreamed.

I don’t recall the exact day and time in 2008 my dad called to tell me he’d gone for his daily visit with Grandma B. He said she had all her belongings spread out on her bed. Some items had notes identifying the appointed recipient of the item.

He asked her why.

She said she had a dream.

A dream where she was going to die.

My dad said he’d laughed, told her he didn’t know how that could be since there was nothing wrong with her. But she remained insistent.

A week later, she began a rapid decline. Hospice was called. She soon slipped into semi-consciousness.

My sister, brother-in-law, and niece went to see her about a week after that. My sister’s feelings were ruffled because Grandma B called her “Linda.”

At almost one hundred and two years old, Grandma B died later that day, two weeks after she’d told my dad she had a dream and her end was near.

She passed quietly.

Whatever information she possessed about her birth, birth parents, birth family, passed with her.

However, I still have science to help me. I’ve learned there’s a singing gene. I don’t have it. And scientist haven’t yet identified a “formidable” gene. No matter—I have it.

I am emotionally strong.

I possess great perseverance.

I believe Grandma B built a moat around the fortress she created to protect her heart. I do believe she knew far more than she told about her biological family. However, I think my lack of information, in part, is what spurred my love of storytelling. I create characters in stories, stories that I imagine have happened to family I’ve yet to meet. Imperfect people, yet interesting and loveable and worthy.

The day will come when I will know all the information I seek about my genetic family line.

And the Underwood…it reminds me to never give up. The vignettes, the stories, the memories of my life all play out in the characters I create. In reading my books, you are reading the stories of me. I may not yet know who “my people” are, however, the journey to getting there is fascinating.

You see, I am formidable.

Rest in peace, Blanche Leona Guidry Brannan. 1907—2008.

Grandma Blanche: 1907 – 2008
by Linda Joyce

Gnarled fingers pounded Underwood keys
at the New Orleans Police Department
until she retired, Honorary Captain, age seventy-three.
Kind words rarely crossed her pursed lips
instead snapped worry, concern, fear
with finger pointing then fists on hips.
Those same hands nurtured me
stuffed mirlitons, jambalaya, divinity
pinch of this, pat of that, no written recipe.
Yet, I longed for tales of her growing up years,
of her Cajun father born from Louisiana “good earth”
of her mother, a German immigrant.
Grandma remained the unyielding guardian
never acknowledging her mother’s ancestry
or her father’s Acadian roots.
Daddy whispered a secret story
Grandma, a motherless child
and her father’s death held no glory.
An outcast at birth
taken in by estranged family,
she never learned her worth.
I pushed and pushed and pushed for more
sought to uncover my ancestry
only to pound against a closed-hearted door.
Grandma Blanche passed quietly alone
wrapped in her mantle of shame.
I hope she finds peace in heaven’s home.
I still want to know
Where do my hands come from?