Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  I hear my father’s voice, saying, “Jemima Keepers was a remarkable woman.” He never lied about anything, and so it doesn’t occur to me to treat this statement skeptically. “The Keeperses were a very fine family,” he says. But here, though I accept what he says, I am far from sure what he means. And I can’t ask him because he has gone to join the people he was talking about. I don’t think he meant that they were socially important. Jemima Keepers’ father, William Keepers, had an iron forge. Before that, the Keepers men were farmers in Maryland. My father may have meant only that they didn’t use conspicuously bad grammar or owe anybody a dime; he attached great importance to financial probity. Or he could have meant that they were people of intelligence and character. In any case, he was speaking from first-hand knowledge. My Grandfather Maxwell took him on a family visit to Ohio when my father was a little boy, and he met several of his uncles and undoubtedly his grandmother as well, for she was alive at that time.

  I’m sure they didn’t ride in a sleeping car—it would have cost too much. And that they brought something to stay their hunger: thick meat sandwiches. Pickles. Pie. And cake. And that my father had a great deal to say, for he was the youngest and it was the first time in his life that he had enjoyed his father’s undivided attention all through a day and a night. Perhaps he was lucky and had a whole seat to stretch out on, facing the one where my grandfather sat, bolt upright, in the dimly lighted coach. If the train was crowded, he slept with his head in his father’s lap. And woke in the night at mysterious wayside stations, and saw greenish-white lights, and heard voices and mysterious clanking sounds, and asked still another question about what it was like in Ohio, and fell back into sleep the moment the wheels began to turn.

  In the morning they got off the train and walked directly across the street to the hotel. And in the hotel lobby my grandfather put the satchel down and told my father to stand right there and keep an eye on it, while he went to the desk. It was a big dark room, with a high ceiling and lots of polished brass, and potted palms, and marble statues, and numerous cuspidors, and my father had never seen anything like it. He was busy taking it all in, when suddenly he heard his name being called. A big boy in a uniform with his hair slicked down was going through the lobby calling his name. My father went up to him and said, “I’m William Keepers Maxwell,” and a tall, lean, broad-shouldered man with a mustache, who had turned up at the same instant, said, “I’m William Keepers Maxwell.” Then, looking down at my father, “Why, you must be Creight’s boy!” The pleasure was mutual and lasting.

  Judging by Jemima Keepers’ portrait, my father got not only her last name but also her nose, and my daughter Kate got her forehead. And nobody that I know inherited her high cheekbones and beautifully sculptured upper eyelids. She is wearing a velvet dress with a lace collar, and she seems to have forgotten that she is sitting for her portrait. This air of melancholy preoccupation may be only that she carried a burden of sadness that was habitual and lasting and showed even when she was attending to other matters. She did not have an easy life.

  The portrait of my great-grandfather is of a much younger man, with thick dark hair and eyebrows, widely spaced eyes, and a square jaw. It has been so retouched that it looks like a photograph of a drawing by a not very accomplished amateur, and that may be what it is. His clothes are much more simply cut than his father’s. He looks forthright and honest and unreal. He was a marble engraver, which I take to mean that he carved inscriptions on tombstones. My great-grandparents moved from Stillwater, Ohio, to Uhrichsville about 1840, and fourteen years later they moved to Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, where, that same year, my great-grandfather died, very suddenly, at the age of forty-two. His nuncupative will reads: “On the morning of the 14th day of September A.D. 1854, Robert Maxwell called upon us the undersigned in his dwelling house in the Borough of Waynesburg Greene County Penn in the last extremity of his last illness, to notice the following disposition of his property, to wit. William A. Porter Esqu. asked him if he was aware of the fact that he was soon going to die? The Testator answered, that he was. Mr. Porter then asked him what request he had to make?—he said, first he wished all his just debts to be paid out of his estate. Second he wished his wife Jemima to have all the residue of his Estate both real and personal—he said that there was a judgment in the state of Ohio in his favor, which he wished his wife to have also, he said he would like to make some other arrangements but could not talk and called upon us to take particular notice that this was his wish and desire. Shortly after, to the best of our knowledge, about one hour, the said Robert Maxwell died.”

  What happened after that is told in a letter to Max Fuller from a cousin of his mother’s. “My mother, Mary Maxwell, was born seven months after the sudden death of her father from dysentery. He was a well-to-do man, living in Uhrichsville, Ohio; Aunt Sade considered him a most remarkable man—very stern, and very considerate, if you can understand that combination. He never broke his word, but was quite slow giving it, she said. After his death, his partner asked for some papers which grandmother gave him, and when the estate was settled, it was found that there was nothing left, but the partner had suddenly become well to do. Grandmother farmed out her five children, and went to her sister to await the birth of my mother. The mortgage on their home was foreclosed. An old friend, Judge somebody, I cannot remember the name, bought in the property, and gave grandmother a deed. One of the choicest stories in our family is that when the sons were grown, they repaid the amount to the old Judge. Mother always rejoiced in telling that. Later grandmother had some of her children with her, and always my mother; but never your grandfather; he had the hardest lot of all of them, and was I fancy the most ambitious, or he would never have done so well as he did with all the handicaps he had.”

  In my Grandmother Maxwell’s scrapbook, under the heading “Maxwell Fuller’s Own Grandfather,” there is an account of his life, in her handwriting. It is maddening. She must have known something about his early years, but what she put down is what she found in print (as if that alone was dependable) in a history of Logan County, published in 1886.

  My copy came down to me through the other side of the family, accidentally, in the same box with a dozen big black bound volumes of the Century magazine I had asked for. The spine is missing and the cover hangs by a few threads, but the pages are edged, top, sides, and bottom, with gilt, the type is of a good size, the paper hasn’t turned brown after eighty-five years, and the lithographic portraits are of men and women who clearly believed that since God knew exactly what they were like, there was no point in trying to deceive the photographer.

  The paragraph about my Grandfather Maxwell begins: “Robert Creighton Maxwell, attorney at law, Lincoln, Illinois, is a native of Ohio, born in Uhrichsville, Tuscarawas County, August 6, 1849. His parents were Robert and Jemima (Keepers) Maxwell, the former a native of Virginia, of Scotch descent, and the latter of Ohio, of Welsh descent. His parents moved to Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, where the father died in 1854. His mother then returned to Ohio, where she is still living. After the father’s death the family was broken up and our subject found a home with strangers.”

  My grandfather was barely five years old when his father died. He was the fourth child; he had an older sister and two older brothers and a brother who was two years younger. Was it chance that he had the hardest lot of all of them? Or was it because his mother knew that he was the one who was most able to stand up to adversity?

  Simple hard work or even being worked to the limit of his strength I do not think would have been considered, in that period, a hard lot. He must have been harshly treated (though the writer of that letter could have meant merely that he was cut off from all family affection).

  It is only partly clear what happened. Jemima Keepers, having no home of her own, and expecting another child, went to live with her sister, but couldn’t keep her other children with her and so they were divided up, probably among her relatives. There was no one who was able, or willi
ng, to take my grandfather, and she had no choice but to entrust him into the keeping of strangers. Though a bookish man, my grandfather knew enough about farming to do it competently for several years before he took up the practice of law. My guess is that he was handed over to a farmer and worked for his keep from the time he was five years old, and the farmer got all the work out of him he possibly could. But my father and my aunts never spoke about it, nor my grandmother—from which I conclude that my grandfather himself never spoke about it, perhaps because he could not bear to speak about it. Or because it was gone, left behind when he left Ohio.

  The history continues: “He mainly supported and educated himself, attending the school of Uhrichsville till seventeen years of age. In 1866 he left Ohio and came to Illinois.”

  The history doesn’t tell how my grandfather got from Ohio to Illinois, but I know, anyway: he bought a pair of shoes and started walking. About six hundred miles. Somewhere between a month and six weeks of steady walking. If it was the early part of the summer, as it is only reasonable to suppose, he was not seventeen but sixteen. In 1866 there was a railroad that would have taken him where he wanted to go, but walking was cheaper. No details of this journey have survived—only the fact that he made it, the year after the Civil War ended. And so it can be assumed that men in uniform trudged along beside him with their discharge papers in their pockets. For a good part of the journey he must have followed the National Road, which at that time extended from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois. The roadbed was thirty feet wide, and the eastern section was paved with an inch of crushed stone and gravel. The western section was not paved with anything. Tree stumps eighteen inches high were left in the road but trimmed and rounded with an axe so that carriages could safely pass over them. The National Road was used by a steady stream of two-wheeled carts, Conestoga wagons, farm wagons, men on horseback, men on foot, men driving cattle, hogs, horses, and mules. Now choking on clouds of dust, now with his new shoes caked with mud, my grandfather moved among them.

  When he had the good fortune to arrive at a log cabin or a farmhouse at nightfall, I expect they took him in. But in 1866 the Great Prairie was not densely populated, and so, many times, when evening came there was not a house of any kind in sight, and he went into an oak grove, out of the wind, and made a bed of leaves beside a fallen log. In his knapsack, or if he didn’t have a knapsack then in his coat pocket, he carried a Bible, which I see him reading from as he walks along. It is too late in the day for him to be surprised by hostile Indians in Ohio or Indiana, but he could have been murdered by a white man for whatever was in his pockets. Such crimes were not common but they did occur.

  His first sight of the prairie he must always have remembered. The vast illimitable plain spreading in all directions. Timber and grass, grass higher than his head and undulating in the wind like the long swells of ocean. The Virgilian cloud shadows following one on another. The meeting of earth and sky. The feeling of being exposed. The unreality—for part of what he saw was a mirage and would fade from sight, only to reappear in its actuality half an hour later when he reached the crest of that farther ridge.

  I know what my grandfather looked like at the time of this journey, because I have a tintype of him, given to me by my Aunt Bert. It was taken when he was still a very young man. The face is not that of somebody given to feeling sorry for himself. The photographer is probably responsible for the cheerful, upward tilt of the head, but the set of the narrow jaw is surely his own, and what it suggests is granite. Even so, it’s a long walk from Ohio to Illinois.

  When he had crossed the Indiana line and was about fifteen miles northeast of Springfield, destiny prompted him to stop in a farmyard and ask for a drink of water. The farmer inquired where he was going, and my grandfather explained that he was looking for a job teaching school. “Can you teach singing?” the farmer asked, and my grandfather said that he could. “You can stay here, then,” the farmer said.

  The house was clean and neat, the stock well cared for. In the fields the grain was ripe for the harvest, and it may have made him think of the Bible. It was land Jehovah might have given Abraham for his descendants. There were five sons and four daughters in the family. The oldest was just back from the war. The youngest was a little girl of three whom everybody petted. They were twelve when they sat down to eat. What I think happened, though nobody ever said it did happen, is that when they got up from the table he picked out a hoe and went into the corn patch. On Sunday he walked beside them to church, but as they went in he held back, because of the condition of his clothes, and one of the boys saw this and motioned that he was to sit with them. When Saturday came around, the farmer’s wife asked him to try on a shirt that was still warm from the iron, and when it fit she said he was to keep it and wear it on Sunday. One day when he sat down and held her skein of wool for her to wind, she said, “Have you written to your mother?” and he knew that he was accepted.

  They were gentle, soft-voiced people, and treated him with a kindness he was not accustomed to. And he was careful not to seem better educated than they were, though in fact he was. What he couldn’t conceal was how happy he was. When he rode off to singing school on the farmer’s horse, the oldest daughter, Maggie, rode behind him, with her arms around his waist. Two years later, they were married, on Christmas Eve, 1868.

  * Charles B. Hanna: Historical Recollections of Harrison County in the State of Ohio (New York, 1900).

  * In a letter to Max Fuller, my Aunt Maybel said that my grandfather, whose name was Robert Creighton Maxwell, helped himself to the Creighton when he was so small he could not say it, and that he called himself “Tate.” This my grandfather must have told her himself. Jeannot Creighton Maxwell was his aunt, and perhaps he took the name because he was fond of her. Or he may just have liked her middle name. Creighton is a variant spelling of Crighton—a Scottish border family that lived in the same general area as the Maxwells. Who the Creightons were that she was named after nobody knows. My grandfather was never called by his first name. The Creighton was usually shortened to “Creight.”

  3

  With a Middle Western American family, no sooner do you begin to perceive the extent of the proliferation of ancestors backward into time than they are lost from sight. Every trace of them disappears, through the simple erosion of human forgetfulness. They were in movement in a new country. The women were committed to drudgery and died young. The men had no proper tools to farm with, and weren’t good farmers anyway. They used up the land by improper practices. Wild animals broke into their fields. Their horses were half-starved, and their cattle sometimes actually did starve, before there was any grass in the spring. In the mountains of Virginia they listened thoughtfully to tales of how easy life was in Kentucky, and from Kentucky, when they had to sell out, or were sold out, to pay their debts, they moved on into Illinois. With their minds always on some promised land, like the Old Testament figures they so much resembled, they did not bother to record or even remember the place of their origin.

  My Grandmother Maxwell’s mother’s maiden name was Louisa England, and my grandmother accepted as gospel truth something that probably was not true—namely, that she was descended on her mother’s side from a little boy who wandered on board a sailing ship and was given the name of England because that was where he came from and all anybody knew about him.

  In an effort to find out something more about this branch of the family (and before I had access to my cousin’s papers, which would have told me all there was to know) I entered into correspondence with the Reverend Stephen J. England, of Enid, Oklahoma, who once lived in central Illinois. His name was given to me by the minister of a church on Park Avenue, when I went there to borrow a history of the Disciples of Christ from the church library. It could hardly have been more roundabout.

  Dr. England had never heard the story of the little boy who wandered onto a sailing ship, and thought it apocryphal. But he knew something about his own ancestry, going back to a Davi
d England who lived on the James River in Virginia at the time of the American Revolution. Dr. England’s line of descent was through one of David England’s sons, and he thought it likely that mine was through another, Stephen England, who was, he said, a great preacher of the frontier and a towering figure in the early history of the Christian Church.

  The minister of the Park Avenue Christian Church had already suggested this, and I said, “No, that couldn’t possibly be.”

  Dr. England recommended that I write to a Mrs. Lloyd Robert Geist, of Maryville, Missouri, who was descended from Stephen England and had a good deal of information about that branch of the England family. It turned out that Mrs. Geist’s great-grandmother and Louisa England, my grandmother’s mother, were sisters. And the great preacher of the frontier was their grandfather. Mrs. Geist supplied me with a genealogy going back past Stephen England to his father, David England, and his father, William England, who had a plantation in Goochland County, thirty or forty miles up the James River from Richmond, and died in 1768.

  Among Max Fuller’s papers there was a photostat of my Aunt Maybel’s application for membership in the D.A.R. On one page she stated that the England family “could hardly be traced as my great-great-grandfather when a boy of 4 years old went onto a ship docked in English water at or near England and the ship left shore and they were so far out before they discovered the boy and would not go back so brought him on to America and gave him the name of England, as he could not tell his name.”

  What kind of a four-year-old boy doesn’t know his own name? Was she claiming descent from a mental defective?

  On another page of the same application she said that her great-great-grandfather, Stephen England, was born in Virginia in 1774. Neither side of my family has ever had the slightest difficulty in entertaining two contradictory ideas at once.