Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  While my grandfather practiced law with one partner or another he also dabbled in politics. In the 1870’s, at which time he was a young man in his early thirties, he ran for Congress and was defeated. Later, when the nomination would have been equivalent to election, he refused it. He had found that he preferred practicing law. Perhaps also he preferred being behind the scenes. In 1880 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention at Chicago, and in 1884 he was one the Presidential electors for the State of Illinois. From 1888–92 he was a member of the Court of Claims, from which he resigned when John P. Altgeld was elected governor. Apparently he was too much of a radical for my grandfather to serve under. Altgeld was a German immigrant. He wrote a book* contending that American judicial methods were weighted against the poor, which nobody in his right mind would deny now, but a great many people refused to believe then. As governor, Altgeld was the champion of labor, reform, and liberal thought, and I wish that my Grandfather Blinn had been among those who fought at his side, but you have to take your ancestors as you find them.

  My grandfather’s obituary notice says that he was “modest in all his actions, never seeming to recognize his own greatness,” that he often asked advice from other lawyers, even the most lowly in the profession; that he headed the bar of Logan County; and that he died “with a legal fame extending to other states and with a standing for probity and honor so high that it was never tarnished by idle report or by the jealousy of his opponents or his competitors in whatever walk of life he choosed to walk.” I have never heard anything that would cast doubt on the truth of these statements, and small-town people like nothing better than whittling somebody down to size.

  * The widow of my Grandfather Maxwell’s brother Will (the one who turned up in the hotel lobby) lived in Parsons, Kansas.

  † What were the others? All gone. Never mentioned in my hearing and probably forgotten by the time I came along, but the explanation, perhaps, for his habitual caution.

  * Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims (1884).

  13

  The paragraph on my grandfather in the Logan County History concludes: “January 1, 1869, Mr. Blinn was married at Cold Spring, Kentucky, to Nettie L., daughter of John C. Youtsey, a prominent citizen of that place.”

  You don’t begin by being a prominent citizen, you arrive there in the fullness of time, after quite a lot of agricultural or commercial activity. The first Youtsey I know anything about floated down the Ohio River on a flatboat loaded with whiskey and molasses, shortly after the year 1800. His name was John, he was my great-great-great-grandfather, and Annette says he started from Knight’s Ferry, Virginia, which I have yet to find on any map. According to a statement by an unnamed person born about 1820 and probably a second cousin of my Grandmother Youtsey, John Youtsey first settled in Maryland, then moved on to Pennsylvania, and “made some money there and bought a little flatboat, and floated down the river to Cincinnati. Didn’t have a brick house in it—so I have been told. Old Dick Southgate was a young lawyer at that time, and he noticed my grandfather’s little boat lying there at the water’s edge, and it was called the Pennsylvania German.”

  For a moment the telescope is in perfect focus.

  My mother’s cousin Hugh Davis said that Nicholas Long-worth, the grandfather of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was with him. Nicholas Longworth was the third son of a well-to-do Tory family in Newark, New Jersey, who, because of fines and confiscations, were in reduced circumstances. I have been slow to accept this connection, but on the other hand it seems rather an odd thing to invent. It is a fact that Nicholas Longworth came west on a flatboat at this time. He was nineteen years old. He had a leather chest with him, and history has preserved an inventory of its contents: “Six coats, black and blue; one dozen plain and fancy waistcoats; four pairs of silk and eight of woolen breeches; six dozen plain and ruffled shirts; a like number of hose and handkerchiefs, with cravats and other et ceteras.” In short his mother sent him forth prepared for every social emergency. I somehow doubt if John Youtsey had much more than the clothes on his back.

  If Nicholas Longworth was an amiable young man, and probably he was, he invited my great-great-great-grandfather to sit on the trunk with him, and together they came floating down the Ohio all the way from Pittsburgh, between two solid walls of timber.

  This suggests Jim and Huckleberry Finn on the raft, though it was the Ohio, not the Mississippi, and the flatboat no doubt was considerably bigger. But they were subject to the same alternation of blue sky, white clouds, grey clouds, stormy weather. Sun burning through the fog. The sound of waves lapping on the shore of an island. A hawk wheeling, herons wading. The sad colors of daybreak. The excitement of smoke rising from the trees. Voices coming across the water. The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, the Pleiades, and Cassiopeia’s Chair.

  There is a legend in the family—my family, I mean—that John Youtsey was offered the land Cincinnati now stands on in exchange for his whiskey and molasses, and turned it down, on the grounds that it was a hog wallow, and went up the Licking River and raised strawberries. Something like that happened, if not exactly that. Nicholas Longworth settled in Cincinnati, and became a lawyer. Unlike other men of that profession he was willing to take land in settlement of fees, and, since Cincinnati was rapidly changing from a village into a city, it wasn’t long before he was immensely wealthy. He also became a horticulturist of some importance. One of his discoveries was that in order to raise strawberries profitably the farmer had to use both male and female plants. So perhaps he was a friend of my great-great-great-grandfather and really did come down the Ohio with him on a flatboat, only my great-great-great-grandfather must have waited quite some time, until Nicholas Longworth made that discovery, before he started raising strawberries for the market in Cincinnati.

  In 1844, his grandson, John C. Youtsey, bought a farm of 106 acres, at Cold Spring, in Campbell County. And at some point he took his family and went north into Illinois, in a covered wagon. He arrived in Postville on a Saturday night, and was so appalled by the drunkenness and the fistfights that he started back to Kentucky early the next morning. In 1855, still living on the farm at Cold Spring, he started to build a new house, of brick fired on the place. It was not finished when the war broke out.

  My great-grandfather would not own slaves, Annette said, but his brother did, and went bankrupt because of this. At different times, both Union and Confederate troops camped in the grove in front of my great-grandfather’s house. He was a United States marshal, and my grandmother’s sister remembered their father being shot at twice, from ambush. Once when they were expecting a detachment of Southern forces, somebody sent a Negro servant out to bury the family silver. He didn’t return, and the silver was never found, though they dug and searched the place over, with a singular lack of suspicion, for years.

  John C. Youtsey had four sons and three daughters. Three of the boys fought in the war, on the side of the North. Among the letters that have come down in the family is one from my grandmother’s brother John, written in a fine copperplate hand, on lined notepaper.

  Dear Father:

  Again we are on the eve of another grand movement. Our Command has orders to be in readiness to march by day after tomorrow (17) The probability is that we shall strike South Carolina, this time. Sherman will make Savannah his base, for the present and as his Army moves toward Charleston he will keep Communication opened through the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. Our Cavalry will cover his left flank, making raids into the interior meantime. Consequently you will not be apt to hear from me for some time after we leave this place.…

  Though she never saw him, my Aunt Annette remembers her mother’s saying that he was very handsome, with dark, reddish hair and a mustache.

  He was the last of the brothers to get home, and when he walked up the drive in the middle of the night, the house was dark. A dog that had been a puppy when he left was now full grown and a fierce watchdog. It knew him and didn’t m
ake a sound. He shinnied up a post and got into his room by way of the porch roof. But he had arrived in the midst of spring housecleaning, and his mother had emptied an upstairs bookcase and dumped the books on his bed. So when he started to get in between the covers, a pile of books he didn’t know was there fell on the floor and woke the entire household.

  John C. Youtsey’s mother lived with them. She was Scottish—“a small but mighty person.” The same thing was said of John C. Youtsey’s wife, my great-grandmother. She was also a great reader. “Grandfather and the man would come in from the fields,” Annette said, “and she’d be sitting with a book and the stove would be cold. When Mother was fourteen she took over the cooking, and her father never came in to a cold stove after that time. She was so beautiful that, when she took the ferry, the men who had just crossed over would cross again with her so they could look at her. She had black hair and big brown eyes, like your mother. When she looked at you with those eyes, you’d do anything in the world she asked.”

  As bookkeeper of the pump factory, my grandfather made routine visits to the bank, and there he struck up an acquaintance with one of my grandmother’s brothers, who was a teller. He invited my grandfather home for the weekend, and after that, he came often. My Great-grandfather Youtsey was very strict in his observance of the Sabbath. The horses were turned out to pasture and the family walked to church. What they ate on Sunday was all cooked the day before. One Saturday, my great-uncle and my grandfather wolfed every scrap of food that had been prepared for the day of rest. I think it is likely that young Edward Blinn and Nettie Youtsey had an understanding before he left Cincinnati to practice law in Lincoln. It was several years before he was in a position to marry. My great-grandfather was distressed to learn that his daughter was being carried off to the very place where he had been so offended by rowdy and drunken behavior, but he did not forbid the marriage.

  When my grandmother came to Lincoln as a bride, someone gave a tea for her. The guests left, by twos and threes, and were raked over the coals. As the teaparty broke up, my grandmother said, “I stayed to the end so you couldn’t talk about me.”

  She was homesick, and every summer, while court was in session and my grandfather was very busy, she went to Kentucky. When he could, he came and joined her there and they stayed on a while longer. One year, Annette said, he was much longer than usual in coming and she missed him so she was never homesick for Kentucky again—only for him.

  While she was in Kentucky, my grandfather had a chance to buy, very reasonably, a house on Ninth Street that had never been lived in by anybody. The contractor had built it for himself, and changed his mind about living there. My grandfather sold the house they were living in, and he threw in the bedroom furniture with it, not knowing that my grandmother kept her engagement ring in a little bag tied to the back of one of the bedposts.

  For a long, long time—for twelve or thirteen years, my grandparents had no children. One of my grandmother’s brothers married a Catholic, creating a scandal, and they had six daughters, and at one point my grandmother wrote to her sister-in-law, whom she had become very fond of, asking if she would let one of the girls come and live with her in Lincoln because she was so lonely. The answer was, “I haven’t one daughter too many.”

  My Grandfather Blinn’s half-brother died, leaving a wife and three small children, and my grandparents took the youngest. They wanted to adopt her from the beginning, but her mother was of two minds about this. She spoke of taking the child back and didn’t. Then she said they could have little Edith and a few days later wrote that they couldn’t. In the end, by insisting that she take the child before they got any fonder of her, my grandparents were allowed to keep her. Shortly after that, they began to have children of their own. My mother was the oldest. Between Annette and my Uncle Ted, my grandmother lost a child, and it made her morbidly apprehensive. She held Annette responsible for my uncle’s safety when they were playing together, and this heavy burden became a part of the fabric of Annette’s dreams. Whether it was true or not, she thought that her mother didn’t love her as much as she loved my uncle and my mother. But there was one person whose affection for her she was not in any uncertainty about. When my grandmother kissed my grandfather good-by at the front door, there, exasperatingly, was little Annette, sitting on the porch steps, waiting to give him the last kiss. In the evening, Annette went down to the end of the street in order to be the first one to meet him coming home. Once, she dressed up in her mother’s clothes and stood waiting on the front porch to greet him. My grandfather tipped his hat to her, and it was too much. She ran into the house, crying, “Mother! He doesn’t know who I am!”

  My grandfather loved to bring people home with him for a meal, and extra leaves were always being slipped into the dining room table. The larder was like a store, with bins of potatoes, barrels of flour and sugar, and the shelves crammed with canned fruit and vegetables.

  Ninth Street then was very much the way it was when I lived there, except that where two or three houses I knew stood there was an orchard, and every house had a barn behind it. The street wasn’t paved, and so the children had the blackest imaginable mud to play in. When I was a child the sidewalks were of cement, but before that they were brick, and before that, wooden boards. When the wooden sidewalks were taken up so that the brick sidewalk could be laid, Annette said, the children followed the workmen in a body, finding all sorts of treasures that had fallen through the cracks between the boards.

  In the texture of the Blinn family life in Lincoln there were both light and dark threads, with, as time went on, the darker ones becoming preponderant. When my mother was about nine years old, the barn behind my grandfather’s house burned down, with my mother’s Indian pony in it.

  I grew up thinking that a man my grandfather had sentenced for some crime or misdemeanor had set fire to the barn, out of revenge, but my grandfather never sat on the bench of a criminal court, and what actually happened was that, for a prank, a boy poured kerosene over the hay in a manger and held a lighted match to it.

  “We were out driving,” Annette said, “and your mother was at home alone. Father saw the flames as he turned into Ninth Street, and said, ‘I think that’s our barn!’ He tied the reins to the nearest hitching post and ran, but it was already too late.” A neighbor had gone into the stall with my mother and thrown a coat over the pony’s head. It was too frightened and totally unmanageable. My grandfather found out how the fire was started, but he did nothing, nor would he tell the children who had set the fire. All he said was that the boy’s mother was a widow and having a hard time.

  My Aunt Annette had mysterious fainting spells which they thought were caused by her heart. At that time the high school was on the third floor of a building that also housed the elementary school, and rather than have her climb the stairs she was tutored at home, which added to her sense of isolation. My mother went to a finishing school in Monticello, Illinois. My grandparents didn’t hear from her at the usual time, and when a day or two passed and there was still no letter they began to worry. Then they had a letter from her roommate saying that my mother hadn’t written because she hurt her wrist playing basketball. They went down and found her with a broken wrist untended to, and took her out of school. After that she was tutored at home with Annette.

  Neither one ever had a friend who was as close to her as the three sisters were to each other, but Annette believed that when she went anywhere with my mother, people always spoke to my mother, never to her. They cannot have been unaware of Annette, because she was the beauty of the family, but my mother had a natural charm of manner, and people felt that she was aware of them, of what was going on in their lives and in their hearts—as in fact she was—and they responded to this concern for them, with the result that Annette felt trapped and rendered invisible by my mother’s personality.

  There are no antiquarians in my mother’s family and Annette is vague, and sometimes even mistaken, about details of family history. But
not about the family life of the Blinns at 301 Ninth Street.

  “I had a kimona with red polka dots on it,” she said. “I was just wild about it. And one day Mother sent your mother and me to see a woman who used to work for us. They were very poor—her husband delivered coal. And she was sick in bed and didn’t even have a wrapper to put on. Her two children were playing on the floor beside the bed, and the sheets were dirty, and there were bags of coal in the bedroom, and coal dust over everything. In those days our dresses touched the floor and had trains, and when I saw how dirty the place was, I gathered up my skirts. I couldn’t help it. But your mother walked right over and sat down on the edge of the bed and took Nell’s hand and began to talk to her. That was the way she was.”

  The first time I heard this story it ended there. The next time, years later, it had a different ending: “When we got home Blossom burst out, ‘Mother, I am ashamed of Annette. She gathered up her skirts so they wouldn’t touch anything!’ And Mother filled a basket with food and wine and clean sheets, and said, ‘Annette, since you behaved that way, you can take this to Nell. And you can take her that kimona you’re so fond of.’ ”

  This severity was never meted out to my uncle. It is, of course, easier to perceive that a child is being spoiled than to prevent it, but my grandfather tried. Where my Maxwell grandparents quarreled over the bills that came on the second day of January, my Grandfather and Grandmother Blinn had words over Teddy. At some point, all unknowing, my uncle had stepped into quicksand: he had discovered how much he could get away with.

  My Aunt Edith (who was really my cousin once removed) was, on the other hand, not allowed to get away with anything. She was the oldest and that in itself would make for a stricter upbringing, but anyway, from things she said over the years, I have the impression that she nourished a number of grievances, and felt that my grandparents had distinguished between her and their own children. Annette says they didn’t. If she had not loved my Grandmother Blinn dearly, or if my Grandmother Blinn had not loved her, would my Aunt Edith have taken such pride in setting before us my Grandmother Blinn’s Thanksgiving dinner, from beginning to end?