Finding Mary: A clash over values

Flying from Baltimore, Md. to Charleston, S.C., I wondered what awaited me. Since we first connected through the ancestry site, 23andMe, in my search for my mother’s roots, my cousin, Bobbi Jo* and I had expressed radically different views on America’s racism legacy.

My chief focus of the trip was to meet relatives discovered on 23andMe and Ancestry.com. But it became clearer over time that Bobbi Jo’s agenda was different. She seemed on a mission to convert me to her view that all things South Carolinian were better and all things elsewhere were less than good. 

Don’t get me wrong: There is enormous beauty in South Carolina and the state has a fascinating history, and I met wonderful people there. Bobbi Jo was generous with her time, opening her home to me for two and a half weeks during my three-week trip and driving me to appointments.

One of those appointments took me to the Charleston Naval Shipyard ,where my mom’s adoptive father, Edward J. Hunt, had been stationed more than 100 years earlier. He rose to the rank of chief petty officer working in ship boiler rooms during more than 20 years of service. 

The question that preoccupied me during the navy yard visit, and during my entire southern trip, was how did my mom’s adoptive dad end up adopting my mom and bringing her from Charleston to be raised in Lynn?

My sister Frances commented various times how tender and loving Edward J. Hunt was to our mom. But my mother’s adoptive mother was a different story and the way “Nana” treated our mother would fall today under the category of battering. 

After the shipyard visit, we visited Florence Crittenton Programs, a home for unwed mothers to see if they had my mother’s birth and adoption records. They were generous with their time but did not have any information or records to provide us with. 

My mother was born in St. Francis Hospital in Charleston. Bobbi Jo and I looked for the street for the hospital, at one point asking a registered nurse who was walking near Calhoun Street for its location. 

She laughed and said, “I work in that building and the successor building at this site is now called the Rutledge Tower.” We drove there and I contemplated standing at the place where my mom was born on March 24, 1927. I reached out to my sister Frances via Duo and showed her the building. It was a very emotional moment for both of us. 

We went to Roper St. Francis Hospital in the West Ashley section of Charleston the next day where the lobby has pictures of the original St. Francis Hospital.

As generous as she was in showing me around, Bobbi Jo was equally intent on giving me her perspective on the Civil War, slavery and the South. Fort Sumter National Monument is where the first shots of the Civil War were fired by Confederate troops and I asked her if she could see a way that slavery as an institution could have been ended without a civil war? 

Her reaction was startling. This petite, 75-year-old woman got loud, red-faced and started yelling at the top of her lungs while slamming her fist against the steering wheel.

“You could be killed for saying something like that,” she said.

“Killed by you?” I asked. 

She calmed down slightly and said there are still southerners who would kill me for asking such a question. 

I was startled and worried her rage might cause her to have a heart attack. But my question reflected my concern that there are some people in our country today who want a new civil war. 

The memory of the Civil War in our country and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our citizens should be instructive on why we need to take measures to avoid such an occurrence in our lifetime.

Our verbal clash aside, my trip to Charleston was marked, thanks to Bobbi Jo, with great food and a wonderful wade into the city’s rich cultural heritage, including concerts, art studios and Irish music. 

But the purpose of my trip was to meet distant relatives in my search for my mother’s roots. Bobbi Jo introduced me to another cousin, Ana Lee.* Like Bobbi Jo, Ana Lee was originally from Davidson County, N.C., where my mother’s biological father, Charles Everett Kepley, was born. 

Out of earshot from Bobbi Jo, I asked Ana Lee if she would join us in North Carolina to tour Davidson County and visit its library with its impressive genealogical resources. She shook her head and said she didn’t want to offend Bobbi Jo.

“You already have a general commanding your movements,” she observed. 

I never got to go to North Carolina to see my new-found family or to go to the Davidson County library. The librarian was kind enough to send me 16 pages of information detailing my grandfather’s origins and family.

Bobbi Jo also introduced me to cousin Paul,* a Charleston resident and third cousin to me. A minister, he initially reacted cautiously to my questions before  loosening up and proving to be a very funny man. He mentioned his dad and he used to joke about the Kepleys — my grandfather’s family.

*The writer has used a pseudonym for privacy purposes

NEXT — The focus of my quest into my past turns to cousin Bobbi Jo’s slave-owning ancestors in Beaufort County, S.C. and the New Reconstruction National Park there.