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One Heart, One Love Of my father’s three sisters who lived to adulthood, none married well. When the eldest of the children, Lucille, left secondary school, she went to teach in a little town near Wilson, North Carolina, where she met and married a good-looking, no-good man, effectively ending her teaching career. Aunt Lucille was notorious within the family for her lack of domestic acumen, which seemed just fine to her handsome, shiftless husband and her two children. In her existence, so far-removed from our own, she struck my siblings and me as living a happy, bohemian life. We had the impression that Aunt Lucille’s one household skill was playing the piano, and we swore that we wouldn’t eat her cooking even if we were starving to death. Aunt Ruth Ann’s marriage was far more disastrous than Aunt Lucille’s. Her husband, an alcoholic who never held an honest job, openly earned his living by selling bootleg liquor. Even though they lived within a few miles of her parents and many other relatives, none of Aunt Ruth Ann’s family, except an occasional brother, ever visited her. If her brothers stopped by her house, they left their wives and children in the car. Her clientele was the underbelly of society—men and women who drank their wages, let their children run wild, and visited the bootlegger’s house rather than church on Sunday morning, after having been there on Saturday night. I knew Aunt Ruth Ann well because she, unlike her husband, was welcome in her family’s houses. She did not seem to resent us for our unforgiving attitudes toward her way of life. My mother always said that Aunt Ruth Ann was one of the nicest people she had ever met. Of my father’s sisters, Aunt Eloise seemed the closest to us although she lived the farthest away. By the time I was born, she was divorced from my cousins’ father and living and working in Baltimore. My cousins lived with our grandparents, so Aunt Eloise would come home a lot to be with them. She was a steady presence in all our lives, and when she came home from Balti4 130 One Heart, One Love more for the last time, it seemed fitting that my father, who was the closest to her in age, would be the one to go to the city and bring her back. Someone had to bring her back. Aunt Eloise had become so ill that she could not travel by herself, and we all thought she was going to die. I remember one Sunday during her illness, when the extended family had gathered at my grandparents’ house, Aunt Eloise asked to see the children. Two at a time, we were ushered from our quiet play outside into the sickroom where her bones of a face spoke to us and her sticks for arms reached out. One of my grandfather’s hunting dogs began a mournful howling from the backyard, and my father came out of the house to run the dog off with a stick of stove wood. Even we children knew that a dog howling for no good reason is a harbinger of someone’s death. When Aunt Eloise recovered, she moved to Scarsdale, New York, where she became the live-in maid for a rich Jewish family. She raised the two children in that family, a cockeyed compensation for not having been able to raise her own. On Thursdays she would take the train to Mount Vernon, a workingclass community, where she would shop and visit with a woman she had met at church. When her daughters and nieces began graduating from high school, she rented first a room and then an apartment in Mount Vernon, so that they would have a place to stay when they came to the city looking for work to help pay their way through college. Over our college years, Aunt Eloise helped to find jobs for nine of her family’s daughters, all of whom earned college degrees. We would take the bus from Edenton, North Carolina, to New York City’s Port Authority. From there we would take a cab to Grand Central Station where we would board the train to Mount Vernon. Although exhausted from an eighteen-hour bus ride and anxious about our new situation, we would head to our jobs on the day of arrival if we had a position lined up...

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