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I hunted for at least seven months to find a specific gift this Christmas that was a half-century overdue. When I finally came across it and slipped it in the mail to Arkadelphia, Ark., I felt as though I had finally put some kind of personal closure to one of my family’s saddest stories.
I was one of three siblings and seven first cousins who pretty much grew up together in Charlottesville. All our dads were brothers, and all the moms took turns raising us, as all the grown-ups in each household worked in various family restaurants. The youngest cousin in our group, Brenda, was the daughter of Dad’s youngest brother, and she — being the baby — was a particular favorite of everyone. We seven rapscallions spent hours playing cowboys and Indians and games made up on the spur of any beautiful summer day.
THE VANISHING OF BRENDA
Then, when Brenda was 5 years old, she and her mother disappeared, vanished overnight.
The mother, secretly pregnant by a man not my uncle, took Brenda via a circuitous route to Atlanta. There she had her baby and some months later abandoned them both in the apartment where they lived. Brenda recalls trying to feed and care for Baby Lorna, whom she adored, but she doesn’t recall how long they were there alone. Eventually the police came and took them both away to an orphanage.
Meanwhile, Brenda’s father returned to his parents’ home in Arkansas and searched for her, with no idea where she and her mother were. When he tracked her down at the orphanage months later, Brenda remembers coming forward for a jubilant reunion with her dad, only to have him say of the little sister whose hand she held, “That one is not mine.”
So Brenda lost her mother, her six cousins, her baby sister, her home and what she had known as her life before she was even old enough to start school. Within another year or so her dad, unable to care for her and apparently too ashamed to let any of the Charlottesville family know of his difficulties, put Brenda up for adoption.
In 1989, 30-some years after I had last seen her, Brenda came back into my life. Now the wife of a Baptist preacher and the mother of three, she was ready to track down her original family and even the mother who had walked away from her. So she and her husband came to Virginia, reunited with her cousins, and went to Crozet for a most interesting reunion with her mother.
THE STORY … AND THE HUNT
As you can imagine, there are a hundred sidebars to this story, and Brenda has put them down in a manuscript that I’m taking a shot at editing for her. In that manuscript I found the paragraph that led to my Christmas-present hunt – a memory from our childhood together:
“We didn’t have a lot of cowboy and Indian props, except for one coonskin cap, and Randy, being the oldest, got to be the one to wear it. I thought he looked mighty important wearing that furry cap with its long tail swinging down the back of his neck. I so much wanted to wear it, even for just a little bit, but I knew trying to sell him on equal wearing time would be impossible. So I admired the cap from a distance and felt privileged whenever he was generous enough to let me touch it. I never knew which of our aunts or uncles was responsible for providing just one coonskin cap in the midst of seven children, but I’m sure it was the cause for lots of battles among the Fitzgerald cousins for years to come.”
If it was, Brenda missed those battles. She missed so much, and we probably missed more, considering that Brenda is now one of the dearest people I’ve ever met.
My brother and sister and our spouses and I all got to spend a full week with Brenda in Arkansas this year, so “she” was my favorite Christmas gift. And mine to her, thanks to the Tennessee Welcome Center Gift Shop, was a soft, silky, ring-tailed coonskin cap.
Randy Fitzgerald teaches modern American literature at Virginia Union University. He was a longtime public relations director at the University of Richmond and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Contact him at
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