Apocryphal Family Tree: The Rough Draft

The Family Tree

Winnie is a short woman who fills a room with her presence, at least when she wants to. She's ambiverted leaning toward introverted, which I also am, and switches between the two depending on what the situation calls for. An evening where everyone has been talking about you calls for extroversion. Showiness. The effort of an introvert and the ease of an extrovert.
The way Winnie introduced herself to each of us was not different at all between me and my siblings. This made a difference to me trusting her because she treated my siblings as reverently and oddly as she treated me. She knew bits of each of our histories that no one else, at least no one else in the room, seemed to know.
My sister's first kiss was with a girl in her eighth grade class trip. My brother's community college break girlfriend had an abortion and he held her hand while that happened. I had gotten drunk and cut different words into my skin to remind myself that I was a loser or a no 1 or (and honestly this was ambitious given the size of the letters I could carve and the size of my wrist) stupid (this was after my first failed salary negotiations).
It was less than great that she'd just spilled all of this to our entire family, including people we'd never met because they'd joined the family after we'd run away and weren't tied to whatever curse or prophecy or whatever kept our family on this mythological bullshit. But it did make me like her more because she did it to all of us, my siblings and me. Like she sees us all the same. It seemed less like she held us to different esteems or cared less for any of us.
Fun fact that I learned much later: if I'd been in my journaling habit, Winnie would keep up with me the least because she could and would just thumb through my thoughts at a later date. Also she knows where to find most of my journals because of that. She also doesn't know where to find my Bone collection and she's very sorry. Did this also endear her to me? Yes. She does own both the black and white and colorized omnibus printings. She also very much ships Thorn and Fone Bone as best friends/asexual partners for life who could 100% communicate to each other through their dreams no matter their distance.
She knows all of these things because eventually she'd be spending a lot of time with me and these things go better when she makes the effort beforehand instead of as the shit comes up. Also because she doesn't have to sleep. And while everyone being in the same house previously. She'd also spied on the offspring of her brothers. I learned all of Winnie's history that she let be known and probably some shot that she let her way off base because I don't think Winnie has laser eyes. That's seems like an ability she let stay that was added during this game of family history and cultural telephone because it smacks of the 80s. Off track but not sorry.
In learning Winnie's history and lineage, I learned more about our family tree on the Washington side. My mother had been really into genealogy and as Black people, especially those with lighter skin, received access to more records and were able to trace back farther and farther, Mom got more information. The Washington binders were more not keep in the same place as the Callahan binders but we all knew they existed somewhere. We still haven't found them but no one researches their spouse's family with as much tenacity without also at some point doing their own. Our family tree is probably far more filled out than most Black families I know, but there are still missing branches fairly low down on the tree. That being said we do know Winnie is in the generation of kids born to parents freed by the Civil War, she's a post-Antebellum baby. Winnie's exact date of birth is unknown but she knows that it was spring of 1870, so freedom was still a very new and novel thing to her parents. Her eldest full brother had been born a slave just before the Civil War but never actually worked a day in the field because people with children were typically sold with their children if they were under five or six because before that the children generally wouldn't work. (RESEARCH IF THAT IS TRUE.) Based on how relationships were allowed to develop on the plantations during the fucking terrible period of enslavement Mama W knew there was a good chance that there were half siblings from the maternal or paternal side that had been produced and sold off before the war that no one talked about. The only families that were apart of this clan are the ones that directly trace their roots to Eleanor Washington, Winnie's older sister who very contrary to common practice did not take her husband Joseph Freedman's name.
Eleanor and Winnie had three brothers: Elijah, Paul, and John. Winnie kept tabs on everyone but only revealed herself and intervened in the lives of Ellie's descendants. The birth order is Elijah, Paul, Eleanor, John, and Winnie. The girls didn't have names from the Bible and the significance of that is mostly that their mother, Bathsheba, had family names to pass down that weren't Bible related. Bathsheba also had an axe to grind against Christian names because of what it made people think when they heard her name and besides Esther, everyone woman listed in the Bible separate from her husband (which is another nit to pick) leads to the downfall of someone or something. That axe is also what led her to seek out conjurers and rootworkers while she was on the plantation. Baba, as she had everyone call her, learned a lot about African Traditional Religions (ATRs nowadays) and translated it into her ancestral veneration practice while keeping things as Christian (and therefore really as "Catholic" as she could). Her parents were Baptist as was her eventual husband but syncretization can get you far in life and away from prosecution.
Side note: having the nickname Baba led Bathsheba down two paths. Or, I guess, it led her to be followed by deities in two very different cultures. One culture based on what she's invoking and one culture based solely one what her name partly invoked.
Path one: babalawos of the Ifa religion. Path two: Baba Yaga. Path two only occurred because there was such a latent, unexplored power to Baba that had yet to be explained and it could totally be from the Baba Yaga from the intervening generations or rapist generations. Consent or no, being born of power is being born of power. And having access to certain things is having access to certain things. Sometimes it is random luck and ain't no one want to say that's what happened.
Anyway, of all of Baba's children, three were born after the Civil War ended. Baba didn't think of it as being born free because ain't none of her babies get to be free the way the master's white children got to be free. She was grateful that she didn't have any of that family of monsters' offspring, though she had delivered several during her time at Washington Manor.
With neither 40 acres or a mule, their family started sharecropping on the same land that they'd previously been slaves on. All of her children had to help out. Winnie, the youngest of the bunch, knew that the family they paid rent to had previously been the family that owned her parents and older siblings and that white people in general were bad news. But sometimes teenagers be teenagers. Winnie developed a crush on a poor white boy that was also sharecropping in the Washington Manor land. Neither of them got much schooling, so they didn't realize that a star-crossed Romeo and Juliet kind of love was not some shit to aspire to. Their romance lasted for less than a week and at the end both of the teenagers ended up dead by their own hand so as to not have to live without one another.
Their love was doomed from external, rather than internal forces. The white boy who watched as his inheritance went from acres of land with dozens of people to work it for free to acres of land with a few dozen people to work it for extremely cheap was angered at the site of the two lovebirds who weren't even trying to hide their disgustingness. White people were fundamentally better than all of races of people. He even looked down at his father for sullying himself with dalliances with the Black females that led to birthing so man illegitimate half-siblings.
They laid a trap for them in the woods. Beat the crap out of them and tossed them in the river. To this day Winnie doesn't know why they weren't lynched but she thanks her lucky stars they were tossed in the river nearly dead because she's pretty sure that saved her life. Winnie came to in the water and with the help of what Winnie describes as a mermaid that was half manatee, half woman, she was able to drag her love out of the water and onto the shore. She thought about it for a minute and realized that Winnie laid on the shore, chest heaving and she saw a flick on the tail and knew the mermaid wanted her to follow. Winnie looked at the bruises forming all over the boy's body and felt the same forming on her, but she knew she needed to follow the mermaid. Winnie dove into the water hit that moment of hesitation was all the mermaid needed to get away. Winnie hasn't seen scale nor tail of the mermaid since. And that's what she wants me to figure out. We know a good deal of our family tree, a good deal more than most Black families that trace their lineage through slavery. But what Winnie needs to know is which deities are we related to.