Should I have published this? I’m not sure. But I keep telling parts of it to people, and I did want it all in one place.
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American culture now easily criticizes fathers. On TV they are the butt of jokes. A dad bod is a body sliding toward flabbiness. A dad joke is a lame and sophomoric (but clean) joke. In historical revisionism the Founding Fathers are depicted as evil racists, when maybe half of them never owned slaves, and some of the others owned them incidentally, by inheritance, and in some cases, like Thomas Jefferson’s, could not free them simply, because Jefferson’s massive debts meant creditors could simply then take them as their own property. (Presumably why Jefferson’s now famous purported lover, Sally Hemings, was never emancipated, but simply allowed to move into town and set herself up as a seamstress.)
For President’s Day weekend this year a West Coast friend came to visit me. He’s a travel writer who frequently goes on junkets covering high end resorts. So it was easy for him to come to the DC area almost as if he were covering the various President’s Day parades in Old Town Alexandria and other nearby areas that were haunts of our Founding Fathers.
Over lunch I discovered that my friend had been adopted, and that then his adoptive parents had passed away early, one when he was a preteen, and one when he was only 17, leaving him with a house in the Bay area where he could complete high school, and an older (not adopted) sister. We had met for lunch and I asked him if he did not have any desire to do 23andMe or something similar, and find his biological family, if for no other reason than just out of curiosity.
I often proselytize for 23andMe and am in my circles met with resistance: people don’t like the idea that corporations, governments, or foreign countries like China might have their DNA on file. I don’t like that either for myself, but until I decide to take up serial killing, for me the expected value of finding lost relations outweighs the cost of the loss of privacy.
My visitor worried about the demands and pressures from a whole new family. Over mussels vin blanc I teased him: one will want a kidney, one a piece of his liver. He added bone marrow. I said it would be a new way to lose weight. And added that then one would make a prospective claim on his heart for when he was no longer using it. And a lesbian niece would want sperm to fertilize her wife.
My friend knew a bit about my own reasons for having used 23andMe, and so I told him the whole tale, including bits I have only found out in the past two years, about people who are mainly all passed, my biological father and those whose lives he impacted. And now I put it down on paper, for the first time, all in one piece.
Let me say that in a way I believe this story should really be spun into a Southern Gothic by a new Flannery O’Connor, though my biological father is actually a Chicagoan, who only spent a short time charming women in the South. And I should add, lest I seem like a very ungrateful child, that, as you will see, my biological father wasn’t really my father. I had a wonderful step-father, though as a child and a teen I did not understand how his generosity and hard work outweighed whatever problems we might have had. He’s not part of this story. This story is about a kind of monster.
I grew up, until age 4, in a household with three parents: my mother, grandmother, and grandfather. The latter was in a way not much of a presence. My maternal grandfather, Horace Powell, did not talk much. He was given to long walks in the country where we lived on his 40 acre farm, with sheep, cattle, tobacco fields, and a large vegetable patch and fruit trees and grape arbors, where he and his wife Lucille grew most of our food, when not working in the day at their textile mill factory jobs. I now think perhaps Horace was somewhat autistic. When not working at his factory job or on the farm, or hiking, he always sat in a rocking chair reading the Bible over and over, talking to no one.
At age 4 I had a hand in marrying my mother off to the aforementioned generous step-father. He was older than she by 11 years, and he owned his own barbershop and the two-unit commercial building in which it was located. My mother met him because he was the first barber I would allow to touch me without a loud protest.
When they married my mother and her new husband came to her parents’ house and the four adults (or three if we don’t count the silent Horace), asked me which household I wanted to live in. My first response was “Can’t we all live together?” at which all the adults laughed. I’ve always assumed I was given the choice because everyone wanted me to live with them. (Only a few years ago, telling this to a slightly horrified lunch partner who was my favorite college professor, did I have the thought that perhaps they were all hoping I would choose the other party. It was probably the former, but I will never know.)
My mom had acquired a child out of wedlock, and hence, back in those days in rural Tennessee, needed a husband, because of my biological father, William Maurice Hill. She’d basically run away from Nashville, Tennessee at 19, where she was an office worker after finishing a secretarial school, with an engineer just out of the Georgia Institute of Technology, 4 years her senior. After 6 years living together unwed in Los Angeles, and not getting pregnant, he did something that made her leave and come back home (I’ve never known the particulars, but one assumes adultery or violence). And according to her, that is when she discovered that she was, finally and unexpectedly, pregnant.
I’d always known about William Hill. I had some of his hardcover books with his signature in them. (Some women save an ex-lover’s t-shirt; my mom seems to have taken his Nicomachean Ethics.) I had photos of them together on a kind of ersatz honeymoon on the glass bottom boat to Catalina.
So when I was out of college and in an early job, before the internet existed, I decided to find William Hill, last known address Whittier, California. I called all the detective agencies in Washington, D.C. and in Los Angeles. They all turned me down, saying they just did divorces or they just did industrial espionage. Finally I turned to the Los Angeles Times, where the nice woman who took down copy for classifieds over the phone (pre-internet) said they had a personals section for exactly this, not for lost lovers but for lost relatives and classmates. They had a special running she said, $10 for one weekend day and 3 weekdays. I took this to mean $40 a week and thought, well, I could do that for a while on my entry-level 1980s salary. We went through the text: “Would William Maurice Hill who knew M—- G—- Powell please contact Bruce Powell Hill Majors at 202-333-xxxx?” I used a long fused name I actually went by until the 2nd grade, before jettisoning the “Hill,” and my office phone number at Georgetown University Medical Center, since this was before the days of voicemail. When I went through the text and billing with her I had been mistaken. It was $10 not per day, but for all 4 days. I realized I could afford to run this ad forever, or at least as long as this pricing lasted.
I should say that before I did this, I told my mother that I was going to do it. I told her I was simply doing it out of curiosity, not because she and the life she had arranged wasn’t enough, and that I was telling her so she could make a choice ahead of time: Did she want to know what I learned or did she never want to hear of it again?
With a wry little smile, she picked the former.
The day the ad was to run was a rare day when I actually had to leave the office at 5:00-5:30 pm, even though I often worked late, until 7 pm or so.
At home that night I kept waking up, with a very visual image of a man’s arm picking up an old rotary phone and dialing, trying to call me.
Part of my job involved managing 3 public health graduate students from the University of Maryland who had internships in my office. When I came in the next day, one of the interns said: “Oh a man called you. Right after you left.” I asked if he had left a message. He had not.
So I worked late for the next two weeks, hoping the caller would call again. He did not call, but, eventually, a letter came. William Hill had at least asked the intern (and she had not remembered to share with me this detail), my office address.
It was an odd letter and odd in a way that many of my subsequent interactions with him (which were few) and with my mother and her family were odd. Everyone had a part of a story, and everyone’s story made them look better and the other side look worse. But no one’s story was actually in direct contradiction of anyone else’s story.
The oddity in this first letter was that William Hill assumed if I was looking for him, I had only just found out about him, and had only just learned his name (I suppose he assumed I would have been looking earlier if I had known earlier - and in fact I had a few years earlier sent out many postcards to people named “Hill” in southern California, with no good results). He also assumed I must have learned about him because of a death bed confession from my mother.
(As things were to come about, he died a few years later, and my mother survived him by over two decades.)
There was a phone number in the letter and I did call. We did not discuss a lot, though I did tell him my job might be sending me to northern California soon, and if it did so I might rent a car and drive down to L.A. And he did tell me (I believe it was during this call), that someone had sent him an anonymous postcard from Tennessee when I was born, saying it was a healthy boy, and that he should not come around if he knew what was good for him. I also learned that I had four half-siblings born in California, but that he was now divorced from their mother and married to another woman, and was a step-father to a final set of children. And that the woman he had divorced took his very nice L.A. area home, complete with swimming pool.
When I did share this report with my mother the next time I visited her in Tennessee, I believe she enjoyed that last detail.
Years then went by, with me trying to reach these four half-siblings, again with no response. (An African American woman from L.A. did contact me thinking her absent father might be mine, and we might be kin, but her William Hill was actually, according to her, visibly African American, which mine was not.)
I never met my father, who I believe over-enjoyed both cigarettes and alcohol, and seems to have died on an operating table after having had a seizure or aneurysm or some kind of cardiovascular event. His kind step-daughter, who reports that he was a far better father to her than was her own disappearing father, sent me a memorial notice.
But he did once call me out of the blue, after I had come home from the aforementioned business trip to northern California. I picked up the phone and an anguished male voice, without introduction said “You must be really angry at me?” I had not been dating anyone for months, and I wracked my brain for a second as to which former lover (I’m gay) I had rejected who would make such a painful call. Then I realized it was William Hill. Somehow that I had said that I might drive to L.A. became in his mind that I was meeting him on a specific day and time at his favorite restaurant. He’d arranged for his current wife, and a friend near my age, to be with him to buffer whatever I might do if I met him. He was upset that I did not show up for this dinner I knew nothing about. For a second I felt so sorry for him, and slightly guilty I had not completed a plan to visit. And then I thought - I didn’t show up for one dinner I knew nothing about - and where were you for decades?
And then he died.
Years went by. I can’t remember if I did much more postcard mailing, or Facebook stalking, etc. etc. before I joined 23andMe, but I did think when I joined I might learn about relatives related to William Hill (as well as whether the Powell’s really had Cherokee ancestry as they, like almost every other black or white Tennessean, claim).
Nothing happened for some time. 23andMe would send me many lists of people who had a 2-3% DNA match with me and might be a 3rd or 4th or 5th cousin. I began to ignore my 23andMe emails, occasionally taking various online tests they offer to complete their database.
Then one day I realized someone had emailed me a month or two earlier, through the 23andMe system. Someone with a 12.5% DNA match. Exactly the correct amount for the child of a half-sibling.
And so I met Michael, a Florida architect, 20 years younger than me, who was the child not of one of the four Los Angeles half-siblings, but of another set of half-siblings, two Atlanta area half-siblings, who had been born years before me.
This was information that was hard to process. My mother did not seem the type to steal a husband. And how would she - at 19 - steal a husband in Nashville from a wife who lived 2 hours south in Georgia. What to think, what to think.
(Though - I myself “stole” a husband when I was around 21 - falling for someone I did not know was in a (gay) couple, and who was not sharing that information as I did so. Curiously someone also just a few years older than me, as William Hill had been older than my mother.)
By the time I learned this detail, my mother was beginning to lose her faculties just enough that, even if I had wanted to interrogate her about it, I could not trust the accuracy of what I might learn. My mother was beginning not to recognize me, thinking I was her (deceased) brother or another relative or acquaintance, and only showing a real memory of the past when I would take her for a drive and play music from the 40s or 50s on SiriusXM radio - and she would know and sing along to many lyrics.
But eventually I did find the California half-siblings, or at least two of them. And they began to fill in more details.
One, the first to contact me, is named after William Hill. He was excited to talk to me. He’d apparently decades earlier done his own trip around the country trying to find the lost half-siblings, First he met one of the Atlanta ones, a daughter, (her brother had already died). Then apparently he had traveled to Washington, D.C., and purportedly found my building, but was frustrated by a front desk that would not let him in or up. I was very touched by this effort, and it led me to overlook the huge number of texts I began to receive, odd texts on odd topics, sometimes on things like Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders that I might be interested in, but also on veganism, landscaping projects, hikes, his playing the guitar. Among the other odd texts he told me a number of strange stories about our mutual biological father’s own troubled childhood (I’d heard some of these before - an orphan in the Great Depression he had eventually been raised by a Catholic priest in Bellevue, Illinois). And he told me that William Hill had told him that the most important thing in life was to impregnate as many women as possible.
I suppose I can at least credit William Hill with living up to his own standards.
Then another L.A. brother contacted me, the one only just a little younger than me (a little less than two years).
A realtor, like me, I had actually found his California real estate website. It was pretty boring (he later told me a third half-sibling was an IT person and had built it for him - but over a decade ago). One curious detail though: in his list of books recommended for sellers and buyers, pedestrian and obvious books for first time buyers, there was a book by Ron Paul. I’m a Ron Paul fan. (More things that could be genetic: when Michael’s, the Florida architect half-nephew’s, wife opened the mailbox and found my Holiday card, she was shocked. Michael and I have the same handwriting.)
The older half-brother filled in other details. William Jr. was sending me odd texts because he actually had a diagnosed psychological disorder. William Hill Sr. had actually been abusive to him, and had also, according to the one sister among these four half-siblings, sexually abused her (though her older brother said he did not believe this). But the really interesting story he had to share was that the first of the wives - legal or common law - in Atlanta, was from a family that had paid William Hill to divorce their daughter and leave and never come back. In the 1950s. This fits better with my understanding of what I think my mother would or could do.
I got other bits of stories, mainly about William Hill’s shattered midwestern family during the Great Depression. I found some Census records online on the website the Mormons provide. (My "new" half-nephew Michael enjoys this genealogical research, and we share photos and PDFs and screenshots when we find a new record.)
At some point I told a little of all this to one of the surviving Powells, my mother’s first cousin, now in her 90s, who I will call Dottie. I always called Dottie “Aunt Dottie,” and her slightly younger brother, who I will call Howie, “Uncle Howie.” Dottie is sharper than anyone else in our family in their 90s (or even 80s), and Howie had one of the better careers of all my Tennessee factory and farm and barber relatives. Howie was a salesman who travelled the country for years selling giant generators and other machinery for a hydroelectric company related to the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority). (I should add Uncle Howie always seemed to both like me and keep me at a distance. And now, perhaps, I know why.)
According to Aunt Dottie, before I was born Howie went to L.A. on a sales trip. He had my mother’s, his first cousin’s, L.A. address. He found her apartment building and went to her apartment and knocked on the door.
A man opened the door, holding a gun, pointed at Howie. He ordered Howie in, and had him sit on the couch and explain who he was. Eventually Howie explained enough that he escaped.
What could that have been about? Drug deals? Loan sharks?
Or had William Hill impregnated one too many women, one who already had a husband?
Do I have MORE half-siblings out there?
I may never know.
A shorter version of this was published at SpliceToday.