A Forgotten Galveston Home: Memoir Excerpt

February 15, 2024
By Vicki Entreken
[Excerpt was originally posted Feb. 8, 2023]

Finding the 1940 census and the matching picture of my mother’s biological family was a huge day in my research. I wonder how Mom would have reacted if I told her it was all on the internet and I could show her. She wasn’t a fan of technology. Avoided it as best she could. But what if I did the driving? 

I imagine my mother and me in a coffee shop, as if she hadn’t already left this world. I order hot mocha cappuccinos, and she settles into a table by the window so she can look out at the chatty couple on the patio with their pugs. I like to imagine her at a time before she started going blind. Before she stopped leaving the house for fear of falling. 

At the table, I pull out my laptop and show her the census. She squints to see the handwriting, then reaches into her purse to find her reading glasses. It takes a few moments to dig through the receipts, folded McDonald’s napkins, and medications. When she looks up, she sees the document with the names of her first family; Darrell, Geneva, Richard, and her own name (the one she never told me about), Geralda. She’d probably say, with no expression at all, “Huh. Would you look at that?” then look away. I’ve seen these pauses, these non-expressions many times before. 

Whenever she responded like that, I never knew if she was just processing the information, or that she didn’t trust what she was seeing or hearing. I wouldn’t expect her to gasp or scream or bounce in her seat. I don’t remember ever seeing her get excited about anything. I don’t even know what her excited expression would look like. 

“Here, you lived on Avenue O in 1940. Want to see if the house is still there?” I’d say. 

“How are we going to do that? You know I can’t fly anywhere now,” she’d say, her dependence on dialysis now seeping into my imaginary scene. 

“We wouldn’t go to Galveston.” I chuckle at her ignorance of technology, something I accepted in her long ago. It seemed like every time we got together, I was explaining how I could send email from my Blackberry or how my camera sends pictures wirelessly to my printer. She always had a blank face for technology, and gave up on it a long time ago. I imagine telling her, “We can look at it online,” and her thinking, she’s just like her father. 

I turn my laptop around and with Google Street View, I find a tiny house with blue trim, one window in the front and what looks like an enclosed porch space. Plants decorate each side of the stoop. The small dirt yard is unkempt, three cinder blocks stand near the sidewalk and potted plants sit on a makeshift shelf placed awkwardly in the middle of the yard. A beer can rests in the weeds. There’s not much to this house. To think that Mom lived here back in the early 40’s, and it looks like this now is depressing. I wonder if I should bother to show it to her at all. 

Mom sips her cappuccino and there’s whipped cream on her upper lip. She used to do that on purpose to make us kids laugh. She’d say, “What? What?” as if she didn’t know it was there. I thought she was being silly and I only played along to humor her. Mom didn’t play much when I was little, so when she was being silly it seemed for her, out of character. This time, in our imaginary coffee shop, I want her to do it again. I would smile and laugh. Then I’d wipe the cream off her face and give her a kiss. But, instead she pulls a napkin from her purse, wipes her own lip, and looks at me. All grown up now, no silly to be had. The moment is gone. 

I decide to show her the house.

“There it is,” I say, and she squints again at the screen. Then she looks over the laptop at me and says, “I don’t know how you look at these computers all day.” I scooch around to her side of the table as she studies the photo. I picture her as a little girl, five, sitting on that stoop with her brother. The island is hot, no trees, and the kids are sweaty and dirty. Then I look at Mom. She gazes at the photo for a long moment and I wonder what she’s remembering. Her father? Brother?

“You sure that’s it?” she asks. Then she glances at me. “It looks so small.” 

I’m not surprised by her comment. It reminds me of a day when I visited the home I grew up in. Dad sold the house on Crawford Street in Ft. Myers in the early 80’s. It burned down the next year because some idiot was smoking in bed. When I was about 17, I went back to the lot. It had been cleared, so I stood on the foundation where the back patio ended, and stared out into the back yard sectioned off by the chain link fence. The storage shed was still there, along with what was left of the huge mango tree that we used to climb, and a short pile of firewood overgrown with weeds. I remembered how tiny the yard seemed compared to when I lived there as a kid. 

Mom used to tell me that when she wins the lottery, she’s going to buy me a bigger house. I’d remind her, “I already have a house, Mom.” 

“A bigger house. That one’s too small,” she said. I never understood her logic and usually dismissed it as some materialistic view – always wanting more. But now, I wonder if she had something against small houses. Maybe she hated them. The wooden farmhouse in Gainesville, where she was raised by her adoptive parents, had only two bedrooms and one bathroom. Small. Builders today don’t even bother with two-bedroom houses. Now, looking at the front of that little Galveston house, I wonder if it ever felt like a home for her. There’s no way to know what went on in the Cravey family by looking at internet pictures of the front of a house. Technology doesn’t provide that information for us.   

If I could find more about her mother, the woman who took her away from that house and later abandoned her, would she want to know? It’s possible. Then I remember how she used to get upset and change the subject. I can see Mom turning away and gazing out the window of the coffee shop, her short pudgy fingers wrapped around the warm cup on the table. I’m remembering how fragile she was. This imaginary moment, her looking away, me acknowledging the silence, is when I see myself closing the laptop. My mother just never seemed strong enough to know more. 

A look ahead: I’ve done more research on this house, watching it be sold, remodeled, and sold again. I even stayed in it once in 2018. How else do you learn about the lives of the biological family your mother kept secret from you? Stay tuned!

Thank you for reading. 
I appreciate you.
~ Vicki