Cease and Desist

 Dear Granddaughter,

The other day you finally asked for the consent of your grandmothers to write about them how you choose. In your imagination, every maternal grandmother lined up behind you and said, oh yes, dear, you interpret our lives through your lens - except me. I did not give you permission to rewrite my story your way. Oh I see your imagination stirring.

I won’t have it. You can’t have my life and call it terrible, colonizing, patriarchal. You can not tear down what all of your grandmothers and grandfathers have built. I do not stand behind your libel.

I have heard you. You aren’t even sure what side me and my esteemed husband were in the civil war. You suspect we supported the south. 

Likewise, you suspect several things based on my husband’s last name. I do not appreciate your judgements one bit. Because I married a Mather you suspect of us of being witch burning puritans. With absolutely no evidence to support this, you decided since these Mathers were only one generation into America in the late 1800’s, you have gone and assumed we are related to the Mather who was part of the esoteric group the Golden Dawn. 

Which ever way you look at it, you want to tarnish our name.

We, LaRue and Castleman descendants, are good people. Why you want to make my dead father off as some horrible bigamist when the record clearly shows he died the year I was born. You have no sense of pride in family name, do you? Saying he raped slaves, faked his own death and married again is a horrid thing. I wish you would shut up. I have no idea how you could imagine any of us support you here in Ancestral Land.  

My granddaughter, Jesse, is your grandmother. I have had more time to talk to her since she died in 1984 then you did while she was alive. You weren’t her favorite grandchild, As I am sure you must know. But she is really happy you want to highlight that she was a woman’s suffragist and fought for the New Deal in a touching and hilarious way. She loves those stories and tells you to imagine more of them. She loves that you realize she took her father-in-law, who lived in her house, down to the next county, to campaign for the New Deal. He sold fruit tress and she gave out New Deal fliers. They had to do it a county south of them because they couldn’t let their own community know what they supported. Jesse’s husband had a politically sensitive job. 

My own daughter, Annabelle, can’t wait for you to explore her story of leaving Kentucky in 1919 after her family settled there over a hundred years before. Like you left Georgia to become a farmer, she and her husband left a lifetime of being morticians among families they had lived with since before the American Revolution to become  diary farmers on the Gulf Coast in their later years. She loves that you see the pattern there from your own leaving of family territory. She likes the way you tell the story tracing it back to patterns beginning thousands of years ago, as our ancestors moved west with herds of domesticated animals, devouring the forests and eroding local cultures with patriarchy. Y’all too moved west (Annabelle moved south, I gently remind her). It goes to prove you are doing all the same things you whine and moan and want to change in the world. 

I can’t even get over what my own mama is happy for you to tell stories. She still hates my daddy so badly, she is ready for you to tell about him raping slaves and leaving her with practically nothing - barefoot and pregnant with me. She has no loyalty to the Castleman name.

I am so done with the lot of you.  Even my grandmother, Jane, is glad for you to expose the Indian Killing of her father. She is also glad to let you explore all the LaRue’s history, the Hugenot family she married into.  She wants you to look into the marriages between cousins and was horrified when I married Henry because he is my cousin on the LaRue side being the grandson of her husband’s brother. 

You all can just go to hell. Stop trying to tell these stories. Nice people don’t air their dirty laundry. We are patriots and proud of our heritage. I need you to cease and desist all these writings.

Your great, great Grandmother,

Melissa Castelman Mather