Farewell to Egypt

By Cheri' Ben-Iesau

This is the true story about a man trying to hide his identity and the pain it caused those unfortunate enough to love him. He rainvented himself and then his past, it caught up to hm in the form of an abandoned son. This is the true story of my father, the lives he affected, and the history that launched him on an unbelievable path.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CB FLEMISTER BOOKS
• Release date: Jul 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578543147

Cheri' Ben-Iesau

Cheri' Ben-Iesau was born in Los Angeles and grew up in a nomadic family who roamed the length of California from San Diego in the south, to Crescent City in the north. Cheri' joined the Coast Guard in 1986 and spent the next 25 years in this same nomadic vein. The Coast Guard eventually brought her to Louisiana in the late '90s where, after marrying a local boy, she threw out the anchor and made New Orleans her home. Cheri's written works are autobiographical. Her first book, The Long September was gleaned from e-mails sent while in New Orleans' City Hall during Hurricane Katrina. Farewell to Egypt is inspired by her family history and the name Ben-Iesau. Cheri' also works as an artist. The cover art on her books is her own and she shows regularly at galleries in New Orleans and throughout the U.S. Features about Cheri' and her art have appeared in Louisiana Homes & Gardens, Professional Mariner, and the Times Picayune.

Book preview

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Copyright © 2019 by C. Ben Iesau

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.

ISBN 781518882944 (paperback)

This is an autobiography. I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places, I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence.

Cover Illustration Copyright © 2019 by Cheri’ Ben-Iesau Creative Arts

Author photograph by Scott Foust

Formatting and cover design by Damonza

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

ONE:

Birth

TWO:

Theories

THREE:

A Child Of The Nile

FOUR:

Preacher’s Daughter

FIVE:

A Very Short Honeymoon

SIX:

Homeless Again

SEVEN:

Ballona Creek

EIGHT

Klamath

NINE

Devolution

TEN

The Daisy Problem

ELEVEN

Another Sibling

TWELVE

Death Of A Son

THIRTEEN

Almost

FOURTEEN

At Arm’s Length

FIFTEEN

Farewell To Egypt

About the Author

Family Tree

Endnotes

In loving memory of Pamela Benedict Collins (1943–2014), who helped me see my worth.

Acknowledgements

Very little worth doing is accomplished without help—this book is a perfect example and I acknowledge my debt to so many who, without their involvement this could not have happened.

First, there were those who listened, relistened, then listened again as I mentally worked through the story. I cauliflowered the ears of my husband, my dear friend Steve Sutton (1961–2018), and Dawn Jelks, who kept a family-tree schematic I had etched into the dirt of her Toyota’s passenger door for many months, so we could use it as a reference.

Then there were the beta-readers. Nancy Riikonen, again, Dawn Jelks, and Andrea Marcovici honed the manuscript, taking an emotionally charged disjointed narrative and making it into a clear, readable story. And along the way they made me a better writer.

Thanks go to Joe Vetromile for helping me figure out how to Eat the Elephant and get started—without him I might still be found cobweb-covered, hovering over a blank page. I want to thank David B. Wolf of David Wolf Law, PLLC, for his promptness, cheerfulness, and sage legal guidance. Hugs and a big thanks go to Laurie Reed and Deyette Danford of Ariodante Contemporary Gallery for their encouragement, spreading the word, and hosting that first book signing. And I thank my husband, Timothy J. Thompson, for the little things—keeping water in the dog’s bowl, the chickens fed, and all the other minutia he shouldered while I worked to drag the story out of my soul and onto the written page.

To all of you, too many to list but who played a part, I thank you.

Introduction

Every succeeding generation has the opportunity to heal the wounds of the past.

—LAURENCE OVERMIRE

Occasionally a story comes along that is so unusual it begs to be told. The sort of story that gets rehashed at family get-togethers, a story that leaves new initiates feeling speechless but with a hundred unanswered questions.

I believe this is one of those stories.

This story often launches after someone asks about my surname: Ben-Iesau. Where did it originate, what does it mean?

This is a true story glimpsed through the foggy windows of time. It will make you feel anger but will also challenge you to find compassion for the characters as their story and their hidden actions unfold.

It is the story of damage done by generations of oppression, abuse, poverty, deception and bad choices made for seemingly noble reasons. It’s also a story of how hope grows in even the poorest of soil.

We all construct our futures from the rubble of our past. Fortunately, even the most dismal of past histories can, with a little compassion, forgiveness, and distance, be crafted into a future resplendent with hope.

There is always hope.

In Akan, a language of South Ghana, there is a word that translates loosely to go back and fetch it.

Sankofa.

A deeper meaning of Sankofa is said to be that by looking back in time at the rubble of our past we know better who we are today.

My family history is better documented than most. An ancestor was in England’s royal court during the Stuart Wars, one was a bodyguard to General George Washington. They were sheepherders in Australia, cattlemen in Texas, dairymen in Washington, and their names riddle Georgia’s slave-tarnished history as both cotton growers and cotton pickers. Despite this, I spent most of my life as an orphan of my heritage, a result of my parents’ attempts to flee the truth. I floated, rudderless, on a sea of contrived lineage without a personal experience of Sankofa.

But that would change.

"Farewell to Egypt" is a story about joyfully embracing who we are. This is a story about the impact our decisions can have on successive generations, even though the affected lives are sometimes separated by centuries. For me, this phenomenon was one of the most poignant aspects of this journey.

Each of us is a sentence with only limited meaning until we take our place in the paragraphs of a family history which together make up the chapters and verses of mankind’s tale.

I have tried to stay as historically accurate as possible, but where there was no record and a need to connect the dots, I did my best to fill the silence with an honest voice. Many of the names have been changed for all the usual reasons. And at the end of the book there is a family tree: it may be a useful reference in keeping the characters clearly identified.

But now it’s time to settle in while I tell you my story.

ONE:

Birth

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.

—J.R.R. TOLKIEN,

The Fellowship of the Ring

The contractions came with a malevolent force. Nearly a decade and a half had passed since the last time she had given birth and those years had not conspired to make it any easier. No—age had done exactly the opposite.

She bore down hard, grunting unconsciously, feeling the pain of labor run through her body like a massive wave slamming against a foundering trawler. She’d had two daughters early in life. One day their father, her first husband, had died quite unexpectedly. At only thirty-six he’d suffered a massive heart attack.

Now she had been married to the new husband for only ten months. He had dropped her off at the hospital and left.

It was 1961 and not expected, nor even desired, for the father to watch his child be born. But they usually were there, in the waiting room, cigars at the ready. And this was his first child. You would think he would have stayed close at hand, anticipating the life-changing news, It’s a boy, or It’s a girl. Mother and baby are resting fine.

But that was not the case.

Once married they had moved nearly 1,000 miles from her home. As a result, there were no friends or family present who might have been eager to herald the birth of the new baby. But now it was just her, and the pain and the pending child.

Her baby, a girl, was born at midnight. A child on the cusp of Pisces and Aries, noted the superstitious mother. Otherwise, as births go, it was an unremarkable event. Then she rested.

When it was finally time to go home, it stung to learn that her husband refused to come to the hospital to pick them up. In short order she was becoming quite adept at making excuses to cover her embarrassment over his bad behavior. Not a skill to be proud of, but one that was necessary for social survival, for her to feel like she had saved face. Maybe she didn’t know it yet, but she would feel the need to lie for him in this way so often it would become as automatic as breathing. So often his lies would replace reality.

He’s mad because it’s his first and he wanted a boy, she explained to anyone who would listen.

Was she also covering to reassure herself that things would be all right? Cognitive dissonance worked to create a narrative she could live with, a narrative she felt would sound reasonable to the hospital staff.

But his refusal had nothing to do with the baby being a girl and that was the second sting.

Would they mind calling a taxi?

And so, on that day Cheri’ Ben-Iesau cabbed it into the crap-shoot of life.

TWO:

Theories

They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succour. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.

—NAYOMI MUNAWEERA

By the time 1969 rolled around I turned seven and had developed several important theories about life:

That all the continents were once one gigantic island.

That chocolate milk was linked to skin color; the more chocolate consumed the more chocolate the skin color.

And my third theory, the one that I was most certain of:

That I was the only real person in existence.

The first two theories resulted from observing what a child’s mind saw as obvious facts, but while I was convinced of its truth, actual proof of the third theory was more elusive.

Like all children I was inquisitive, but my siblings and I had minds made more creative by having to invent our own entertainment in a mostly television and toy-free world. This was thanks to our father’s not-so-creative money-management skills. A trait that resulted in the family living in a 1955 Pontiac Safari station wagon for a significant amount of the time. Evictions and homelessness defined much of our existence during the 1960s and early 1970s.

We were properly housed only occasionally. By properly housed I mean living in anything more than the Safari wagon. I have very few memories of homes where we had lived. I suspect much of what I recall is the creative hole-patching our minds do when cobbling together a cohesive past, filling in the gaps between actual memories and those implanted by stories and some old, faded Polaroids.

At one time we lived in an apartment which apparently had a pool. My parents discussed their fear about the pool since my little sister, Shami, was a chronic sleepwalker. I remember an even earlier house where I had my first nightmare. I thought a tree was going to fall on us. When I woke up, I looked out the window to see the tree being ripped out of the ground, its roots laying completely exposed around its trunk. I must have screamed because my mother came running. She studied the catastrophe unfurling outside the bedroom window and explained that the roots I saw were merely the shadows cast by the tree limbs under a full moon.

*

It was about seven when fate would find our family living in another house, for a little while at least. One I recall a bit better.

It was a great luxury to sleep in beds instead of stacked belly-to-butt in the back of the wagon. Living in a house also afforded some other luxuries. There was a stove and an oven which had to be lit with a match. This was significant for two reasons. First, my mother baked a lemon meringue pie for my birthday. I watched as this woman who was disinclined to cook mixed up eggs, lemons and sugar into a golden filling,