Laurina's Quest for Her Roots

By Addie L. Chavis

This story is about LAURINA (a young girl) wondering what was the other half of her family heritage/genealogy). Where did her ideas and thoughts come from. Her inner self kept saying she was much more. At the age of 7, she grew up with a mother, stepfather and siblings of her mother and stepfather. She always felt like an outsider in the family she lived with. She was pretty much treated like a second class member of the family. She knew in her inner self she was capable of much more and felt that her other side came from a great family. Laurina was the oldest in the family and got stuck with baby sitting and cleaning. As she grew older, her inner sense knew there was more to her life and self worth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465393647

Addie L. Chavis

Author, Addie Lee Chavis born in Louisiana in 1940. This book is dedicated to my children, grandchildren and future generations. The names of the people in the book have been changed to protect their privacy. Laurina in Search of her Roots is an account of her life and the search of her genealogy.

Book preview

Laurina’s Quest

For Her Roots

Addie L. Chavis

Copyright © 2011 by Addie L. Chavis.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011960183

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4653-9363-0

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4653-9362-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-9364-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION

THIS STORY IS about LAURINA (a young girl) wandering what was the other half of her family heritage/genealogy). Where did her ideas and thoughts come from. Her inner self kept saying she was much more. At the age of 7, she grew up with a mother, stepfather and siblings of her mother and stepfather. She always felt like an outsider in the family she lived with. She was pretty much treated like a second class member of the family. She knew in her inner self she was capable of much more and felt that her other side came from a great family. Laurina was the oldest in the family and got suck with baby sitting and cleaning. As she grew older, her inner sense knew there was more to her life and self worth.

CHAPTER 1

LAURINA HAS FOND memories of her two grandfathers and a grandmother. Her mother’s father and mother raised her until she was 5 years old. She called them mama and daddy. Laurina was a quiet shy girl and didn’t talk much, but did a lot of listening. In the 1940s, they lived in Louisiana in the country two-story farmhouse and a huge barn with horses. Her grandparents also had an old Model-T Ford, which had to be cranked to drive it. The car was used mostly for going to church or town. Laurina’s granddaddy would hitch a horse to a flat bed sleigh and travel the creed looking for crayfish, fish, and frogs (he was very fond of eating cooked frog legs), she sometimes rode with him. The other thing he was fond of was black birds. He would rig up a frame with chicken wire stretched across it and a stick holding up one side of the frame with a string attached to it. Then he would place bird seed or corn under the trap and wait for the birds to eat. When he had enough of them under his trap, he would pull the string and caught the black birds. The closes house in the area was a one-room schoolhouse a mile away. Her grandfather raised many kinds of vegetables, but the ones she remembered most was the cotton and watermelons. When the worker went to the fields to pick cotton, she sometimes went with them to eat a watermelon. She would drop the watermelon on the ground to split it and then eat the insides of it; it was very tasty. In the summer, she remembers being bath in a galvanized tub filled in the creek with water and little fish swimming about. Laurina remembered jumping off a chicken coup which she and a cousin was playing on and cut her wrist with a large piece of glass sticking up out of the ground. That was a dramatic memory for her. Her grandmother fixed her wound herself for there wasn’t a doctor in miles. She also remembered one of her cousins shooting her in the leg with a BB gun, this BB still reside in Laurina’s leg today. When she was slimmer in size she could put her finger on it and feel it, but when she grew heavier she could no longer feel it. You can also still see the scare on her wrist when she cut it with glass even today at age 64. Her grandmother’s remedy for cuts were to bath it in Epsom Salt and warm water.

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Later Laurina’s mother and father ended up living in Texas and this is where her father’s sister also lived with her four children and another married daughter in Louisiana. Two events in Laurina’s life she remembered one was when a ship blew up in the harbor and killing many people in Texas City. She was playing and all of a sudden the whole ground shook under her feet and she was knocked to the ground. It was later reported that a ship blew up and many people were either hurt or killed by the strap metal flying through the air. The other event was the approach of a Hurricane and her whole family had to evacuate to a Coliseum that was about the highest building in Galveston for the night. Upon returning home, the streets were filled with water for days. Laurina remembered going to a Catholic school with her cousin (Patty), who was a lot older (a teenager). The Nuns were very strict. If you did something wrong, they would hit you with a ruler on the heel of the palm of your hand. This was a new experience for Laurina. Patty was a beautiful girl (who Laurina admired). She had long red hair and freckles and had a magnificent soprano voice. She loved to sing Ava Maria. They played a lot together. Patty later move to Rhode Island to live with her uncle and went to school there.

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Laurina didn’t remember her father being around much in those early years of her life or any divorce. Her mother remarried another man when she was 7 years old. Later when she lived with her mother (which she called mother since mama was already reserved for her grandmother) and new stepfather (Daddy-O), who had just married in 1947, she didn’t see much of her grandparents after that. They moved to El Paso where Laurina was put in a public school and took ballet lessons. One of the events that she will never forget at school was the appearance of a stage coach for the children to ride. It was drawn by four horses and Laurina had her ride on the stage coach which was very enjoyable but a little bumpy. They live around a lot of Mexican people, and Laurina could speak Spanish but soon

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forgot the little Spanish she knew when she moved out of the neighborhood. Laurina learned to speak Spanish while playing with the children in her neighborhood. At the age of 7 years, she quickly learned to dislike her stepfather after he tried to rape her. He claimed that Laurina called him black (was this a way of getting back at a 7 year old?). As time went by the family visited Mexico; it was a vast difference between the people of the rich and the poor in Mexico. There was no middle class; you were either rich or very poor. The rich lived in fine houscindo and the poor lived in adobe huts with no floors or glass on the windows. Many of the children would wade in the Rio Grand River (which looks like a large ditch with a small steam running through it. Possibly it was larger up or down stream.). They would take long poles with large cones on top to collect money being thrown in by the tourist.

Laurina was