My Mother is My Sister

By Ogles McB'well

The story setting is in an upscale, lower-level, top-one-percent class, family environment. This employer has no earthly idea that his young caddie is not only the son of his VA team member during the war but is also his biological son!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645446965

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My Mother is My Sister

Ogles McB’well

Copyright © 2019 Ogles McB’well

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

ISBN 978-1-64544-695-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64544-696-5 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

It has been said that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Speaking of two, let me add that I’m only two generations removed from slavery in the McCarter lineage. Rick Warren once wrote, Life is about a test, trial, and testimony. When I was a toddler, my mama said the measles, mumps, and chicken pox were on me at once. I took my first baby steps around eighteen months. My speech impediment lasted the first few years of life. Of course, unplanned pregnancy wasn’t as popular in the early 1900s. A product of incest, Cherokee, and Irish descendants, and my grandfather was my father, and his daughter was my mama and sister, and his father was my grandfather/great-grandfather.

I am the fifth child by my mama and my father. My grandma died of a broken heart in 1959. She, my aunt LA, and her son, Clyde (cousin), actually showed genuine love. I am left-hand dominant (only one out of thirteen), the rarest blood type in the country. I’m the only McCarter of the thirteen children. Grandfather McCarter (Jim) was born around 1860s, as well as his wife, Lizzie Oglesby. Grandmother Annie was part Cherokee. Granddad/Dad was Irish/Cherokee Black American. Mine is a rich heritage with a range of emotions from one extreme to the other. What makes my story any different from anyone else, you may ask? There were four older siblings that shared a different name than I. However, the sixth child, who happened to be two years younger, shared the last name as the older siblings, yet their dad had long been deceased. Did I mention all six of us were born in the same town? Go figure! To the best of my knowledge, there were only two McCarters remaining thus far: my cousin, John Henry, and me, who actually carried the McCarter name.

Obviously, the makeup of me was my parents gone wrong. Conception is granted by God, whether it is a blessing or curse. The only Bible records that a woman’s womb is either fruitful or barren by God. Apparently, my parents had the proper DNA for me to be here. As far back as I can remember, things were often a little awkward. During one summer day, my younger brother came rushing into our grandfather’s house, into my bedroom with some very exciting news he wanted to share with me and show the proof of it right away.

We went back to his godparents’ house, and there it was, sitting on a night table in the hall, a picture of us two with another man and our mom.

Immediately I said to my brother, Who is that in the picture with us? and his reply shocked me.

That is our real daddy, he said!

No, it ain’t, I said!

Yes, it is. My big mama Gaither told me a little while ago.

Obviously, overhearing our dispute, she entered the hallway and told us both to get out of there and to put that picture down before we broke something.

Dale [that was the name they called him by], what have I told you about telling everything you hear, she scolded him.

Don’t tell everything I know, he said as she removed the photo from out of our reach and once again repeated her demand about getting out of the house.

Armed with this newfound information and not knowing what to believe, we returned to my grandfather’s house.

I asked my aunt Bert, Was that true about what I just learned at the Gaithers’ house!

Her response didn’t make the answer to my question any better. Later that day I asked my grandfather when he and I were all alone.

Where did you hear that from? he asked me.

After telling him, his response was as bad as his sister’s answer. Don’t listen to everything you hear, boy.

With that, the subject was now finished, period. My usual morning chores were gathering eggs, milking the cow, feeding the hog and pigs, making my bed, and other things per the demands of my elders. There was a waterfall not far from our home, where my brother and some of the other neighborhood kids and I would visit to swim and fish. Returning from the waterfall, my mom and her husband and their children were there to take me from the comfort of my grandfather’s home to relocate to Atlanta with them. It just wasn’t fair that my brother remained in our hometown where we were born, no less with his godparents and not our grandfather’s.

Needless to say, my aunt LA felt betrayed and humiliated. She was told by her sister, my mom, that she could raise me as her own child. LA never filed adoption papers because she thought her sister would never renege on their agreement. It took me some time to get adjusted to being around my siblings, my mom, and her husband. Clyde, LA’s only child, was very close to me; in fact, he was the one who named me. He made several trips to my mom’s home to help me adjust. After all, my mom’s older children didn’t care for me at all.

During one of my cousin Clyde’s visits, he and I walked to this discount store named Papa Sunshine. During the walk there, we crossed over a railway tussle bridge when my favorite ball cap blew off my head and over the bridge. Some things just weren’t meant to be. For instance, right when the cap was almost in hand, Clyde reached me just shortly before I would have fallen about fifty feet on the tracks, which surely would have resulted in serious injury, or perhaps even death. Needless to say, I didn’t recover the cap. All the way to the discount store I cried. I was between six and eight years old. This was significant because President Kennedy had not been assassinated.

The following summer a group of neighborhood friends and I were foot racing down the street when flying overhead was a large seagull that most of us hadn’t seen before. Needless to say, I was among the first in the group who looked up and ran into an adult neighbor’s car door head-on, which opened up a laceration on my right eyebrow and knocked me unconscious. While JFK and Khrushchev had their cold war, Clyde frightened me when he said the Russians were rolling down the street and that I should hide under the bed, which I did. November 22, 1963, the school principal made an announcement that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. The school dismissed early for the day. The Bible tells of Jesus’s making a statement that a prophet is not accepted in his own country. Don’t get it twisted! By no means am I claiming to be half of a prophet.

Nevertheless, because of how I came to be, practically everyone in my hometown avoided me. My older siblings blamed me for the breakup between their daddy and our mama. Aunt LA literally adopted me without the legal paper trail. Remember, the sixth child—my brother who was born two years after me in the same town—just happened to share the same last name as our older siblings. Now Clyde walked several blocks past his school to take me to the sitter, which was right down the street from their home. Every summer for years I would stay in my hometown. My younger brother lived next door to our granddad (my dad) with his grandparents.

Eventually, the older siblings and my brother JD moved in with us. Some people say God takes care of fools and babies. There are some