Sadie's Life-Altering Secret

By Raziel Bearn

Sadie’s Life-Altering Secret is a fact-rooted fictionalized memoir as her daughter imagined it of what caused one young woman from Texas to flee from family and start a surprising new life in Missouri.

Born fourth of six kids during the Great Depression, Sadie starts life as a disappointment to her under-employed father who wanted a son, and another burden to her under-educated mother who needed a rest. Determined to chart a different course for herself, she looks outside the family for role models and skills to elevate her life’s chances. But one instance of misplaced sympathy changed her forever and could have destroyed everything she dreamed of having.

When researching her family tree, Raziel discovers photos from her mom’s high school yearbook. Suddenly she sees her mother as she was in the era when Raziel was conceived and gets a glimpse of Sadie’s early life and interests in an oil boom town of East Texas. A newspaper article from just a few years later surfaces, adding more details and a connection to the US Air Force.

Then DNA results reveal the truth Sadie had never admitted to her parents and siblings, lied about to her husband, and concealed from their children. She even declined to tell the whole truth to her best friend who had seen her through the most difficult of times.

It is with undeniable, documented facts, shared memories, and plausible conjecture that Raziel weaves together the memoir-esque story of Sadie’s Life-Altering Secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liminal Realities
• Release date: Apr 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215464113

Raziel Bearn

Raziel Bearn is a seeker of ancestral and personal truths, who discovered her birth mother when Raziel was 63 and her mother had less than a year to live. They never met. Genealogy opened to her a vast new world of relatives and centuries of great grandparents. Some of these connections have been surprising, and worthy of having their own stories told. Vignettes from her own life are now being explored, in hopes of the discovery of lessons of redeeming value and reader interest. Raziel writes true memoirs and fictionalized stories about herself and her family connections, always with an eye toward illuminating the emotional truths and fascinating women who persisted in her heritage.

Book preview

Sadie’s Life-Altering Secret

the story as her daughter

imagined it

By Raziel Bearn

Published by Liminal Realities

Copyright 2022 by Raziel Bearn. All rights reserved. No part of this ebook 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 written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. For permission, email [e-mail]

This ebook is a fact-based fictionalized memoir, and any resemblance to persons living in corporeal form in the here and now or in an alternate Universe, dimension, or lifetime, or to businesses named and currently operating or no longer open, exist mostly in the author’s mind, or are used fictitiously, and should not be construed as inhabiting consensual reality. Events referenced in this story are noted here for dramatic purposes to provide realistic context to the plot, and should not be understood as a depiction of any similar events.

Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This publication is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or shared with other readers, for any purpose or intention, except as allowed by a bookseller system. This restriction contributes to an accurate accounting of readership. To support author Raziel Bearn, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. We appreciate your understanding.

Cover Designed with Snappa.com

Dedicated

to all the young women

before and after Roe

whose choices for controlling

their own bodies have been

restricted by families, religions,

governments, and society’s

dictates, as if women’s

lives and needs didn’t matter.

*****

Growing Up Texan

Serious Student

Flirting with Travis

Disaster

Fleeing Friends

Shelter

Relief and Regrets

Partial Truths

Anticipation

Cecilia

Life Goes On

Epilogue

Afterword

About Raziel

Growing Up Texan

BY THE TIME SADIE WAS BORN, Mama Myrtle already had three daughters and she was near exhausted. Daddy Willis was sorely disappointed. He had wanted a son to follow in his footsteps as a carpenter, if not preacher. Well, he’d make do. Myrtle would just have to try again until she got it right.

Sadie’s oldest sister, Bessie, was something of a wild child, her values formed in the Roaring Twenties despite Daddy preaching in favor of Prohibition and against women’s suffrage. Being on the losing side of both issues added to his sour disposition more than Myrtle’s buttermilk cure for what ailed him from smoking them cheroots, she told him. His fire and brimstone sermons only grew hotter when the Great Depression pushed him further into poverty on the eve of Sadie’s birth.

Bessie was dead set on getting married as soon as possible. Marriage would be her ticket out of Daddy’s firm hand across her mouth when she got belligerent. Yessiree, landing herself a good lookin’ young man was gonna be the answer to Daddy’s stinging belt across her backside for challenging his authority, and his belief in the mighty rightness of the lord. Mama worried about Bessie the most.

Next oldest Marie was quiet, observant, and sensible, the problem solver of the bunch. Marie was Daddy’s favorite for knowing how and when to stay out of his way. Then had come Winifred, not even three when Sadie was born, and Daddy had forgiven her for not being a boy. As soon as she could hold a hammer, he called her Fred, ignoring Myrtle’s disapproving frown. It is not fittin’ to treat that little gal like a son, Myrtle told him over and over, but Willis never listened to anyone but his self.

Sadie had a lot to compete with and as an infant the only way open to her was by howling. Bessie quick learned the howl for pick me up, and did. We don’t got no extra to throw around on dolls. You’ll have to make do with yer baby sister, Daddy told her, not much interested in that fourth daughter. Myrtle was not opposed to that idea. It helped her out when hanging the laundry out back and when the never-ending cooking kept her stirring at the stove. Bessie, though, knew by instinct, and smell, when to ignore Sadie’s howls for change me and burp me. Bessie didn’t want the messy stuff under her fingernails.

By the time she could talk with any sense Sadie had figured out what would get Mama’s attention and what would set Daddy off on a rage. To anyone watching how her eyes danced when telling a fib, they would see her mind calculating the effect of her words. Marie noticed and smiled at Sadie’s courage, but kept the knowledge to herself. Fred took offense if the lie was about her, which it often was, for Sadie figured Fred was a natural enemy in the competition for Daddy’s attention.

The need for male attention sprouted early in little miss Sadie, and Daddy was the only man available until Bessie’s suitors started hanging around. Daddy would put them to work out back in the shed, teaching them the proper use of tools and his inviolate rules for courting his daughter. Only those who could wield a saw and chisel with innate skill showed enough promise as future carpenter assistants to be worthy of his permission to take Bessie for a soda down at the Five and Dime. Daddy’s permissions always came with ulterior motives.

Sadie was three and a half, and just perfecting her skills at attention-getting when the first tragedy of her life struck. Baby Geraldine cried herself into the world upstairs in Mama and Daddy’s bedroom, a scene stealer from the get-go. The midwife, and Bessie, now 14, bustled around tending to Mama gruntin’ and groanin’ in labor. Marie, eight now, had been through this twice before, and served quiet and steady at the bedside with a cool wet rag wiping the sweat off Mama’s neck and forehead. Seven year old Fred escaped being witness to the birth. She was out with Daddy fixing the cradle Sadie had out grown. Daddy had predicted this one wouldn’t be his son either. He muttered a gruff dang it when Sadie came running out with the news, and redoubled his determination to make do with Fred.

It wasn’t until Sadie was seven herself that Daddy finally got his wish. Son Willis Junior was born with initial joy, but that was soon dampened when it became apparent that Junior wasn’t quite right. Daddy concluded he clearly had been cursed by the devil. He set his mind right then on being even more strict with Myrtle and the girls, a requirement the way he saw it to regain the lord’s good graces. Whether it was the Depression’s lack of pre-natal care, Mama’s worn out body, or her secret nightcap of rum and Coke, plus as many gin and tonics she could get when visiting her sister Nellie, no one could explain why Junior joined their family to be an affable, good looking, but not so bright child.

Junior was slow in picking up the power of speech. Of course, with a houseful of women, often talking all at once – except for Marie the quiet one – Junior barely needed to talk. He was talked at, his needs and preferences assumed by his coterie of nursemaids. He walked late too. Daddy blamed that on Mama’s laziness. Mama said it was because Bessie would hardly set the boy down. Marie and Sadie, in consultation with each other, saw that Junior’s muscles were unusually weak and his eye-hand coordination poor. They each intuited that Junior needed more patience than he was likely going to get in that chaotic household. Only Marie was cut out to provide it. Sadie was busy daydreaming about a different life.

Sadie was in school now, exposed to children from other backgrounds, children without so many siblings, children whose fathers were less strict and more loving with their daughters. She came home one day after just a month in first grade and took advantage of finding Mama in a quiet moment on the back porch, shelling peas grown in the garden. Mama, I want a library card, Sadie announced, surprising Myrtle who didn’t know the library was even operating yet.

The Gladewater school building was nearly brand new, erected as one of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration projects in the mid-1930s as the oil boom rapidly swelled the town population to nearly 10,000 from the barely 500 residents when Sadie was born. Willis had secured a job with the WPA, giving his family some relief from the crushing poverty of the Depression, but keeping him moving around the area as job assignments came in. The library was the most recent addition, one that Willis had helped frame and roof, building in two small side spaces for a librarian’s office and paraphernalia like coats and boots, making sure the shelves were sturdy enough not to fall over should rambunctious children push into them.

The building may have been new, but most of the books that filled those school library shelves were discards from richer schools two hours west in Dallas, and the estate sales an hour and some across the state line around Shreveport. Sadie was learning to read at school, and her teacher said she was good at it, the first time anyone had told her she was good at anything and Sadie felt a pride in that. But books were an unnecessary expense, Daddy thought, so besides the Bible and a volume of nursery rhymes Myrtle’s sister Nellie gave her on the occasion of Bessie’s birth, they had no books in the house. Mama brought magazines home from the market once in a while when they were too old to be sold. Often, before they could be completely consumed, Daddy would use the paper to light the wood stove in the mornings to boil up his coffee.

Mama, please. I like reading. Sadie pleaded with dignity. She was aware she was not her mother’s favorite. Myrtle had a twinge of guilt feeling a distance between herself and her fourth child.

What’s it cost? Mama asked, always having to justify her spending, accounting for every penny.

Nuthin’, Sadie said with a grin. That’s the beauty. Teacher says with a card I can borrow from the library as long as I’m careful and return what I take in two weeks. Mama, please. You have to sign this permission slip.

Mama saw the eager earnestness on her daughter’s face. Poor little Sadie, so often overlooked, she never got new things for herself, her hand me down dresses patched and worn, though still starched and clean. What happens if you lose a borrowed book? Mama asked, fearful that the cost of it would come out of their weekly food budget, and get Willis all riled up.

I won’t lose it, Sadie said, trying not to show anger at the implication that she’d be irresponsible. I promise, Mama.

Mama was having a day of moral weakness, or parental insight, she wasn’t certain which. Alright, Miss Sadie. I’ll sign for this, but don’t tell Daddy, and don’t let the others know. Read somewhere that won’t get you noticed, Mama said, taking the paper and the pencil Sadie held out for her.

Yes, Mama, thank you. It’s just between us, Sadie promised, her first promise and secret. It felt like a victory. She had wanted something important to her, and she had gotten it. Unconsciously she tucked this strategy away into a part of her brain that would help her navigate through all of life’s challenges to come.

After that day, Sadie stayed late after school on Mondays and Fridays, reading in the library until they kicked her out. It was her safe space, her reading sanctuary. Her siblings would demand she walk home with them, and after the first couple arguments about it, she learned to hide in the library’s cloak closet, sitting on the floor under the window in the otherwise dark space, with just enough light to see the big print words and black lined pictures on the page.

By the end of first grade she was reading far above her grade level and had started chapter books when the school year ended and her access to the library was interrupted for the summer. That’s when she started to write stories of her own, always about the only child she wished she were. Sadie had begged her teacher for three notebooks and five pencils, hoping those would last her through the summer months, her mind working fast to figure out a hiding place for them.

The attic! The third floor of the house Daddy rented was unfinished and unused, except for storage. Sadie and Marie had explored it once, looking for Bessie’s clothes that Mama had put away until they were needed by a younger daughter. Mama kept a trunk of her own treasures in the attic, things from her life before Daddy – a fake pearl necklace, a wood framed photo of her own parents, her grey wedding suit all wrapped in tissue, and old letters tied up in red ribbon. There was an old, thin, lumpy mattress half leaning up against the wall right next to the window, behind the tall stack of boxes that would make the perfect setting for her writing, Sadie thought.

Mama didn’t go up to the attic often anymore since her hips started hurting and her feet got sore. No one went up there, Sadie knew, because it was spooky and full of cobwebs. Even Marie had got frightened when a mouse ran across her foot the one time she and Sadie explored. After that, Marie couldn’t be dragged up there, and she’d told the others about the mouse. They had all screeched, even Junior, and no one was brave enough to confront the critter, never mind that one of their three cats had probably dispatched it long ago. It was perfect for Sadie’s summer writing nook. She and Mr. Mouse would just have to come to an agreement, if he was still prowling up there. Likely the black and white cat had got him anyway. He was the most aggressive, hissing at anyone who dared walk past his favorite napping spot on the stairs to the attic.

But that was no worry to Sadie. She had a perfect password. Well, pass snack, really. If she pulled a bit of chicken off last night’s supper carcass and dropped it on the step below the cat, he’d let her pass without trying to claw the bejeezus out of her leg on the way up to spend an hour or two with her pencils and notebooks.

Sadie religiously journaled her feelings that summer, long before journaling became a therapeutically prescribed thing. The journal and the attic were the refuge for expressing the frustration and unhappiness of believing that somehow she didn’t fit in her family. Of course, at that tender age, what she recorded were the anguished questions of why is Daddy so mean to me, and why does Mama always forget my birthday until the last minute, and most painful of all why did I get stuck in this family where I don’t count for nuthin’ to no one.

The discharging of emotion done for the day, Sadie then wrote happy vignettes about a little girl she called Ceily -- spelled phonetically as Seelee until Sadie turned 10 and had a more sophisticated understanding of pesky things like spelling and grammar. Nonetheless, Ceily was endlessly loved, and showered with everything any only child could want. Ceily and her mama went on long walks together to the town park where the swings and merry-go-rounds were always empty, as if waiting just for her, and she was allowed to play on them as long as she wanted. Ceily’s mama was never in a hurry, and when she talked to Ceily she’d bend down with her knees and looked Ceily right in her blue eyes and really listened, and spoke to her like she was a miniature adult. Sadie wrote that made Ceily know she was really loved. Knowing she was really loved was something Sadie had never felt, but she had seen it at her friend Franny’s house.

Franny, short for Frances, whose other names were Elenora Rachela Noronha, was a year older than Sadie. Franny’s was an educated family who had come to Gladewater from Kansas with the oil boom of the 1930s when the town grew from around 500 residents to closer to 10,000. Her tati was a merchant, his grandfather before him a traveling salesman through the Plains states, trading with the Natives and selling to the homesteaders. They had settled in Wichita a generation ago and built up a successful general mercantile business.

The Noronhas valued reading. They had a whole room in their house with books floor to ceiling, and comfortable green velvet covered chairs and sofas where, if her shoes came off and her feet weren’t dirty, Sadie was allowed to curl up and take turns with Franny reading to each other aloud. No book was off limits to the girls, although several dozen were out of reach. When you can get them without climbing on a chair or each other’s shoulders, you are welcome to read those books, Franny’s ima told her daughter and her friend. Sadie did the math and came to the conclusion she would need to be about six foot four inches to touch the intriguing, and ancient looking, off limits tomes.

Franny and her parents were mistaken for second generation Portuguese Catholics -- due to their dark hair and eyes, and slightly accented English -- something suspicious as far as Daddy Willis was concerned. It was bad enough to be Portuguese, an ethnicity which in Texas was confused with being Spanish, which itself was mistaken for being Mexican, none of which was particularly welcomed in the white Protestant town of Gladewater. To be Catholic was tolerated, but was still a distinct minority in East Texas after the terrorizing era of the KKK throughout the South that hunted and punished Papists as often as they had the freed slaves starting with the Reconstruction era. To be openly Jewish would be downright dangerous for the Noronhas.

Daddy refrained from forbidding Sadie to mix with Franny, but he wasn’t comfortable with those people, whatever they were, in his town. James Noronha was difficult to dislike, though, because he extended credit on fair terms to the Gladewater residents there before the boom and went out of his way to import goods they needed that he did not normally carry, if they showed him a business license or enough pay stubs to prove their means to repay him. And for you, little miss with the big round eyes and beautiful smile, I have a Tootsie, Mr. Noronha always said