The Ghosts of Crestview

By Julianna Rowe

 

Every soul bears the whispers of its ancestors, but for Katerina, those murmurs became an inescapable roar.

In the shadowed halls of Crestview, the weight of generational trauma strangled out the truth and love from Katerina's life. Now she grapples to navigate the imposed labyrinth in her mind. With the lines between her emotional voice and her authentic one blurred, she searches for an escape from generations of pain until a hidden pathway to empowerment is revealed. A metamorphosis of spirit ultimately frees Katerina to explore the vast potential of her life.  

Juliana Rowe invites you to witness a tale of resilience and revelation, where breaking free from ancestral ghosts unlocks the strength found within the silence after the storm.


 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julianna Rowe
• Release date: Feb 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224068500

Book preview

PART I: ABANDONED

To forsake as a hopeless enterprise, to desert.

Abandonment is cold as the icy winds of the tallest mountain and as lonely and frightening as the descent among a storm.

A child that is abandoned at birth or before.

A wife who gives her all only to be left with nothing.

A family pet left at the shelter they call humane.

A man thirty years doing his job ... fired.

A country devastated by terrorists with no help in sight.

A mother praying for her child’s life and receiving no answer.

A lie ... lived out many generations ... at CRESTVIEW.

Hello, my name is Katarina and I have a story to tell. It will not always be in a straight line, as my memories tend to jump around or bleed into one another. But please bear with me because there are lessons to be learned and tales to tell.

This is the true story of my life, and I’m sharing it for the first time.

Chapter One: Reflecting

Iwas standing at the sink, washing the normal stack of daily dishes when my mind began to wander. You know, like when you’re driving, and you forget how you got where you were going?

I began thinking of my Nana. What was she really like? And upon reflecting, I recall thinking she was more important to me than I was to her. I had never realized it until that day when my mind left the building. Odd how she reminds me of my best friend, Jacque, the finisher of my emotional ties to Nana. Jacque came into my life in my twenties and replaced the lost love and abandonment I had felt from her. I believe she is the friend I called into my life to finish the incorrect dream of who I believed Nana to be but wasn’t, although Nana was a woman of interest as well as a positive force in my life.

I met her when I was four years old when my grandfather brought her to our home. Nana was his second wife, and she was beautiful with auburn hair and skin the color of milk. I had never felt skin so soft, nor had I seen such large breasts. Her small frame glistened with a wealthy energy just like her long, red, natural fingernails. She wore furs and fine linens that draped her gentle demeanor. She adorned the finest gold jewelry on her frail gentle skin. She had class, I spotted that at my young age. As I grew, she would take me to the finest stores and buy me clothes of quality. My first pair of high heels was at age twelve for my confirmation, against my mother’s wishes of course. Story goes she was engaged to Gene Autry when she met my grandfather, but then the story goes that Grandfather rode with Poncho Via.

My grandparents lived in the Crestview addition on the side of a mountain in Los Angeles. The backyard was landscaped with walls that cascaded down the side of a hill that, to me, looked like a mountain. When you stood in the living room or on the deck in the evening, it was a sight to behold. The entire city of Los Angeles lit up like a million stars. It was a place most can only dream of living. 

On the floor of the living room in front of the fireplace lay a huge bear rug. Nana shot that bear herself as they were avid hunters (I still have a photo of the kill). They spent weeks on horseback, camping in the Wyoming range, and that bear rug was to be mine upon her death. I spent many a day laying on it, looking into its glass eyes and touching the terrifying teeth with no fear.

I was a princess, and I had a castle. My bedroom consisted of twin four-poster beds, all hand-carved from Europe. A dressing table with silver mirrors and deep pink, satin, quilted bedspreads surrounded me. The drapes were heavy and consoling. I had special dolls, but they had to stay at Nana’s house, which was fine with me, for they had mink coats just like hers. The bedroom even included my own private bathroom. I can remember the smell to this day—that certain smell of elegance. 

Every Christmas we would find the latest toys under the tree. A fond memory is the Posie Doll who walked and another who talked. My life was complete.

My destiny was already secured at such an early age.  I was too young to understand, but hints of their heavy drinking were everywhere.

Grandfather would do his native Indian dances after a few shots of Canadian Club.

One night while preparing for a dinner party, I was in the kitchen with Nana when she dropped the entire bowl of tossed salad to the floor, a carpeted floor no less. She gently and ever so quietly whispered with a hint of a giggle while nudging me, Help me pick this up so I can present it to my guests later this evening. And keep this to yourself.

Naturally I did as I was told, but no, I did not partake in the eating of that salad.

I never forgot the salad incident and later realized it was an alcohol-induced situation. Everything was hidden that was real. Life was a fantasy to me in those years, and I never saw the reality of it for many decades to come.

Sometimes ancestry cells are cemented within our minds. Actually, they come through the umbilical cord which is the thread of life from beyond. It is the cord of life, in my belief, and contains all our past lives and more.

One day, my grandparents moved. I never questioned it as I was too young to notice at the time. They moved to a nice neighborhood suburb of Los Angeles. Certainly not like the mansion in Crestview, but to me, everything was the same. The new home had a summer house adjacent to it and an adjoining utility house where laundry, freezers, and another entire kitchen were located. Stacks of bulk groceries were stored in this small house along with another bathroom and shower.

The summer house was a marvel of everything imaginable for comfort. A cowboy-cowgirl’s dream. Leather furniture with studded edges of brass, lamps from the actual hooves and legs of the animals taken on the hunts. The lampshade sections were sewn together with rawhide string depicting photographs of the very animals whose foot or leg was lighting this museum of Wyoming hunting and Indian relics. Busts of moose, elk, ram, deer, antelope, and bear covered the walls. Bookcases wrapped around one entire side of the five-hundred-square-foot room and housed a collection of novels, history books, and a forty-year collection of National Geographics. Another wall sat a large table with an Indian teepee that was approximately five feet tall. Running through the teepee, was an operating train set that stopped, started, and went through mountains and grain mills where its cars were automatically loaded and unloaded. There were working stoplights, and railroad crossing guards that lifted, tiny houses, tiny cars, and tiny people. What a thrill for a child and it was my favorite place to be. 

The smell of leather danced through the air from the saddles that hung in one corner, not to mention the gun collection. Grandfather taught me to shoot when I was about ten years old. He took me out into the woods where he told me to lay on the ground on my tummy. He then placed a pillow against my shoulder and on that pillow, he positioned a twelve-gauge shotgun. Little did I know what was coming. Surely, we should have started out slower, but that was not Granddaddy’s style. So, I aimed and pulled that trigger. My little body shot backward, pillow and all, at the least a couple feet. I liked it! I also shot the old Colt 45 and didn’t know which I liked better. I learned to aim and shoot quite well during that part of my life, which has come in very handy at local carnivals.

Grandfather and Nana went to all the grand openings of the finest hotels in Texas, California, and Virginia. They took my parents hunting on President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s ranch where the butler took care of their every need. President Johnson’s butler wanted to take my father’s boots and socks off. It was something Father wasn’t so used to yet, and Daddy told that story over and over till he died.

Yes, they lived the high life and wore the finest linens and knew the who’s who to do it.

Grandfather built me an authentic playhouse behind the summerhouse. Authentic meaning it had its own electricity, its own little porchlight, running water into a tiny kitchen sink and a table and chairs. I would take my dolls with their mink coats to my own little house where I felt like a total princess.

And then disaster struck.

No, Grandfather didn’t die. He moved two of my cousins into his home and forgot about me. Abandoned.

He was a master narcissist. At the time, I didn’t know how hard he had tried to manipulate my parents to get my brother and I away from them. When that didn’t work, he moved on. He and Nana couldn’t have children, so they made the next best move. He conned two of his other daughters out of one of each of their children, one a boy and the other a girl.

They not only abandoned my brother and me in the earthly realm of his scheme, but in heart also. My dolls and their minks were no longer mine but given to someone else. My room was no longer mine and was passed on. My playhouse, my bear rug, my satin bedspreads, my train set and teepee, my shooting lessons, my grandfather and Nana ... everything had moved on to other children. 

I was abandoned.

How was I to know it was all about control. A child always believes it is something they did wrong to have been shunned.

Grandfather wanted control in every area, even to the extent of taking someone else’s children. They, Nana and Pop, couldn’t have my brother and me so the fake love was over along with the monetary gifts and possessions. All were gone and I took it as a serious rejection because no one ever explained to me what had happened. I thought I wasn’t good enough. If I had only known everything Grandfather ever did was to ultimately benefit him, and only him.

It all started when I was five. Grandfather and Nana would make regular trips to Virginia to visit my parents at the home my father and his brother built by hand from the ground up. My father and uncle worked at the local factory making minimal wage. Granddad always had a personal goal, and these trips were to flash his money, jewelry, and cars until he enticed my parents to leave everything familiar to them for his good life in California.

And so, they did. 

But first, we drove downtown to the local Chevrolet dealership and bought a brand new, shiny, 1956 Chevy Belair that was crème, and bronze. My parents sold the house Dad and his brother built, packed our belongings, and headed for California and the better life.

That was the beginning of an odd string of events that would end when my parents told Grandfather and Nana that they could not have my brother and me, their children. The promises made to my parents of the high life were never seen. My Father was overworked and underpaid. That gave Granddad the control he needed to get the outcome he was after. It didn’t work. 

When I was thirteen, they packed our belongings once again, rented a U-Haul that Father pulled behind his 1956 Blue Chevy named Bessie and headed across country back to Virginia with one cat in the back seat, a Chihuahua in the front seat and a birdcage somewhere in between with Pete the parakeet inside.

Father’s truck wasn’t in the best shape to be pulling the overloaded U-Haul, and it showed. When we hit the Ozark Mountain Range, Old Blue gave it all she had, but twice we lost sight of Father and my brother and had to turn around only to find Old Blue couldn’t make it up the mountain with her load. Father had to coast back down the incline to allow the old truck a long head start to make it back up the hill and he did, but just barely and ever so slowly.

I know now the stress they encountered not only during those years in California, but also on the trip back.

My aunt, my father’s sister, had loaned them the money to get back home. There wasn’t any extra for breakdowns of any sort. 

Not to mention the breakdown I wanted and deserved to have, considering I had left my life and friends forever.

I had a boyfriend back in California, a real nice young man named Dwyane Houser. Surely too old for me, but never-the-less we had a connection. Even at that tender age, I thought I was in love, and I still believe I was to the extent possible. I was barely a teen by a few months, and he was fifteen. We were in junior high, and I was fully grown physically at 34-24-34. Not the best thing to happen to a pretty young girl at that age who looked much older all together. Add the fact that life in a large city is different than in a small farm community we were heading for. Regardless, it was a sad day to leave Dwyane. 

Every day after school, we met at the local soda fountain. He bought us a soda pop with two straws, and we would sit and stare at each other for a long time and giggle. We rode on his white moped up into the mountains overlooking Lake Henry, the wind blowing against us, giving me the opportunity to wrap my arms around his waist and hold on as tight as possible. He was tall and lean with beautiful black shiny-slicked hair. He was of French descent, so his skin looked like a perfect tan year-round. He was a cross between Elvis and the Fonz. His gentleness came through each kiss he presented to me. Yes, presented like it was a gift. (I have no clue where I told my mother I was, but I surely didn’t tell her I was on a moped in the hills) We never entered sexual relations, of course. I realize the age sounds out of line with the acts, but even as I sit here today, decades later, I remember him. I remember the bond we shared as good friends. On my last night in California, he came over to my grandparents to say goodbye and I will never forget how he cried. We gave one another one last hug and one last gentle kiss with tears falling between our tender lips. Then, with a sudden break, he walked away, tears hidden and silent. 

I never saw him again until I was fifteen and I revisited California. I hear he married a girl named Londa who was in one of our junior high classes.

I wonder where they are. Someone said Sacramento.

I have fond memories of my junior high school years, and to this day, I still have a few classmates as Facebook friends.

Chapter Two: Ruby

Ruby started as Granddad and Nana’s maid at Crestview and continued her position when they moved to the new house. She was from a long line of slaves from the South who moved west to get away from the harsh environment. Her family migrated to the Los Angeles area from Louisiana in the 1950s. Her husband, Charles, worked on a chicken farm near Jordon Downs, better known as The Projects. Charles’s uncle, Ramos, had been on a chain gang on the old slave trail that had traumatized a myriad of families whose husbands were sold down the river onto steamboats and sent back to Louisiana and the cotton plantation owners. Ramos’s handcuffs were padlocked, and he was chained. Some of the men were forced to wear iron padlocked collars. White men stood nearby with whips and vulgar breath. 

Ruby and Charles lived in the housing area that was used for World War II veterans returning from service. That rundown area created violence due to a lack of education and the influx of the migration of black families, and their radically restrictive stipulations only added to the violence.

Granddad owned a painting company and had been contracted to do work at the chicken farm where Charles worked. Granddad had driven out to oversee the workman at the job site when he overheard a man loudly demeaning another. It sounded more like a one-man shouting fest, which it turned out to be. Granddad was the type of man who did not like the underdog being misused (even though he did exactly that by using manipulation to get his means to an end), and that is exactly what he found when he turned the corner and saw the chicken farm foreman berating Charles. Granddad stepped directly in between the two men, one a white man and one a black man. Quite unheard of, but Granddad never did like rules.

He boldly asked the chicken man what the black man did that called for such degrading tactics.

Chicken Man responded angrily, Who the hell are you anyway? 

To which Granddad responded with fortitude, saying, I am L. C. Morrison of Morrison Painting and Decorating at your service, gentlemen. Granddad put his hand out to shake but it was rejected by the bully Chicken Man, so Granddad put it to the black man who smiled and shook it with intention. Granddad added, And might I say, I do not find it appealing in any way how you are addressing this man, who apparently works for you and earns you a wage as well.

The foreman said in no uncertain terms that Granddad was out of turn and to get off the property at once.

My granddad had the most exuberant laugh that side of the Mason Dixon Line that he instantly reared his head back and bellowed out. And then he asked the young black man his name.

But before Charles could respond the foreman said, I told you to get off this property, you son of a bitch.

Granddad ignored Chicken Man and offered Charles a job working for him at a much better pay grade that would begin immediately. 

Charles grinned from ear to ear, but Chicken Man said, Oh no, you don’t! He isn’t going anywhere. He owes the farm monies for his son’s doctor bill. He let out a squealing, little man, rhetorical laugh."

Grandad told Charles, I will see to the bill as I’m friends with the owner of the farm.

The chicken foreman’s eyes grew a bit larger and was infested with intimidation and retreat.

Charles and Granddad walked away proudly, although Charles was quite unsure of what would happen next considering he had no idea who this stranger was that stepped in on his behalf. Charles told Granddad he did not have a proper painting white shirt and pants for the job and the bill he owed was substantial. Granddad assured him it would all work out. And it did.

Granddad took Charles under his wing and taught him the trade. He gave him two sets of paint clothes, a vehicle to get to work, paid his medical bills, and moved the family from the projects to his farm outside of town where they lived for the next twenty years. 

Charles’s wife Ruby was hired as Granddad and Nana’s maid where she cooked and cleaned and helped me with homework and did my hair. She was one of the nicest people I ever knew in my life. She wore a neat, pressed, light blue dress with a crisp starched full body apron. Her hair was perfectly done in a roll around her face, and when she smiled, her teeth were as white as the summer clouds. Her nails were gentle and trimmed, but her feet were very large. I didn’t care because her personality made up for any imperfections a child might find fault with. I loved Ruby and had memories pop up of her for decades, especially after-school ice cream with chocolate malted milk powder sprinkled all over the top of the perfectly scooped treat. 

Charles became foreman for Grandad’s crew and made enough money over the years to send his children to college, drive a fancy family car, wear the finest church clothes, and take a vacation every year. 

Granddaddy had his faults. More than not, he helped others more than he did his own kin. When I go through the old 35-mm slides Nana