Having so many relatives I’d never heard of isn’t the only reason I still need to work. In the nineteen-twenties, the family bank, which by then had been chartered as State National Bank, was in trouble. My grandmother’s father was its president at the time. According to my mother, he was so distraught that, in 1925, he drowned himself, in a well by his house. His death certificate listed the cause as a heart attack, but the doctor who signed it was the husband of one of his cousins. The largest of the Bremond Block houses—one of the first houses in Austin with an indoor toilet, built by John Bremond, Jr., in 1886—belonged for many years to the Y.M.C.A. In 1969, the Texas Classroom Teachers Association, which already owned my grandmother’s childhood home, bought it and converted the rooms into offices, after removing shag carpeting, showers, and ceiling hooks that had held punching bags.
Other kinds of legacies resist inheritance, too—or so one hopes. No one got rich in Texas in the eighteen-hundreds without contributions from slavery, even after slavery had technically ceased to exist. My grandmother’s maternal grandmother’s second husband, whom she married in 1883, was Alexander Terrell, commonly known as Judge Terrell. He had been a Confederate colonel during the Civil War, and was named a brigadier general just as the fighting ended. He fled to Mexico after the South surrendered, rather than live in the home of the Emancipation Proclamation, and served briefly as one of Emperor Maximilian’s battalion commanders. Soon, though, he returned to Texas. He was elected to the State Senate in 1876, and later served in the state’s House of Representatives. One of his legislative priorities in those years was disenfranchising Black Americans. (He was responsible for the so-called Terrell Election Law, enacted in 1903, which enabled county party committees to bar nonwhites from voting in primary elections.) In 1893, President Grover Cleveland chose him to be the U.S. minister plenipotentiary to the Ottoman Empire. Before the Senate hearing to confirm his appointment, according to an account that my mother found in some family documents, Cleveland asked Terrell about a poem that he was rumored to have written shortly after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated: nine fierce six-line stanzas arguing that John Wilkes Booth—“who dared break the rod / Of the blackamoor’s god”—was a national hero. Cleveland supposedly showed him a copy and asked him whether he’d written it:
Judge Terrell replied, “Mr. President, the authorship of this poem has been for long in dispute. Were I to acknowledge it, it would revive a literary controversy, and were I to disclaim it, it would be ascribed to political cowardice; so, with your permission, I will neither affirm nor deny.” Mr. Cleveland folded the poem and returned it to his pocket and simply said, “All that I wanted to say was that it is damned fine poetry.”