Listen to Angie Romines read this excerpt.
Around the turn of the century, on a patch of quiet, eastern Kentucky farmland, my great-great grandmother took a hatchet and buried it into the chest of a woman who had been hanging around her husband, or so the family story goes.
The hatcheting was the first story I had ever heard about Mary Jane Fields Bishop (or Granny Bishop as she was known on my dad’s side of the family). A shocking introduction, to say the least. Knowing I come from people who lived very hard lives and endured terrible things is difficult. Knowing that I come from someone who ruined others’ lives and did terrible things haunts me perhaps more than it should, considering I didn’t choose my origins. And yet I keep digging. I keep trying to understand the blood I came from and just how much of it still runs in my veins.
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When I first started researching my family in earnest a few years ago, I went out to my late grandmother’s house in Riverhaven. She had raised my dad and his eight older brothers and sisters in that Kentucky expat community in northern Indiana where no one is allowed to build anymore on account of all the flooding and lack of utilities. I’m not sure if it’s still there, but when I was a child in the 1990s, a snake- handling church was located just three houses down from my grandma Mary’s.
We sat at a Formica kitchen table that used to have a giant canister of black pepper on it for Grandma Mary’s signature (and only edible) dish: biscuits and sausage gravy. That day there were seven of us in what was once her kitchen—two aunts (one by marriage), two uncles, my grandmother’s youngest brother, and my father. Three years later, only five of us are still alive.
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The hatchet story nearly didn’t get told. We were packing up our things and about to head out through the back porch where Grandma Mary used to keep dozens of stray cats when Aunt Norma said, “Oh, you know about Granny Bishop?” I had just started dabbling in genealogy, so it took me a few moments to conjure an image of the person she was talking about. I remembered seeing her pictures on Ancestry.com, labeled by her maiden name, “Mary Jane Fields.” From the photos, she seems so diminutive, hunched over as if the weight of her thin cotton dress was too much for her small frame to hold. There are no photos that show her smiling, but that is understandable since, from the telltale hollow around her lips, it was clear she had lost her teeth.
“I know who you’re talking about, but I don’t know anything in particular about her,” I said, stuffing my iPad into its case.
Norma rose from the kitchen table and started to walk my dad and me to the back door when she said, matter-of-factly, “Well, there was a lady hanging around Granny Bishop’s man, so Granny hit her in the chest with a hatchet. Woman died two weeks later, but everyone said it was from pneumonia.”
My dad and I stopped in our tracks and turned back around as the kitchen broke out in pandemonium, a mix of questions from those of us who’d never heard the story and loud confirmation from those who knew about the hatchet. No matter how many questions I asked, Aunt Norma didn’t know much beyond what she’d just said, but my Uncle Larry and his wife, Barb, had also heard this story before. The part about listing pneumonia as the cause of death was news to them, though they’d heard about the hatchet and that the victim had been following my great-great grandfather around on their mountainous Kentucky farmland.
After we left what was once my grandmother’s home, I furiously scribbled down what I could remember as my dad drove us back to the suburbs. My notes from that visit are infuriating. I was typing as they all talked, but much of what I wrote is too cryptic to be used. For example, I have no idea who was being talked about when I wrote, “faking spitting on you, threw an ashtray broke and cut the knee, hit in the stomach, threw a knife at Fred, got the worst of it. Threw a pair of scissors at Stan.” My best guess is this is about my alcoholic grandfather, Raymond. Stan was my dad’s cousin, and my dad is Fred. But then the very next words are, “hatchet to the chest Granny Bishop (died two weeks later) everyone said it was pneumonia, husband couldn’t.” Husband couldn’t what? What had my aunt Norma said after that? What couldn’t her husband do? Talk to women without risking them ending up murdered? Leave Granny Bishop’s eyesight? Maybe he couldn’t look at Mary Jane the same way anymore, knowing what she’d done.
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The daughter of Mary Jane was my great grandmother, Susan Bishop, who was given in marriage at age fourteen to seventy-four-year-old Henry Hazelwood in exchange for an apple orchard. He died a couple of years later, leaving her with an infant son. Until I saw the child listed on the census, I wondered if perhaps she’d been spared from consummating the marriage. Surely, a man that old in those hard times might’ve not been able to. That hope for my fourteen-year-old great grandmother was quickly snuffed out. Susan Bishop had to live with the knowledge that her parents, Mary Jane and James, wanted an apple orchard more than they wanted to allow her a childhood. And now, I also have to live with that— knowing who I came from and what they were capable of—the kind of inheritance we don’t speak of. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as they say . . .
To read the whole essay, purchase 44.4 (2023) in print or as an e-book.