As a child, I would sit and my mother’s feet in the early morning to hear her family stories while my siblings still slept. In a family of five children, it’s the only time I had alone with her. She told the story that my grandmother Ruby ran off with another man when my mother was an infant. Because she was still nursing, her father allowed Ruby to take my mother with her. Mom’s story peaked when she told of Ruby and her boyfriend “robbing trains” over two years. When the authorities arrested my grandmother, they threw my mother in an orphanage. My grandfather found out about his ex-wife from a relative who handed him the newspaper article. He traveled to spring my mother from the orphanage (called a Home for Friendless Children, no less), took her home, and raised her. From my mother’s stories, I gathered that my grandfather was a kind-hearted man with integrity—the only parent my mother needed.

I met this legendary grandmother for the first time when I was thirteen. She connected with my uncle and asked him to plead with my mother to allow her to visit our family. My grandmother promised to bring boxes of family photos to give to my mother—the ticket to my mother allowing the visit. I believe my mother last saw her as a child. I remember a few details of meeting Ruby. She was beautiful, elegant, and had expressive blue eyes. She tried to hug my mother on that visit, and my mother cringed at the closeness. My grandmother attempted to teach me manners at the dinner table, and my mother told her to stop. I can only imagine my mother thinking, “How dare she try to grandparent when she hadn’t bothered to parent me in the first place?”

When I graduated from college and started working, my uncle relayed that my grandmother was in the hospital due to an infected rat bite on her leg. I had just received a Christmas bonus at my first job. I didn’t know my grandmother, but it seemed she needed my bonus money more than I did. I sent it to her with a note, catching her up on my life and asking about hers. She wrote back, and we continued our correspondence for years. Finally, I visited her in the projects of Washington, D. C. when I was pregnant with my second child. It amazed me that she had the same habits as my mother, rubbing her forefinger over her thumb when she was nervous and stuttering when she answered the phone. My mother didn’t grow up with her mother—the similar habits intrigued me.

On the visit, Ruby gave me a tour of her apartment, and I saw a china-faced doll in her bedroom, the face slightly cracked. I remembered my mother recounting a tale of getting a doll for Christmas one year and her older brothers breaking the doll the first day she had it. I wanted to ask Ruby if that was my mother’s doll, but I caught myself and wondered if my grandmother had another daughter besides my mother. I knew very little of her life. I thought at the time she served time in prison for her crime, and I couldn’t fathom how that doll had survived. Oh, how I wanted to take that doll back to my mother.

My grandmother had a gentleman friend who lived upstairs in her high-rise, and she invited him over to meet us. It allowed me an opportunity to watch my eighty-year-old grandmother’s charm as she talked to him. My previous fantasies about my grandmother were not as good as watching her in person. We visited for only two hours. I rehashed the details of the day on my way home and still remember them.

My grandmother died on my 29th birthday. She left instructions with my uncle to call me. I regretted not having the courage to ask her about her life. Why had she left her family to follow a gangster? What caused her to make such questionable decisions? Did she have any regrets? Did she ever try to visit her children again? I will never know the motivations for her decisions.

My sister found a distant cousin of my grandmother’s online, who gave us more information. My grandmother married again after her probation and had two children, we believe. When that marriage ended after World War II, Ruby moved to Washington, D.C.—leaving another set of children behind. The job market was good because the federal government needed employees. She began working at the Mayflower hotel across the street from the White House and sent this cousin a postcard pointing to the rooms she cleaned on the top floor. At this time, Truman had meetings in the hotel’s lobby to arrange his re-election. When he headed the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover had lunch every day at that hotel. My mother had heard my grandmother was the secretary for “an important congressman.” Perhaps she met this man at the Mayflower hotel. Perhaps she wasn’t his secretary.

About eight years ago, I found my grandmother’s conviction papers—after looking for them for twenty years. The court convicted her of Larceny and Possession of interstate Freight with a young man she knew from her hometown—a crime made a felony only a few years because of a notorious train robbery in Rondout, Illinois. The new Bureau of Investigation watched her nationwide operation involving two years of illegal activity.

The court likely granted two years’ probation because she was pregnant by her train-robbing boyfriend. They had nowhere to incarcerate her—the only women’s federal prison had been closed for a few months before her conviction and the new one not yet open. The court ordered her to stay away from the prison where her boyfriend served time. Her probation letters indicate that she ignored the judge’s orders and moved closer to the prison in Georgia around the time her boyfriend would be released. Later her probation officer reported to the court that she had “given up” her newborn boy. I found in census records that her son went to live with her train-robbing boyfriend’s parents. They had a son only four years older than her boy. My mother never knew she had a half-brother.

My half-uncle turned out to be a war hero. When he was sixteen, he enlisted in the Army, traveling two states to lie about his age. He worked with planes and made flying missions. Early in WWII, his aircraft was shot down over Italy after a bombing raid to destroy oil refineries in Ploesti, Romania. One of the survivors, Staff Sergeant William Fay, kept a diary. His story is portrayed in Maternity Ward: Final Flight of a WWII Liberator—by William Fay’s cousin. The oldest person on the plane was eighteen years old. My half-uncle remains entombed in the Maternity Ward in the Mediterranean Sea. He received the Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross due to his bravery. You can read more at https://etvma.org/veterans/leon-d-pem....

My grandmother left at least five children and possibly more. I wrote this book as an attempt to understand what led her to make the choices she did. Because of my mother’s childhood experience, I know that she chose to be a “she-bear” for her children. She became a protective mother even when—or maybe because—she didn’t have one. I come from a long line of wild women. My mother lived her life with the most determination of them all. I am grateful for the cherished stories she told and her intentional grit to learn from them.

Rock Bottom, Tennessee