Ophelia took the photograph down from the wall with both hands and laid it in my lap. She sat down across from me on a cane bottomed chair, her feet barely touching the floor, and folded her hands. “Your great grandfather was Anatole Prudhomme,” she said. “He had two families. Everybody on Cane River knew it, and nobody said it. Your grandmother Lottie was the daughter of the wife. I was the daughter of the other woman, a Creole lady named Marie Batiste, who sewed for the wife.” She smiled, a tiny crinkled smile. “We were born eleven months apart, in 1936. Lottie was my sister.”
I looked at the picture. The two girls in their Sunday dresses, in front of the church in 1951, one pale and one brown, with the same long nose and the same straight, stubborn mouth. And between them, the stern, handsome woman with a hand on each shoulder. “Your great grandmother brought me to that church herself,” Ophelia said. “She was the only person in the parish with the nerve. She told the priest, These are both the children of my husband, and I will have them both in my pew. The families have not forgiven her yet.” She shook her head. “She never once let go of my shoulder.”
She told me about the peas. After the great grandmother passed, in 1989, Lottie did the one thing her mother had asked near the end. She asked her half sister to come and sit on the porch. Not to talk, because the old wounds would not be talked through. Only to sit, with a bushel between them, in the sight of the street, every Sunday, as a kind of public vow. “We shelled over eleven thousand pounds of peas,” Ophelia said. “And in thirty four years, your aunts never once stopped on the road to say good morning.” I sat in her small, clean parlor with the photograph against my heart, and I knew what I had to do.
A framed photograph from 1951 gave one granddaughter the Sunday to bring a hidden sister back to the porch in Natchitoches.
I drove across the bridge to the house of Aunt Charlene that evening with the photograph on the seat beside me. Aunt Rose was there too, with a legal pad, making notes for the lawyer in Shreveport. I laid the picture on the table among the coffee cups. “Aunts, I have my terms,” I said. “Ophelia Batiste is the daughter of Anatole Prudhomme. She is your aunt. She is Mama the sister of Mama Lottie. You will call off the lawyer tonight. And on Sunday, you will come to my house for dinner, and you will seat her at the head of the table, because she is the oldest one in this family.”
The silence went on a long time. Aunt Charlene sat very straight in her chair, a heavy woman of seventy with a church fan in her hand. Her eyes moved over the photograph, over the faces, and the fan began to shake. “Mama never told us,” she said. “All those Sundays I told her people were talking. And she said, Let them talk.” She put the fan down. Tears ran down her face and dripped from her chin onto the table. “She was not senile, Teresa. She was the bravest woman I ever knew, and I called her senile in front of a lawyer.” She put her hands over her face.
Aunt Rose did not weep. Aunt Rose was angry. She snatched the photograph from the table, stood up so fast her chair fell over, and started toward the fireplace in the next room, where a small fire was burning. “This is a forgery,” she said, in a high, tight voice. “It is a trick of that woman.” But my husband, Wendell, a retired football coach who had followed me in and stood quietly by the door, stepped into the doorway with his arms spread. “Rose, I played linebacker for twenty years,” he said gently. “Please give it to me.” She stared at him. Then the paper trembled, and she held it out.
On Sunday, they came. Aunt Charlene first, in her best hat, with a pound cake on a plate. Aunt Rose behind her, stiff as a post, with her mouth in a line. Ophelia sat at the head of my table in her dress with the old pattern, and nobody said a word. Then Aunt Rose put down her fork. “Ophelia, I am sorry,” she said, in a voice I had never heard from her. “I have been ashamed for forty years of something I did not even understand.” Ophelia reached over and touched her hand. “Child, I have been waiting thirty four years for one of you,” she said. “Eat your supper.”
The money consequences were quiet. The aunts withdrew the contest on Monday, and the lawyer in Shreveport sent a bill and a polite note. The house on Williams Avenue and the three hundred ten thousand dollars passed to Ophelia as the will said. She kept the house for herself and gave a hundred thousand dollars of the money, on her own, to a scholarship in the name of the great grandmother for girls of Cane River who want to study to be teachers. She did it, she said, because someone had once put a hand on her shoulder and not let go.
In the name of my grandmother, Lottie Mae Prudhomme, who passed in June and who sewed wedding dresses for half the brides in the parish, I started the Back Porch Fund. It pays for family records, legal help and counseling for families in Natchitoches, Sabine and Winn parishes who are trying to find or acknowledge lost relatives. In the first year, we helped forty one families. A woman of eighty one, in a sunbonnet, laid an old photograph on the desk and said, “Nobody ever asked me who this was.” I pulled up a chair. I said, “Tell me.”
Every Sunday after church now, the five of us sit on the back porch of the house on Williams Avenue, the aunts and Ophelia and I, in the shade of the pecan tree. There is a bushel basket in the middle, and a pile of green pods, and a big pot to catch the peas. Aunt Charlene tells a story. Aunt Rose corrects it. Ophelia laughs, and shells faster than any of us. She hands me the first full bowl, without a word, and I feel the weight of it settle in my hands like an inheritance. Down on the river, the evening light comes across the water.