My Grandmother’s story

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Dedicated to the erased, to the unheard

In Harriet’s time, not every woman could write, after all why would they need to know that? Their purpose in life was to have children, lots of children, cook, clean, do laundry. Besides, teaching them to read and write would make it more difficult to keep them silent, which is what women and children have historically been asked to be. Seen and not heard.

My paternal grandmother, like Harriet, was one of few women of her time who knew how to read and write and who was also blessed with the intelligence and courage to look around her and see where things were less than just, less than equitable, less than auspicious for the greatest chunk of the people in her world. Her parents believed that it was a good thing to be educated, and that women needed to be just as educated as men. Since grandma was an only child – a rarity in those days – their resources and hopes were all devoted to providing her with the best education and future possible.

Grandma was born in La Habana, Cuba, as best as I can figure, sometime in 1892. Just three years before Cuba’s War of Independence (from Spain) began. I have no information about my great-grandparents. Where were they born? When were they married? When did they emigrate to Cuba? Were they born in Spain as I have been led to believe? Maybe that side of my family had been in Cuba for a few generations before my grandmother was born? All I do know is that my great-grandparents and their very young daughter, Maria, left Cuba and went to live in Asturias, Spain not long after she was born.

My guess is that they probably went back to Spain once it was obvious that the war would eventually come to La Habana and that would not be a good place to be when you were of Spanish descent and had a very young child.

My grandmother’s life is almost a complete mystery. I know she was born in Cuba, right before the beginning of one war and she lost her life, along with her husband, as a result of another – the Spanish Civil War – in December 1937. A life framed by war. I know more about the circumstances of her death than I know about her life.

And so, I dedicate this to her and her efforts to be one of the few “unheard voices.” To her valiant refusal to be silent, when most others chose that path. I do not know if she left writings, but I am guessing she did. What happened to those is anyone’s guess, probably ‘disappeared’ along with most of her worldly possessions when Franco’s men exacted their ‘limpieza’ on the small village where she lived with her husband and 9 children, aged 17 to 5. Her two adult sons were already gone, fighting for the Second Republic, when she, her husband and 17-year-old daughter, Cristina, were rounded up in the middle of the night and taken to jail.

Less than a month later, as a result of one of the ‘military tribunals’ Franco had started using to justify his genocide, my grandparents were dead and buried in a secret location and my aunt was sentenced to eight years in one of his prisons.

The rest of the children were scattered among a few of their extended family and that was only thanks to my grandmother’s astuteness and clear thinking – despite knowing her days were numbered. Once her (and her husband’s) death sentence was ‘officially’ decreed, my grandmother had the presence of mind to demand to see a lawyer so she could leave a will and name guardians for her minor children.

You see, she knew what would happen to them if she did not do that. As ‘orphans’ of the civil war, they most likely would have been ‘adopted out’ – at least the younger ones who were still redeemable and whose ‘red genes’ could still be overridden – to Franco loyalists who perhaps were not able to have their own or who wanted to ‘save’ one of the poor little children who had the misfortune of being born to those “dirty, filthy, heretic rojos.” It wasn’t their fault, after all, was it?

Being 7 years old and having very minimal schooling, my father would have likely been one of those eligible for “adoption.” As it turned out, he was raised by his uncle, a man who was later – after the war ended – responsible for the death of one my dad’s older brothers, one of two who had fought, and lost, against Franco’s military coup. Hard to say which of these two potential fates would have been most traumatic.

I offer you (below) a short digital story about my grandmother’s execution. And I know everyone’s question will be: “so, how do you know she refused a blindfold?” That, along with other less obvious questions, will be addressed in time. For now, accept it as a mere metaphor if you doubt its literal truth. For one cannot doubt her eyes were wide open about what was about to happen in Spain as a result of Franco’s coup.

While my grandmother’s story will be the focus of this digital notebook, hers will not be the only story to be told here. Practically every day something will come across my overstuffed digital inbox that leads me to the story of yet another woman or young girl whose voice has been erased, or forgotten by a world that rarely even bothers to take note of a woman’s – or child’s, especially a female child’s – contribution. Remember, seen and not heard.

But these are stories that need to be told, that need to be heard, that need to be recorded so that future generations of girls and women will not feel so alone and unnoticed.

We all need to know about them, we all need to follow their example, to pick up their flag and continue fighting for humanity and freedom. Their personal battles may be over, but – sadly – the war they battled in is not.