What I Inherited from My Criminal Great-Grandparents
“As winter has no money”, the Democrat and chronicle reported: “He must one day serve for each dollar fine, so his sentence is really twenty years.” The severe penalty echoes the draconian vision of the secret services of counterfeiting. “There was not much sense of proportions,” said Mihm. “These agents had internalized the conviction that the money itself is sacred and that a counterfeit – even a bad counterfeit – is an insult to the majesty of the state.”
Selma also pleaded guilty, but her sentence was suspended because of her sons. When she was released, she went to Rochester to recover Earl from the children’s refuge, then to her parents’ house in Erie, to find the rest of her boys. But she did not give up her husband. Later in 1907, Selma sent a letter to the Advocate for the US to the Pardon, James Finch, about the continuation of a switching from Anton’s sentence. “I’m so miserable without him,” she wrote. She was taking the laundry and cleaning of the work, but, she said in Finch, she was not “able to earn enough money to take care of my children properly”. She continued: “To raise good Christian citizens, the father is wanted and I think he will be a better man for what has happened to him.”
The return address on Selma’s letter was not that of the Brandts; She had not lasted long under the roof of her parents. During a large part of Anton’s imprisonment, Selma apparently lived alone, without her boys, in a rented room.
Until recently, I didn’t know anything about Anton and Selma Winter, and I didn’t know their son Earl little, who died when I was twelve. My father’s relationship with his parents was tense and we did not spend much time with his family side. One evening, I procrastinated by writing a piece that involved research on the genealogical websites, and, on a whim, I started hitting the names of my grandparents in the search bars.
One of the first articles I discovered that night – the portal that sucks me in an endless flow of newspaper archives in the progressive era and secret service books – was the entrance to my grandfather in the 1910 American census. There, I found Earl listed as a “prisoner”, six years old, of the house for without friends. He was an orphanage in Érié; Charles Dickens himself could not have evoked a more biting name. I stayed at my laptop until three years that morning, ransacking each digital binder that I could locate, trying to understand how Earl had lost his family and found himself in such a place.
This fixation was catalyzed, at least in part, by the suspicion that I had already possessed an unconscious knowledge of the fate of Earl – that the files that I was looking for had been hidden in a crawl in the spider canvas of my psyche. Years ago, I wrote a novel about a mother who adopted the youngest of her four children from an orphanage. She, like me, is a passionate reading of Donald Winnicott, the English psychoanalyst and pediatrician whose work on the relationship between mothers and their children has contributed to the development of what we now call the theory of attachment. To seek the book, I plunged into the literature on the neurological, psychological and socio-emotional effects of the neglect of children, disturbed attachment and institutional childcare services. I often wondered why I was attracted to these desolate stories of cruelty and abandonment.
When I still wrote the first draft of this book, at the end of spring 2018, the Trump administration largely applied its family separation policy to the American-Mexican border, under which thousands of children were taken from their parents. During the weeks when the crisis dominated the news, my combat or flight response was constantly activated, to a certain extent that embarrassed me. I was nervous, irritable, subject to tears. I thought of little apart from families on the border. I dreamed of it. These intrusive thoughts struck me like a narcissistic illusion – as if I had lost the ability to distinguish between what was happening thousands of kilometers and what happened to me. My children were one and three years old at the time, and I had to sleep in their rooms at night, or I did not sleep at all.
You could say that I normally reacted to an atrocity of human rights perpetuated by my own government. And I may have been hormoneally shifted because my baby had recently finished breastfeeding. But, years later, when I found Earl in the orphanage, another possibility appeared: that, of all the horrible news that generates big titles in the world every day, I was defeated by this story – children drawn from their parents – because it has aroused something in the corners of my mind.
While I clicked to enlarge the entry of the EARL census, the recognition was instantaneous and visceral – a shocking relief. My hands have become cold and numb. A high electrical frequency affected in my ears. The novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, writing a century ago, described a similar moment: “The certainty was so complete that he seemed to paralyze his powers of understanding, like a bottle of snake in the brain.” I knew that my grandfather had been in an orphanage-right? I learned that only now, or do I remember? How did I not know I knew it?
The discovery triggered a kind of synaptic flood, a wave of memory crushing its conscious embankment. Or that’s what it was. Maybe my limbic system relayed intense sympathy for the fate of my grandfather, nothing more. Maybe I was simply surprised by a remarkable coincidence, just like you could jump to a slapting door, when it is only the wind.
I had the common dream where you find a secret room in your house. In my version of The Dream, I would also find a child in the room, hungry and ruffled, looking at me in the stoic accusation. I had this dream so often that I gave it to the mother in my novel, so that she can invest her with a meaning. Finding my grandfather in the census was as if someone had awakened me and gave me the birth certificate of the dream child.
During the years when Anton was in prison and Selma was devoid, their sons Arthur and Hugo are nowhere in the public archives or in all the archives that I have sought. In the 1910 census, in which Earl is listed at home for homeless, the valor of nine years lives with another family, in an external farm in Erie, probably offering manual work in exchange for the chamber and the board of directors – a common arrangement for orphaned children of the time, and often facilitated by the children’s aid company.
Selma’s pleadings on behalf of Anton finally reached his Congress Member, Arthur Bates, who petitioned the American prosecutor in a letter: “My friends in Erié write to me that the punishment of this sentence arrives harder on his wife and four small children, all of ten years, than on himself.” The Erié Daily time reported: “Ms. Winter is in very poor health and the children need a father to take care of them, he feared becoming public accusations.” Anton wrote to President William H. Taft, promising that “if you will only give me a chance, I will once again lead an honest life.” He concluded: “Hoping that the fate of my children will encourage your excellence to let Mercy replace justice in my case, I am, most respectfully, Anton Winter.”
President Taft was born of Anton’s sentence and erased his fine in March 1910. Forgiveness passed despite the vehement opposition of agent Gammon, who revealed for the end of finch that, in his search for the winter house, he had “found glass negatives and obscene images that he had reproduced, which were very obscene”. Other laconic objections have also been published by Wesley Dudley, the District of the County of Erie. Dudley wrote: “I would say that my opinion is that winter is almost well done and that her confinement is not so much a loss for Ms. Winter that she seems to believe.”
Anton apparently proved Dudley. After being released from the penitentiary in Atlanta – his discharge papers indicate that he left with a pen pen, a watch, a “pack of various waste” and a suitcase – he disappeared. He never reappears in Erie City’s repertoire, and Selma began to refer to herself as a widow a few years later. It is likely that he has never seen his wife or sons again.
While I continued to search for my family, I saw more and more parallels between the life of my ancestors and mine. I came to believe that I was, in some ways, the protégé of my great-grandmother, or its doppelgänger. Or his counterfeit. For example: she married a man who turned out to be terribly unstable and horrible with money. Me too. She “lived constantly in the fear of a violent act”. Me too, until I bite it. (In 2020, my husband was accused of assault. The case was finally rejected, and he denies all violence during our marriage.) By working in winter files, I often felt sting of already seen: an exact turning point of sentence, an absurdly specific expenditure. There were too many rhymes. Perhaps my terrible marriage was only the fabric of intergenerational habit, the imprints, the grooves deposited a hundred and twenty years ago by a lonely and ignorant woman that I have never known. Maybe I was reading someone else’s lines, writing fiction on the real child of another woman.
No one, the generation of Earl knew Anton. My father, who now has eighty-eight, told me that, growing up, he was vaguely aware that his grandfather had a criminal in Germany. I remember that he had said that the term “horsepower” was stuck to him. But my father does not remember having heard of the real work of Anton and Selma, and he did not know – at least not consciously – that his father had spent stretching of his childhood in and outside the institutions, separated from his parents and brothers and sisters. He and Earl have never talked much much, he said.
Jill Salberg, who teaches in the postdoctoral program of New York University in psychoanalysis, told me that, often, stories of family trauma are not communicated directly to children but mentioned in passing and half forgotten, or heard out of context. The information is housed somewhere in our unconscious. Children, writes Salberg in a 2015 test, subliminally absorbs in the history of their parents, “before there were words, and therefore before a story could be told.” The psychoanalyst Galit Atlas, in his book in 2022, “emotional heritage”, written on a patient, Noah, who imagines from early childhood that he has a missing twin brother; As an adult, he learns that he had a older brother, also named Noah, who died as a baby. Another patient, a homosexual, has recurring dreams of an ex-little friend who ends up unlocking the enigma of the death of his grandfather, whom he never knew, and who committed suicide after his wife discovered that he had business with other men.
In the work of Salberg and others, the disrupted attachment of the type that EARL has undergone in childhood is the central injury of intergenerational entertainment. The sudden loss of a parent, like other forms of toxic stress, can have deep effects on early development of the brain; Being torn from his family had to shape Earl, and it seems intuitive that this disaster also marked how he raised his children and, in turn, how they raised theirs.
