Love, Janis Read online

  My own grief settled into my life like a cat settling into a sunwarmed spot on a rug, except its claws were always extended to cause piercing pain if ever I loosened my stiff control of my life. I carried it around for eighteen years, until one day it burst out as anger. I kicked boxes of files around my office, files that contained the legal papers that defined my obligation to Janis’s career. I grabbed every artifact of hers that lay around my house and boxed them up and shipped them to my brother. I made him come get her Porsche, which I had stored in my garage. I was desperately trying to be free of something. Finally I broke down and sobbed. Grief jolted my body, bringing old memories to mind like slides of a personal travelogue. It felt so bloody good, I sought out every last kernel of hiding sorrow and threw it away, forever. Finally I understood that I had held on to my grief because it seemed like the last thing I had of her; it had been my silent resistance to accepting her death. It was an absurd emotional overreaction, but afterward when I walked down the hall, I seemed to float. I was giddy. I was free.

  That specter haunted me no more. I didn’t know what other masks there were to be torn away, but having tossed aside this one, I was unafraid of the others. I found myself strangely drawn to a better understanding of Janis.

  I listened to these words that my sister spoke, reflecting an idea from our common upbringing: “Don’t compromise yourself, it’s all you got.” I knew that my search for Janis was about the truth. I could not be content with anything less than a full understanding of her life, her choices, and her times.

  Janis said, “Let yourself go and you’ll be more than you’ve ever thought of being.” Free of my grief, I was free to love her again. I released my assumptions about Janis, willing to let her life tell me what it could.

  TWO

  OUR ANCESTORS

  When I’m sitting round late in the evening, child

  Wondering why, why, why did I ever leave

  Well, I went out searching for something, baby

  I left it behind now, babe, now I see

  —JANIS JOPLIN, “Catch Me, Daddy”

  THE NAMES THAT I KNOW from my father’s side of the family are Joplin (or Jopling), Porter, and Ball. My mother’s family name was East, with Hanson (formerly Hoar, and before that, Hore), Sherman, Coulter, Fleming, and Rosine also related.

  The first of my ancestors to reach the American shores were fishermen from the Hore family who ventured the rough Atlantic to harvest the rich waters off Nova Scotia. There, twenty-five-year-old Hezekiah Hore was stung by the salt spray of opportunity. He lusted for the miles of unused farmland, dense forests, and thriving game. He was the second son in a second marriage. Besides a fishing fleet, the family owned rich land leases from the days of Henry VIII’s confiscation of the Catholic Church’s property. None would be his because he was not the eldest son. In 1633, twelve years after the Mayflower first landed, Hezekiah Hore sailed on the ship Recovery to a new life in the Massachusetts Bay colony.

  Hore joined a group of cousins and neighbors in founding the town of Taunton, Massachusetts. He settled among people generally considered to be Puritans, but from the first, nonbelievers were a sizable minority. These other Pilgrims celebrated life in colorful clothes and with hearty laughter. Hezekiah prospered as a farmer and businessman. Like his peers, he sought to break away from the tyranny of the Church of England, the English government, and an economic system that kept each man slotted into the station of life in which he was born.

  Conflicting religious sects disrupted the otherwise tranquil coexistence of the colonists. Each group was an uncompromising defender of its own views. Puritans, Baptists, Separatists, and Quakers argued heatedly. At the height of the tyranny of oppression in the Plymouth colony, ships carrying Quakers could be fined and the Quakers whipped and imprisoned. Several were hanged.

  Roger Williams set many hearts on fire because of his cries for religious tolerance and respect for the Indians. His accusations influenced the life of another of my ancestors in the Bay colony, Phillip Sherman, Williams’s son-in-law. “No man has the right to force another to join any church!” Williams complained. “There should be no state religion in the new land.” He especially infuriated settlers with his defiant support of Indian rights. He lived among them, learned their language, and charged, “No Englishman should take the land of the Indians without permission and payment.” His troublemaking views so threatened the Plymouth colony, they evicted him and his followers. Phillip Sherman left with this group of more liberal colonists to form the colony of Rhode Island. The remaining Bible-reading settlers captured the surviving Indians and sold them into slavery in the West Indies.

  Reacting to their parent’s zeal, the children of the first settlers ushered in a new era of caution and stability. William Ball, one of my father’s ancestors, moved from Chesapeake Bay to Virginia, where he built his Georgian-style mansion, Millenbeck. He would be the grandfather of George Washington.

  Phillip Sherman became a Quaker, a farmer, and a speaker at meetings. John Porter and Thomas Jopling were farmers in Virginia. All were caught up in the “Great Awakening,” a time of religious fervor and discovery of an inner self in the early 1700s. This group cast off their parents’ views that mere living could bring satisfaction. They wanted the “New Light” to shine from within, so that all would know the glory and euphoria of a spiritual rebirth. They hit the roads and founded new communes, denounced slavery, and converted Indians while revitalizing their churches.

  Frontier wars also consumed their energy. During the seven years (1755–63) of the French and Indian War, thousands of settlers lost their lives. A young Swedish woman who was my mother’s first American ancestor, Sidneh Rosine Brown, felt the brunt of the abominable violence of the racial and territorial clashes. It was night when a knock came at the door. “Who keeps house?” the English voice asked. Her young husband opened the door and his surprised body was pierced through by Indian lances. Sidneh’s two-year-old baby’s head was smashed against the door frame. The house and barn, with livestock inside, were burned as the band of six Indians and one Frenchman dressed as an Indian danced and whooped in the smoky night air. Sidneh was forced to march with them to Canada and gave birth to a son along the way. The Indians gave this new life their ceremonial christening in an ice-cold stream. Sidneh won the approval of her captors when she refused to eat her share of the last edible thing that they carried, a leather pouch that had held rifle shot. She was eventually sold to the French in Canada for $5.30 and stayed with the governor to recuperate before she was traded back to the English settlements.

  Sidneh returned to Virginia, where she married George Fleming, a recent emigrant to the New World. A man of great girth and guts, his ship had foundered on rocks three miles from the coast with no lifeboats on board. Throwing his belongings and his gold overboard, George Fleming had lashed himself to his wooden trunk and floated to land on an incoming tide. Settling down, George and Sidneh made a comfortable life for themselves buying convict labor contracts.

  The smaller wars eventually erupted into the major conflict of the times, the American Revolution. John Porter enlisted in 1776 as a sergeant. Shadrach Hoar became a corporal. One from Virginia and one from Massachusetts, they fought in the same campaign to stop the British in their northern assault on the colonies. This, the Saratoga campaign, was a decisive and skillful battle, which succeeded due to the skill and daring of the commander, Benedict Arnold, a man history recalls for his later traitorous acts.

  Jacob Sherman defied his Quaker upbringing to shoulder a rifle and march into the fray in Boston. He fought in a battle that became known as Bunker Hill. In his “Crisis” paper of December 23, 1776, Thomas Paine described the day: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

  Far from receiving the gratitude of his loved ones for his efforts, Jac
ob Sherman was disowned by his parents for violating the Quaker belief in nonviolence. His efforts helped found a country but tore apart a family. He was the last of the Quakers in our family.

  The next generation of family members brought all of my family groups westward. Benjamin Jopling was a scrawny Scotsman with the large, rough hands of a man used to hard work. In 1826 Jopling joined the Methodist Church during one of its tent revivals and his life changed abruptly. The Methodist Church was the first to publicly disclaim slavery. The Methodist-Episcopal Church split off in 1844 as a proslavery movement, and Benjamin went with them. They were a true people’s church, with no paid missionaries. The spirit moved members to pass the word along by traveling in community groups to new territories and founding new churches.

  This inner force compelled Benjamin Jopling to uproot his family from their relatives and head for the frontier in northeastern Alabama. White men had recently found gold on lands owned by the Cherokees. No amount of diplomatic wrangling could keep the federal government from finding a way to force the Cherokees from their land. Benjamin became an established community member until urged on by the signs of TEXAS OR BUST on wagons passing through. He finally settled near Fort Worth, where he farmed and helped to build the fort that gave the settlement its name. Along the way he was married four times, had twenty-two children, and outlived all of his wives.

  John Milton Hanson took a northern route in his westward journey from Massachusetts. His father, William Hoar, had changed the family name to Hanson. With his new bride, Lauretta, John first tried the life in New York and then Ohio until they settled Henry County, Iowa, thirty miles from the Mississippi River. In exchange for the team of horses that had hauled them to Iowa, they received raw land.

  Ten years later, the ever-alluring call of a better future obliged John Hanson to chase his dreams in the California Gold Rush. He left his wife and eight children, taking his eldest son with him. His wife soon died and the children were placed with neighbors and relatives until, six years later, John returned home to resume his role as householder. He was a man of marked intelligence, had wide respect within the community, and lived to a ripe old age.

  In Virginia, John W. Porter married the daughter of a Baptist preacher. The young couple planned their future from stories in letters from John’s brother, Beverly Porter, who lived in the distant world of Texas, then a Mexican territory. John’s wife was a tough pioneer woman, stout of body and strong of heart, whose inner convictions and faith in her husband carried her across the frontier. In 1833, husband and wife, two children, and a handful of slaves set off from Nashville on a flatboat bound for New Orleans. Porter had loaded the boat with pork and stoves as trade goods, which he bartered for sailboat passage to the Texas port of Velasco. There they found brother Beverly Porter dying in the cholera epidemic of 1833. Undaunted, John and his group made salt from seawater to afford the purchase of oxen and wagons to begin their inland journey. They dogged the twists and turns of the Brazos River until they reached a rolling, hilly area that was lush with deep green grass and dotted with pines. There Porter claimed his homestead as allowed by treaty. He called it Porter’s Prairie, and fashioned crude log cabins for himself and his slave families.

  John W. Porter’s son, Robert Ury Porter (my father’s greatgrandfather), shared the gift of making a fortune with many in his generation. After his father’s death, he managed his mother’s interests. He bred cattle and cultivated the raw land with grains and fruits. He had his slaves cut and mill lumber from the farm and the East Texas woodlands. They built the first two-story house in Burleson County, a white clapboard affair modeled after the gracious Southern home. It had broad verandas front and back, with the upper porches for sleeping during the muggy Texas summer nights. There was a central hall with rooms on either side and a detached kitchen to keep the all-too-common kitchen fires from spreading.

  Robert got married and took his young bride to New York to buy furniture for their new home: oak four-poster beds, highboys and lowboys, rugs, and a parlor piano. He built the first Methodist church and the first school building in the county. During the Civil War, Robert served as a purchasing agent for the Confederacy. The success of his group’s connection to Mexico enabled the South to maintain its forces much longer than it could have if it had relied solely on Southern supplies.

  Robert’s brother joined Terry’s Texas Rangers, the scourge of the Northern armies. This group was known for its daring and pluck, though by the end of the war two-thirds had lost their lives. They rode thoroughbred mounts and time after time defeated the Yankees, who paled in comparison to the cunning Comanches, whom the Texans had fought at home.

  On the other side of the Civil War fought the Hansons. Henry W. Hanson (my mother’s great-grandfather) enlisted as a volunteer in the Fourth Iowa Cavalry when he was eighteen. He served as an orderly in General Roberts’s headquarters. His awe of the service was such that he wore his uniform often years after the conflict had ended.

  His generation of progressives was attuned to serving society, and Henry joined the Masonic Lodge and the Grand Army of the Republic, which was devoted to the active work of relief. At birth he had been named merely Henry, but as an adult, with his respect for the pomp of institutional life, he felt the need for a middle name, so he gave himself the initial W.

  The next generation continued the westward migration, with Mother’s family stopping in Nebraska. Ulysses Sampson Grant East, my mother’s grandfather, was an Illinois boy born to patriotic parents during the Civil War. Grant, as he was called, caught the fever of the Oklahoma land rush in which several of his relatives participated, but he took a more northerly route. A soft-spoken but autocratic man, Grant ended up farming in the southeastern corner of the state, in an area the Pawnee Indians had recently been forced to vacate.

  Grant’s neighbor was a fellow recently relocated from Iowa, Herbert Hanson. Herbert had lost his job as a mail carrier in Iowa and couldn’t farm because of a baseball injury to his leg. His father told him, “Go to Nebraska, Herbert. Any man who can lift a hammer can earn a good living there.” Since Herbert’s family had sometimes been reduced to eating potatoes for lunch and potato water for dinner, they needed a change. In Nebraska he prospered, eventually owning both a plumbing store and a secondhand furniture store.

  Herbert was active in the Republican party. If you wanted something done in the little farming community of Clay Center, Nebraska, you were told, “Go see Herbert Hanson. He can make it happen.” In fact, he was so politically and socially active that his wife, Stella Mae Sherman Hanson, was left alone to raise their eight children. She resented his absences and became fretful, often writing her children (when they were grown) sentences that started with, “I am grieving so about . . .”

  W.E.B. Du Bois began the first movement asserting equal rights for blacks while my Porter ancestors were forced to deal with their ownership of slaves. Family myth says Robert Porter called his slaves together and said, “Those of you who want to leave may. I will take care of any of you who wish to stay.” To his credit, he did help buy land and mules for one of these families. He taught his children that slavery was wrong. He could accept defeat and change.

  My grandmother Florence Porter Joplin started life in the protected Southern tradition, which soon gave way to the economic realities of the late 1800s. Born to a father who was sixty-two years of age, she suffered from his declining ability to farm the land. While visiting a cousin in Big Springs, Texas, she helped entertain by baking fresh breakfast rolls for a group of cowboys who came calling on Sundays. She soon wed the shy ranch foreman, Seeb Joplin.

  Seeb had been raised near Lubbock, Texas, as the eldest of eleven children. Seeb’s father, Charles Alexander Joplin (who had dropped the g in Jopling), helped found the local Methodist church and served as a county commissioner. He helped lay out streets, design municipal buildings, and plan social charities. Charles was a man of humor and industry, but he did not put much faith in education for hi
s children. Rather, he felt they should shoulder much of the burden of the farm work. Seeb was a markedly intelligent boy, but got little more than a sixth-grade education. His training on the land would have stood him well in earlier eras, but he came of age when all the land available for homesteading was gone.

  Seeb flirted with the romance of new frontiers when he drove a herd of cattle from the ranch he managed to Billings, Montana. With his brother, he ventured on a narrow-gauge railway to Dawson, Alaska. He was offered eight hundred dollars to winter over just to keep one cow alive, but he shied from the snowbound climate and returned to Texas. He and Florence raised their two children on a large ranch they managed outside Tahoka, Texas. Women’s suffrage may have been voted into law in 1920, but real emancipation for my families came in reduced numbers of children. Florence Porter Joplin grew up in a family of sixteen. She had only two children. That was liberation! My father, Seth Ward Joplin, was born in 1910, the second and last child of Seeb and Florence.

  “Ask the madam” is how Seeb dealt with many questions his two children asked him. It was a sign of the formality that governed their household, even in its remote spot on the West Texas plains. Grandmother Joplin taught her children to respect people because of their merits. She had learned a lesson during the Reconstruction days of riots, race-related killings of blacks and whites, and the Republicans in state government forcing real estate taxes so high that the prewar owners would be forced to sell their land. The lesson was how to lie low, and she passed it on.

  One of the frequent stock-market panics caught the ranch’s owner in its tumultuous slide and forced the sale of the land Seeb managed. For a time he was the sheriff of the town of Tahoka, but his personality was too gentle. Seeb finally found his niche managing the stockyards in Amarillo, Texas. Florence helped by running a boardinghouse for the men who worked for Seeb. Her cooking was so good that men sought jobs with Seeb for that reason alone. Florence learned to drive an automobile solely so that she could attend cooking classes.