Odd Birds
September 05, 2024 at 09:30PMShane Mitchell remembers her great aunt Aileen, a woman born in 1897 who shucked off the limiting gender expectations of her time, leaving the south for Chicago to earn a master’s degree at Smith College School for Social Work. Mitchell pieces together bits of her great aunt’s life from childhood visits and insight gleaned from letters, postcards, photos, travel diaries, and fragments of memory. My only wish for this piece? That it was five times longer.
My great-aunt went on to earn her master’s degree at Smith College School for Social Work, and then settled in a teaching position in the newly formed Richmond Professional Institute at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. That’s where she briefly mentioned meeting “Anne, a newcomer from Ohio” in 1929. The two would be together for the rest of their lives.
That summer my great-aunt overheated under her wig, and revealed something of her true self, I was 15, and my parents had sent me off alone on a southbound train from New York with the sole instruction: “Get off at Richmond.” Aileen and Anne greeted me in the grand lobby of Union Station, one cheery and chattering, the other buttoned down and stern. Both appalled at the unsuitable clothing in my suitcase. (My mother got an earful.) It was a sad and lonely spell for me, because Mom was manifesting her own drama, and honestly, I only wanted to be swimming in the lake and playing baseball at twilight back home, not spending precious summer weeks with little old ladies in pillbox hats and sensible heels. They took me to a secondhand store and bought a couple of dresses so we could dine at the James River Country Club, where I ate lime sherbet in a silver dessert bowl for the first time. Aileen taught me how to snap a hand fan, a remarkably flirtatious skill. She also gave me a tooled-leather jewelry box, and Anne allowed me to choose a silver-and-coral ring from hers.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/05/odd-birds/
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