50 First Cousins

My mother had 50 first cousins.

Her father had seven brothers and sisters, and her mother had eight. Each of those had kids, and before she knew it, there were fifty of them. Give or take a few.

“I don’t know the exact number,” she told me when I was young. “There were lots of them I never met. Didn’t even know their names.”

She would gaze off into the distance, trying to picture them. “Some of them live near Nashville. One owned a construction company. I see his signs around town. Another one was in the Grand Ole Opry. My Cousin Len built five thousand schools.”

My mom, formerly known as Ida Sue Smith, would go back to whatever she was doing—cooking, gardening, keeping track of family finances—leaving me to gaze in wonder at the picture she had painted.

Who were these people? What were they like, and where did they go? Would I ever meet them?

Shortly after that, our family left Nashville, made a brief stop in Chicago, and moved to Los Angeles, shown here with my mom to the left and me to the right. It’s where I grew up and where, eventually, I met and married my wife, Yvonne. In time, she and I became tired of all the people and traffic and frenetic pace, and we looked around for another place to live. We chose Nashville.   

When we arrived, we were invited to the Smith family gathering, held yearly by my mom’s relatives. There, I was reacquainted with her family, and one of the things we talked about was our relatives—the 50 first cousins.

For a while, I wanted to write a book about them, using that phrase as a title. I would research and track down the cousins, or as many as I could find, and the book would describe that search.

But books are funny things. They hop and swivel and stretch until you hardly recognize them. That’s what happened with this one. Instead of branching out to all the cousins, I found myself honing in on a small group of my mom’s relatives. I dug deeper with those few, a wonderfully colorful and talented group.

Aunt Minnie, Aunt Molly, and Aunt Stella owned a pie shop, where my mom and her family lived when she was growing up.

Cousin Beasley had a dance band that played for the opening of radio station WSM. When that station began broadcasting the Grand Ole Opry radio show, another cousin, Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, was one of its members.

Uncle Len, shown here, ran the Rosenwald Fund, which in the days of segregation built more than five thousand schools for African American children throughout the South. I wanted to tell these people’s stories, but all my research didn’t add up to a book. A few years later, my mom’s long life ended, and I lost my best source of information.

I decided to try writing the book anyway. And that's what I'm doing.

Of course, the Ida Sue Smith in my stories isn’t exactly my mom. This Ida Sue is half her and half me, a curious kid who lives partly in history and partly in my imagination, where I take real events as far as they go and then fill in the gaps.

I love writing these stories. They let me tell family history and, as all of us do with history, add some of myself.

My mom lives in these stories. So do I.