Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

Called “Gwen” in the memoir, Gwendolyn is an African American woman from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where most of her family still resided during Natasha’s childhood. Gwen was born in June 1944. Her father, Ralph Turnbough, was a very light-skinned Creole from New Orleans who later relocated to Los Angeles. He was not involved in raising her. At university in Kentucky, Gwen majored in literature and theater. There, she met the Canadian-born Rick Trethewey. She and Rick bonded over a shared love of literature. They married in 1965 in Ohio, where it was legal for them to do so. Gwen was already pregnant with Natasha at the time. Then, they moved to her native Gulfport, where Natasha was born. Gwen was about 22 then. The couple attracted a great deal of attention in post-Civil Rights Mississippi, where the sights of an interracial couple and their child were still causes for ire. Gwen and Natasha continued to live in Mississippi, while Rick spent most of the week away in New Orleans, where he attended graduate school. He later became a writer and professor, points of pride for his daughter.

Not long after Gwen and Rick divorced, Gwen took a job as a cocktail waitress. Around this time, she met Joel Grimmette, who became her second husband. As with Natasha, Gwen likely married Joel when she was already pregnant.

Natasha describes her mother as “graceful and reserved, attentive to details” (19). She was also averse to confrontation. Gwen was tall and graceful. Gwen earned her Master’s in Social Work during her second marriage and took a job working with children with mental disabilities. Before she died, Gwen worked as personnel director for human resources at the DeKalb County mental health agency, then called the “Georgia Retardation Center.”

A native of Nova Scotia, Rick is Natasha’s father and Gwen’s first husband. Gwen and Rick met at university in Kentucky, where they fell in love over a mutual appreciation for literature. After their marriage in 1965, Rick moved to the Gulf Coast and lived with Gwen’s family. He then split his time between Gulfport and New Orleans, where he attended graduate school. He and Gwen divorced when Natasha was six. Rick became a writer and professor and believed that his daughter would grow up to become a writer, too. From 1967 to 1968, Rick served in the Royal Canadian Navy, which gave him the opportunity to sail around the world on the Centennial, a destroyer.

Trethewey describes her father as rough in his manners, as well as “rowdy and bookish” (19). 

Joel is Gwen’s second husband, Joey’s father, and Natasha’s stepfather. He is also Gwen’s murderer. When Natasha describes Joel to the reader, her portrait of his likeness is scant. He is “tall and slim” and has long sideburns (69). Though Trethewey never directly mentions Joel’s race, as she does that of her father, the reader can infer it through her references to his Afro.

Natasha recalls her unease when she first met Joel, whom she called “Big Joe.” She noticed that one of his eyes bulged out and that he had toes missing from one foot, which he blamed on his two years in the Vietnam War. Though Natasha initially doubted this story, Joel’s ability to seek psychiatric treatment with the Veterans Administration indicates that he was, indeed, a soldier. During a phone conversation with Gwen, Joel reminds his former wife that he had been in Vietnam for two years. Joel was abusive to both Natasha and his wife, though there is no reference to him ever abusing Joey. His behavior toward Gwen was possessive, obsessive, and controlling, mirroring that of many abusive people.

Joey is Natasha’s younger brother, born from her mother’s second marriage to Joel. Gwen announced that she was married to Joel after Natasha returned home after spending the summer with her maternal relatives in the mid-1970s. Initially, Natasha believed that Joey was her stepbrother. Her mother told her only that she would soon have a little brother, but there was no indication that Gwen was pregnant. Natasha did not find out until her teen years that Joey was, in fact, her half-brother. 

Born in 1906, Aunt Sugar is Natasha’s maternal great-aunt, who lived next door to Natasha’s grandmother “on the small plot of land” where Eugenia McGee, her great-grandmother, had lived (25). She was 10 years older than Natasha’s grandmother, thus positioning her to be a surrogate mother when Eugenia died. She and Grandmother Turnbough were Eugenia’s surviving daughters. Eugenia bequeathed her land to them. They each built houses on their mother’s land, across a highway that had once been a pasture. Sugar’s brother, Son, lived across from them in a house that he had built for himself and his wife, Lizzie.

Aunt Sugar lived in “a squat bungalow of masonry brick, a bunker with jalousie windows” (27). She had the house built shortly after her retirement. She moved back to Gulfport around the time that Natasha was born, having been away in Chicago for 25 years, where she worked in a lab. Natasha’s recollection of seeing her aunt in photos, looking at test tubes, suggests that Sugar may have been a chemist; but her past profession or previous studies remain unclear.

A believer in phrenology, Sugar insisted that Natasha would only adequately receive education if her skull were the right shape. Thus, she took up the duty of massaging the baby’s skull with oil each day. She had started her own church, which one day became Mount Olive Baptist—an institution that sat across from the family’s plot of land. Natasha knew that Sugar had been married once, but she had never seen her aunt in the company of men. She remembers her mainly as “the family heroine, standing up to everyone, white people included” (28). Sugar was six feet tall, wiry, and fierce. She defended her home with a shotgun. She played piano and took Natasha to fish at the pier in Gulfport on most weekends. She spoke in “idiom and metaphor” and chanted Psalms, even after dementia set in (29). 

Like Aunt Sugar, Natasha’s grandmother is a formidable maternal figure and an influential elder during her early childhood in Gulfport. Natasha never mentions her given name. Grandmother Turnbough lives next door to her sister, Sugar, on a plot of land that their mother, Eugenia McGee, passed down to them. Son, her brother, lived in a house across from her and Sugar. She had Gwen at age 30, while she was studying at beauty school in New Orleans, training to be a hair stylist, and living in the French Quarter.

Natasha’s grandmother worked at a drapery factory in town, a job that she quit as soon as Natasha was born. Since then, she worked from home as a seamstress, placing her work room beside Natasha’s playroom so that she could watch over her granddaughter while Gwen and Rick were working. Like Sugar, Natasha’s grandmother refused to be cowed by violent white supremacists and kept a firearm to protect herself from them. 

Uncle Son is Natasha’s great-uncle. He is the brother of her grandmother and her great-aunt, Aunt Sugar, and the son of Natasha’s great-grandmother, Eugenia McGee. Natasha describes her uncle as “tall and handsome with a trim mustache above perfect teeth” (27). He was debonair and often wore dress shoes, “finely ribbed undershirts, and creased trousers, even when he mowed his lawn” (27). Trethewey describes him as light enough to pass for White, which gave way to questions about his paternity. The general assumption was that Son had been fathered by a man named Mr. Griswold, for whom the town had once been named. As a result, Son owned much of the land in North Gulfport on which his rental homes stood, as well as his own juke joint—Son’s Owl Club.

Son had been a member of the Elks lodge since the 1950s. He had a baseball team, which played in Gulfport, and he drove the school bus for the Head Start program. Son was married to a woman whom Natasha called Aunt Lizzie.