Blue Bloods

They weighed upon my girlhood like medieval chain mail. They came bearing birth dates and death dates, their genealogical trees spreading through my consciousness like the roots of Blue Spruces, their family crests seared into my imagination like sealing wax, their Latinate mottos befuddling me, even in translation: Sapere Aude, Dare to be Wise; Sapit Qui Deo Sapit, He who is Wise is Wise through God. My mother talked about them obsessively, about the great, great grandfather or the great, great, great uncle as if she were talking about the neighbors; indeed, they were more vivid to her than the neighbors, who had the bad form to live in ranch houses instead of castles, who lacked the pedigree to gallop back into the twelfth century, to dine with a certain grand ghost named Sir Andrew Wyse, originally of landed gentry from Devon, who had crossed over to Ireland and subdued the native Celts, for which Henry II rewarded him with a title and 2500 acres. According to my mother, Sir Andrew could ride his horse twenty-five miles, twenty-five miles she would repeat, as if I were hard of hearing, in any direction.

When my mother talked about her ancestors (and she always called them, “my” ancestors, to distinguish them from the dead white folks on my father’s side, whom she considered slightly beneath her, since none were titled), her face lit up and her pupils blazed, as if she were starring in her own son et lumiere show. Her audience, it should be said, was primarily my sister and me, since everyone else upon whom she plied her tales died a bubonic plague-like death of crushing boredom. Mom could fly through the years faster than the flipping pages of calendars in black-and-white movies. Sometimes she began at the end: with her mother’s father, John Francis Henry Wyse, who was born in 1860 and grew up on a plantation called Deer Park outside of Baltimore, and then parried back to his father, Henry Francis Wyse, her great grandfather, who kept slaves at Deer Park but freed them some ten years before the Civil War, riding further back to Sir Thomas Wyse, an eldest son who had remained at the family seat, St. John’s Manor, outside of Waterford rather than seek his fortunes in America. Sir Thomas, who required cash to maintain St. John’s Manor in the style to which it had become accustomed, won the hand of Laetitia Bonaparte, Napoleon’s niece (which meant, my mother crowed, that we were related to Napoleon!). Laetitia Bonaparte, though she brought a handsome dowry, proved to be “bad news” for Sir Thomas. After giving birth to two sons, Napoleon Alfred and William Charles Wyse, she “ran around’” with other men, finally fleeing rainy Waterford for the continent, and bearing three more illegitimate children before she divorced Sir Thomas and married Count Ratazzi, leading my mother to concede that there were “counts and no-counts” among our relations.

My father had no use for ancestors: his view was that if you went far enough back we were all related, all family trees branching out from the original monkeys in trees. Dad’s favorite sport was teasing Mom about the Wyses: one of his standard routines, which he resorted to whenever there was a pause in dinner table conversation, was to insist that the Wyses were connected to the potato chip dynasty. And even though my mother had a sense of humor about Laetitia Bonaparte’s libido, she was dead serious about the Wyses having nothing to do with Earl Wise of the Wise Delicatessen in Berwick, Pennsylvania who had bagged and sold his own potato chips in 1921. My ancestors were W-y-s-e not W-i-s-e, she painstakingly explained, spelling out both versions like a first grade teacher each time the subject came up.

“Your mother is straight out of a Jane Austen novel,” a friend once joked, and of course it was true. Snobbish to the point of caricature, my mother, who hung a framed portrait of the Wyse family coat of arms beside the hall mirror, truly believed that she had blue blood in her veins, and that it gave her permission to lord it over everyone around her.

According to Robert Lacy, author of the entertaining tome, Aristocrats, the Spanish were the ones who came up with the bizarre idea that some mortals have blue blood rather than red running through their veins. Some years after the Moorish occupation of Spain in the 9^th Century, certain families, especially in the Castille region, refused to intermarry with their dark-skinned conquerors. (Moors, by the way, did not have a good rep in Europe, as evidenced by the portrait of swarthy, hot-blooded Othello in Shakespeare’s play.) As the Spanish successfully pushed the Moors out of the Iberian peninsula, the term "sangre azul,” was applied to all Spanish aristocrats, whose skin allegedly revealed slightly bluer blood vessels than ordinary people, especially in the veins of the arm and hand. What’s curious about “sangre azul,” Lacy observes, is that while aristocrats’ light skin could be attributed to their avoiding peasant-type work in the fields, as well as possibly the disease of argyria, which came from ingesting trace amounts of silver in eating utensils, “sangre azul,” had nothing to do with breeding, since all Spanish people, themselves descended from marauding Visigoths, intermarried with their Moorish cousins, especially if you went far enough back in history.

Curiously enough, blue blood did not enter the English language until 1834, at which time the European aristocracy was already on the wane, the use of titles having been banned by the United States Constitution in 1787 and the titled themselves falling to the guillotine at the dizzyingly bloody rate of sixty an hour during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

(By the way, the entry for blue blood in my online dictionary reveals that the only living creatures that can boast of truly possessing an oxygenated form of blood containing hemocyanin are horseshoe crabs, who, at 400 million years old, were around long before the Visigoths.)

The United States has a love-hate relationship with blue bloods. Although we profess to eschew all things aristocratic, we nevertheless have created organizations like the Mayflower Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution, which encourage all kinds of snobbery, racism, and elitism (my mother belonged to neither, as ‘her’ ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower, though she claimed that she could have joined the DAR). The DAR famously banned internationally renowned soprano Marian Anderson from singing to an integrated audience in Constitutional Hall in 1939. Fifty years after the DAR dissed Anderson, Barack Hussein Obama addressed thousands of blacks and whites gathered on the mall on a cold January morning (including this humble blogger and her family), speaking in his ringing baritone of the dream of equality in which everyone, regardless of their origins or skin color, has a chance at the American dream. Obama, mindful of history and its symbols, held one of his first business meetings among the gold-gilt French Empire chairs in the Blue Room of the White House. Obama thus put the blue-blooded Bush dynasty to bed (remember the late Governor Ann Richards’ joke about Bush pere that “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth”?).

I often wonder what my mother would have made of Barack Obama. When she was a girl growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1930s, her family had employed a black cook named Orilla, whom my mother adored in the simple way many white children adored their black ‘mammies.’ But such affection had boundaries; she would no more have considered fraternizing with Orilla’s children than she would move to Brazil to take tea with Amazonian pygmies. There were no blacks in my mother’s class at Smith College; no blacks at the country club where we played tennis; or at the Church of Christ, Scientist, where we recited the Scientific Statement of Being; no blacks anywhere in our New England city, save in a ghetto of run-down triple-decker houses with mangy dogs and uncut lawns.

But like all ancestor mavens, my mother worshipped at the temples of success and power. In the end, she would have been impressed by the Obama’s Harvard credentials, literary acumen, princely demeanor, as well as his Nobel Prize. I suspect that she would attributed Obama’s rise not to his white mother, Ann Dunham, from Wichita, Kansas (whom she would have considered poor white trash) but to his black African father, Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’omo Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya; a prince in Africa was hardly the same as a lord in Britannia, but nothing else, in her lexicon, could account for his meteoric rise to power.

“Success is counted sweetest,” Emily Dickinson once observed, “by those who n’er succeed.” As I have grown into middle age, I see my mother’s ancestor worship in a different light, not only as comedy, but also as tragedy. All those knights and lords of the manor that weighed upon me as a child gave my mother, an insecure girl from the Middle West whose family could barely scrape together the tuition for Smith College, a certain gravitas, a sense of identity and purpose. Because she feared that her own little light would never be powerful enough to shine its brightness through the world, she depended upon the luminosity of the dead to shine for her.

“There’s an old Irish saying about ancestors,” one of my boyfriends had informed my mother one Christmas dinner years ago when she was droning on about the Wyses.

“What’s that, dearie?” she had inquired sweetly. Sean Shesgreen, whose people were lawyers from Letterkenny, couldn’t hold a candle to the Wyses of Waterford, but my mother was impressed by Sean’s table manners (“he’s a gentleman and a scholar,” she had enthused) as well as the fact that he was largely self-made, having arrived in Chicago in the 1960s with not much more than $100 and a suit. She had brought out all the family silver to entice him to marry me. (I was then in my middle thirties, widowed and without issue.)

“Ancestors are like potatoes,” he said merrily, “the best thing about them is under the ground.”
My mother, who was not without a sense of humor, laughed heartily, complimented Sean on his Irish wit, which reminded her of her grandfather’s, then returned to the story of how St. John’s Manor had been given to the Wyses by Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries.

I didn’t marry Sean Shesgreen, but that’s another story, and it has nothing to do with blue bloods.
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