Orphaned triplets search for their family’s history
|
Version 0 of 1. When Mamie Lee Kelly gave birth to triplets on Jan. 18, 1953, at Adams Hospital near Logan Circle, Washington was gripped with Ike fever. Dwight David Eisenhower was about to enter the White House, and the new parents decided to honor the new president. The boys would be named Dwight and Alexander David and the girl would be named Mamie — to jointly honor the first lady and the triplets’ mother. It was the sort of feel-good story that newspapers love, and the triplets were pictured in the Afro-American newspaper: the tired mother, her newborns and three Adams Hospital nurses, L.E. Lee, Evelyn Cheffens and Ruth Milberrie. It’s the only picture of the triplets with their mother, for not long after it was taken, Mamie Lee Kelly suffered complications from the birth. She died when her babies were 4 days old. In November 1955, the body of their father, Alexander Kelly, was found on the shore of the Patuxent River. He had been shot. The triplets, and their older sister, Linda, were orphans. “It seems we’ve just been erased off the earth,” Alexander, now 63 and living near Fayetteville, N.C., told me recently. Alexander got in touch after seeing columns I wrote in 2009 about Adams Hospital. He’s desperate to discover whatever he can about family history. [Answer Man finds more than he bargained for (from 2009)] I was able to find out a few things. Their father was shot by Anthony Edward Smith of Drury, Md., who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. Smith testified that he’d tried to break up a fight at a party and that his gun had gone off accidentally. I’m not sure knowing the name of the man who killed your father brings comfort, exactly, but Alexander is hungry for any scrap of information. “I’m a very inquisitive guy,” he said. “I like to know stuff.” [More about D.C. hospitals that are no more (from 2009)] Alexander and his siblings were in an orphanage briefly. Then the triplets were split up. Alexander, Dwight and their older sister, Linda, were taken in by their father’s older sister, in North Carolina. Mamie went to Philadelphia to live with their father’s stepsister and her husband. Mamie told me that she didn’t know they weren’t her parents until, while still a child, she found some legal papers in a drawer. “I thought she was my mother for a long period of time,” she said. Alexander said that until Mamie started to visit every year, he thought he and Dwight were twins. The triplets cling to things they heard growing up, such as that their father was the first black mechanic to work on the city buses in Raleigh, N.C. “My momma who raised me,” Alexander said, referring to his father’s sister, “she said she would go anywhere with him and not be worried about getting back. If the car broke down, he could fix it.” Alexander worked in warehouses most of his life. Dwight worked for the state of North Carolina and now lives near Rocky Mount, N.C. Mamie served in the Army. She allows as how she always felt an estrangement from her brothers, raised apart as she was. “I always say to myself that I was in the womb with them — in the sack as they say — but I think I was way over on the other side,” she said. She wonders why she was separated. “I felt like I was the black sheep of the family,” Mamie said. And given that at least some of their grandparents were still alive when their parents died, why wasn’t it them who took them in? “That was a little disappointing, to have someone that close, a grandparent, and they’re alive and nobody tells you,” Dwight said. Mamie said: “There was some kind of feud in the family. My grandmother didn’t want our mother to marry our father, and she married him anyway.” And then she died. And then he died. Alexander is the triplet most eager to unearth family secrets, whatever those might be. For example: How did he and his siblings all end up spelling their last name “Kelley”? Dwight is the least interested. He’d rather focus on his daughter and two grandsons. “I want to leave something they can know about,” he said. And Mamie? Last month, she moved from Philadelphia to North Carolina to be closer to her siblings. “They had been asking me to move down here for years,” she said. “I just didn’t think it was the right time, and I didn’t think it would work, because we didn’t grow up together. I feel now is the right time.” Alexander keeps searching. “What we’re trying to do,” he said, “is to mend the hurt and all the loss that we have accumulated through the years, because of not knowing where we come from and what we are.” Twitter: @johnkelly For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly. |