David Cohen illustration
My grandfather Matt was a skilled furniture builder, though this was not his trade. When he and his family lived in Newcomb, Tennessee, he worked as a lumber inspector and a Baptist preacher. After he moved his family to Marion, North Carolina, in the 1920s, he worked at a furniture factory and continued to preach.
In my grandmother Annie’s house were many pieces of my grandfather’s woodwork that had been brought from Tennessee. In her bedroom, beside the feather bed where I slept with her when I spent nights as a child, sat an oak dresser. It was dark-stained and had a carved mirror frame that encased a beveled glass mirror. In the mid-1970s, after my grandmother died, I inherited this handmade dresser, which now rests in a bedroom of my home. Though I never knew my grandfather, who died when I was a baby in 1957, he was a palpable presence in my grandmother’s house.
When my father’s family was sorting through my grandmother’s belongings, my mother found a stack of my grandfather’s handmade oak picture frames, some of which contained colorful still life pictures my grandmother had clipped from women’s magazines.
“These are good frames,” my mother said and asked if she could have them. No one else in the family wanted them, though they were solid and tightly assembled, each having a clear glass pane, cardboard backing, and a hanging wire.
At the time, my mother needed a frame for a hand-tinted portrait of me, recently made at a local photographer’s studio. At home, she placed my portrait in one of the oak frames, decorating the dark-stained wood with floral appliques. She hung this portrait on her front room wall, where it would remain through the years.
Another day, she picked up one of the frames that contained a magazine clipping, thinking to use the frame for a new picture.
When we removed the cardboard backing and glass from the frame, we discovered that the cardboard was actually a cabinet card, the face of which had been concealed by the magazine picture.
“Wow,” I said as I looked at the sepia-toned photograph. It was an outdoor portrait of my father’s family, taken in Tennessee. I doubted my father had seen the picture in years—if he’d ever seen it. Who knew how long ago my grandmother had covered it with her magazine clipping. She may have forgotten the family photograph was hidden there.
I studied the photograph, seeing that my father was not in it. Based on the age of his four older siblings, who appeared in the picture, I guessed it would have been made around 1916, two years before my father’s birth.
In the picture, my grandmother held a baby—my father’s brother Junior—and stood alongside my grandfather under a rose arbor behind the gate of a picket fence.
Her hair was pinned up in Gibson Girl style (as it would always be), and she wore an Edwardian blouse and full-length striped skirt. My grandfather wore a suit. Two tow-headed children, my father’s sister Carcenia and brother Paul, stood in front of the fence in white smock dresses and black stockings and shoes. Beside them stood their teenage half-sister Cora, whose dark hair was pinned up and who wore a sailor blouse, below-the-knee skirt, and black stockings and shoes.
The family’s wood-frame home stood in the background.
“What a nice house,” I said, noticing the neat railing around the porch and Victorian gingerbread trim decorating the turned porch posts and twin screen doors.
“I can’t believe this beautiful picture was covered up,” I said. “If you hadn’t gotten the frames,” I said to my mother, “this picture would have been thrown away.” We placed the cabinet card back in the frame and showed it to my father, who was happy to see it.
Today, I keep the antique portrait safely stored in a trunk, along with other mementoes from my father’s family—vestiges of their life in East Tennessee. When I take the framed portrait out of the trunk to look at it, I’m grateful my mother and I discovered it that day—a hidden treasure almost lost forever.