Sycamore Row - John Grisham

“What’s the point here, Lucien?”
He opened another file and slid a copy of a single sheet of paper across the table. “A
lot of Negro babies were born back then without birth certificates. They were born at
home, with midwives and such, and nobody bothered with record keeping. But the
health department in every county tried to at least record the births. That’s a copy from
a page in the 1941 Register of Live Births. It shows one Letetia Delores Rinds being born
on May 16 to a young woman named Lois Rinds, age sixteen, in Monroe County,
Mississippi.”
“You went to Monroe County and dug this up?”
“I did, and I’m not finished. Looks like Lettie might be a Rinds.”
“But she said she doesn’t remember any of this, or at least she doesn’t remember
anything before her childhood in Alabama.”
“Do you remember anything that happened before you were three years old?”
“Everything.”
“Then you’re a nutcase.”
“So, what if Lettie’s people came from Ford County?”
“Let’s assume they did, just for the hell of it. And let’s assume further that they once
owned the same eighty acres that Cleon Hubbard took title to in 1930, the same that got
handed down to Seth Hubbard. And the same he willed to Lettie. That closes the circle,
doesn’t it?”
“Maybe, maybe not. There are still some huge gaps. You can’t assume that all black
folks named Rinds in north Mississippi came from Ford County. That’s a stretch.”
“Granted. It’s only a theory, but we’re making progress.”
“We?”
“Portia and I. I’ve got her digging through her family tree. She’s been hounding
Cypress for details, but she’s not too talkative. And, like most families, there’s a lot of
crap back there that Portia wishes she’d never found.”
“For example?”
“Cypress and Clyde Tayber never married. They had six kids and lived together for
forty years, but never tied the knot, legally anyway.”
“That was not that unusual. The common law protected them.”
“I know that. There’s a good chance that Cypress is not even blood kin. Portia thinks
her mom might have been abandoned more than once before getting dumped on the
Taybers’ front doorstep.”
“Does Lettie talk about it?”
“Not much, evidently. As you might guess, her family tree is not a pleasant subject.”
“Wouldn’t Lettie know if she was born a Rinds?”
“One would think so, but maybe not. She was thirty years old before Cypress told her
the truth about being adopted; in fact, Cypress never met Lettie’s mother. Think about
that, Jake. For the first thirty years of her life she assumed Cypress and Clyde were her
biological parents and the other six kids were her brothers and sisters. Portia said she
was upset when she finally learned the truth, but she’s never had any desire to dig into
her past. The Taybers in Alabama are not even remotely related to the Rindses in Ford