Valerie Miner

Introduction

This is the story I have been writing for my whole life. With my life. This is the story I will never know well enough to write. The Low Road is about location and dislocation in a large, poor Scottish family.My family. Over the years I discovered thirteen of my mother’s siblings while collecting memories and secrets from Aunt Bella in British Columbia, Aunt Chrissie in Toronto, Uncle Johnny in Fife, Uncle Colin on the south coast of Australia. During the last thirty years, at first unconsciously and then intentionally, I pieced together a story.

For too long, Mom told me nothing, ashamed of being “illegitimate.” Her parents—Mrs. McKenzie and Mr. Campbell—were married to other people when Mom was born in Edinburgh in 1910. My grandparents conceived a second child together. I eventually learned that they were divorced and married to each other in time for the birth of their third baby. This new life meant that Grandmother relinquished her first four children to Mr. McKenzie. Grandfather left his seven kids behind with Mrs. Campbell. A terrible rift. A Scottish Opera. Then, when Mom was seven, Grandmother got pregnant once again and decided to have an abortion. She died on the kitchen table of their tenement flat. Seven years later, Grandfather died of tuberculosis. Mom was fourteen. She quit school, rented lodgings, and got a job in a dance hall. Eventually, the fourteen children scattered, as many poor Scots did—to Canada, the United States, India, England, New Zealand, and Australia. In 1930 my mother immigrated alone to the States, traveling in steerage at age twenty. At the age of seventy-seven she was laid off her job at an all-night coffee house in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

People went literally to the ends of the earth to escape this history. What right do I have to dig it up? Is this my story, too? Is curiosity a form of loyalty? These questions nag me throughout six years of writing, answers emerging and submerging, sharpening and blurring. Ultimately I have come to understand that the reasons to hide or tell the story have less to do with morality and more to do with survival.

Excerpt from The Low Road.