THE FAMILY TREE : THE ROOTS.
the maternal side of eddie's family.
jack franklin grows up lower-middle class, but happy. he's not as brash as his father, nor as querulous as his mother, but the love of the small group of friends he makes as a boy is enough to satisfy. they have two dogs and a steady enough income to fill the icebox. his parents care not for what he does, nor where he is. the library parents him more than those who gave him life - romance and mystery alike. though not wealthy enough for the fancier schools, jack is well-read and well-spoken. he has dreams of authorhood & is the right kind of sentimental for when he meets betty archer at sixteen.
betty's family, much wealthier than his own, has just settled in tennessee. she newly attends his school's sister school, and thus they are given to cross paths at a mingling lunch. she wants to be a dancer, and jack is the only one who does not laugh. even her own father scoffs at girlish delusion. perhaps it's because they both dream too big / too loud that their romance snowballs quickly. they sneak into theater performances, take picnics & pen love letters. the archers don't like the franklins - even ordinary dwells too far below their station. betty's father is controlling & prickly, her mother enabling. when jack presents her with a ring, betty takes her leave from the fortune she might once have inherited.
they are married in 1938. both of their sets of parents are left in the rear-view, a family of their own the dream they cradle.
elizabeth 'lizzie' franklin is born to jack & betty on friday, the fourteenth of july, 1939. they are overcautious not to step into the shoes of their own parents ; to find the middle ground between the cold, choking grasp of expectation that was betty's parents & the carelessness dressed as freedom proffered to young jack. elizabeth is the center of their world, but she is also the stopper shoved in bottled dreams. her parents are not cruel or resentful, but they speak wistfully of the things they had once wanted : she can imagine her mother, elegant and beautiful under the warmth of a spotlight & her father, brilliant as he scrawls his autograph on front pages.
still, they are happy. lizzie knows she's lucky to boast parents whose hands are still and gentle - not all of her friends growing up are so lucky. but lizzie's father reads her the novels written only in his notebooks, and her mother shows her the music of tchaikovsky & tells her its tales. from birth, she is awestruck by music and words. elizabeth grows up listening to the blues ; beale street transforming in front of her eyes into the most beautiful place in the world. the home of the blues, cafes and parks her parents would take her to overcome with live music. near every step she takes is loudly serenaded - lizzie grows up just as loud as her home town. it's as a teenager that she bears witness the birth of rock & roll, and what is a teenage girl with wild hair and the thrum of a song in her heart to do but to follow the music ? not everyone understands a young girl so outspoken / so loud / so many things a girl shouldn't be, but she cares little for decorum or tradition.
her parents haven't the money for all the records she would like, so every one her guitar-callused hands manage to obtain is treasured. every one is a ticket to another place - somewhere else in the world where there is music she hasn't heard, but will someday.
is it any surprise a girl so raised on music and the stories it tells would be so easily wooed by charming passerby al munson, who is roguish and mysterious and wonderful, like a man ripped from a country song ? ( she will leave with him when she is nineteen, and when she is alone in hawkins cradling her son - missing her own parents and wondering where on earth her good-for-nothing husband is - she will regret it. her records will become plane tickets in a more heartache-inducing way, then ; freedom from the life in which she is trapped. but for the time, it seems like a wonderful adventure. )
