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Spotsylvania County resident John Jenkins, 52, recently learned the identity of his father and met relatives he never knew he had. He began searching for his family after he was severely injured in 1991.
Jenkins hugs his daughter,
This undated photo of John Jenkins is the only known picture of him as a child.
John Jenkins (second from right) has met five of his siblings and their spouses. |
By CATHY DYSON
If John Jenkins hadn't been thrown from a cherry-picker 17 years ago and suffered injuries that will last a lifetime, he may never have found out who he is.
Jenkins, 52, started having visions of a mother he couldn't remember and sisters he had met briefly as a child. The dreams apparently were triggered by the trauma.
In 1991, Jenkins was working in Prince William County, standing in the bucket of a crane to fix a traffic light. When a tractor-trailer struck his truck, he was hurled to the pavement.
In the months that followed, Jenkins had 15 surgeries to fix his fractures, including a broken back.
Because the Massaponax man wasn't wearing a safety harness, he didn't get a settlement to cover loss of future earnings, just a lump sum for medical bills.
"And that's long gone," said his wife, Deby.
Jenkins isn't bitter about what happened, even though he can't work because he has limited strength and trouble concentrating.
He'll start a story, offer a visitor a mug of hot cider, then walk out of the room as he asks Deby to pick up where he left off.
"She'll tell you how I feel," he said, smiling. "She's the other half of me."
Jenkins is at peace with himself because he finally has answers.
They're complicated ones.
His family tree is full of overlapping branches and includes a secret that stayed hidden for half a century.
AN UNHAPPY CHILDHOOD
The first night after he fell from the truck, Jenkins started dreaming about his childhood.
There weren't any pleasant memories. From the time he was about 6 until he joined the military at 17, he was bounced from one farm or foster home to another, all near the Virginia border with North Carolina.
As soon as he was well enough to travel after his accident, he and Deby went to Danville to search social services records.
He discovered his mother had died four years earlier. He met one of his sisters--their reunion was featured in a 1992 Free Lance-Star story--and talked with the other by phone.
Jenkins had periodic contact with the women in the years that followed and pieced together vague details about his troubled family.
His mother had lost a child in infancy, a girl named Patricia Ann. Oddly enough, Jenkins gave his first daughter the same name, years before he ever learned about the sister he never knew.
After the death of the infant Patricia, his mother had a miscarriage. Another one of her daughters was burned badly in a fire.
Her mental well-being deteriorated. Her husband placed her two daughters with relatives and left to start another family out West.
All this happened before Jenkins was born.
During his early years, his mother was living with an abusive man. Jenkins' sisters apparently visited during that period--and those were the images that kept popping up in his dreams.
Jenkins knew the man in his visions wasn't his father, but the family stories didn't add up, either. It was assumed that his sisters' father also was his dad, but that man was out of the picture long before Jenkins was born.
Who, then, was his father?
A CALL OUT OF THE BLUE
After he found his sisters, Jenkins and his wife abandoned their quest for answers about his father. Every lead turned into a dead end.
Besides, Jenkins and his wife had more pressing problems. She was laid off from her job about the same time as his accident in 1991, and their daughter was born six weeks after Jenkins got hurt.
He began to question if he should pursue the people in his dreams.
"You kinda wonder, 'Maybe it's not meant for me to know,'" he said.
Then came the phone call that changed his life.
On Sept. 10 of this year, a woman from North Carolina called, claiming to be a relative. The Jenkinses eagerly talked with Janice Grant of Goldsboro.
As they exchanged photos and e-mails, Jenkins was struck by how much he looked like her family, which included three brothers and four sisters.
It made sense. The man he had been told was his father and Grant's father were brothers, which would make Grant and Jenkins cousins.
But as the two talked, Grant revealed their connection was even closer.
He was her half-brother.
She and her siblings had the same father as Jenkins, but different mothers.
That meant that the women Jenkins heard about years earlier were both his half-sisters and his cousins.
A POWERFUL FEELING
In a telephone interview, Grant asked for respect for her late father because he's not here to speak for himself. No one knows what happened between him and Jenkins' mother, she said, except that Jenkins was born in 1956 from their relationship.
Grant said she didn't know about her half-brother until 1987, when his mother died.
Grant went to the funeral with her mother, who apparently knew her husband had fathered a child with another woman. Not just any woman, but his brother's first wife.
Grant's mother wanted Grant and Jenkins to see each other. But Jenkins didn't know his mother had died and wasn't at the service.
More than 20 years passed.
Grant made attempts, here and there, to reach Jenkins. But when she hit dead ends, she, too, assumed it wasn't meant to be.
She had some kind of "spiritual experience" in September, near the anniversary of her father's death. She doesn't want to discuss the details of what prompted her to call Jenkins.
She's just glad she did.
"We went from there and made arrangements to meet," Grant said. "When he walked through the door, you could feel that love in his heart for us, and we had it, too."
Jenkins has been to North Carolina, met five of his seven siblings and visited his father's grave. He felt such a sense of belonging that he had trouble leaving the cemetery.
He and his siblings talk regularly now, and he'll spend the days after Thanksgiving with them.
Deby has to work; after bouncing from one poor-paying position to another, she now has a good job as a state employee and wants to keep it.
Jenkins has trouble putting into words just what it means to have a family, after a lifetime of feeling he had no roots. He's sensitive to his siblings' need to protect their father, and he doesn't dwell on how he got here.
He's just glad he has found brothers and sisters to share his life.
"Let me put it this way, to know who I am is the most powerful feeling in the world," he said. "I can sleep at night now."
Cathy Dyson: 540/374-5425
Email: cdyson@freelancestar.com
