A Secret Gift Read online

  George and Hazel Carlin had three children: a daughter, Jean, a social worker; a son, George, an electrician who works for the Central Arizona Project, bringing water to area farmers; and another son, Donald, a technology teacher in Henderson, Nevada. None of the children knew of their father’s record, but son Donald, speaking for them all, took it in stride, his admiration for his father intact. He cannot bring himself to judge his father harshly.

  For George Carlin’s daughter, Jean, the revelation of her father’s prison record even brought some clarity to her life. She remembered that her father was very demanding and offered morality lessons that sometimes went too far and frightened her. One of these was the story of the Haldeman brothers, who George Carlin said were hanged for rustling cattle. He suggested that the two were somehow related to the Carlin family. The story made Jean uneasy. She was nine or ten and never forgot it. It also confused her. She didn’t understand why her father had told the story and with such immediacy. “Now remembering back to that incident,” she says, “it makes it personal, which it wasn’t then. I was thinking ‘yadda, yadda, yadda . . .’

  “I can only remember hearing the story once,” recalls Jean Carlin, “but it left such a powerful impression that I remembered it.” Years later, when she moved back to Tucson, she looked up the Haldeman hangings and discovered that they were indeed real. William and Thomas Haldeman were hanged on November 16, 1900, in Tombstone for killing a constable who tried to arrest them for shooting cattle. Perhaps the story was George Carlin’s way of scaring his children into staying on the straight and narrow. Perhaps it was an oblique attempt to pass on what he had learned the hard way. Either way, it was effective. As a social worker, Jean Carlin has spent years keeping young people out of trouble.

  Legacy of Lies

  Sam Stone would doubtless have understood what it was that drove men like Noble Wright and George Carlin to break the law in those terrible times. Each had a single costly flirtation with crime that left them both with a sense of remorse. But there was at least one other man who wrote to Mr. B. Virdot that Christmas of 1933 who had stepped outside the law and remained there, seemingly untouched by police and the courts. His name was Allen C. Bennafield. He was African American, and, like many of Canton’s blacks, had roots in the Deep South.

  There are myriad conflicting versions of his early life. The one accepted by some of his descendants is this: his mother, Cora Ellington, was one of at least seven children. Born into slavery in 1863 in Georgetown, Georgia, her parents were farm laborers working the cotton fields. But her family celebrated the emancipation, naming her younger brothers who were born immediately after the Civil War Grant and Sherman in honor of those two formidable Union generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Cora too worked the fields, and married William Bennafield. It appears that he may have fathered two large families, one with Cora, the other with her sister or cousin. The confusion and enmity that ensued caused friction that passed from one generation to the next. There is a sense among his descendants that the tangled story of his origins was purposeful, that it concealed the true narrative. If so, that is something he shared with Sam Stone.

  Ben and Cora’s son, Allen Chester Bennafield, maintained that he was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in February 1897. In his early twenties he and a sister, Rosa Lee, migrated north to Canton, arriving about 1918, the same year Sam Stone arrived. There Bennafield ran a pool hall at 802 Cherry Avenue Southeast—one of Canton’s forty-six billiard parlors. Next door on one side was the Greek-American Agency run by the Hasapis Brothers. On the other side was Fried-man’s Drug Store. Greek/black/Jew, side by side yet worlds apart. In 1927 Bennafield lived at 414 Ninth Street Southeast. Across the street, he looked out on the Agudas Achem Congregation, the “Hebrew Church” for Canton’s Orthodox Jews.

  In Canton, Bennafield met a younger woman, Emily June Johnson, and together they would have four sons, Allen Jr., Donald, David, and Paul; and a daughter, June. They apparently never married but lived as common-law husband and wife. But by 1933, the Depression weighed heavy on Bennafield and his family. On the evening of December 18, 1933, he took out a pencil and wrote to Mr. B. Virdot:Dear Sir-

  In this evening’s Repository I see that you want to put a little Christmas cheer in homes where it is needed, so I am daring to write to you in the hopes that I may be one of the fortunate ones.

  My name is A. C. Bennafield and I have a small dry cleaning establishment in my home at 518-8th St. S.E., but business is very poor. Every cent I make has to be paid over for bills. People put their work in, asking for it right away. I pay what little money I have to have them cleaned and then they aren’t called for right away. Sometimes it’s 3 or 4 weeks before I can get rid of them. So you see, in this way I haven’t any chance to make anything. I have three children, the youngest 4 months old, and it is necessary that they be supplied with good wholesome food. It’s rather a pull to always have bread when the others, who are 3 and 2 years old, call for it. I have been in this business for about 2 years but times have not been good enough so that I can give the kids a Xmas. Of course one good thing about it is that they are too small to know what it’s all about. If business picks up I am hoping I’ll be able to give them one when they are old enough to understand. Because of this little business, which just manages to keep bread on our table, the Family Service will not even give me milk for the children. I can’t make them understand that business isn’t any good.

  Before entering this business, I was in the pool room business and made a fairly good income. While I wasn’t rich, still I was comfortable and didn’t have to worry about where the next meal was coming from. Then the Depression hit me and in trying to save my business I used up every cent of the little nest egg I had saved up. When I began this business I had to borrow money in order to get started and I have just recently finished paying that debt off.

  So Mr. Virdot, if you think that I am deserving of your help, I will be eternally grateful to you, and for myself and my family, I thank you.

  Wishing you a merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.

  A. C. BENNAFIELD

  A few days later, B. Virdot’s check arrived in the mail. But it was not enough to hold the debtors at bay or keep bread on Bennafield’s table. And as his vulnerable little Monarch Tailors declined, Allen Bennafield came to realize that all his efforts would not be enough. And so he began to take in more than just dry cleaning. His son Donald says his father began to solicit bets and allowed himself to become a part of Canton’s thriving gambling and numbers racket.

  In time, according to son Donald, he worked for the notorious John Nickles, a Greek immigrant from Constantinople known throughout Canton as “Nick the Greek.” Nick was part of the lore of Canton’s thriving underworld, living large and fast—too fast. On June 22, 1953, Nick was gunned down, his body discovered in a storage garage. The next day’s front-page headline declared, JOHN NICKLES, VICE LORD, SLAIN.

  After that, Bennafield’s son Don said his father worked for Pat Ferruccio, a racketeer with reputed ties to organized crime. (In the 1940s, before Ferruccio went to prison, he regularly raced his speedboat against my grandfather, Sam Stone, on Turkey Foot Lake. Later, the Ferruccio family lived across the street from us.)

  Bennafield was never arrested but continued his numbers racket long after the Depression passed. He was never wealthy but managed to acquire at least four modest parcels of land in Canton. But on April 2, 1948, at the age of fifty-one, he dropped dead of a heart attack. He died without a will and was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery.

  Just days later, Bennafield’s widow and five children were hit with a second shock: Bennafield had concealed a secret marriage to a woman named Nettie Richardson. The family had known nothing of her. What they discovered in the ensuing probate struggle was that she and Allen Bennafield had married in Detroit, Michigan, on July 3, 1923—some twenty-five years before. On the marriage license, he had written that he was born in Cuba and that his mother’s mai
den name was Martinez. The family, disoriented from the loss and confounded by the web of lies and secrets, did not know what to believe.

  And, most devastating of all, Bennafield and Richardson had never divorced. Hearing of Bennafield’s death, Richardson wasted no time filing a claim against the estate. She walked away with it all, leaving Bennafield’s forty-one-year-old widow, Emily, emotionally and financially devastated. Humiliated by the scandal, she retreated from Canton and moved to Cleveland to live with her son David. Emily died in Cleveland in 1988. Surprisingly, she was buried next to the man who deceived her.

  In the years that followed, the Bennafield family has been plagued by tragedy and crime. As a young man, Bennafield’s son Donald served time in prison. Donald’s wife, Martha, was found murdered in a field in 1991. It remains an unsolved homicide. One of Donald’s daughters was convicted of prostitution. Allen Bennafield’s daughter, June, served in the military and died of a heart attack at twenty-nine. His son Paul found work in a steel mill. Bennafield’s son David, born four months before his father wrote to Mr. B. Virdot, worked for thirty-eight years as a special delivery driver for the U.S. Postal Service in Cleveland. In March 2006, his stepson Shaun was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison for selling crack cocaine.

  It is no wonder, then, that Allen C. Bennafield’s oldest son and namesake, Allen C. Bennafield Jr., now eighty, has no interest in speaking of his father. He refused to even listen to the words his father had written to Mr. B. Virdot. Perhaps it was because he chose such a different path from his father. Allen Bennafield Jr. left home early, and served in the army, then the air force. Later he retired as a captain in the Washington, D.C., police department. But despite his insistence on distancing himself from his father and his clouded past, his thirty-five-year-old daughter, Leta Bennafield, has doggedly sought answers about her family’s origins. She has spent years researching and trying to reconstruct the family tree, as twisted as it may be.

  An information technology administrator, Leta has posted numerous entreaties on the Internet’s genealogy sites seeking to fill in the gaps left by a grandfather who did what he could to obscure his own roots. To this day she continues to ask questions, and to this day her father declines to answer them—either because they dredge up unpleasant memories or because he may not know the truth. His son Damon, a former advertising executive, now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, the state where, a century and a half earlier, the Bennafields worked the cotton fields as slaves.

  Mr. B. Virdot’s Story: The Crossing

  The more I dug into Sam’s past, the more I discovered that he had something in common with each of the people he helped, and that I shared something in common with their descendants. Like the grandchildren of Noble Wright and George Carlin, I was to discover that my grandfather, for all his goodheartedness, had broken the law. And like the descendants of A. C. Bennafield, I was to learn only after his death that the man I thought I knew had concealed an earlier life unknown to us all—though it hurt no one but himself.

  There were early hints that Sam Stone’s life was more complex than he let on. As a young adult, my mother, Virginia, learned that Sam’s name had once been “Finkelstein,” meaning “shining stone.” She despised the name, in part because it sounded less American than “Stone,” and in part because it linked our family to what she regarded as Sam’s less reputable kin. Sam had taken it upon himself in his early twenties to change his name to “Samuel J. Stone.” He liked its lapidary quality and its strength. Out of that block of stone, Sam might have seen himself as a sculptor chiseling a new name and a new life for himself. “Samuel J. Stone” was a name befitting an executive, a self-made man, literally. Thereafter, the name Finkelstein was almost never uttered, and when it was, it was said in a hushed voice.

  Over the next few years he persuaded his three brothers and three sisters to take the Stone name as well. Each of the brothers used the middle initial “J.” It was a sign of his growing influence over the family, both as the oldest son as well as the most successful member of the clan. In time, even his mother, Hinde, changed her name, but his father did not.

  The siblings understood that it was taboo to utter the old name and conspired to wipe out their own pasts. Their children would be raised as my mother was—with little or no knowledge of their early circumstances or origins. At one time or another, Sam had claimed his parents were German, Russian, Bohemian, or Romanian. I remember that when he spoke there was the slightest trace of an accent. There were just a few words he said that reminded me of the actor Bela Lugosi and brought to mind Transylvania. But it was not enough to fix it to a certain place, or even to be sure that it was foreign. It was a mere residue that only a forensic linguist could perhaps track to a crossing in steerage or time in a ghetto.

  I had a copy of Sam’s birth certificate from Pittsburgh but was unable to find any evidence of his birth in that city. I searched records in several surrounding cities and towns and found nothing. I began to have fundamental doubts about the veracity of Sam’s sketchy account of his own early life. At that point, I expanded my search to include ships’ passenger lists under the name “Finkelstein.” That too seemed fruitless. But just when I was about to give up, I found them: Janne (Jacob) Finkelstein, forty-three; his son Sam, fifteen; his eldest daughter, Hana Sure (later known as Sarah), seventeen; and his son Moses (later known as Mack), eleven. Sam and Hana Sure were listed as “laborers,” and Janne as a “private dealer.” They sailed from Le Havre in France aboard the La Champagne and arrived in New York on October 6, 1902. They listed their final destination as Pittsburgh. Their nationality was “Roumanian,” their home village, Dorohoi. It was the first I’d ever heard of Dorohoi. It meant nothing to me. It was also the first time I heard that my family’s roots went back to Romania.

  But why all the secrecy, I wondered. There was no shame in being an immigrant. Why had Sam and his family taken such elaborate measures to conceal from their neighbors and even their own descendants the truth of their origins? He had sworn falsely under oath, violated federal laws, fabricated documents, and lied to his own children and grandchildren about his origin and their heritage. I needed to understand why. I suspected that in finding an answer I would also understand far better what it was that motivated him to take on the guise of B. Virdot.

  But first, there was a more immediate mystery: how and when the rest of Sam’s family came to America. These too I eventually found in the passenger lists. Sam’s mother and four other siblings followed a year after Sam aboard the SS Ivernia. They sailed from Liverpool, England, and arrived in Boston in September 1903. Listed in steerage was Hinde Finkelstein, forty; an eleven-year-old daughter, Gusta (later known as Gussie); another daughter, Tina (later known as Esther), nine; a son David, four; and a son Isadore (later known as Al), nine. On the list, Hinde Finkelstein declared that she and the children were bound for Pittsburgh to join her husband, Jacob, and a brother-in-law, Hersh Eger, a dry-goods peddler already living in the Jewish ghetto of Pittsburgh’s Hill District.

  On May 11, 1954, fifty-two years after boarding the La Champagne in Le Havre, France, for a crossing in steerage, Sam Stone returned to that port—this time with his wife, Minna, aboard the luxury liner Isle de France. But in all the intervening years, he did not speak to anyone of what it was that had driven his family from Romania or why it was he was so intent upon keeping it a secret.

  IN YIDDISH, THE word for troubles is tsuris—the cumulative measure of a soul’s burdens; not the routine setbacks life deals out to one and all, but the true body blows to heart and will. Sam Stone knew the word though he would never say it. Yiddish was his native tongue, but it was a language he refused to speak almost from the moment he stepped off the gangplank in 1902.

  On the passenger manifest Sam’s father, Jacob, and mother, Hinde, had both listed their home as Dorohoi. With some effort, I found it on a map. In my grandfather’s day, as today, it was a shtetl in northeast Romania that sat along the Jijia River. In 1899, som
e sixty-eight hundred Jews made their home there, a little more than half the town. Jews had lived there for centuries and in relative peace. By 1895, it had its own secular Jewish school.

  All that changed during Sam Finkelstein’s boyhood. Increasingly Jews were singled out and marked by law as “foreigners” and “aliens,” targeted by the state, and ostracized by the community. Sam was born in 1888 in a country that year by year tightened an economic noose around its Jews. Laws barred them from working as peddlers or shop owners and made it illegal for them to sell sugar, flour, or other staples. In 1898, when Sam was eleven, new laws imposed a quota on the number of “aliens”—Jews—allowed to attend schools. (That word, alien, would haunt Sam throughout his life.)

  Jews could neither vote nor obtain licenses. Crop failures and economic reversals turned their Gentile neighbors against them. They became targets for popular discontent and scapegoats of the state. In 1900, a new set of decrees was passed designed to starve the Jews or drive them into exile. They were forbidden from owning land or cultivating it, barred from living in rural areas, and even working as laborers, subject to a quota that required that two Romanians be hired for every “unprotected alien,” a thinly veiled reference to Jews. They faced homelessness, hunger, and depression. An influx of Jewish refugees from neighboring Russia and Galicia, nearly all of them destitute, triggered further repressive measures. The Romanian government declared the Jews “a nation apart,” separated by culture, faith, and dietary restrictions. As such, they were entitled to none of the civil rights accorded to those considered true Romanians.