Karen Smith, sitting with her husband, Herman Smith, shows a photo of herself and her newfound mother, Ruth “Kitty” Sharp Tew, in Raleigh, N.C. (Brian LodenThe Vicksburg Post)

[12/24/04]Karen Clevenger Smith will call her mother in North Carolina first thing Saturday morning to say Merry Christmas. Calling your mother on Christmas Day may sound ordinary, but for the 48-year-old Smith, it will be a first.

Until two months ago this mother and daughter had never spoken.

After giving birth in Rosedale in 1956, the unmarried 20-year-old Ruth “Kitty” Sharp Tew placed the baby girl with her paternal grandparents, Vernon and Evelyn Shaw.

Smith grew up in Greenville assuming that her father’s parents were also her parents.

She said it may sound strange, but she just wasn’t a curious child. It wasn’t until she was in junior high school that she realized something was different about her family. For one thing, her last name was Clevenger, not Shaw. And, for another, her parents were much older than most of her friends’ parents.

When she asked, the Shaws were honest. They told her that she was actually their granddaughter, that she was their son’s child.

“They told me when I asked, but my grandmother never wanted to talk about my mother. She always said it was something I didn’t need to know about. It was a really big mystery, but I finally gave up and never really questioned it again,” she said.

They told her about her father the late Charles Clevenger. He had left Mississippi, married several times and had other children.

Though he occasionally sent birthday and Christmas cards, he wasn’t an integral part of her life even after she found out about him.

But the summer before her senior year of high school in 1973, Smith felt the need to gain independence, so she left Greenville and moved in with her father in Martin, Tenn.

They were still never close, though, she said.

“One day after I had been living on my own for a few months, I went back to his place to get some things I figured I had left there and he was gone. I asked the neighbors, and he had just left right overnight,” she said.

Still, the urge to search for her birth mother didn’t hit.

“Ignorance is bliss. I had been raised in a great atmosphere, so I wasn’t angry that she left me. I was content with my life,” she said.

Smith’s first husband died in 1996. After his death she ran into Herman Smith, her high school sweetheart from Greenville. She moved to Vicksburg, where he was living, and they married in 1997.