"He waited up in a tree with his rifle, waited for Ol' J.I. to get home..."
I once had a friend who had no idea of her ancestry or family tales of long ago and she didn’t care. I thought that was just sad.
When I think about “my people” who lived long ago…their genetic material still vibrates within us…I think how we are the culmination of those who have gone before. I believe we honor them by knowing a bit about them.
I learned a lot about some of my ancestors from my grandmother. My father’s mother was a great storyteller.
Grandma was one of seven children of an iron ore mining company manager that lived in the Appalachian Mountains in western Virginia near the West Virginia border.
Grandma was a cigarette-smoking, Bible-quoting, stern yet fun Virginia mountain “girl.”
My folks shipped me off to live with my grandparents for my last couple of years of high school. That’s how I came to hear Grandma’s tales.
It being Christmastime I got to remembering my Grandma.
One Christmas when I was a teenager my brother and sister didn’t come home for Christmas. It was just going to be my mom, dad, grandmother and grandfather.
I woke up Christmas morning and things were strangely quiet, not noisy and busy like many Christmases before.
I walked downstairs and found my mother and father sitting at the table having breakfast like any other day.
“What’s going on? Where’s Christmas?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” said my father.
“There’s no noise, nothing’s cooking, there’s no smell of bacon or coffee,” I said.
“We’re waiting for your grandmother to get up. Why don’t you make a pot of coffee and take it in to her and wake her up?” said Mom.
So I made a pot of coffee, unplugged the percolator and walked into her bedroom where she was sound asleep.
My plan was to wave the spout of the coffee pot with teenage accuracy right underneath her nose thinking that the aroma would wake her up.
I waved the pot under her nose not remembering it was a pot full of hot coffee. I didn’t give it much thought because this was the first time I’d made a pot of coffee.
So the waving action brought hot coffee up and out the spout into her ear.
Grandma sat bolt upright in bed holding her ear and yelling.
Grandma was a storyteller. She would sit in her easy chair smoking her filter-less Raleigh cigarette, watching her soap operas and offering up stories and opinions during the commercial breaks.
“You’ve got a double cowlick on your head, boy,” she told me. “You’re going to be bald when you’re grown.”
You know what? She was absolutely right.
My Grandma also believed that the wild weather she saw in her last years was because of the rockets we sent into space.
“We’re poking holes in the sky and we’re messing things up,” she would say.
Grandma told me of her mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Hill. That’s what they called each other, he called her "Mrs. Hill” and she called him “Mr. Hill."
Grandma told the story of her youngest brother, Teddy, who died in an awful industrial accident in the mine.
“The day Teddy died, his dog sat out in the back yard and howled, nobody at home knew anything had happened but my daddy knew it was an omen. He heard that dog howl and he turned to my momma and said, “Mrs. Hill, I don’t believe our boy is coming home anymore.”
About that time the booming klaxon horn from the mine went off, telling everyone for miles around there had been an accident.
Grandma talked about meeting my grandfather when he came to work as a bookkeeper for the mine. She said when she saw him come she knew she was going to marry him. They were married Christmas Day 1912.
Grandma told the story about their big wedding day. After the ceremony they dashed out the door and hopped in their one-horse buggy.
Somewhere in the rush of things my grandfather dropped the reins and the horse took off with them. “I yelled and yelled at him all the way down the road,” said my grandma.
“What’d you yell?” I asked.
“It didn’t matter,” she said, blowing smoke in the air. “He deserved it.”
My grandma yelled at my granddaddy a lot, it might’ve been where I got the notion in my early years that yelling at each other is a perfectly normal part of marriage.
Well, that and my mom and dad were always arguing and yelling.
Grandma told more stories of life in a mining town in the 1910’s, how “the meanest man in the county,” a fellow named J. I. Jones, met his death in 1913. Word was that Jones had killed two men. The son of one of the men waited in a tree at Jones’ place for the man to return home and when he did he gunned him down.
The area around the mining town was full of immigrants from Europe who worked in the mine. Grandma told the story of the time that she and my grandfather were out for a leisurely afternoon in a rowboat on the James River and as they rounded a bend witnessed two men kill another man for his money.
There was the story of the time the town doctor was called to a miner’s home, the whole family was sick. He finally got around to asking them what they’d been eating when the wife went outside and came back in holding a dead “American chicken” by the legs: A turkey vulture.
Then came the flu epidemic of 1918. By that time my grandparents had two baby boys…one was my dad…who wasn’t quite a year old. Grandma said my dad and the town doctor were the only two people who didn’t get the flu. Grandma believed the town doctor didn’t catch the flu because he had a drinking problem and my dad didn’t catch it because he crawled around chewing on chunks of coal from the fireplace.
The doctor would walk up and down the streets of the town, yelling into houses, asking what folks needed. He’d come back later and walk down the town’s main street throwing a chicken in the open window of a house here, some cans of food in another house there and so on.
I suppose the point is that no matter how small a story might seem to someone it may be a gem to someone else. It fires the imagination. It puts relatives, ancestors in a more real light.
I find it sad when a person knows nothing about their ancestry. Oh, not the kind that requires research and such, that’s more of a hobby. Just to know a little about those who have gone before. Their journeys are a significant part of how we got here.
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