Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a writer and author with a rich family history. My folks either are Southern or on my dad’s side of the house, immigrants who came in the late 1800’s. I’m a widow with a big hound named Venus and a small cat, living in Missouri in what passes for the suburbs in a small town. I’m proud to have shared my work in The Dead Mule before. Southern Legitimacy Statement: I can trace my family history to colonial days in Virginia, where my ancestor is still know as “the old pioneer”. My folks fought against England in the Revolutionary War and stood with the South during the War of Northern Aggression. I make my cornbread without sugar and when I went to New York City, the locals thought I sounded like I spoke with a mouthful of brown sugar. My Southern accent sounded soft against their harsher Yankee tones.
Grandmammy
I was very young, and she was very old but the day I met one of my great-grandmothers is a memory I will cherish forever. Her children called her Mammy and so I, alone of all the great-grandchildren, dubbed her ‘Grandmammy’.
We traveled across several states, from Missouri to Ohio, to visit my mother’s Aunt Mae and her grandmother. Appalachian born in southwest Virginia, my grandfather had left home as a young man to seek his fortune in Missouri. He died long before I was born but despite that, we remained in communication with his family.
At my great-aunt’s humble home, a small cottage surrounded by cornfields, we arrived on a summer evening. Although it was still daylight, my great-grandmother was in bed, but Aunt Mae took me with her to waken her for the visit.
She wasn’t asleep and when we approached the bed, my eyes and Grandmammy’s met. Hers were dark but alive and filled with a bright vigor. She rose to receive her family, fussing a little as she smoothed back her white hair, saying “I must look like an old haint” in her mountain drawl.
In her nineties, she seemed ancient. My other great-grandmother back in St. Joe, Missouri, was in her seventies and still had red hair with a little help from a henna rinse. Grandmammy’s partial Native American heritage was evident in her dark eyes and skin tone. As her daughter, Aunt Mae, told her that we’d come from Missouri to visit, she said, “I had me a boy who went out there, to St. Joe but he died.”
“This is his daughter,” Aunt Mae told her. She pointed to my mother. “This is your granddaughter, Carol.”
She struggled to make that connection but somehow, she recognized me as one of her own. I had kept close to her since she rose and she patted me, occasionally stroking my hair.
“This is Asbury’s baby,” she said with a smile.
“It’s his granddaughter.”
“She’s mine,” Grandmammy said with certainty. “She’s his granddaughter and that makes her my baby.”
We bonded, that old woman and I, drawn together by love and blood and shared DNA. Until she retired for the night and we prepared to leave, I remained with her. And I never forgot Grandmammy.
Aunt Mae would later share details of my family’s rich Appalachian and Irish heritage. She sent a few precious photos of Grandmammy as a young wife and mother.
I saw her on that one occasion. She died a few years later, during my second-grade year in school but I had already began writing letters with Aunt Mae, something I continued until her death just before my college graduation. One of the last cards I ever received from her included handwritten advice. “Get all the education you can,” she wrote. “It’s something they can never take from you.”
I took her advice to heart and believe it. I’ve shared it with my children..
I carry Grandmammy in my heart and always will.
