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PROLOGUE
(Book
Prologue)
PROLOGUE
It
is
July 2, 2002
, a little
after
twelve o’clock
noon
. A
blazing sun hangs in the brilliant blue
South
Georgia
sky.
The air is extremely oppressive and muggy; the
temperature and the relative humidity are both in the high
nineties. We are
on the wrong side (south) of the “Gnat Line,” and gnats
are everywhere. This
day the gnats attack as if they are on a suicide mission,
with no regard for their own life, but with the singular
purpose of making every person in the immediate area
absolutely miserable. They
are succeeding. Some
blow at the gnats, some try to fan them away with their
funeral-home fans, or with their hands or handkerchiefs.
None of this helps.
Many finally give up and decide to bear with dignity
and grace whatever the gnats can dish out.
These are the real old-time southerners in the crowd.
The
sharp cracking sounds from the firing of M-16’s by the
Fort Benning Fourth Ranger Battalion Honor Guard Detail echo
in the oppressive
South Georgia
air.
The clear, plaintive notes from a single bugle
playing the heart-wrenching melody of “Taps” come from
behind a stand of pecan trees in this small
South
Georgia
cemetery.
The hearing of this bugle call will, in the future,
summon for me sad memories of this day and time.
Several
of us stand rigidly at attention and offer hand salutes to
honor the man in the casket draped with an American flag.
Other family members stare straight ahead, numbed
from grief and incapable of any movement. We
are burying my father.
A
brilliant red cardinal sits in the oak tree close to my
dad’s gravesite and sings so loudly you can hardly hear
the words of the preacher.
The bird keeps up its raucous praising, welcoming,
and farewell chirping until the service is over and then it
flies away as if its assignment is complete.
It is
very difficult to accept the fact that my father is gone
from our family’s earthly presence forever.
I know I will see him again in a different place and
in a different time; that knowledge does little to temper
the deep grief I feel. I
also know he is in Heaven, where there is no sadness,
sickness or suffering, and plenty of catfish.
We will all miss him terribly.
While
“Taps” is playing, with sweat mingled with tears running
down my face, I decide to honor the memory of my father by
writing about the huge shadow he cast, and how that shadow
affected my coming of age in a small
South
Georgia
town in the
1950s. As I
stand there with a half-billion gnats trying to fly up my
nose, I decide that any writings about my “coming of age
South of the Gnat Line” must include not only a
description of my own evolution, but also a depiction of the
people, times, and events that shaped my life:
childhood and beyond.
Our
family genealogy reportedly goes all the way back to the
early 1600s, to a small French village and an original
family progenitor who now has well over five hundred
descendants. Everybody
has to come from somewhere, but having your heritage rooted
in a country with such a squirrelly history as France is not
exactly a confidence builder.
I do take some comfort that the French army was
instrumental in helping General George Washington defeat the
British in the last major engagement of the Revolutionary
War at
Yorktown
,
Virginia
. (Say
what you want about the Civil War, but it’s a fact the
Revolutionary War was won in the South).
If the French had not been there, the first president
of the
United States
would
probably have been a British general named Cornwallis.
Somehow, I expect having a national capital named Cornwallis
just wouldn’t do it for most Americans.
My two
siblings and I are very fortunate to come from good stock,
once you get past the French part.
Our lineage is rooted in the flat, dusty, red clay
farming country of
South Georgia
, the windswept high plains grasslands of
Colorado
and
Wyoming
, and the
foggy mountains and “hollers” around
Weaverville
,
North Carolina
.
My brother and I were born in
Cheyenne
and our
sister was born in
Americus
, a small
South
Georgia
town
located “south of the Gnat Line,” where we all came of
age.
I come
from a large family of storytellers.
My father and his five brothers were master
storytellers in their own right.
Many were the times when, after a huge meal, be it a
fish-fry or family reunion, my brother and several cousins
and I would gather close to the dining room table where my
father and several uncles would sit and lapse into their
“storytelling zone.”
As the yarn-spinning progressed, the tales would
become funnier, more outrageous and highly improbable and
would eventually move into the realm of blatant
over-exaggeration. We didn’t care one whit about that.
In
more recent years my two sons and other young nieces,
nephews, and cousins would sit absolutely still and quietly
for hours, listening to kinfolks from my generation continue
the storytelling tradition, scared to be the kid who breaks
the magic spell of the storytelling by moving or making any
noise. These
family offspring still talk about those sessions of mixed
metaphors and extreme hyperbole, and how they felt they were
privileged to have been exposed to such valuable family
lore. (I hope
lore doesn’t have to be one hundred percent accurate to be
called lore.)
Naturally,
this treatise is filled with many of those precious family
stories and anecdotes, which, for the most part, are true.
Well, at least each tale contains a modicum of truth,
cobbled together with a draught of imagination and a bit of
humor. And
that’s the gospel truth if it has ever been told. What
good is a story if it doesn’t make the reader laugh, or at
least grin, and once in a while evoke a sniffle or two?
Above all, I hope these stories, woven together with
the threads of time and family, are entertaining for the
reader.
The Story Page
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