A Walk Among My Fathers

We have been planning this trip for some months, a leisurely time of relaxation for the occasion of our wedding anniversary. We have been (perfectly) imperfectly married for a long time, now we were about to walk through centuries of family history, reducing almost forty years together to but a mere moment of time in retrospect. Our family history in the South started well before the United States was even a thought. This week would prove a reinforcement to the rootedness our family has to this land, this most beautiful of paradises, our Dixie. 

The weather was very accommodating for the type of activities we had planned. A day to walk among my fathers. A day of honoring my ancestors. It was misty and cool, an unexpected pleasure for our first exploration through the church graveyards of upstate South Carolina. In reflection, it initiated a sense of sobriety, a gravitas long overdue, easing the guilty conscience of my neglect. Though I believe had done well in honoring my parents, it was evident that I fallen short, not honoring in remembrance my earlier ancestors. The Bible is very explicit about honoring our mothers and fathers, which is the first Commandment with promise. In keeping such, we are assured that our days would be long in the land the Lord our God had given us, and we have been given the Southland.

Our first stop on this divine quest to rediscover people and places neglected in our hurried lives was the old home of my grandparents. It was a meek wooden home that had always been painted white. It had accommodated the better part of a family of 15 souls. Their few acres were always full of chickens, my overall clad grandfather, different pieces of farm equipment, an outhouse, a lovable terrier named Brownie, and my grandmother’s garden, in which I would always find her upon my visitations. However, it had been long sold to someone outside the family, and it was now unrecognizable to those who knew of it long ago, such is the tragedy of so many old homesteads in our lands. 

After this disappointment, we made our way through the resting fields of people remembered but long gone, and those never known but whose names I can now recite in cadence through nine generations. Our people have a long tradition of naming children after the surnames of their kinfolk, and though that was never impressed upon us as we grew into adulthood, it appeared that we were named accordingly, and by instinct, so were our children. This is a tradition that we have rediscovered and made deliberate for my grandchildren, passing it into the next generations.

We visited four graveyards afterwards, the first of which I had visited more than once, that of my paternal grandparents. They rested in a not so well-kept place that lay at my grandmother’s Pentecostal Holiness church. She was very devout and had stopped attending services when the pastor started admitting divorced people. Perhaps that is where I get my zealous demeanor, although my Presbyterianism may have shocked her a bit. I left a stone on the granite, cleared the weeds that had grown around their graves, thanked them for being there for me, and then departed to the other cemeteries. 

The rest of the graves laid in Baptist churchyards, many of the stones were much older, and yielded a treasure that left me humbled. When you visit old graveyards, there tends to be a large number of stones dedicated to infants and small children, lives cut short, leaving grieving parents, something my wife and I know all too well. But you also get to see the tenderness of the parents toward them. At one such marker, we discovered the hurt and deep Christian faith of a little girl’s parents. Also, we got a glimpse of the affectionate love her parents displayed toward each other, and the pet name my great great grandfather called his wife, “Dovie.” Seeing that made their lives real to me, not just names and dates chiseled in stone and stillness from over a hundred and fifty years ago, but as if they had just parted. We were discovering pieces of family history that I had never been taught, but that I will most definitely teach here after. 

There were many Confederate graves at each of the older graveyards, and though most had no direct family connection, I felt they were all mine, and I needed to honor them as such. But there was one that was directly related to me, one I had almost tripped over in my distraction, as my wife called to me from the other side of the cemetery having discovered my maternal grandparent’s location. The grave was flat on the ground, the stone was the length of a casket, blackened from age and weathering. But there it was, my last name, along with my grandfather’s name. There was a lengthy epitaph, most of which was unreadable; however, I could make out a few things: he was born in 1843, was 19 years 6 months and 25 days old when he went home to his reward, he had volunteered for his country, South Carolina, fought in the Confederate Army, and died in battle in 1862. What a loving tribute my ancestors gave to their son who had given his all-in defense of his home, his land, and my family. 

What a fitting way to end this day, a day to take a walk among my fathers, but it was just day one…