Heritage

I’ve been nostalgic for family stories lately.  I guess it has something to do with turning 40 in a little over a week, and having the realization that as the stories die with my grandmother and her kin, they’re dead forever if someone doesn’t carry that torch.  I aim to pick up that mantle and hope to do justice to the stories that made us.  They’re not all good stories, hell most of them are downright tragic; but they shape who we are and who we’ve become and therefore they’re valuable to share with those that follow after us. 

I grew up going to Elloree, South Carolina just about every summer for family reunions.  If you throw a rock within ten miles of that small town, you’re likely to hit someone I share some genetic markers with.  It is a land of flat fields of peanuts and cotton, pecan trees, and swarms of gnats.  Lots and lots of gnats.  My siblings and I always loved going down to that land and hanging out with the myriad second cousins and great aunts and uncles.  It always felt like there was some sort of magic down there.  It’s hard to explain but that place just had a draw and you could always feel the love when everyone was gathered together around a tiny homeplace under the shade of those pecan trees. 

I guess that’s why lately I’ve felt an almost magnetic pull back to the dirt from whence my people came.  I am desperate to know more about the land and people I hail from.  For the past couple years since my grandmother died, I have been dreaming of that land and those memories more than ever.  I decided last weekend that enough was enough and it was time to just make the four-hour drive with no real agenda.  I left around lunchtime on Saturday and picked up my younger brother, Shawn, and we set off on our trek southward.  I called my eighty-six-year-old Great Uncle David Bair who lives in Orangeburg, South Carolina and he was more than happy for us to come visit with him.  “I’ll show you our family lands and graveyards and introduce you to some of your cousins” he said excitedly.  Orangeburg is only around twenty minutes from our family homeplace and some of the family graveyards, so once we picked up Uncle David, we traveled to the Hungerpillar family cemetery.  Hungerpillar was my great grandmother’s maiden name.

There are names on headstones that can only be spoken with what sounds like a mouthful of peach syrup.  Names like Marcelus Hungerpillar and Junius Bair.  The names on those grave markers would evoke a low country drawl in even the fastest talking Yankee.  While my brother and I were driving down, I said I couldn’t really place how to describe the regional accent our family has down there.  Shawn nailed the description perfectly.  He said they talk with what sounds like a “slow Cajun” accent.  That sums it up perfectly.  This area is around an hour from Charleston so there are hints of a low country drawl. The creole influence likely comes from the cultural dynamic of the area being inhabited primarily by African American people who have influenced the culture and regional dialect greatly.  Combine this again with the myriad relatives that hailed from Scotland, Germany, France and every other European locale who settled the area.  These influences make it a dialectic soup of linguistic diversity.  I love this stuff. 

We visited at least three different family cemeteries in the first few hours of our trip.  David, a natural story teller, was spouting off facts about family history at a breakneck pace and at times it was dizzying.  We would ask him questions and he would go on wild rabbit holes and right as he was about to answer our question he would trail off into a separate seemingly unrelated story.  This would leave our questions sometimes floating in the air.  His excitement to share all of the nuances of our family history, coupled with the fact that he was entirely deaf in one ear and likely not much better in the other made it a fun challenge to get the facts we were after. 

There has always been such a lore surrounding the house my grandmother and her nine siblings grew up in.  We grew up hearing stories of a six-bedroom, two-story plantation style house with wrap around porches on both levels of the house. I’ve only seen artist renderings of that house because sometime when my grandmother was a child, the house burned to the ground destroying everything except the chimney bricks.  This is where the lore of the place comes in.  The story we were always told was that my great grandfather rebuilt a smaller house from just the bricks from the chimney of the former house, illustrating just how big the previous house must have been.  That smaller house was all I ever knew, the old homeplace we visited for our reunions.

The original house burned down sometime after 1947 and before 1963.  I only say this because in 1947 my grandmother’s mother died of breast cancer, and the younger children were sent to the Connie Maxwell Home, an orphanage.  Their father died in 1963, and since he rebuilt the smaller house, this is my approximate date range.  This was one of the questions I asked my Great Uncle David that was left hanging in the air in lieu of “better” stories as he saw something that sparked his mind while we were driving.  It went something like “when did the house burn down Uncle David” and he started to reply with “It was a really cold winter that year…look ova yondah…this swamp right here is where my daddy’s momma is buried…”  I was happy to get any information about our family and history that I could, but that was how many of the questions landed.  It was like drinking from a firehose as he recounted names, dates, and events one after the other.  I will definitely need to get back down there soon.

Even as I am recounting what little I know of these people and that place, there is still so much I could say.  Assuredly I will find more stories to tell in future articles as I do more research and fill in the gaps in my memory.  Every story leads to another, and many of them only partially answer a question while also opening more cans of worms for me to sort through.  This is the beauty of being tied to a place in some regards, there are at least physical things to see and touch. There are actual records, homeplaces, and gravesites to visit to add layers of meaning to each name on a genealogy sheet.  My mom made a good point that this won’t be the case for our generation.  My grandmother was cremated, there is no tombstone, the same is true for my grandfather, and likely the rest of us.  The only things that will remain are our stories and my hope is that I can catalogue it for whoever may care down the line. 

My brother and I dropped Great-Uncle David back off at his house in Orangeburg around 8pm Saturday night and we made our way to Santee, South Carolina to our hotel.  We were both reeling from the onslaught of information.  There had been moments where we learned things we’d never heard, and the depth of information we’d just been given was quite a bit to process.  It was a lot, but we were more than grateful.  David Bair was always the highlight of our family reunions growing up, and it was the same for us all these years later.  He is a phenomenal storyteller, some of his stories may be relegated more to tall tales, but we loved hearing them all the same. 

Sunday, we arrived back at David’s house around 9am.  Shawn and I were both groggy from mental fatigue, the hundred-degree heat, and the previous day of riding in my black truck.  Ushering us into his living room, David Bair told us to sit down, then he proceeded to dump out a box of papers and pictures on the couch next to me.  He told us of his personal exploits growing up in rural South Carolina catching snakes for a safari park in Santee, South Carolina, and later working with Bill Haast down at the Miami Serpentarium.  That one blew my mind.  He told us that he got his drivers license at fourteen years old and was able to drive the school bus for the orphanage at Connie Maxwell in Greenwood, South Carolina.  There was a story about how he was driving a cement truck back from North Carolina in the early 1960s, and he had to drive through Greensboro during the civil rights sit in protests.  He said he somehow accidentally ended up in a NAACP convoy.  Laughing as he remembered it, he said he later saw himself on the news in the middle of their processional bouncing along in his cement truck as if he were part of the protest. 

Uncle David told us of how he won a boxing match against a professional boxer while he was in the Air Force.  He was just good old country tough like that.  Allegedly, when he was down in Florida, he tried to spar Muhammad Ali.  He was turned down because he was just that hard-hitting, so he says.  That one made me really laugh, I don’t even care if it was true, don’t let the truth ruin a good story, and that one was good.  With every piece of paper or picture he sifted through, there was another personal or family story to regale us with.  He kept gifting us with more and more information.  It was way too much to process and truthfully, I’m still piecing much of it together in my mind.  I will likely further unpack specific stories for the sake of preserving our collective history in the coming weeks.

All in all, I just loved spending time with him as I know these opportunities aren’t going to last forever.  Of the ten children in my grandmother’s family, only four are still alive.  The youngest being in her late seventies and the oldest being ninety-three.  I never thought much about the finality of these stories until my grandmother passed in 2019.  Her voice, that wealth of information, was silenced forever when she breathed her last breath.  The loss of that information is almost as soul crushing as the loss of the person.  The scariest part of our “modern” generations is that nothing we do is tangible anymore.  Our entire lives are digital.  That convenience is good for today, but we are one crashed hard drive from erasing our history.  That is sobering.  This is why it is so important to tell our stories, share them out loud and write them down.  Through the good and the bad family is important, they are our connections to both the past and to the future.  If you still have relatives living, especially elderly ones, ask them to tell you a story.  You may be surprised at what you hear.

**I tried something new this week with the narration. I sounded especially country in this and well, sometimes that happens when I stop trying to suppress my accent I suppose. That said, did you enjoy that as an option? It was a good deal of work to produce it but if people like it I can entertain doing more narrations in the future.**

If you liked this one, check out “Home Is Where You Plant It” about my Grandmother