beautifully broken-the southern extended Family

​“I grew up around adults…while they sat on the front porch rocking and shelling peas and telling tales, I picked beggar lice off my pants leg and listened closely to what was probably the best education I ever received. And as I look back on it now from the perspective of middle age, I realize there was more wisdom on that porch than I ever imagined”
-Lewis Grizzard, Jr.
 
When Dixie Traveller was just a young Confederate, my parents worked overnight shifts, making it necessary that I have a sitter at night, presumably to keep me from leading my  subdivision to secede from the County (or keep me from writing on my little sister in crayon, but I prefer to think the first one).

​It was here that fate smiled on my sister and I when we were entrusted to the care of Mee-maw and Pee-paw.  So far as I know, Mee-maw and Pee-paw were not blood relatives. They actually came from what they jokingly referred to as “L.A.” (Lower Alabama), in the area around Millbrook in Elmore County.  Mee-maw used to tell me stories of when Pee-paw frequented the honky-tonks in nearby Montgomery getting in his fair share of scrapes and soaking up the musical scene. (More than once they both were privileged to be in the audience when a little-known local boy named Hank Williams was the evening’s entertainment). They also had the misfortune of living in Montgomery during the bus boycotts, but that’s another story for another time.

Mee-maw and Pee-paw were only baby-sitters in the most academic sense. In truth, they were surrogate grandparents to a generation of us kids whose parents worked all night (or day).  Being “sat” by them was a master class in Southern hospitality.
 
When bedtime came, we were tucked in by Mee-maw, given a glass of water to keep by the bed, the heat or air adjusted to our liking. Many nights Dixie Traveller laid there in bed with the glow of the nightlight, the grandfather clock in the kitchen chiming on the half hour, and the trains from the nearby Norfolk Southern Railroad echoing their whistle across the little suburban valley as my companions. This too, was home.

Breakfast before school came with fresh pineapple, bacon, sausage and first-rate biscuits. Pee-paw’s early morning viewing of the Three Stooges was foregone so I could watch Looney Toons. I admit they spoiled me rotten, like good grandparents should. After prying me out of bed the first time to eat breakfast, Mee-maw, bless her soul, permitted me to return to bed until she once again called me from the kitchen to be in time for the school bus.

During summer vacation we stayed later in the day and got lessons in economics via The Price is Right beaming out of the old wood-panel picture tube T.V. it would have taken a small army to steal.  Lord only knows how many cups of coffee Dixie Traveller, Sr. sat and drank at the dining room table talking the hours away about everything from politics to country music to Jesus to how to grow a good tomato at home.

It was Christmas tradition in our home that we each got to open one present on Christmas Eve. Here again, my sister and I were spoiled by ALSO getting to go Mee-maw and Pee-paw’s house when we were allowed to open another gift on Christmas Eve.  Their two children had moved away a long time ago, but for those of us fortunate enough to be raised by them, the humble lights in the bay window and the tiny artificial Christmas tree beckoned to the warmth of family-not to mention an extra Christmas Eve present!

As years went by, my parents’ night shifts turned into day shifts, and staying with Mee-maw and Pee-paw became a thing of the past. Pee-paw passed away not long after I stopped my nightly stays, but for years thereafter Mee-maw was a fixture in our lives and in our neighborhood. Heaven only knows how many children in our area and nearby were raised in part by the gentlefolks from Millbrook.  Every Mother’s Day amid our hustle and bustle, Mee-maw received a visit from her numerous “young ‘uns” that she helped raise. Even among the older adults in the neighborhood, their real names were seldom used.  Mee-maw and Pee-paw wasn’t what they were called-it was who they were, an honored status in our little community.

I had moved away by the time Mee-maw passed away several years ago, and at the time work wouldn’t permit the trip to Alabama for the funeral. Now 200 miles and thousands of memories later, I knew something significant had passed from my life.  All I could do is smile wistfully at the memory of Pee-paw making funny faces for me and nicknaming me George Jones (perhaps sensing I would have good taste in music) and Mee-maw in her sweet South Alabama accent calling me” shugah” and singing “Jesus Loves Me”. Even now, sleep sometimes comes easier thinking of the sound of train whistles and grandfather clock chimes.

Mee-maw, Pee-paw, and all of their young ‘uns were something more than babysitters and charges, more than even neighbors and friends. They were “our people”, something unique to us as a group, but one of Dixie’s most sacred and time-tested relationships. When you’re a child, it rarely occurs to you that the world exists outside of your bubble.  Only as an adult will many realize how special the time and place they grew up in was-usually once it’s too late to go back.
  
Still fewer of us reach maturity with the realization that those cherished times and places that made us who we are as individuals made us a small part of a people’s story-the “our people’s"-history, their culture and social behavior.

I was nearly forty when I first read David Hackett Fischer’s magnificent book Albion’s Seed. While not the final word, I would recommend it as mandatory reading for anyone interested in how their roots in the South came to be. In the second Chapter, “Distressed Cavaliers and Crackers”, Fischer details the “family ways” of the first generation of Southerners in the New World. Reading about Virginians in 1675 was almost like taking a walk through my Southern world over three centuries later.

Fischer noted that amongst the Virginia Cavaliers, family had a different meaning than it did in Puritan New England. The immediate family, while important, was almost matched in importance and affection by the extended family. It was common in early Virginia to address relatives as “coz” (cuz), regardless of the actual family relationship.

Nor did one necessarily have to be a blood relative. “Brother” was a term of friendship and affection that could be applied to friends, neighbors, political supporters or even business partners. (Years later, Augusta, Georgia born-Hulk Hogan would address his “Hulkamaniacs” with “Let me tell ya something, brother!”)

Also included in the Cavalier’s definition of family could be servants, visitors or those weary travelers simply staying a night or two with the gracious host.

The fact that Virginia colonies were so small and isolated, and that entire families might make up a single community added to the bond between the nuclear and extended family even more important.  Even in death, the nuclear and extended family (like their kin in the south of England) were buried together in the “family plot”- a Virginia practice that would not take hold in New England for centuries to come.

In a time and place when malaria, fever, wild animals and Indian raids seemed to thoughtlessly and cruelly destroy families, the extended Southern family brought comfort, stability and nourishment to those who otherwise have none.  One bout of malaria or one Indian raid could suddenly create new orphans and 18-year-old widows. In the 17th Century more than 75% of children in Virginia Colony lost one parent before the age of 18.

Historians of the period noted that “in just about any household would be orphans, half-brothers, stepbrothers and sisters, and wards running a gamut of ages”. The mother and father figure in the house were just as likely to be an elder sibling, Aunt, Uncle or cousin.

Even servants and slaves often shared an intimacy with their masters that Northerners could never comprehend.  One man of English gentry noted in his diary “I called up my man, who lay in my room with me” for his help.  This close quarters relationship with the servants was duplicated by their kinsmen on the other side of the Atlantic.

Centuries later, in Margaret Mitchell’s classic novel “Gone with the Wind”, a Reconstruction era carpetbagger refers to the kindly former slave “Uncle Peter” as a n****r and says he shouldn’t be trusted with the children. Seeing the tears welling in Uncle Peter’s eyes, an infuriated Scarlett curtly replies that “Uncle Peter is part of the family”.

Later, on the ride back from Atlanta, Scarlett still seethes over the Yankee woman’s cruelty:
 "Those women had hurt Uncle Peter—Peter who had been through the Mexican War with old Colonel Hamilton, Peter who had held his master in his arms when he died, who had raised Melly and Charles and looked after the feckless, foolish Pittypat, “pertecked” her when she refugeed, and “’quired” a horse to bring her back from Macon through a war-torn country after the surrender. And they said they wouldn’t trust n*****s! 

Nor did war and emancipation necessarily destroy this bond. Reflecting on the results of Sherman’s terrorism in South Carolina, former slave Rosa Starke says of her old Master’s family
“Some of them is the poorest white folks in this State today. I weeps when I sees them so poor, but they is respectable yet, thank God.”

To the modern eye, the Southerner’s generosity might seem easy to take advantage of, and it did happen. The Northerner Phillip Fithian noted on a stay with the Carter family of Virginia that one resident “stays only about eight or ten weeks of the year at his own house” relying on the hospitality of the Carters for the remaining time. Yet, to a Virginia gentleman, to have been inhospitable even to this stranger would have been almost unthinkable.

No less than the great Virginian General George Washington at Valley Forge referred to Martha, his aides, staff, servants and even visitors to camp as his “family”. Those under your care, entrusting you with their protection, were your people.

In Dixie Traveller’s own family history, the Southern extended family played a crucial role. In 1850, my 3rd great grandparents, William and Elizabeth, were still in mourning from the sudden loss of their six-year-old son, Blacky.

 Hearing of new western lands opening up and perhaps hoping to leave the bad memory behind, they and five children uprooted from Elbert County, Georgia to Monroe County, Mississippi. But tragedy would follow them to the Magnolia State as well. On December 17th, 1851, William was driving an oxcart when the reins slipped from his hand. Eager to not bring the wagon to a full halt, he stepped out on the icy tongue of the wagon and slipped-falling under the moving wagon wheel, crushing his skull and killing him instantly. A devastated Elizabeth, barely a year from the loss of her son and now a 37-year-old widowed mother of five, gathered her shattered family together and made the long wagon journey back to Elbert County, Georgia- where “her people” would provide love, support and guidance that raised five healthy children to adulthood.
 
Like untold thousands of Southern families, the Yankee War to Prevent Southern Independence shattered my father’s family. My 3rd great-grandfather, Noah, was held for ten months as a POW at Point Lookout, Maryland-one of the worst Yankee prisons of the war. By most accounts, he was lucky-he survived the icy, disease-ridden prison and was paroled not long before Washington closed the prisoner exchange in 1864. But he returned home scarred, physically and mentally, from the hell he endured during the war, and the wreckage he found his State in upon his return. He died in 1870 at just thirty-two years old, leaving his wife, Temperance, a thirty-six-year-old widow with five children. Just four years later his widow, made an old woman before her time by War and Reconstruction, followed him in death.

But where fate had cruelly created five orphans, the Southern family did what they do best-pick up the pieces. My 2nd great-grandfather was raised by his sister Margaret, eight years older than he, and her husband, Harris. I remember my Grandmother telling me my Great-Grandpa said he “had people” in Alabama. Years later I discovered that after the War some of the family relocated to Alabama, to the Sand Mountain area in the northeast corner of the State. Though over a hundred miles away by now and out of contact, these Uncles, Aunts and Cousins were the only stable family his Daddy ever knew, which made them still “his people”.

​ The 21st Century dying off of small towns, forcing many to move away from the “old home place” in search of job opportunities has presented new challenges to the Southern extended family. Mercifully, Southerners have been up to the task, for their families are still being cruelly shattered by outside forces.  Drug company executives may laugh over martinis about the “pillbillies” overdosing in Appalachia, and politicians of both parties may babble about the benefit of the “diversity” that the fentanyl traffickers pouring over the border will bring to “Our Democracy” all they like. Every day, families across Dixie wake up to new widows, new orphans and lives unfulfilled.  

My own family awoke one gray January morning years ago to the news that drugs had taken one of our own-and created an orphan in the process. Thank God the Southern extended family still exists to do what we’ve always done-pick up the pieces and support.  Barely a year old when her Daddy passed into eternity, she was raised by her grandmother and uncle. Today the beautiful young lady is testimony to the power of love passed down through generations.
​

Southern patriots are confronted with many issues, chief among them defeatism among many of our people. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the lethargy and cynicism of those who simply wish to be “good citizens” of the empire-to work, drink beer, have occasional intercourse and die with as little as possible in between. It’s frustrating to see so many of our people once again looking to Babylon on the Potomac for the answers believing that this time, we really can fix it. It’s bothersome that so many descendants of Confederates are perfectly content to let the White South die with them, so long as they are not bothered or called “racist”.

But take heart my brothers and sisters; it is not in our blood as Southrons to quit, to proclaim the situation too overwhelming and abandon our people in their hour of need. Remember, through our veins runs the blood of centuries of Southrons who life’s greatest tragedies-from disease to military defeat to drug culture- could test but could never break. Let us as an extended Southern family give each other support, encouragement and heart. If we have disagreements between us let’s deal with them in private, as a family does, rather than airing our dirty laundry in public for friend and enemy alike to hear.

​The Second Reconstruction still ongoing has left our people fractured, decimated and demoralized. But as long as one drop of that noble blood of old runs through one Southron’s veins, we shall answer the call of the Ages and do what we do best- dry the tears, and where tragedy and sorrow hoped to take root, be an extended branch that gives them new strength and hope.

​If you’re lucky enough, you might just find a Mee-Maw and Pee-Paw along the way.