My Grandfathers, My Grandmothers
My father’s father was born in South Georgia in 1897. Albert Ezra. “Out from Manor,” he’d say, pronouncing the name of the nearest town with a long A. “Mayner.” Manor is about thirty miles from the northernmost edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, over a hundred miles from Savannah. I don’t know much about his childhood. He learned to read and write before the age of four, less out of a need for education than a desire to do something better than his sister, Bee. He took pride in his writing, meaning the act of writing itself. He was taught Spencerian, a penmanship technique popular until the typewriter became ubiquitous.
America entered the The Great War in 1917. My grandfather enlisted the same year. He trained at Tybee Island on the Georgia coast and became a member of The Fighting 6th Cavalry stationed out of Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. At Fort Oglethorpe, he survived a bout of meningitis, almost contracted Spanish Flu from a bunkmate, and was assigned a horse he named Nicky. He rode Nicky around nearby Chickamauga, some days as far south as Peavine Creek near Noble. That’s where her met the woman who would one day be my grandmother.
Her name was Dollie. Depending on who tells the story, Albert was watering Nicky without permission on Dollie’s father’s land and got caught. The other story is that Albert befriended Dollie’s father and was invited cordially to dinner. Either way, Albert made his soldierly way to France and back to marry Dollie in the late Summer of 1919.
I’ve seen photos of Dollie as a young bride, simple, and pretty next to a man who looks a lot like me. I’ve seen later photos of her with my mom and my aunt, standing in the kitchen and smiling with pride. I’ve heard of her cooking the way legends are passed down. Of green beans kept on the stove all day, steeped with ham hock until they were black.
Dollie passed away in the late ‘60s, a few years before I was born. Ask anyone who knew her and they say to me, “Oh, she would’ve loved you, Tommy. She would’ve loved you so much.”
I knew my grandfather as an old man. While he might’ve been too stern a parent to my father, terrifyingly so, he was only Papaw to me, a silver-handed man I saw every week at church, a well-dressed man who knew my name and shook my hand. A man who drove his Plymouth Volaré long past the age he should’ve been driving at all. And he could tell such good stories.
What I remember most of my grandfather is his voice, roughened and rasped into something like audible oak by the time he knew my name. There was a cadence to it, to the way he built sentences with a consistent rise and fall. Stories from his past — World War I excepted — were always at the ready, always closed with a nod and a laugh and a “That’s as far as it goes.”
I miss that laugh, a sound I’ve only heard on audio tape since and wouldn’t know how to imitate. It’s too simple to attribute that laugh, that voice, to a lifetime of cigarettes. There’s something else that informed it, a knowledge of how the world worked and an understanding that the one thing he could count on was the land, the earth under his feet that could be tilled and planted and coaxed into providing cucumbers, okra, tomatoes, squash.
My grandfather was a few months shy of 98 when he passed in 1995. I was in downtown Chattanooga with my cousin that night, being an adult and drinking half a beer in a corner booth. I got home to find my parents pulling out of the driveway, heading over to Papaw’s house. I asked if I should go and they said I needn’t. I wish I had. A few days later, I was one of six who carried him to his plot in Peavine Cemetery. For weeks after, I was kept awake with thoughts of my grandfather under so much earth.
***
My mother’s father was born in Schenectady, New York, in 1908. Lawrence Irving. Son of Oliver and Odessa, I know next to nothing about his childhood or even his becoming an adult. His father left home when he and his brother was very young. His mother learned short-hand and became a live-in housemaid for a well-to-do family. I’ve seen faded photographs of Lester, his brother, standing thin as a whip next to that family’s beautiful car, looking all the world like Jay Gatsby out for a drive, goggles, cap and all. Early images of my grandfather offer a calmly handsome man on the verge of smiling always.
The Civilian Conservation Corps was a product of FDR’s New Deal, started in 1933 to provide paying jobs to unemployed, unmarried men from 18 to 23. My grandfather became one of these Dollar-A-Day Boys that first year, though I’m not entirely sure how. He was 25, two years too old. Nonetheless, later that year he was assigned to an erosion prevention detail atop Lookout Mountain, Georgia. That’s where he met the woman who would one day be my grandmother.
She was a mountain girl named Jewel, her people from no further than Hinkle and High Point. He was a soft-faced man from New York State, still young though ten years older than she, a Yankee in every sense of the word. And yet, there they were, a married couple in August 1934.
My grandfather died in the late ‘60s, a few years before I was born. Ask anyone who knew him and they say to me, “Oh, he would’ve loved you, Tommy. He would’ve loved you so much.”
I knew my grandfather as a family photo atop my grandmother’s dresser, a photo from later in life. His face was softer, broader, a benevolent moon of a face. He worked for a fire hydrant company, most likely on the factory floor, but I can’t imagine him in anything but the suit he wore in that photo. Married at 16, my grandmother depended on my grandfather for just about everything, so that when he passed in 1966, living alone in her small house in Rossville became more and more untenable.
And so it was she came to live with my mother, my father, my brother and I. She became my Mamaw. Because of her, I never wanted for a babysitter, only rarely spent a time in any daycare. She’d make sure I was fed before I walked to school, asked me where I’d been if I came home late. She fed me a snack of butter on bread even when dinner was only an hour away. She made peanut butter cookies for me, the kind with marks on top from a pressed fork. And every Christmas, every birthday, she’d give me something she’d embroidered (pillowcases, usually) and a modest check for me to buy myself something nice.
She never learned to drive and depended entirely on my mother to get from anywhere to anywhere else, but she was a living communications hub. She had her own phone line distinct from my parents, a line that rang almost non-stop from morning to late afternoon. She’d answer and listen and relay the news of the day from one relative to another, reporting on the latest family gossip and medical conditions in meticulous detail. At the time, I couldn’t understand the need and felt like my burgeoning teenagerdom was constantly interrupted by phone calls that weren’t for me. I could’ve been kinder.
“Remember … your Mamaw loves you,” she’d tell me, even after I graduated from college and moved to Atlanta, reminding me over the phone. She pronounced the “you” as “yee,” an affectation that came down from Lookout Mountain with her. I could’ve been so much kinder.
Cancer came after her again and again and each time she’d slip through its fingers. She survived friend after older friend until almost all of those reporting voices fell silent and left her telephone line still and quiet. But even a survivor can get weary. It’s been eight years since my grandmother passed. She was 89.
***
Two grandfathers. Two grandmothers.
We talk about how much we are like our parents, what traits and habits we picked up from moms or dads. But I learned just as many lessons from the grandparents I knew.
My grandfather Albert Ezra would never have called himself witty. Wasn’t part of his vocabulary. No, he was sharp. Sharp as a tack. Combine that sharpness with the ability to reel out a story and that’s how my grandfather held a room’s attention. I learned everything I know about storytelling sitting on the floor of my grandfather’s living room.
My grandmother Jewel was always interested in the lives of others, their health and well-being, the things that made them happy as much as the events that took a toll. She’s so nosey, I’d think as a teenager. But I understand now she was running a string of concern from those who needed care to those who could care. Information as compassion.
And the grandparents I never met?
My grandfather Lawrence, he took up with the CCC to help his mother and brother after their father left. For them, he left New York for Georgia. He went out of necessity, maybe out of curiosity as well? He could’ve traveled South for just as long as the work demanded, then turned back for home. Instead, he fell in love and stayed. He was willing to find a home where his heart led him, even a thousand miles away. I can relate.
My grandmother Dollie, by all accounts, she cooked as a way of showing affection. It’s one thing to cook out of necessity, and I’m sure she did more than her fair share of that. But the way my Dad’s face lights up when he talks about her food, the look in his eye tells me how she could take the expected and make it remarkable. I try to do that.
My grandfathers, my grandmothers, they’re all gone now. I miss them, all of them so much. Those I knew, those I didn’t.
I have so many questions. I’d give anything for a time machine. I want to ask them little questions about where they grew up. I want to ask them big questions about the history they witnessed, over a century between them. Most of all, I want to just sit down and talk with all of them.
“What was it like when you fell in love?” “When did you start smoking?” “Did you really meet Babe Ruth that one time?” “What was your favorite song?” “How did you deal with being so far away from home?” “Did you ever make it to Paris during the War?” “Why did you leave South Georgia?” “Why did you make North Georgia your home?” “How’d you become such a Braves baseball fan?”
“I moved to New York, y’all. New York City. What do you think about that?”
I hope they’d all be proud of me. My Mamaw wouldn’t understand why I moved even farther away from home, but she’d remind me she loves me.
Finally, my Papaw would laugh, call me “Tommy,” and shake his head. That voice. How much I miss that voice.
“And that’s as far as it goes.”
