In The Beginning

When I got so excited about having a blog, I thought I would become addicted like Paige and want to write every day. I even composed in my mind the stories I want to tell, but eventually fell back to sleep. I imagined that I would be able to embellish my stories with pictures like Paige does, but it seems I am technically challenged. I need a new computer and some serious lessons from someone who will let me pay.

Just imagine a cotton field in the south. The cotton is ready to pick, and we approach it from a narrow dirt road back from the modern highway. The building is square with only a door in the front. It needs a coat of white paint. Perhaps it has only had one coat in the past two hundred years. I have seen smaller churches, but not many, and the others had some semblance of a steeple. It is only one room, and out back there must have been an outhouse. Sandy Bottom Baptist Church has been preserved as a storage shed. I have a picture taken recently of my Aunt Ruth, my brother Bobby and myself standing on the front stoop, which I will send to you if you wish.

We went out there to pay homage to our fourth great grandmother (only third in Aunt Ruth's case) whose name was Gatsy Harper Gray, a name which was struck from the records of same church, for adultery before she was twenty. The evidence was very clear. Her husband whom she had married at age 15 had been away for two years and upon returning found her with a newborn son. The divorce proceedings recorded his testimony that he had not seen her for two years. The son, Alexander, like his older and younger brothers had the Gray name, and although I assume I am not directly related to the Grays, they remain in my genealogy.

There was some speculation as to the identity of Alexander's father. Two names of possible liasons appear in the stories gathered by family historians. I can only imagine the eagerness with which the research was compiled, but unless you really want to know, I will not go farther.

Life must have been very hard for Gatsy. There are no pictures, but I imagine her to look like Mammy Yokum, a small wiry woman with a fuzz of white hair protruding from the back of a gray handstitched bonnet. She would be sunburned in spite of the cardboard slats inserted into the lining spaces in the front of the bonnet meant to shade her face. In the corner of her mouth was always a corn cob pipe, not so much for smoking the home grown tobacco as to bite upon when faced with all the problems of running a farm by herself. Women did not wear men's clothes in those days, but long skirts down to her brogan boots, Mammy Yokum style. Maybe Grandmother Gatsy wore her skirts a little shorter than most, showing a little bit of leg, because she had no shortage of suiters and had two more children without the support of a husband. She drove her own mule and wagon, lived to be eightysomething (like me) and was nice enough that her son Alexander, my third great grandfather named his daughter for her, Gatsy Susan Gray.

I feel a special connection to both of these Gatsys. The first one's father had been a soldier in the army during the Revolution as witnessed by a petition made by his widow many years after the war seeking a widow's pension due to wives of veterans of the war. It would have been typical for her to wait until she was destitute to ask for help. Like all the ancestors I have met through these stories they were very poor tenent farmers. They grew tobacco as a cash crop, taking it to the market in September, and turning over half the money to the landlord. Tobacco continued to be the cash crop of North Carolina until just a few years ago when smoking was found to cause throat cancer. Now most of the fields are converted to growing cotton, the fiber which almost lost it's popularity when synthetics came out just after WWll. Hence the field of cotton surrounding Sandy Bottom Church.

In 1865 at the end of the Civil War, the second Gatsy was a twelve year old girl, on another tenent farm when she had an encounter with a Yankee soldier. Story to come.