Cornbread and Buttermilk and the unrolling of stuff

 When I was in my early teens or so my grandfather tried to feed me cornbread and buttermilk. Crumbled it in a tall glass and poured cold buttermilk over it.  Handed it to me, "try it, nothin better than cornbread and buttermilk." In my teens through present day, this seems a disgusting combination. I could take either separately, but not the combination. Like mustard and ice cream, Japan and Korea, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, lobstermen and opera - cornbread and buttermilk were two of God's gifts best left separate.

Yet, it is taxing to resist the touching of a family tradition. Doing things my grandparents did, and their grandparents did, has always had appeal. Not something of power or magic or mystical source of strength. Yet a thing with purpose that I often feel I should do. The past matters, my past, my ancestors past, my grandchildren's past. When I can touch it in some way that is not make-believe I do. 

It is Holy Week. My wife is in Arkansas, chasing tornadoes and siblings and the offspring of siblings. 

I made a pot of soup beans a few days ago. They are only available to me at times such as this. Solitary times. 

I also made cornbread, of course, to go with the beans. Used corn meal and Martha White flour and all the usual components. Baked it in my great grandmother's iron skillet. I had one hot slice after another, big wedges covered with butter, or mashed into a bowl of beans. While cleaning up I stared at the cornbread leftovers and a half quart of buttermilk, sitting side by side on the kitchen counter. I heard the voice of my ancestor, Houston Blevins, my mother's father, speaking a simple truth with his mouth full, drippings on his chin, "You ever had cornbread and buttermilk? Honey, it's good! "

After 50 or so years of resistance, I caved. Like the chicago cubs in August my strength of will faded before the still clear memory of his voice. 

If there is a Cornbread Church, this was the day I saw the light. The scales fell off my eyes. The sea parted, the rain stopped, the dove flew away, the fire fell and the lady turned to salt. This is day I walked the aisle and said "sign me up, and give me some more of that mountain stuff". 

That good mountain stuff. That good mountain stuff. 

He was indeed heir to a great fortune

 On December 16, 1922, in the evening, a baby was placed in the back seat of the car of Dr. Frank Cullen in downtown Dallas, with a note: "This boy's name is J.D. Take good care of him as he is heir to a great large fortune. His mother is in great trouble and can't keep him now. You will be watched. Put him in a good orphan's house if you don't keep him. I am coming back after him when I can. I have your no. Anything you do for him you will be made rich." 

The baby was placed by his biological mother, an unwed girl of 19, named Josephine. The baby was my Dad. 

This note was the first thing I read when I opened the files of  case 4014 of Hope Cottage Orphanage in Dallas. I finally had in my hands the file my dad always wanted to see, but never did, the story of his adoption. It answered many questions about his birth and circumstances and of course created new ones. "Why this?" and "Who is that?" But that is a writing for another time. The intimate details of the circumstances that led Josephine to do what she did are lost to time and passed with her death in the late 1980's. 

My father was adopted by Thomas and Elizabeth Welch of Goliad, Tx.  Elizabeth told the story many years later of a long train ride to Dallas, and an appointment at Hope Cottage. All references and paperwork in order, she was escorted into a room with 28 babies in cribs. 

"Pick one", was the simple instruction that would change so many lives. And she did. She picked the one with the bluest eyes and the biggest smile, the one who cried when she walked away from his crib. He was named Thomas Benjamin Welch, Jr., after his new father. 

He grew up in small town Texas in the 1920's and 30's. Played football, was in the band. Had a little sister, Ada Sue, the long desired biological child of Tom and Elizabeth. In his youth he suspected he was adopted, which was confirmed when an aunt left him off a family tree. He wrote years later, "I was nonplussed - numb and rooted to the floor and couldn't have moved if I had tried." 

He left high school in 1941 before graduating. War was brewing. That spring he enlisted in the Navy and in the summer found himself on the USS Neosho headed for Pearl Harbor. By a twist of fate or fortune he was out of harm's way on December 7th. As he told it to me, he was not there, but "close by". 

He was in the Navy for six years. During this time he was drawn deeper to his Christian faith. In a hospital bed in Australia, he confided to a nurse that after the war he wanted most of all to be a minister, but didn't think he'd be a very good one. She thought the idea was wonderful and fitting and encouraged him during his weeks of recovery from an injury. Her name, like many others in this story, is lost, but to her lasting credit, she pushed him to hang on to this dream.   

After the war he spent his last months at the Navy Yard in Chicago. He was discharged and finished his high school diploma at the YMCA while working nights as a guard at Continental Illinois Bank. (He loved to relate that "that bank never got in any trouble as long as I was guarding the vault!'). 

He returned home to Texas where he graduated from the University of Corpus Christi and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He met my mom there and they were married during the time in Fort Worth. Josephine lived in Fort Worth then as well. After she was notified of his adoption, there is no record that she ever attempted to find him. Perhaps she pictured him lost in the war, as so many men were who were born in 1922. But I also imagine that as our family gathered around his birthday cake each year with smiles and laughs and goofy presents, there was a woman in Fort Worth who always shed a tear and wondered. 

He was a pastor, and a good one. He led churches in various locations across the South, mainly Florida and the Carolinas. Always small, always paying just enough salary for us to get by (when combined with mom's salary from teaching school and giving piano lessons). But for thousands and thousands of people it was from his lips that they heard the message of Christianity proclaimed clearly and lovingly, with a gift for expressing truth that came from his heavenly Father. He was a prolific writer and left behind dozens of articles in Christian publications and hundreds of pages of notes, essays, musings and outlines on faith that his descendants will cherish. 

He had three sons and though he left this earth much younger than we wanted, at 76, he lived long enough to know all of his four grandchildren very well. 

Elizabeth Welch was certainly pleased at the choice she made when called on to "pick one". Josephine must have always wondered, but never knew, of the man who grew from the baby she believed she had to let go. She would have been very proud. 

In the note she left behind, Josephine scratched out "great" and claimed the boy was heir to a "large" fortune. Like many things in the story, this is puzzling. What caused that little scratch of a line and a quick change. A passing thought, perhaps, "I have to be quick, but I want to get this note just right". Call it large, call it great, but one hundred years later it now rings so very true. It was a fortune indeed. One of faith, family and friendships. A legacy that I am heir to, as are all his offspring and everyone who ever felt the warmth of his smile and the shake of his hand. 

From a blanket in the back seat of a car, from the arms of a troubled teenager, from the arms of a kindly doctor, from the protection of an orphanage... to the arms of a new mother, to the call to arms of a nation, to the cuddly arms of grandchildren. What a life. And now he knows. 

 

On the 57th anniversary of the birth of my brother.

I am doing some genealogy work. Ora Asa Butler, a minister in New York state, was my fifth great-grandfather and died in 1811. Like my youngest brother he died at a relatively early age. As I read his obituary I could not help but think of my brother. The author had a wonderful command of the English language that still holds beautiful meaning, 210 years after it was written. 

"...it pleased the Lord to call him, in the midst of his usefulness, to rest from his labors, to the great grief of the church, and of his numerous brethren and friends. 

...it has pleased a righteous God to call us to mourning. Our dear brother has been called from this militant state, to join, as we humbly trust, the saints in glory. 

He died of a painful disorder but his soul appeared full of glory. He left a striking proof of the power of Divine grace to comfort and support in a dying hour."  

Flowing through these four sentences is the idea that the pain and suffering of the righteous can bring glory to God. Not in a way that we understand, or like, or can ever figure out. Sometimes we get it, often we do not. But He can and does use it, of that we can be certain. He promises us a day when all of this will come crashing down and he will gather his followers and "wipe every tear from our eye". 

Roan Mountain I

 Every year I travel to Roan Mountain, in present-day Tennessee, in the former State of Franklin.

I have blood here that flows throughout the valleys and hills, around the creeks and hollows. Like the reliable Doe River that gathers hundreds of tiny streams, it emerges in present life from thousands and thousands of days past.

They gather names known and unknown from the cities like Elizabethton, Johnson City and Bristol to the hamlets of Sinking Creek, Stony Creek, Banner Elk, and Hampton to place names like Sycamore Shoals, Powder Branch and Whitehead Hill; they collect the blood and toil of generations. Each year around this time, the land calls our family back.

Here our ancestors first came, for free land and independence. Before there was a Tennessee, we were here. Proud and independent subjects of Kings George II and III.

You will find us buried both in places still marked and in places forgotten. The strongest of us, who made it to age five, had a good shot at living to adulthood. The weak and sickly but a few days. Our mothers often joined the children in the grave as death hovered over childbirth and snatched the weakest whether the one delivered or delivering.

We gather and think about those we recently lost. Grandfathers and great-grandmothers, aunts and uncles, the ones we knew. The ones whose accent and mannerisms and smell we still hold vividly in our memories. But we also think a bit about those we never knew, but whose names still trickle down through time, such as Hans Michael Hyder, the original settler from Germany via Pennsylvania.

Rueben Brooks, the ardent supporter of the Confederacy and slaveowner, whose homestead still stands. Six years after the end of the Civil War, his daughter Margaret married LF Hyder, a former Sergeant, Fourth Regiment, Tennessee Infantry, Union Army. This story was no doubt repeated in countless weddings in the border states of the conflict, eventually bringing a tiny bit of healing to a torn land.

Floyd Blevins, the uncle we miss but never knew, and whose violent death is still a mystery.

We also do the things that bring families together in the best way. We play with the new arrivals, those most recently landed on this earth. There are no infant deaths to mourn, only births to celebrate. We also stare at those who have recently joined us in marriage, or are thinking about it, and judge whether they will make it as one of us.

We eat, too much. Our ancestors could survive for weeks on an array of dishes based on bacon grease, corn meal, buttermilk and beans. If they could sit at our tables they would still recognize the food as theirs. Cornbread, sliced tomatoes, blueberries, gravy, soup beans, grits, baloney, cole slaw, and steak, all adorn our weekend feast.

They climbed the top of mountains and forded streams to get to this place. We repeat these acts because we are drawn to walk where they did. We stand at the High Bald at Carver's Gap and on top of Roan Mountain. We wade the Doe River in the shadow of Elizabethton's Covered Bridge, grateful for every one of them, for what they did, what they dreamed, what they passed on to us.

Passed on are bits and pieces of stories. Tales of success and also of plans that were surrendered to death and hardship. We honor them for both. We have a treasure of stories of cunning and luck and pluck that we pass on and that bring laughter and wonder still. Most of all, we are thankful for the faith in Christ that was handed to us and the "thousand tongues" of our people and our people's people that in this valley have sung "our great Redeemer's praise" for centuries.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, they looked up in a night sky undimmed and dreamed. Those dreams were about us.

What if.....

I am in Philadelphia where one of my earliest ancestors Hans Heider first landed in the 1729 at age 25, with his bride Katherine. In the city at that time lived a 23 year old Ben Franklin, and it is something to wonder if they ever crossed paths.

He settled in the Pennsylvania countryside for a while and farmed, before moving south to what is now West Virginia. His sons later moved on as early settlers of Tennessee territory.

My hotel window looks out on shipyards and docks where he may have first set foot in America.

What if he had stayed? Life takes so many twists and turns. His decision to leave PA for VA was a big decision in his day, one that would put his very life in peril. His decision ripples through the lives of his descendants 250 years later. We expect these big decisions to have big implications. Marriage, career choices, hobbies, all play a role in our lives and the lives of others.

But sometimes so do the little things, though we don't notice it at the time. We look back and see that some little event was one of life's turning points.

In 1974 I stood in a registration center at St. Petersburg Jr. College. I was planning to enroll for the fall. However, I did not like the course offerings, which would require me to start class at 7am most days. Seemed crazy to get up so early to trek across town for class.

On a whim I tossed my application in the trash, went back to my job running a gas station and skipped school for that semester. Six months later I was at another college, in Missouri, attending class at 7 am most days. Little decision, big impact. Impulsive, but somehow it worked.

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Thank you Hans Heider

My earliest known ancestor, Hans Heider, was born in Glashuetten, Oberfranken Province, Bavaria in 1704. At age 25 he emigrated to America, sailing from Rotterdam to Philadelphia, arriving on the ship Mortonhouse on August 17, 1729.