More Family History: A Death in Texas

We are cleaning out a storage unit (I don't want to say how long we've had it) and one of the things Tom found was a history of the Smith family written in 1990.  It had been written by someone I didn't know, Eddy Smith, from Texas.  From reading what's in it about my family, it is clear that my mother had been interviewed by Mr. Smith, so I am assuming that when she was contacted she ordered a copy for me.  I haven't done much work to track down the Smiths - my mother's mother was a Smith - because I was very intimidated by trying to sort through all the George Smiths to identify the one who is my great-great-grandfather.  So I was delighted to find the book on the dining room table when I got back into town week before last.

The George Smith who was my great-great-grandfather was born in Rutherford County, North Carolina, but later moved to Spartanburg County, South Carolina.  He married at age 33 to Atha Adaline Liles, a widow with six children.  Atha also had been born in Rutherford County and moved to Spartanburg.  One of George's brothers married one of George's step-daughters.  According to Eddy Smith, "Nancy Ann Blackwell Greenway's grandchildren remembered that their grandmother often told them that her step-father, George W. Smith, insisted that his sons get a formal education.  The daughters and step-daughters did not receive education because George W. thought it unnecessary." 

But Eddy Smith also included in his history a photocopy of George Smith's will.  George and Atha had four children, three boys (one of whom was my great-grandfather, Jones Foster Smith) and one girl.  According to his will, 

...I will that my beloved wife Adaline Smith have the use and control of my Estate both Personal and Real during her natural life or widowhood, that she educate my children Rudicil Lafayette Smith, William Washington Smith, Geneva Smith and Jones Foster Smith as well as she reasonably can, and as soon as practicable after each of them arrives to the age of twenty-one years, that she furnish each a horse, bridle, and saddle at [graduation?] and in case each child should not receive the same amount of schooling that the one or ones following short of an equal amount of schooling with the others have enough money or property to make up for said deficiency of schooling ...

Perhaps George felt differently about educating his step-daughters and his daughter.

I don't know how much education any of them got.  George died in 1877, and sometime after that all four of his children made their way to Texas.  My mother told me that her grandfather Jones Foster Smith had gone to Texas to establish himself so he could get married, but when he returned to South Carolina he found his fiancé had married someone else.  So he married her younger sister, Mary Green.  Jones's sister Geneva married Mary's brother Lewis Green.

According to Eddy Smith, Geneva and Lewis had one child in South Carolina before they left for Texas around 1891.  They settled eventually in Hunt County, Texas, where they had a large farm.  They also had a store on the farm, where their neighbors bought supplies, and they had "the only phone in the community in the early years.  Whenever death messages were received, the Green family members were sent to deliver them to neighbors."  They built more houses on the farm as their children grew up and married, and most of their children (perhaps all but one of them) stayed in Hunt County, and bought property of their own.

Eddy Smith's book has many interesting stories about Geneva and Lewis's children.  Their oldest child left for Oklahoma when he turned 18.  According to Eddy Smith, he ran off with the wife of his uncle.  One of their children "was pretty much a drifter" who ended up killing a police officer in Kansas City in 1937.  He'd been drinking, and when a police officer tried to escort him from the saloon, he took the policeman's gun and killed him.  He fled, but mistook the bathroom door for the back door.  "He was standing on the toilet seat when the police broke in and emptied their guns into the doors of the toilets and shot both of his legs full of bullets."  He died two weeks later.

One of Geneva and Lewis's daughters lost her husband and two young sons to influenza in 1919.  She remarried and had seven more children.  One of them died in 1930 at age 4 of tetanus.

But those story that most caught my imagination, on reading Eddy Smith's book, was that of Geneva and Lewis's son George, who was shot and killed on September 15, 1918, by Hubert Cotten.  According to Eddy Smith, "The real story may never be known or told as everyone involved is deceased.  I have only heard stories and no one can supply exact details."  Hubert and his brother Ira were tried for murder or manslaughter multiple times in the years that followed; Ira was eventually acquitted, in 1921, but I'm not sure about Hubert.   The newspaper headlines from Greenville, Texas, indicate he went on trial for the fourth time in 1921, right around the same time that Ira was tried the last time.  

 I found the court opinions that overturned the convictions of Ira and Hubert in 1920, and there was a little detail there about what had happened - or at least what the survivors said had happened.  George and his brother Tom got into a confrontation with Hubert and Ira one evening, after church.  Hubert had a gun, and he shot George and killed him.  It is not clear whether or not the Greens were armed; Tom said they weren't, but Hubert said both George and Tom had clubs.  Hubert said he thought George had a gun (but he had already said he thought he had a club - would he really have had both a gun and a club?).  He shot him, and when Tom came toward him after he started shooting, he shot him too.  George was 27 years old when he died; he left a wife and an infant son.  His brother Tom survived; he died in 1969, at age 77.  

The first convictions were overturned in 1920 because of improper instructions that were given to the jury. I don't know what happened at the later trials, and whether or not Hubert ever served time for George's death. If he did, it's not reflected in the Greenville, Texas, newspapers that have been indexed so far.

I've used Ancestry.com for several years to find information about my family, but you don't have to be related to people to look for information about them.  (Of course you can't find too much unless they are really old or dead.)  So I looked up both Hubert and Ira Cotten.  Hubert - who was 18 when he killed George - married and had three children, and died in 1982. There's a charming photograph of him as a toddler, and another photo of him as an old man; I can visualize him at church or at Lions Club or Rotary, just like my father and his friends.  Ira was 20, in 1918 when George Green died; he also married and had children. He died in 1981. 

All three of the survivors - Tom, Ira, and Hubert - appear to have stayed in Hunt County for the rest of their lives.  According to the 1920 appeals court decision, there were bad feelings between the Greens and the Cottens before the September evening that left George Green dead on the ground.  There must have been a cafe on Main Street, where the older men met for coffee.  Did Tom talk to them?  What did they say to each other?  Nowdays, something bad happens, people move on to a new place and leave this history behind.  But they were attached to the land, and there they stayed.

Mulberry Jam

One Saturday in late April, Caroline and Iain and I were walking back from somewhere - probably Alon's or the Farmer's Market - and Caroline noticed the mulberries on the tree in Vita and Alex's yard.  She told us that she'd never known mulberries were edible, til one day when - as part of a school-organized field trip - she and some classmates and their advisor had spent the day riding MARTA and visiting local sites in Atlanta.  Somewhere they had come upon a mulberry tree, and her advisor picked some berries and ate them. 

We talked about making mulberry jam.  It seemed like it might be fun to do, even if it wasn't very good.  When I got home, I found a recipe on line, and emailed Vita and asked if it was okay if we picked some mulberries.  She said yes, and I bought some jars and pectin (we had plenty of sugar), but then I left town for a trip and we didn't get any made that weekend.

It wasn't til a couple of weeks later, on Mother's Day, that Iain and I walked up the street with a metal colander and picked what I guessed to be a quart of mulberries.  They were beautiful, I thought, so I took a picture of them:

Each berry had tightly attached to it a quarter-inch-long green stem.  In the instructions with the on line recipe I'd found, the writer said it was too much trouble to take off the stems, but I cut them off with scissors as I sorted the berries.

I washed and sterilized the jars and then started on the jam.  It didn't seem possible that the jam could boil - the recipe just called for berries and sugar and a little bit of lemon juice - but it did, and at some point something magic happened and it suddenly turned translucent and a beautiful claret color.  It was, I think, the most beautiful jam I'd ever seen. 

It also was, quite possibly, the best jam we'd ever had.  It was delicious!  I left a jar for Vita and Alex, and gave one to my friend Karen when she was in town.  Now we have about half a jar left, of the six half-pints that we made that day.  I was hoping that we could make another batch, but Caroline and I walked by the tree earlier this morning, and there are no more mulberries.

She is sitting at the dining room table across from me, now, eading the New York Times and eating wild plums that we just got at the Farmer's Market.  No more mulberry jam til  next year.  We'll just have to make do, somehow.

The Day After the World Didn't End

It's May 22, and the world didn't end yesterday.  It wouldn't have been a good time for the world to end - Sarah is in Germany, and Iain at a Boy Scout outing.  It was not that clear to me exactly when it was supposed to happen (6 p.m. local time or 6 p.m. Pacific Time?), but if it was local time, Tom and Caroline weren't home either - it was just me and the dog.  I think I was sorting laundry.  It wasn't how I'd want to spend my last moments before the world ended.  It would definitely have been a waste of time doing the laundry at all, much less sorting it.

There was an article in the Times on Friday about a family in Maryland.  The parents were convinced that the world was going to end - the mother had quit her job and they had stopped saving for college for their 3 teenage children - and the kids were just embarrassed by the whole thing.  You have to wonder about the people who emptied their savings accounts to buy billboards announcing the world was ending.  What do you do, when it doesn't?

The last time Harold Camping announced the world was ending and it didn't was in 1994.  He said, afterwards, he'd made a mistake in the calculations, but this time he was absolutely certain.  There's been no word from Mr. Camping since yesterday, so we don't know yet what he's going to say this time.  But in the press stories this morning there's puzzlement from the people who believed, and some expressions of sympathy and concern for them from others.  (And of course plenty of material for Jon Stewart and the other late night comedians, as if they needed any more.)

Tom and I had decided, earlier in the day, that if the world was going to end we might as well be drinking champagne, and if it wasn't going to end, well, that was something to celebrate.  So I put a bottle in the fridge during the afternoon, but when we pulled the cork, it was flat and not drinkable.  We'd kept it too long.  So we put another bottle on ice that I thought might be newer and once it was cold, we opened it, and it wasn't drinkable either.  By this point it was well after 9 p.m. (6 p.m. PDT) and the world had not ended.  The third bottle still had some bubbles left, and we all drank to the world not ending.

So here's the take home message, besides not quitting your job and emptying out your savings account when told by an elderly religious broadcaster from Oakland that the world is ending.  We clearly are not celebrating enough.  It should not take the end of the world to open a bottle of champagne.  We'll do better, going forward. 

But now it's time to get dressed, walk the dog, and enjoy the day.  I'm glad we're all still here.  The mockingbirds are queued up to get to the suet feeder at the window, and there's a cardinal on the other feeder.  Bullwinkle's asleep just outside the back door.  A chipmunk just ran across the back yard.  Time to get going for the day.

Tornado Season

I was out of town when the tornadoes hit, week before last.  Seeing the images on CNN that Thursday morning was heart-breaking.  Calling home, to make sure Atlanta had not been hit.  (I figured CNN would have mentioned that if it had, but just checking.)  Since then, reading about the devasting tornadoes that hit Tuscaloosa and Birmingham and lots of other towns with names that aren't so well known.  Little towns that probably were struggling to keep their downtowns from closing and people moving to bigger towns even before the tornado hit.  Now their downtown is gone and so are a lot of the houses.  Towns where people were born, grew up, got married, and had their children are just gone.

I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, and I have strong memories of fear of tornadoes.  Not actual tornadoes - I lived in towns that experienced devastating tornadoes, but they were either before I was born or when I was too young to remember them (and not in the part of town where we lived) - but hearing sirens, and (when we lived in a house with a basement) a few times going to the basement until a particularly strong storm passed.

I went to high school in Woodward, Oklahoma, which had been hit by a devastating tornado in 1947.  Hundreds of homes, damaged or destroyed, and about a hundred people killed in Woodward.  I remember a grave, at Elmwood Cemetery, marked "Unidentified Girl," but there were two unidentified children found in the rubble of the tornado in Woodward, a girl of about 12 and a baby girl.  According to Mike Coppock's compelling accound of the Woodward tornado, there was speculation "that the powerful storm blew them in from Texas, even though the farthest a human body was known to have been carried by a tornado was a mile."

Caroline and I were in Woodward, visiting my mother, in May 2004, when a storm system unleased a series of tornadoes south and east of Woodward.  One of them hit Geary, the town where my parents met as school teachers in the 1930s.  The storms were moving away from us, not toward us, so there wasn't any sense of personal threat - but we kept the television on and watched, mesmerized, as the storm system moved across western Oklahoma.   They knew exactly where the tornadoes were, with great precision, and tracked them from intersection to intersection.  Talking about that evening later, to friends in Atlanta, I said that the local TV stations in Oklahoma cover weather the way the Atlanta stations cover traffic.  Driving back to Oklahoma City to the airport, I remember we saw some storm damage north of Geary - a galvanized metal structure on its size, and broken trees - but it wasn't a really strong tornado and there weren't many people in its path.

The paths of these tornadoes - the ones that just hit Alabama and Georgia and other southeastern states - were long and wide and went through populated areas.  Hundreds of people died, thousands lost their homes.  Lynsley shared the information the other day that there will be a truck at Morningside Presbyterian Church on Wednesday to collect relief supplies.  We bought peanut butter and a big corregated box of diapers at Target yesterday and will be doing some more shopping before Wednesday.  So check the list of what they need and make a trip to your favorite store so you can give a little something to some people who have lost everything.  And if you can't make it this week, they will be there every Wednesday through the end of the month.

Caramba Cafe Reopened

I think I was out of the country last June, when there was a message on one of the neighborhood message boards that Caramba Cafe had closed.  The word was they had lost their lease. 

Caramba Cafe had been a neighborhood destination for at least 20 years.  When I first moved to Atlanta, I think there was a rotisserie chicken place in the location on North Highland (I remember eating there with the real estate agent who helped me find my house), but they moved into that space not long after that.  It was child-friendly and popular early in the evening with families with young children, but there was a lively neighborhood bar and great Margaritas and the child-free crowd later in the evening.  We often took friends or relatives from out of town there, and one December the Wessyngton women had our Winter Solstice celebration at the big round table in the corner.  We had to pull up extra chairs, that night.

But mostly I remember being at Caramba with my family.  Tom and I celebrated our first anniversary there, with Caroline - two weeks old - beside us, outside on the breezeway (that was before it got enclosed and turned into retail space).  We were new at being parents, and terrified, and the pediatrician had told us to not have the baby around other people if we could avoid it until she was at least six weeks old, so we did - and had we not been able to eat outside at Caramba, we probably would have had take out from somewhere for that anniversary dinner.

And there was the night that something caught on fire on the roof of the building.  There didn't seem to be any imminent danger, but they told us all to leave, so I took the kids and we waited across the street for Tom, who stayed behind to pay the check.  But he didn't come out for what seemed to be a very long time, and the kids got frightened.  (I suspect he was just finishing his drink.)  Fortunately, whatever damage there was seemed to be confined to the roof, and the next night they were back open.

There were postcards to Tom and me on our birthdays, and sometimes a cupcake with a candle when the kids chose Caramba for a birthday celebration.  We celebrated report cards and making it to the weekend and sometimes we went there when we just didn't feel like cooking.

So it was wrenching for us when Caramba closed.  We were glad to get the news that they were going to re-open elsewhere, but it took a long time.  But now they are open again, in a new building at 349 Decatur Street, and last night we went there to celebrate my birthday.  George and Rachel and Mia hugged all of us when we walked in (3 x 5, 15 hugs total), and we were glad to be back.

We can't walk there anymore, but it's not so far.  You can park in the deck behind the building for free, or there's also some parking on the street.  If you go, say hello for me.

Lockdown in Morningside

On leave, yesterday and today.  I think I was planning on buying a new car (since the old one is now property of State Farm) but the idea of having to drive around to car dealerships and talk to car salesmen is just not something I can force myself to do right now.  So instead I've done a little work in the yard; the strawberries are mulched, now, and I discovered there are some volunteer tomato plants that have come up in the bed where we planted the heirloom tomatoes.  So maybe we will be more likely to have tomatoes for more of the summer, with more varieties growing.

Yesterday Tom and I went out to lunch and stopped by Home Depot on the way back and bought a couple of small Japanese maples for the backyard.  Put them in the ground or leave them in pots on the patio?  It was while we were still moving things to the backyard when we got back that I noticed the helicopter that kept circling, low, and just a few blocks to the south.  Tom said it was an Atlanta Police Department helicopter, and they must be looking for someone.  I checked my email - the neighborhood message boards are good about posting safety and security warnings - and signed up both Tom and I for the APD alerts.  But no information anywhere, just the incessant circling of the helicopter.

The first email came at 1:55 p.m., with the alarming subject line, "STAY AT HOME!!!!!!!"  There was "an incident with gunshots on Greenland Avenue," and a request from APD that "EVERONE stay in their homes til this incident is sorted out."  We locked the doors and I forwarded the email to the neighbors.  More emails, that streets from Courtney Drive to Amsterdam Avenue were closed.  The helicopter kept circling.  There was a report on channel 11's website that someone had thrown an explosive into a house on Greenland.  Tom said that probably meant we didn't have much to worry about, since people who throw explosives are usually pretty crazy.

Morningside Elementary School went on lockdown but it was lifted around the time the kids would have been leaving school anyway - a message from a parent at the school was that the kids would be released just a few minutes late.  At 3:16 p.m. there was a message that they were no longer concerned about Greenland Drive, but the "person of interest" was said to be on Kings Court.  By 3:51 p.m. there was a notice that the person of interest had been apprehended.

By yesterday evening, the story was on line at the AJC, that there had been a disagreement between two men that had been playing out on Facebook - Facebook?? - and that the one of them had shot a gun into the other man's house; no one had been injured.  By this morning, the AJC reported that an arrest had been made and that the shooter had been taken to Grady Hospital for evaluation.

Last night, Iain and I stopped by Lynsley's to say hello, when we were out walking the dog.  She had been at Murphy's with an old friend, and (thanks to a new Blackberry that wasn't working yet) had no idea what had brought the SWAT team and the K-9 Unit out.  This is not usual for our neighborhood, she told her friend.

Since I was home (and indoors, with the doors locked, for much of it, I would add) while all this was going on, I did forward all the emails to the neighbors.  That's the good thing about all this connectivity.  The bad thing, of course, is that disagreements get amplified the same way.

More Current Events

I looked, earlier this morning, but couldn't find it.  It was a small booklet that might have fit in a business-size envelope.  I remember when I got it years ago, looking at it in fascination.  There were drawings of girls doing all the things Girl Scouts do - outdoor activities and cooking and first aid and child care - but the text was foreign and completely indecipherable.  It was in Arabic, with curved lines and dots that conveyed no meaning to me, but because of the pictures, I could tell what most of it was about.  What I don't remember is exactly how the girls were dressed.  Were they wearing something I would recognize as a Girl Scout or Girl Guide uniform, or traditional attire?  I'm not sure - I think the latter, but I don't remember.

I've been a Girl Scout leader since Caroline was in 1st grade.  There is a Girl Scout holiday called World Thinking Day, that is celebrated worldwide by Girl Scouts and Girl Guides on February 22 each year.  Sometimes Girl Scout troops get together with other troops and have a festival of some kind (that's what our Girl Scout troop has done in recent years), but back in 2002, we picked a single country to learn about.  In 2002, that country was Yemen.

So I invited a friend who was from Yemen, and she came and talked about her country with infectious warmth and enthusiasm.  I remember she said that coffee was from Yemen.  Sarah, who was in 1st grade at the time, remembers a pair of ornate beaded shoes.  I bought the flag of Yemen, and we hung it from the ceiling in the classroom at Haygood.

Later, a package came.  There were T-shirts, with the emblem of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts and more Arabic writing, and color copies of pages illustrating stamps from around the world that had been issued commemorating scouting, and the Girl Guide handbook.  It was a slim booklet, with small drawings of girls doing the things that Girl Scouts and Girl Guides around the world do.  

Fast forward to now.  We have been watching recent events in Yemen, where the president made the mistake of saying it was un-Islamic for women to join men in protesting against his rule.  Since then, even more women have taken to the streets.  The pictures on Al Jazeera are amazing.  A large group of women, marching in the center of the street, with a ring of men around them, at enough distance that it is clear they are there to help provide protection if they are needed.  Another picture, from a video story, of three women in doctor's white coats, with black veils nearly completely covering their faces. 

The world is a complicated and interconnected place, but what's going on in Yemen is breathtaking. Hoping for a transition to new and more responsive leadership without more bloodshed. And thinking about those women who have taken to the streets, with great courage. Wondering if, as children, they had a slender Girl Guide handbook, and promised to do their duty to God, and then to country.

I still have the flag.