It’s really a funny story. My mother grew up on a wealthy cotton plantation in Tinsdale, Georgia, called Indian Creek, with her brothers and sisters, my aunts, Fawnie and Wanetta and my uncles, Billy and Tom. My grandparents, the McKeys, were Scots-Irish. Grandma Jane had come from Stone Mountain; her maiden name was Cloud. Grandpap Bill had built her a big house that I thought looked like something straight out of The Iliad, with marble pillars and a statue of Dionysis in the orchard. He was smiling, and his hair curled up into little horns hidden beneath the wreath of vines. It was a charmed place, a fun place.
Mammy was in charge of the children, Grandma helped with prayers. They were Presbyterian, but the church was in town, forty miles away, so they only attended on holidays. Grandpap had a sort of folly, a chapel, beyond the herb garden where the roses grew, and the bees buzzed. Sometimes a breeze picked up and blew through there on hot summer nights when it was sticky hot indoors. The sounds of the bugs and frogs gave it an otherworldly feel. There weren’t just slaves, there were staff. There was an overseer, Ole’ Berner, and the tutors, Miss Mitchell and Mr. Leslie, who taught everything from embroidery to Latin.
It was a grand house full of music and dance. Mama and my aunts sang and played piano. Uncle Tom played the fiddle like a cricket. They held holiday balls in the great room where they waltzed the starry nights away.
It was a working farm complete with stables and a carriage house. There were gray and white horses, mules, goats, chickens, and ducks. Grandpap didn’t keep any pigs, said they smelled. He was most fond of his hounds and their pups.
My father’s family, the Hollidays, on the other hand, ... (Dream Time, TTYL)
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