BEFORE THE BEGINNING
They were from two different worlds.
He was the scion of a family of Frenchmen who first set foot on Charleston, S.C. soil in the 1700s. They scattered as the nation grew. Hard drinking, fast-living, the Frenchmen left their imprints as they migrated, spiking 18th century news stories with their escapades in colonial taverns or shootings on courthouse steps during busy market days.
From time to time they left town by night or when dawn threatened in the east, hurriedly, though not always alone. Once, they took with them the saucy young daughter of a Georgia doctor who slipped from her covers at night to ride with her lover to a new life. Her father would wonder the rest of his life what she saw in the pale blue eyes of the tall younger son of the Frenchman with the coal black hair. His wonder would be shared by preachers and plantation owners who were also left with empty upstairs beds and lonely aches in their hearts.
It was a tradition with these Frenchmen in the new world.
They raised hell and they lived by their own code. But they married Ladies.
She was a Lady.
Born in 1898, her family lived in a rural community in a rural county in South Alabama. They struggled to survive in the poverty shared by Southerners in the years after the Civil War.
She and her sisters worked in the fields, but their mama saw to it that their fair complexions were protected from the sun. They wore homemade bonnets with large brims which tied under their chins. Their hands were covered by gloves.
They lived on little more than the vegetables they grew on their land and bread made from corn ground into meal by a gristmill on the clear gurgling waters of nearby Pigeon Creek.
Each night, the family of nine settled into their cabin built of logs which came from trees cut to clear their acreage. They stuffed rags and newspapers into the chinks between the logs to deflect the icy January wind.
Each night their mother and older sisters hung their newly�washed one change of clothes to dry by the fire.
In lantern light, they studied worn books and drew from their parents' heads what knowledge it was possible to share.
From his Bible, their father would often take a picture of Light Horse Harry, father of Robert E. Lee, hero of the South.
"My granddaddy Lee had this picture in his Bible. `Never forget it. Light Horse Harry was my cousin,' he would tell his children. Now those children told their children. "You are Virginia Lees. Never forget it."
On summer evenings the old great uncles would sit on their grandfather's porch listening to the younger men fiddle as they had once fiddled, before arthritis froze their swollen fingers..
When the music was over, the young men drifted off into the shadows with the girls who had watched them play with shining eyes.
Then the uncles entertained the younger children with tales of the past.
They always started the same way.
Once, they would say, our ancestors know another kind of life a different world."
And we will again.
Words followed which transported the children from the wide wooden porch on which they sat. They forgot the distant call of the coyotes which moments before had made them shiver. They even forgot the darkness which crept upon them from the east as the last gold rays of sun set across the corn fields.
While the uncles talked, doors opened to great mansions where food was plentiful and drink flowed freely and thousands of candles lit the darkest night. Grand rounded stairways led to gossamer silk and rich, heavy satins which waited to be snatched from chifferobes and
donned for dances where musicians played non-stop from second-floor galleries. High-spirited
horses stood instead of mules at the hitching posts, prancing and pawing and waiting for their riders.
On into time their voices flew, carrying listeners past armies and valiant deeds, past an eon of suns which set on distant lands.
Talk of me, the people from long ago begged the uncles. Breathe life into me with your words. Remember my hope and my despair.
Glory in my triumph. Cry for my defeat.
And I will never die.
When the words fell silent, it was as though their absence drew both story-teller and listener back to the porch with a thud, to the dark, black of night to be relieved only by the flicker of fireflies and the distant crinkle of starlight.
If front porches were their delight, Church was the mainstay of their life, as it had been their ancestors.
One uncle who fought his way across muddy roads to do his duty as a legislator was also a stern preacher. Too poor to buy "store-bought" clothes, they donated part of their farm for a site on which to build a church.
And they loved music.
She was 19 when the Frenchman stole here heart. She loved to dance. While her brothers fiddled, her feet flew and her body followed, loosing the pins from pale ash hair
which fell below her waist, a single lock of deep Irish red mingling with her other locks.
He was 22 and already the image of his French granddaddy, a gambler, a ladies man. He loved to watch her dance, to catch the deep gleam of red which in the lamplight she tossed away from her face..
Two from such different worlds could not marry. Her father would not allow it.
But they did.
They eloped in a mad moment she remembered 60 years later as though it was the day before, heading 100 miles away to Pensacola, Florida for a honeymoon.
He stopped in a small town to buy her a hat and the closest he could find to a pink silk suit.
It was the perky hat she never forgot.
It was not easy, their half-century together in Covington County, Alabama.
He cursed like a river boat gambler, which he was.
She washed out her children's mouths with soap when they swore and tried to repeat to them at night the tales her uncles told.
They were children of the 20th century, however, and had little interest in forgotten lore.
He rambled, buying timber and businesses and leaving them to
her to run.
She ran them, tucked away money for her children's educations and, with a sigh, hushed the voices of the past which begged to live again through the words that only she could speak.
He took his teen-age grandson in the back room and told him to have fun with the wild women.
But marry a lady like Ma.
She took her teenage granddaughter to church, walking each Sunday up the dusty hillside lane, talking of the uncles of long ago.
He died in the spring in 1969 and was buried on a day when spring breeze whipped the skirts of mourners in the graveyard and chased white clouds like lambs from the blue sky above.
In the deep nearby woods, the once thriving old town of Westover founded by her Lees hid from the light, only a memory. The white picket fence in Bushfield Cemetery leaned to one side, its white paint also a memory. She insisted when they bought his tombstone that they put her name by his. Thad Jackson Gomillion. Irene Lee Gomillion.
After that, she devoted herself to her God, her family and the garden that grew stubbornly on land she had as a bride dubbed Red Clay Nob. Each sunny morning the rest of her life found her humming happily in an old straw hat as she thinned turnips and planted butter beans and okra.
Fifteen years later, she admitted to her children that Thad sometimes talked to her in the afternoons.
The family worried privately.
She said he was just impatient. Why was it taking her so long to join him?
She died Feb. 22, 1984, leaving a lonely spot forever in the hearts of those she loved.
But she was not missed by the hills and meadows and creeks of Covington County, where in some time known only to God the Frenchman still waltzes his lady over shady lanes and honey-lit meadows.
And if a stranger happened today on those same lanes, as surely as fireflies still emerge at twilight and mists rise from the rivers and creeks, as surely as the lonely owl flies from tree to tree asking his eternal question, he would find the mystery for which his heart searches. For on a star-filled night, there would be shadows hovering near that old wooden porch and distant voices would wait patiently with tales a thousand years old to be retold, waiting only for words to be reborn in the night.
Talk of me, they beg. Breathe life into me.
And I will live again.
And just as surely as those fireflies glow, the rockers where the old great uncles once sat will begin to sway softly in the breeze, their words only a heart's breath away.