by Marjorie St. Clair
My kin have longtime roots in the South. My mother and her family, the McCulloch’s, grew up on a small farm in northern Alabama. She met and married my father, and we lived in a small town in Alabama until I was seven years old when we moved to Georgia. During my early childhood in Alabama, we made many trips to visit Grandma and Grandpa McCulloch on their farm. In the evening’s cool everyone would sit on the front porch in the swing or rocking chairs. Most of the adults dipped snuff or chewed tobacco while regaling us kids with their stories, wild tales that freely mixed facts with a vivid imagination. Grandpa told tales of being a young drummer boy that accompanied the Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. Grandma always had fresh peach pies she’d just pulled out from her wood stove, ready for us to eat when they cooled. As children, we took no notice of the physical difficulties and poverty that most families like ours living on farms in the rural South experienced. There was no fancy furniture or elegant rugs, no paintings or decorations on the walls, and few books. How it came about or why I ended up with my Grandma’s copy of the controversial book Uncle Tom’s Cabin I don’t recall. Maybe she gave it to me because I loved reading or maybe with my blonde curly hair and bright blue eyes, I reminded her of one of thirteen children she’d birthed. Or maybe it was because when we moved to Georgia, I started writing to her, telling her about our news in the far-away place we now called home. She always wrote me back in her practiced, cursive handwriting, telling me of simple things around the farm, what the weather was and who had visited.
I saved her letters and kept them in a special box but after decades of moving and living in various countries and places around the world, I lost track of that special box of letters. When I returned to live on Maui in 2020, as I was boxing up my extensive library of books, I found a letter from Grandma McCulloch tucked inside the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book she’d given me long ago. I stopped packing, sat down on the one chair left to be sold and opened the envelope to read her letter, now yellow and frayed at the edges. There wasn’t anything particularly extraordinary in the letter, just a short note really with a few simple sentences about her life and the farm…no amazing words of wisdom or philosophical advice beyond “Be a sweet girl,” a true reflection of who she was; an older religious woman, strong in body and spirit who had born and raised thirteen children, a simple woman who mourned the two babies who were still-born; a kind woman who had performed physical labor her entire life to keep the children and animals fed, helped her husband with the planting and harvesting of crops and oversaw the exhausting canning of enough food to last for the winter.
Flash forward from 2020 when I moved back to Maui from New Mexico to the day of the devastating Lahaina fires on August 8th, 2023. On that day, my entire apartment was burned to the ground as was the historical town of Lahaina. One hundred people died including eight of my neighbors. I lost everything and narrowly escaped with my life. There are many stories to tell here but I want to focus on the intrinsic value of the few things we possess that are important to us beyond any monetary value they might hold.
Regarding my loss of literally everything beyond a few Native American pieces of pottery, friends offering condolences would say, “it’s just stuff and you can always get more stuff.” I would nod in agreement. You know, the Buddhist thing of “non-attachment.” It wasn’t until recently, after I’d read a post from a Los Angles fire survivor who took a different point of view, that I began to consider the loss of some of my stuff in a new way. She said that stuff is just stuff, true, but some stuff functions as holders of our most beloved memories because they symbolize significant events along our life path.
I’ve mourned that few of my material possessions remained, including my beloved copy of Grandma’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her letter reminding me to be a sweet girl. (Of course, that ship sailed a long time ago!) Even though those two items were no longer in a physical form, it was the deeper symbology of my Southern Grandma having a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and what it may have meant to her that I have pondered. Did she admire or reject the character of Uncle Tom who was portrayed as a black slave on a Southern farm, a meek and docile character who would tell the white children stories to make them laugh. How did she regard slavery? Did she ever bear witness to a lynching or a raid by the KKK? After all, it was the Deep South, Alabama. What was the preacher’s message at the all-white, small country church she attended? Did anyone there consider it odd that no black folks attended service?
Many of the Southern country folks, the older ones anyway, had either themselves been involved in the Civil War or had family members who served and died. Unless you had visited the South after the Civil War ended, especially during the period called Re-Construction, the absolute devastation of land, crops, towns and the many women left to fend for themselves because so many Confederate male soldiers were killed or died, you might have only been able to shake your head in disbelief at the devastation. It wasn’t until, during and after WWII when so many military bases were built in the South, that there were any kind of jobs available for a person to work and support a family. Today, however, the refrain “the South shall rise again” which was uttered after the South’s dramatic defeat after the Civil War, has become a reality. People flock by the thousands to places in the South like Atlanta, Georgia because jobs are plentiful and the cost of living or a new home is significantly lower than most places in America.
Since I didn’t have the opportunity to talk with my Grandma in person about how she felt about racism, poverty, slavery and women’s roles before she passed, I have imagined joining her on the front porch of the family farm, she putting a large dip of snuff in her mouth and sitting in one of the rocking chairs and me flopping down on the porch swing as we begin our many conversations about her life and those poverty-stricken times in the South. She would begin by telling me that those were different times then than now. There was so much death and animosity between brothers and family members, she’d said with a sad face. Mostly, it was the big plantation owners that wanted to hang onto their black slaves. We farming folks didn’t have much….do you remember that your Christmas presents as kids were an apple and orange tucked inside a pair of socks? We both laughed. Yeah, we were doing okay until some of the Southern states wanted to withdraw from the Union. She paused, took up the spittoon sitting by her rocker and gave a good spit, then resumed her stories. Your mother Susie was the baby in the family. She was a sweet girl, although I think she felt resentful that she had to stay home from school to take care of me when I came down sick.
These imagined conversations with my Southern Grandma have felt like a healing for her, for me and for all in our bloodline. Obviously, I’ve grieved and mourned about all the losses I and the many people affected by the devastating Lahaina fires, have experienced, but part of my healing has been to consider my Ancestors, my own and those of the Hawaiian culture, who have so much to teach us. Our Ancestors, if we listen, still whisper in the wind, speak to us in the rustling of the leaves; when we are still or do restorative things like put our hands in the good Earth and grow things and share our bounty with our neighbors. If we look to our Ancestors and our Kupuna or elders, they can show us ways to lift and lighten our burdens. I imagine a scene where a little singing of old hymns like “The Old Rugged Cross” are being sung by a group of people sitting on a porch somewhere in time, swaying and hugging each other as they and we reconnect through space and time with the eternal bond that connects us to each other, past, present and future. Once we have re-rooted ourselves in place and the soil of the good Earth, we are home.
Marjorie St. Clair is an adventurous spirit at heart whose interests have guided her in diverse pursuits from teaching, writing, and coaching, to artist-musician-performer and spiritual mystic. She founded Writer’s Adventure and is the author of A Southern Belle in Paris, Writes of Passage and Wild Women Write.