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Searching for my Great Grandmother at Stonewall
(For my great grandmother Mary Lewis Farrar)
By Beverly Fields Burnette
Part 1
They call you "Grandma"
(the seven children of your only daughter)~
but they,
the ones who owned your flesh
for the cooking and the
washing,
called you Aint Mary.
I know you by the messages
that I heard on cold night by
open fireplaces,
or summer eyes on breezy
porches.
They, my mama and my aunts,
described your early advent
to this place,
You came here with the Lewis
Family
from a nearby town called
Louisburg.
Your arrival as a slave girl
collided with the very date,
April 9, 1865
that Lee surrendered
at the Appomattox Court House
in Virginia.
You were a mere girl of
thirteen,
Perhaps they told me that it
was your date of birth, as well~
(I don’t recall),
that made the date more
special.
That’s how you said you
always knew the moment
that you brought our family’s
lineage
to this Rocky Mound . . .
now know as Rock Mount . . .
t’was not your choice.
I’ve always strained to see
the shadow
of our early life of slavery
there,
the place they now call
Stonewall.
I’ve peered from swift moving
auto
streaking down highways to
“new day’ destinations;
but now I stop to look up
close,
to ramble through thick vines
for a past that few are
searching to recall.
I explore forgotten rubble
to find your ancient
footprints
near river rocks and steady
flowing waters,
which run as deeply as our
common blood.
I survey objects that may
have held your sight,
or sand you may have sifted
in a time
when your own breath was
merely a vapor
to the ones who held your
walking papers.
I could not have known you
closely
for our times did not find
overlapping years,
but you knew that I would
come to see your face,
would walk this distance to
your time and place
we are linked together over
scores of year
by tinkled veins.
Part 2
The restorators prop up fine
paintings
of southern planters and
their ladies.
Parades of antebellum
connoisseurs
magnify southern showcases,
like your Stonewall.
When he inherited it,
so did you . . .
now I.
Restorers now stir paints
to put it back
to look like time left no
touch,
but they fail to look
past new window panes
to your meager hut out back,
which still stand like noble
ancient ruins~
a slave’s ignored existence.
They seldom excavate the
unnamed tools
of your dwelling place.
Polished silver and fine
porcelain
merit positions of high
holding
on well carved mantels.
The cracked and partly buried
that could have been your
dinner plate
lies crushed beneath the
vehicles
of their renovations.
I know your spirit roams out
back,
as it did more than a century
past,
when chains clamped tightly
on your soul,
and clanged loudly in your
ear.
It’s worthy of note
how mortar withstands
centuries,
while mortals quickly pass to
unseen earthless planes.
The north winds moan your
slave song on a silent night
through paneless windows
while doors clash like
cymbals on rusty hinges.
Part 3
I glimpse the wispy shadows
of your days of “freedom,
hands hidden behind your back
in obedient servitude,
though in your solid frame,
in your unbroken spirit
I see your hidden pain.
I step inside the tall, white
stately doors,
once closed to me,
and state my claim to proud
ancestry.
Few written words await my
starving fingertips,
my greed eyesight
in their new expedition for
your path..
A few ragged photographs leak
out bits of knowledge
from family albums buried
deep in closets.
I track you down
to learn your muted story,
to whisper mine to you,
and to snatch from the last
ancestral mind
the precious morsels of a
nearly forgotten time.
Like Haley in his own
odyssey,
names from family stories
told in dark of night
are born out in true historic
clues
from casual documents
now handed out at tourist
centers.
And I now mount the wide-eyed
ride
from here to Stonewall
with no thought of my
surrender.
I cross a mere century and
more
to touch your trail
and the clock does not erode
my quest
to know.
* * * *
* posted 13 February 2007 |
