Kith & Kin

Our former home on Bartley Road, LaGrange, Georgia. We lived here in 1973 – 74. Author’s Note: This essay is absolutely not intended as a condemnation of all people who live in Georgia, of all people who live in LaGrange, or of anyone living there today. This is how things were for me fifty years ago. Although I don’t speak of them here, we met many wonderful people and made great friends back then. And I am sure that today the good people of LaGrange, like the rest of us, are very different from those I knew so long ago. It was 1973, and I was riding the bus home after my first day at Troup Junior High School in LaGrange, Georgia. Two boys about my age were a couple of seats behind me. “Hey!” one of them said. “Hey you!” I turned and looked at them hopefully. Maybe they would be friendly. “Where you from?” they asked. “Ohio.” They looked at each other and said, “Oh-Hi!” and laughed. “I bet you like Sherman, don’t ya?” one of them added. Now, the only “Sherman” I knew was ...

It seems that as I was growing up Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners were always held either at Grandma Swartz’s or Great-Aunt Mildred’s. That makes sense, since for years they were the matriarchs of our extended family—they were sisters and the last members of that older generation. I loved them both dearly. I was closer to my grandmother, of course, not only because she was Grandma but also because she lived in our town. Great-Aunt Mildred was Grandma’s elder sister, and she lived about forty-five minutes away in Ashland. (I shall refer to her hereafter as “Aunt Mildred,” which is what we called her—and by the way, in our family it’s pronounced “ant”; none of that hoity-toity “ahnt” stuff for us!) I never knew her husband, Uncle Herschel. He passed away in 1963, two years after I was born. Uncle Herschel and Aunt Mildred had one son, Andy. “Andy” was his given name, and for a long time I thought he had no middle name. His grave marker, dated 1940–1994, has only the name “Andy” on...