Genealogy
I saw you when you rolled your eyes. I say "genealogy" and you roll you eyes. Did you read where in Palo Alto, California, they're going to make it against the law (or at least against the rules) to roll eyes in response to someone speaking. Aren't liberals cute? You know the goodie-two-shoes making the proposal is a liberal, you just know it. I'm not endorsing conservatives, but you just know that is not one of the things they have on their legislative agenda. If I'm wrong on this one, someone send me an e-mail.
Back to the subject at hand. Genealogy. When I was growing up, back a million years ago, I lived for quite a few of my years with my maternal grandmother, Minnie Ashworth Droddy. From the time I was big enough to drive, probably 12 or 13, I began to drive my grandmother to funerals. She happened to be from one of the largest family groups in Louisiana, so we had plenty of funerals to attend.
Now to explain that, I have to go back to 1803, when my gggggrandfather, James Ashworth, and a group of friends, in-laws, and cousins, decided to forego South Carolina and migrate to Louisiana which was about to open up to American settlement as a result of the Louisiana Purchase. His wife, my gggggrandmother, Keziah Dial, had already birthed about 5 of her eventual 9 kids. Her parents and brothers were part of the group making the migration.
There were about 12 or 13 families in all. One of the leaders of this group was the Rev. Joseph Willis.. It's not my job to tell their whole story right now, just to give you a few pertinent details. Another one of my important Descended From families, the Perkins, were also part of the group. Near as we can tell, the only thing these families had in common was their rejection by the dominant culture in South Carolina for being mixed race, most likely, and if you believe our family's oral tradition, American Indian and White.
We know they got to Louisiana about 1804, because records indicate the first children of this group being born in Louisiana in 1804. They settled in a disputed area between Louisiana and Texas known as No Man's Land or the Neutral Territory. The area became home to outlaws, slave smugglers, and my grandmother's people, the Redbones. Looking at their history, it's not surprising that they chose to settle someplace outside the law. In South Carolina, they were reputed to be outlaws and had run ins with the vigilante force called the Regulators. Either my gggggrandfather, or his father, also James Ashworth, was branded with a "T" on his hand for breaking jail according to Richard Maxwell Brown in his book, The South Carolina Regulators, published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 1963. He must have reformed somewhat though, because he received a grant of land on the Little Pee Dee River in 1774. James never got a chance to develop his place on the Little Pee Dee, however. The region was soon caught up in the American Revolution. James and his family found themselves on the side of the Crown, and after the American victory, were forced to move. Family legend has it that for the years between the end of the Revolutionary War and the migration to Louisiana, the Ashworths lived in a Cherokee village in northwest South Carolina.
Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. These dozen or so families lived marginally between Texas and Louisiana for over 100 years, having large families, cousins marrying cousins, so by the time I was taking my grandmother to funerals, there must have been thousands of them.
At the funerals to which I accompanied my grandmother, were groups of old women who sat together at the wakes and recounted the genealogy of the peson being buried, as well as that of any person who happened to come up in conversation, usually someone who was not present. This was also when the stories of who we were and how we came to this place were told. We know who we are.
Slowly, over time, as I have grown older, I find that I have less to say and find myself content to remember conversations from times past. This is a bit odd and unexpected because I sometimes can't remember what I'm doing, why I walked into a room, things like that, but I can remember with crystal clarity a conversation between old women at a funeral 40 years ago. How is that possible?
Be that as it may, woven into those stories are the genealogies of my family. To Southerners, genealogy is a memory tool. In telling of our kinship with one another and with the past, we remember their stories. I remember stories of those old women at the funerals. I can't account for the accuracy of my stories. Boundaries in the world of memory are more flux. Stories mix. Those things aren't as important as simply having a story. I want to thank my grandmother, Minnie Ashworth Droddy and her best friend, sister-in-law, and also first cousin once removed, Loanie Perkins Ashworth for the many stories they told. As I tell my stories, I can hear both of them laughing gently as they remember the struggles and adventures of their parents, their cousins, and their friends.
We're coming up on the 200th anniversary of the Redbone people in Louisiana. Our story is largely untold to outsiders. One of the purposes of this blog is to tell our story. It's a good tale worth telling.
Thursday, April 10, 2003
Victory in Iraq Irrelevant!
I know because I saw a protestor on Market Street spray paint "irrelevant" on the plastic of a newsrack so you couldn't read the headline which read BAGHDAD FALLS over a full-page picture of the statue of Saddam that was pulled over and off its pedastal Wednesday morning. An event witnessed by the w.f.w. (whole f*cking world). This act of vandalism was in response to heckling from passer-bys (one of whom was my downstairs neighbor, Joseph, a man of few words and not known for tolerance of idiotarians, who yelled at them to "Read the F*cking Headlines, Losers!"
I know because I saw a protestor on Market Street spray paint "irrelevant" on the plastic of a newsrack so you couldn't read the headline which read BAGHDAD FALLS over a full-page picture of the statue of Saddam that was pulled over and off its pedastal Wednesday morning. An event witnessed by the w.f.w. (whole f*cking world). This act of vandalism was in response to heckling from passer-bys (one of whom was my downstairs neighbor, Joseph, a man of few words and not known for tolerance of idiotarians, who yelled at them to "Read the F*cking Headlines, Losers!"
Pfc Jessica Lynch
Sara, from West Virginia, is blogging with a group called Hillbilly Sophisticate. At present she is writing a lot obout Pfc. Jessica Lynch, our American hero of the moment. She tells a good story. I'll come back to this topic and write more later. My hopes and prayers go to Pfc Lynch as her body recovers, her spirit heals, and she puts her life back on track. Good luck, Private Lynch. After the American media get through with you, you're going to think the Army was a picnic. Anyone want to bet how long it'll take for us to watch the entire rescue as a made-for-tv movie staring Wynona Rider as Jessica Lynch?
Notice how I tried not to refer to her by her first name, as in "poor Jessica." I do not wish to participate in diminishing her contribution as a soldier and as a heroine. She's not a frail young girl. She's a battle-hardened woman soldier. I'm guessing, but I bet she comes from hearty pioneer stock. I'm not sure when her Lynch's got to West Virginia, but I bet it was about the same time my people did, and that was back in that wave of Scots-Irish settlers that drifted down the Shenandoah Valley in the middle 1700s. Those were tough people, the men and the women. Women like Pvt. Lynch might be small in stature, but sugah, they tough as nails.
Sara, from West Virginia, is blogging with a group called Hillbilly Sophisticate. At present she is writing a lot obout Pfc. Jessica Lynch, our American hero of the moment. She tells a good story. I'll come back to this topic and write more later. My hopes and prayers go to Pfc Lynch as her body recovers, her spirit heals, and she puts her life back on track. Good luck, Private Lynch. After the American media get through with you, you're going to think the Army was a picnic. Anyone want to bet how long it'll take for us to watch the entire rescue as a made-for-tv movie staring Wynona Rider as Jessica Lynch?
Notice how I tried not to refer to her by her first name, as in "poor Jessica." I do not wish to participate in diminishing her contribution as a soldier and as a heroine. She's not a frail young girl. She's a battle-hardened woman soldier. I'm guessing, but I bet she comes from hearty pioneer stock. I'm not sure when her Lynch's got to West Virginia, but I bet it was about the same time my people did, and that was back in that wave of Scots-Irish settlers that drifted down the Shenandoah Valley in the middle 1700s. Those were tough people, the men and the women. Women like Pvt. Lynch might be small in stature, but sugah, they tough as nails.
Life in Paradise
I was being sarcastic. However, I do live in a place where every level of government is controlled by Democrats. I sometimes call it Democratland. It is a Leftist controlled enclave in the midst of George Bush's Brave New World. My Congressman is Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote to deny the President the authority he sought to wage war against terrorism. I'm sure she had her reasons. The mayor of my city is Jerry Brown, also known as Moonbeam. I work in San Francisco whose mayor is Willie Brown, whose personal motto is "I like to live big, with white women, fur coats, frequent trips to Paris." His favorite hobby is giving his ex-girlfriends government jobs. No one thinks this is a big deal in San Francisco. I ride BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to work. BART probably has a bigger budget and more employees than half the states. Oh, and I work for the government.
Tuesday afternoon, a couple of friends and I were walking to catch BART for home, and as we passed through a lovely plaza named to honor the most vaulted of liberal ideas, the United Nations, we saw a woman of indeterminate age, apparently homeless, obviously incapacitated by drugs, alcohol or both, urinating in front of the doors of an unused (for security reasons) entrance to the federal building facing the plaza. Urinating like a cow.
Dear Ms. Manners? What's a guy to do? The Conservative in me wanted to scream at her to stop defiling my plaza, my city, my state, my nation, my earth, my universe. Where was the cop that walks this beat? Where's the federal cop whose job it is to patrol the building's perimeter? You see how quickly my outrage was channeled away from personal responsibility? Have I been trained or what?
Back to the urinating cow: although I would like to have walked over and slapped the bitch, I know better. The good ol' boy in me knows that if you step in shit, it's hard to scrape off and the smell lingers.
What I know from this is that government is not a solution for everything. If it were, the people around the San Francisco Bay Area should be a lot happier than they are. Maybe it's just me, but they sure do seem angry. And isolated. And powerless. Presented with a problem, they look to the government for solutions. There are 50 million of us here. The structure of our society is very complex. The government serves many good purposes, but it is also so large it is stifling. How well is it working? For the most part, it seems to be doing okay, but it costs a lot.
Democrats seem to think if the government hasn't solved the problem, then the program (and by extension, the government) needs to be bigger. When Republicans control the government, they treat government like it's a business, and although maybe run better, it quickly forgets that its purpose is to solve the problem and not just run itself efficiently. Big is not necessarily good. Efficient is not always better.
I was being sarcastic. However, I do live in a place where every level of government is controlled by Democrats. I sometimes call it Democratland. It is a Leftist controlled enclave in the midst of George Bush's Brave New World. My Congressman is Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote to deny the President the authority he sought to wage war against terrorism. I'm sure she had her reasons. The mayor of my city is Jerry Brown, also known as Moonbeam. I work in San Francisco whose mayor is Willie Brown, whose personal motto is "I like to live big, with white women, fur coats, frequent trips to Paris." His favorite hobby is giving his ex-girlfriends government jobs. No one thinks this is a big deal in San Francisco. I ride BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to work. BART probably has a bigger budget and more employees than half the states. Oh, and I work for the government.
Tuesday afternoon, a couple of friends and I were walking to catch BART for home, and as we passed through a lovely plaza named to honor the most vaulted of liberal ideas, the United Nations, we saw a woman of indeterminate age, apparently homeless, obviously incapacitated by drugs, alcohol or both, urinating in front of the doors of an unused (for security reasons) entrance to the federal building facing the plaza. Urinating like a cow.
Dear Ms. Manners? What's a guy to do? The Conservative in me wanted to scream at her to stop defiling my plaza, my city, my state, my nation, my earth, my universe. Where was the cop that walks this beat? Where's the federal cop whose job it is to patrol the building's perimeter? You see how quickly my outrage was channeled away from personal responsibility? Have I been trained or what?
Back to the urinating cow: although I would like to have walked over and slapped the bitch, I know better. The good ol' boy in me knows that if you step in shit, it's hard to scrape off and the smell lingers.
What I know from this is that government is not a solution for everything. If it were, the people around the San Francisco Bay Area should be a lot happier than they are. Maybe it's just me, but they sure do seem angry. And isolated. And powerless. Presented with a problem, they look to the government for solutions. There are 50 million of us here. The structure of our society is very complex. The government serves many good purposes, but it is also so large it is stifling. How well is it working? For the most part, it seems to be doing okay, but it costs a lot.
Democrats seem to think if the government hasn't solved the problem, then the program (and by extension, the government) needs to be bigger. When Republicans control the government, they treat government like it's a business, and although maybe run better, it quickly forgets that its purpose is to solve the problem and not just run itself efficiently. Big is not necessarily good. Efficient is not always better.