The story below was published as a ‘Field Note’ in December 2019 under the headline “Going Up Home.” These memories of a place and a time, of kin and country, come into my thoughts especially at Christmas-time.
I suspect many of us of a certain age, wherever our families hailed from, have recollections like these - the tales of our generations, their traditions that became our own, and things held dear. How nice it would be if more of us shared our memories like this, the stories of where we come from, whether near and far.
-Keel
o
There is a house up in Jackson County, Tennessee, a very old house by our American measure, in a tiny place called Liberty.
It is the house where my father’s mother was born, in 1896. She was Mary Terrell Byrne, the youngest of ten children born to Bascom and Darthula Watts Byrne, whose own grandparents were born in Ireland. They “crossed over,” as folks used to say of the North Atlantic voyage, that brought so many Irish to the New World and our new nation. In so doing, the Byrnes became some of our very earliest Tennesseans.
In time the family settled in Jackson County, in the hill country of the Upper Cumberland. This came about by reason of a land grant. My grandmother’s great-grandfather had served on the staff of General Andrew Jackson and received the homestead for his war service, or so the story goes.
Just so you know: Liberty is found near Granville, between Chestnut Mound and Flynn’s Lick, at the spot where the Shepardsville Road (or State Route 290) leaves Highway 53. All of this sits in a peaceful valley down from Chestnut Mound, which rises east of Carthage or, to be precise, east of Elmwood.
Bascom was born in 1856 and became a tobacco farmer in this place. He was also the builder of this house. Soon this house was full of children, my grandmother the youngest of them. She was called “Mary T” at birth. Eventually she became “Aunt Mary T” there being so many nieces and nephews also underfoot in the fullness of time. By the time I was underfoot, her brother, my great-uncle Alvis Byrne, was the owner of this place. He and his son, N.B. Byrne, who lived about 200 yards up the same road, had carried on the hard farming tradition.
Mary T departed the family home-place and went away to college over in Cookeville, at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute, forerunner of Tennessee Tech. This was an extraordinary achievement for a young woman in her day (meaning 1914). Not long after this, my grandmother was married in this same house. She and Sherman McKeel Hunt Sr., then settled in a different county far beyond Carthage, down in Nashville, on the east side. It was there, in 1923, that my father was born.
In time Mary T told me her stories, including the ones she herself had been told as a girl. She loved to tell them, and I loved to listen. She told how her father had felled certain trees to fashion the sturdy foundation timbers for his house. He did his work well; today, when many newer barns and homes of this region are leaning or have long fallen down, Bascom’s house stands straight and true.
My grandmother would return to Liberty often over the long years. She called it "going up home" and whenever we heard her say those words we knew exactly the place she meant. A place of warmth in its many forms - the crackling fireplace in winter, the energy about the kitchen in the mornings, the embrace of family everywhere.
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In her later years, she shared her memories of how her father would sit on the front porch, on the side opposite the cemetery, facing the planted fields, and there he would read his Bible and the newspaper.
When he looked up from his reading, to his left he could rest his eyes upon the rolling hills in the western distance. In the foreground he could observe his tobacco crop in progress. To his right, he could see his barn. Here the harvested tobacco was hung in the upper levels and then cured (or “fired” as they said) to be made ready for market, and in the barnyard the animals were tended.
That same barn, now in ruin, is where I learned to milk a cow on one of the summer “vacations” with my grandmother. But it was always Alvis’ wife Ola who did the serious milking. I remember her in the kitchen of this house, churning a portion of that milk into butter for the dinner table.
To this day, one of my most vivid memories is a dramatic scene of life and death in her back yard, between the kitchen porch and the hen house. It was the day I watched Aunt Ola select a live bird from the flock and make it part of our Sunday dinner.
o
It seems to me now that I must have traveled from Nashville to Liberty three or four times a year, with my Mom and Dad in the front seat and my brothers Shawn and Kris with me in the rear. One of these regular visits was always for the family reunion, in the fall. They were always held outdoors and very well attended. The branches of the extended family tree included Spurlocks, Drapers, Willoughbys and Jareds, as well as the Byrnes and the Hunts.
In the earliest of these reunions that I can recall, I remember watching the men create the outdoor serving table in the front yard, using ropes and quilts. They would string ropes tight between the same trees every year, and upon these ropes they spread the quilts to make a colorful serving surface off the ground. On this the women would place their dishes, buffet-style. Later reunions were held indoors on proper tables, at the old Granville Elementary School, by then a senior center.
I remember summer vacation trips with my grandmother, and these would extend for a week or two. On still other visits, probably day-trips from Nashville, I remember fine dinners and afterward evenings on the porch. I can still close my eyes even now and see the glow of the tips of the adults’ cigarettes and hear the murmur of their grown-up conversation, in darkness, as a ritual for ending the day.
The children felt lucky to be up that late. There was no TV, no Internet, no social media, and we didn’t require any of it.
On the overnight stays, at the end of the evening there was the warmth of the feather bed and the knowledge that the chamber-pot was available on the floor underneath. That pot was important; it spared you the long cold walk to the outhouse in the dark. I was truly a city boy, but somehow I don’t remember thinking of these procedures as inconveniences at the time.
o
Memories of this house always come to me at Christmas-time.
How, as a boy, I would watch my Dad step onto the porch and leave with the other men to go hunting. Alvis (whom we called “Uncle Bud”) and N.B. would take the squirrel rifle that hung over a door inside the house and the shotgun that rested above the mantle over the fireplace, both kept up high where no children could reach. (The shotgun was mainly used to fetch mistletoe for the house at Christmas; one of the men would blast a clump of it out of the tall trees, where it grew in abundance.)
I always wanted to go with the men on their hunting trips, of course, but was too little for the danger. But then came one December morning later on when my Dad said I could go with them on the hunt. I put on my coat and stepped off the porch as they did. I proudly marched in the rear of the file, and followed along expectantly through the chilly woods, as we hiked up the hill behind the house.
No species of bird or rabbit or squirrel was even close to being endangered that morning; I believe we came back empty-handed. For the men I’m sure it was just another uneventful hike. For me, it was a grand adventure, and a kind of confirmation. Somehow, in my adolescent mind anyway, this surely was connected with becoming a man.
My memories of that long-ago morning, and maybe those same sounds and smells and expectant feelings too, were in my head again some forty years later, when I returned to these same woods with my son. By then he was a young teenager with his own hunting license. We rediscovered the same trail through the brush and the autumn leaves.
We hiked up the same steep hill to its top and spoke of many things.
o
In the Byrne family cemetery, on a gentle rise just east of the old house, the headstones all face homeward.
These markers stand worn by weather and time. They tell of at least three generations of our ancestors (Bascom and his Darthula among them) who came here to their final rest. The stones are silent memorials to those generations and also to the hardness and the harshness of life. Among these are the names of at least two of our early family who passed as infants.
And on some of these ancient stones are carved the words of the hope and promise of our faith:
“We will meet again.”
