We buried my Uncle Wayne today. Fittingly, his burial, and that of his wife—Aunt Mavis—was in the Conwill-Goodwin cemetery which is located about ¼ mile from the place Uncle Wayne and Aunt Mavis have called home for decades. The cemetery is entered through an ages-old wrought iron arch, announcing the family ownership, and is sheltered by ancient cedar and oak trees underneath which multiple family graves are marked. Tombstones in the cemetery spell the progression of family lives and loves that were lived out on the surrounding land. Husbands and wives are buried alongside infant or young children that fell to accidents or childhood illnesses. First names on various markers suggest favorite relatives, and shared history, as the same name might appear multiple times. Nephews are named for doting uncles, and sons carry on the names of their fathers. The obvious intertwining of families and existences that drew life from shared labor and homebuilding are well defined by those families documented amid weather-worn granite markers in the sandy cemetery. In mute testimony, those tombstones paint a picture of the Old South, replete with families that share the same ground in death that they did in life.
The Conwill family has called Carolina home since the early 1800’s when the first settlers to occupy the former Indian land arrived from Newberry, South Carolina. Among those settlers were Joseph and Mary Conwill, who brought with them untold dreams and most assuredly unfathomable faith in themselves and their Creator. They cleared land along the Boguefula Creek and laid claim to hundreds of acres of virgin forest that would prove to be fertile soil for raising both crops and families. Joseph’s son, John Peter married and raised a family, including a son named Presley Bailey, who in turn married and raised a family. His second-born son, Wayne, lived and died within a ½-mile radius of the original Conwill home, raising a family of his own and cherishing beyond measure the deeply felt place of belonging he knew in Northeast Mississippi and in the Carolina community. In that respect, he is not unlike many Southerners, who draw a sense of self and history from community.
Native Southerners tend to put down deep tap roots. Although we may wander and relocate for work or other obligations, the sense of place, the sense of belonging to a particular group of people, the pride in ownership of a story, is rock solid. In fact, knowing that we can hearken back to a time and a family who spent a lifetime carving out its own story, is very much a point of identity and an anchor for us. Such was the case for Uncle Wayne and his entire family, even those of us who found ourselves at a distance from Carolina. It is from that place that my father, Wayne’s brother, grew and was encouraged to make the most of himself that he could, even if it meant leaving the family home. For what he knew, or came to understand, is that although we leave home, we actually never do, as it is from that point that we draw our heritage and take our strength. And it is to that point, that we often return for sustenance, if only in our mental travels.
As the funeral procession crossed the Tombigbee River, late on that wintry day, the sun setting over the muddy water cast all measure of orange and yellow and lilac hues across the sky. The heartbroken daughters who had lost both parents in one weekend, surely took comfort in God’s portrait of light and new beginning, even in the darkening day. Continuing down Carolina Road, the two hearses passed the family home, the house where Uncle Wayne and all of his siblings had been born and the house where his father had died. The yard where he had spent countless hours racing and playing and wreaking havoc as the baby boy, and the same yard from which a speeding car had ferried him in its backseat to a hospital after the tractor accident that had left him partially paralyzed for life. The front porch on which the entire family had whiled away many Sunday afternoons, laughing and playing and napping. But on this day, the house and the yard and the front porch were deserted, having yielded life to the beginning of so many others in so many places. About 100 yards from the house, we passed the Conwill Brothers Store—Carolina’s social center at one time– and the place where a much younger Uncle Wayne one day had gleefully hidden behind the gas pump as he worked the lever to continue pumping gas into a car, fooling the unsuspecting customer and drawing the ire of the store’s manager, his Uncle Clay. He had made countless dashes down the dusty path connecting his home with the store, a happy young boy sheltered in a loving community.
Finally, the procession wound through the driveway of the home he had shared with Aunt Mavis for almost their entire 55-year marriage, giving a somber nod to its absent owners as they were carried to a final resting place. The waiting cemetery, a few hundred yards down a tree-shaded drive from Uncle Wayne’s house, is beautiful in its serenity and grace. It doesn’t need well-manicured grounds or spotless markers to testify to its dignity. The deepening shadows of the day, and the protective closeness of the wooded area surrounding the little gated clearing, gave comfort to those who had gathered to say goodbye, proving an apt reflection of the lives being celebrated. Even the thick carpeting of brittle brown oak leaves that chattered loudly, but grudgingly gave way to the footsteps of a grieving family was appropriate for the day on which we remembered a family so closely tied to its history and the very earth from which it had sprung.
You can’t create a sense of place. You can’t go without an anchor for a lifetime and then amazingly locate one. Generations of shared experiences, common goals, family ties, and cherished history combine to create a unified family group that occupies a single place at a single time, no matter how widespread geographically that place actually is. We can point to a common point of origin on the map and take pride in our family ownership of that place, but the fact is that although family might have originated there, its real treasure is the continued closeness and shared support of the generations that follow the first homestead. Our roots run deep. We are Southerners and we are family.
