FAMILY PHOTO ARCHIVE
Title: Pearl (Pearl Peacock Vara, Great-grandmother) as child, professional portrait.
Photographer: Professional photographer?
Location: Eastman, GA?
Date: 199_?
Medium: Black and white print 1.5x2
There’s a photograph of you, a black and white portrait smaller than my palm. You look about five, maybe seven years old. Your brown hair is parted in the middle, long large curls resting just below your shoulders. Two ribbons are tied on either side of your face, framing the short curly bangs cut across your forehead.
I imagine you’re sitting on a wooden stool, propped in front of a blank wall or a sheet hung from a ceiling beam. Feet dangling, you’re unable to reach the floor.
You're wearing a stiff cotton dress. The sleeves, shoulders, and neck embroidered with thick white cotton thread in blanket-and-whip stitch. Your arms are crossed and rest on your full skirt. Or maybe its a cloth laid over your lap by the photographer.
Your fingers look thin and delicate but capable. On your wrist, a bracelet with silver charms.
I imagine you were told to sit very still and not to smile. Your round face, frowning, and large brown eyes stare out at me.
*
This photo is most likely you. On the top center of the photograph’s card stock is written in thin blue cursive, My mother. Dad says its Papa’s handwriting and I believe him but sometimes cursive looks like all cursive.
I think it’s you because the little girl looks so damn Southern. Antebellum Southern. Like you could have been an extra in Gone With the Wind or Twelve Years A Slave. Its this photograph and the family story of you, “the daughter of a well to do Georgia family” that paint your grandfather as an Edwin Epps in my imagination.
*
I don’t know much about you. All the family stories have Doc in the center of the frame. And you, the Georgia born Scott-Irish mother who spoiled her only son, neglected her only daughter, knew her husband had another family a town over, went to the Methodist church, worked part-time at the local movie theater selling tickets, and never allowed her African American house cleaner to come through the front door.
*
You were born in 1892 in Eastman, Georgia. This summer I went to Eastman for the first time. The place you were raised, where you gave birth to Papa and Aunt Joyce. Later where Aunt Joyce would give birth to her only child. Out of wedlock. I wonder if you were the one to hand the baby over to your first cousin and his wife to raise.
I drove from Uncle Chip’s house in Jacksonville, FL. Made the three and a half-hour drive north on US-23 passed the 438,000-acre peat-filled Okefenokee Swamp, the bald cypress and swamp tupelo trees, and across the state line.
When I crossed into Dodge County, I smiled at the welcome sign, a radiating warmth rising from my chest into my throat. Dodge County has always been the setting of a family story. Not a physical place.
Then a large wooden sign at the mouth of a dirt driveway read END THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST, END ABORTION in red paint.
*
I slept in one of the two motels in Eastman. When I pulled up, construction workers were drinking beer on tailgates. Inside the small lobby, a woman with two tattoo sleeves creeping over her fingers and neck sat behind the counter. I asked about the large roses on her forearm. And we compared tattoos before she handed over my key and said “Have a good night, sweetie,” in a thick southern drawl.
Couples sat in lawn chairs in front of open room doors. Kids in ruffled pink bathing suits and wet t-shirts and shorts plastered to their chest and legs swarmed around the small outside pool. I unpacked my rental car and locked myself in my yellow and red room. I listened to families and couples slowly make their way into their rooms. The clicking of closing doors, the murmurings of TVs and conversations. A bulldog puppy tied to the pool’s gate barked and cried for his owners as I fell asleep.
*
The next day I met Aunt Joyce’s daughter’s daughter. When Tracy stepped out of the car, I thought I was seeing Aunt Joyce. She looks so much like her. Olive skin and dark brown hair. I remember being jealous of her. She looks like a Vara. Like Doc.
We met at the library before driving around the county with her Aunt Linda grave hunting for Peacocks. We found two of your uncles, your father’s brothers, and their families, in the old Little Ocmulgee Graveyard. The gravestones were sunken into the ground and weathered, the names barely visible. Off the main road and no houses in sight, it was quiet. Tracy, Linda, and I walked through the graveyard with our heads down in the ninety-degree heat reading each stone for a familiar name.
At the far end of the graveyard, Linda pointed at a patch of woods. And I looked through the thick pine. “Through there is the Little Ocmulgee Church the Peacock family used to attend.”
*
I only stayed two nights in Eastman. On my last day, I visited the local hardware store. I was told a local historian had self-published a series of books on the history of the county and that I should look at them. The library had them but I could buy one (or a few) at the local hardware store on Maine Street. “Ask for Mrs. Yates. She’ll
help you.”
I drove from the motel over the train tracks that cut the town straight down the middle and into two. On one side of the tracks, Main Street, on the other, West Main Street where Mrs. Yates’ hardware store sits between an antique shop and Taqueria y Tienda’s Mexican Restaurant.
The window fronts were lled with old wooden dressers and tables set with embroidered cotton tablecloths. The doorbell announced my entrance. An old man was examining a washer. He turned as I came in and smiled. I smiled back and asked if Mrs. Yates was in.
“She just stepped out. Think she went to the post office. What do you need?” he asked.
I told him I was looking for books on Dodge County history. “Ones with newspaper articles.”
He knew the ones and directed me to a narrow bookshelf filled with thick red, green, and brown covered books. They were textbook looking and were ordered by year. I began with Aunt Joyce’s birth year. I don’t know when you and Doc got married but I imagine Joyce’s birth came soon after. I flipped to the index and found you and Doc. Small articles about Doc being a vet. You coming home for your father’s funeral. I worked backwards from there by book and date, visiting each index for your name, Doc’s, or our Peacocks.
I was on my second volume when Mrs. Yates came back from the post office. A small woman in her late 70’s with short curly white hair. She first looked at me confused. “Can I help you?”
“She’s looking for Ted Evans’ books,” the older man told her.
“Yes?” she asked. “What for?”
“My great grandmother grew up in Eastman,” I said. “I’m a Peacock.”
“Well, there’s a lot of those around here,” Mrs. Yates said from behind the counter. The day before at lunch with Tracy and her aunt, I was introduced to three distant cousins.
Mrs. Yates invited me to sit at a small table in the back to look at the books. From one book to the next, I read short articles about your father and his seven brothers. Of your grandfather, Sherif Rawlins. Then I found it.
“Thursday, July 22, 1909, NEGRO LYNCHED NEAR CADWELL TUESDAY AFTERNOON. John King Strung to a Tree and Riddled With Bullets at the Hand of Unknown Parties.”
But in the article, the unknown parties are named. Your father and uncle are two of the men.
King’s body was found in the woods between the Little Ocmulgee church and the graveyard.
*
1909, you would have been seventeen. I wonder what you saw in your father’s face when he came home for dinner.
