My Uncle Zeke had only one son, Samuel. A big, strong, hardworking, loyal son, but with a spirit as wild and free and untameable as his forefathers. There was no preacher in him. So my grandmother took it upon herself to redeem her grandfather’s dream. She married a man named Malachai Greene, from another farming family with an exceptional amount of land for a black family in the 1920s. Their lands combined were equal to her brother Ezekiel’s. And as time went on, she and Zeke took on more and more of Jethro’s place, a field here, a pasture there.

Now who’s to say why my Great-Uncle Jethro took to the bottle? With a brother like Zeke and a sister like Jonnie Mae, I suspect I have some inkling. He and his wife Ruth Davis had twelve children by 1935. Six were boys. By 1950 all the boys who had not moved or run away or had not been drafted into World War II and decided to stay in the service, had taken jobs at Camp LeJeune military base down in Jacksonville. The girls all went North either during or right after the war. Jethro died in 1959.

My grandmother and grandfather had only one son, Lester. The rest were girls—Rebecca, Ruthester, Rachel, and Rose, my mother. Jonnie Mae resigned herself to her task. For many years her husband, Aunt Ruth, Uncle Jethro, Lester, Uncle Zeke, Sammy, and Jonnie Mae herself ran the Cross/Greene lands together. They kept afloat, through war and depressions and recessions and sickness and death and children growing up and walking out. Through it all, in the back of her mind—it amazes and chills me to realize—she had plans still that her issue would stand on the pulpit of her “Grandfather’s church,” as she would sometimes slip and call it when she forgot herself.

Uncle Lester established early on that he was not preacher material. He and my Uncle Sammy became the family hellraisers, two handsome, big strong men made to work hard in the field all day; their minds were not on prayer meetings at night. They were loyal sons who apparently never considered leaving the family, but they reserved self for self, never went to church, and drank what they pleased, when they pleased, and with whom. But the community as a whole adored the both of them, admiring their independent minds and charming ways. Both were charismatic in that heroic sort of way, inseparable, swift—often violent. It all changed for Uncle Lester the day Uncle Sammy was shot down in Maple Hill over some foolishness. He lost that fierce independence of mind, that dashing cavalier attitude, and knuckled under to Jonnie Mae’s reign. He never became a churchgoer, but he lost the luster and sparkle.