When I drive to Savannah to visit my aunt, who lives in the venerable Smith family home there, I usually make a short detour in Bulloch County to pay my respects to relatives on my mother’s side of the family.
All of them, I’m sad to say, are long since deceased. They are reunited now in the Jones family plot in a small cemetery next to a small Baptist church located two miles south of Interstate 10 on U.S. 301.
Yes, I know. Smith and Jones. The concept is rife with humor, or irony, or something.
I’ve written before about the Bulloch County Joneses, the family of my maternal grandmother Leila. They lived in rural Georgia near Statesboro, 50 miles inland from Savannah. A few Joneses moved away as adults; most didn’t. One of the brothers, a lawyer, allegedly proved to be quite a villain. We don’t talk about him.
My great grandparents, George and Jincy Ann Jones, raised eight children, seven of whom reached adulthood. My grandmother Leila was the youngest of four girls.
George was a farmer, and over the years, he was quite successful and prosperous. He and Jincy Ann owned several hundred acres of rich farm land, and they grew a variety of cash crops — cotton, corn, tobacco, and assorted grains.
As an indication of their prosperity, the Joneses sent five of their children to college, including my grandmother. Two of the brothers became attorneys. The oldest daughter, Janie, became a high school principal in Virginia.
The Jones family lived on the literal south edge of the county in a sprawling farmhouse surrounded by cultivated fields. A few hundred yards away, out of sight beyond a grove of oak trees, was a small house where the caretaker and his family lived.
The caretaker was George’s assistant, foreman, and personnel director. The caretaker supervised day-to-day operations and managed the hired hands who cultivated and harvested the crops.
George died in 1921, and Jincy Ann took over the enterprise. As before, the caretaker kept things organized and functioning.
But everything changed with the Great Depression.
In Bulloch County, as in most of the country, markets collapsed. Crops went unsold. Bills went unpaid. Banks foreclosed, and sometimes collapsed themselves.
When Jincy Ann died in 1939, the Jones children tried to keep the farm going. But it was hopeless. There was no work. The caretaker and his family, and the hired hands and theirs, moved on.
In the end, the Jones family lost everything to foreclosure — the land, the farmhouse, the farm equipment.
All that remained was the caretaker’s house. And that became the Jones family’s new home.
By the time I came along, two of the sisters, Leila and Mattie, had families of their own and lived elsewhere. Janie had retired and returned from Virginia to care for the remaining two siblings, Pearl and Lester.
And clearly, they needed her care. Where Aunt Janie was scholarly and sophisticated, Aunt Pearl was countrified and rough-hewn. Uncle Lester, who lost his vision early to glaucoma, navigated the house with a cane while reciting bible passages.
Aunt Pearl was wild-eyed and unpredictable, maybe a trifle unhinged. She greeted us with painful backslaps and an alarming, but genuine laugh. She had a habit of knocking over her juice glass at breakfast or her iced tea glass at dinner while gesticulating to illustrate the stories she told nonstop, at high volume.
Uncle Lester would corner me (or my brother Lee, if I were quick-thinking enough to escape Lester’s grasp) and deliver his best Old Testament admonitions, accompanied by scripture he had memorized in his youth. The words were difficult to fathom, but the delivery and the implications were clear.
Aunt Janie, the parent of the household, maintained order and kept Pearl and Lester relatively in check. The three of them lived together in the caretaker’s house for 20 years. During the summers of my childhood, we often stopped to see them on our way to Savannah.
After Pearl died in 1971, Janie bought a house in Statesboro. She and Lester lived there until 1983, when Janie died. Lester moved to a nursing home. He died there in 1985.
Years passed, and I didn’t think much about Bulloch County. I remembered the people, and in general, the history. But the details were vague, and after a time, I didn’t even remember the location of the old farm. The church and the cemetery, yes, but nothing else.
Then, while driving to Savannah one year, on a rare trip when my mother and sister were traveling with me, Mom asked to stop at the cemetery.
It was, I think, in the late-1990s. As we stood there next to the graves of Leila’s family, Mom told us stories, some that I knew, some that I didn’t.
She shared some of her childhood memories of the farmhouse and the caretaker’s house. She told us about the good years; about the shock of family money stolen, so the story goes, by a wayward brother; about the depression of the 1930s; about how the family coped afterward.
Then I posed a question I should have asked sooner: where, exactly, was the old Jones family farm?
Mom pointed to an unpaved road beside the church. Down there, she said.
Mom and Betty and I drove slowly down the sandy road. On both sides, as far as you could see, were cotton fields.
All of this, she told us, was the Jones family farm. She said the land looked exactly the same as in the old days.
On a whim, I stopped the car, walked to the edge of the field, and picked four bolls of cotton — one each for Mom and us three kids.
As we drove on, Mom pointed out the knoll where the old farmhouse had been. There was no sign it had been there, as the spot had been returned to cultivation.
Several hundred yards ahead, the old dirt road ended at a paved county road. Mom told me to turn left. Just ahead on the left was a small, neat country house, obviously occupied.
I recognized it immediately as the house where Janie, Pearl, and Lester lived when I was a kid — the caretaker’s house.
We were surprised to see the old place still standing at all, much less occupied and in good condition.
I suppose we could have stopped and introduces ourselves, but most likely, that would have been awkward.
And really, it didn’t matter. All we needed to know, we could see: that the house and the land were still in use.
Since that day, I’ve stopped by the cemetery on almost every trip to Savannah. Now and then, I will take the time to drive down the dirt road past the church. I will survey the farmland, then proceed around the corner to the caretaker’s house.
The land is still under cultivation, and the little house is still occupied. New people are carrying on.
It doesn’t affect me in the slightest, but still, I’m very pleased about that.
My maternal great-grandparents, George Asbury Jones and Jincy Ann Anderson Jones.
The former Jones family farm, still under cultivation today.
The caretaker’s house.
My souvenir boll of cotton.
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