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fabric. But when I asked for the name of Grandpa Ring's grandfather, her busy fingers stopped.
Grandma did not know, as I do now, that his name was Joe Ring.
After a moment of reflection, her fingers went back into motion. She did recall hearing that the man owned a plantation. In Mississippi. A large plantation. In Rolling Fork.
"Ha!" - It amused Grandma to remember after so many years. - "Rolling Fork!"
"The man owned many slaves. And one day they revolted. They killed him, and burned the house to the ground."
She picked up the scissors.
"Everybody in the house was killed."
She began to cut. Her voice quivered now with outrage, as though she herself had been there.
"Oh, it was terrible!"
I sat there nonplused. Not by the far-fetched story - things like that did not happen in real life - not in my family, anyway. Rather, it was the strength of my grandmother's belief. Gently I pressed for details. Grandma protested.
"That's all I know! Nobody ever talked about it. It was too long ago."
The scissors maneuvered with surgical precision along the pin lines. Their rhythmic slicing measured the silence, and evidently cleared Grandma's memory.
"Somebody said once that it was highway robbers. That the man had traveled to Greenville, to take care of some plantation business. He was returning to Rolling Fork with a lot of money - a payroll or something. They killed him and robbed him, and left his body on the road."
The old woman looked up and glared at me, shaking her shears menacingly.
"But that's not how I heard the story! It was the darkies!"
Now she was angry.
"And they burned the house to the ground! With the people inside! It was terrible!"
Her eyes lowered and her hands went back to cutting. She was calm again.
"So the man's wife," she continued thoughtfully, "Barbara" - she knew that name because they had met once in 1912 - "Barbara came back up to her family in Buffalo. She came up the Mississippi River on a steamboat, she and the boys. She had four boys. But the boat sank - the boilers were always blowing up in those things! - and the baby slipped out of the poor woman's arms and drowned. One of the other boys disappeared, too. Only in the morning they found that one. Floating on a mattress in the river. Alive."
The scissors never wavered. Grandma never looked up. A fine net flattened her greyish-brown hair. She had been a radiant young seamstress once. She clicked her tongue and shook her head.
"When I think of it! The poor woman."
Determined to fill my Composition Notebook with information more credible than this outlandish tale, I returned forthwith to questions about branches of the family Grandma knew first-hand. Nevertheless, the notion had already lodged in my head that one day I might try to find out what really happened to my great great grandfather.
Now I know. It was terrible. Grandma was right - about that, at least. Three decades of searching have verified that there was indeed a conflagration, and the people inside did perish. Only it was the Rings' country store, not their house. And they lived on a modest farm, not a large plantation. And they never owned slaves. Burglary may have figured into the true story - though certainly not highway robbery as Grandma had heard. And Barbara's riverboat did indeed go down, dumping the widow and her boys into the river. Only it was not the boiler, and it was not the Mississippi, and it was not just one member of the family who drowned.
Still, in the end, it would amaze me how much of what Grandma repeated to me on blind faith turned out to be factual. - But factual in a deceptive way, a smattering of misshapen pieces of the truth, jumbled and insufficient. Stitched together, they would never add up to a whole garment. So Grandma never knew, as I know now, how truly terrible it was.
She never knew that Joe and Barbara Ring went South after the Civil War, not before. Naturally, then, her narrative included no mention of Reconstruction,
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