Family Reunion

On Sunday, my people gathered on a mountaintop called Ramsey Ridge, a place that is truly God's country.

The road to the top is long and winding, peppered with an occasional trailer or farm. It's a place so remote the dogs nap in the road and a man sitting on his porch will straighten up and stare to see a row of cars wagon-training by. Mostly, the mountain is untouched, edenic, with thick, lush woods that finally give way to wide, smooth pastures and a tiny family cemetery where our ancestors are buried.

The Four Sisters: Emma, Ethel, Grace, and Eva lived the longest of all the Stanley siblings and grew old together, telling stories, cooking, sewing, writing letters to tell of the weather and new grandchildren. Their children brought them together as often as they could until one by one they left for a place they had prepared their whole lives to see.

My great-grandmother, Ethel, told me a hundred stories about her life on Ramsey Ridge, where she and her sisters forged a romantic suicide pact to jump off the Raven Cliffs (they backed out), where her father hid moonshine stills that he confiscated as the county revenuer, where her mother was almost stabbed to death by Aunt Pop, where she met my great-grandfather on the croquet grounds her father built. It was a place where, she said, they "had it all," a plot of such unspoiled beauty I thought her memory must be romanticizing it until I went there for the first time and saw a flock of wild turkeys in the fields. On the horizon above those fields are mountaintops, first green then blue in the distance and reaching for miles and miles, the only sound is the wind that sweeps the air clean and turns the scarecrow to wave.

The old barn still stands under a grandfatherly tree that spreads his branches wide and deep. My great-great grandparents, uncles, aunts, babies who succombed to turn-of-the century sicknesses rest in the shaded cemetery beside the Raven Cliffs. Their spirits walk among us when we gather, still plowing the land, still tending the garden, still strolling to the one-room school where Mamaw's brother Roley was the teacher.

Sunday was a cusp-of-autumn day, too chilly for shade and too warm for full sun, but perfect for walking down dappled roads to the Caney Fork church where food was laid out the length of the building. We feasted on fried chicken, cowboy beans, potato salad, cornbread, blackberry cobbler and German chocolate pie. Behind the church, just beyond two outhouses with indoor carpet, is another cemetery with the most famous grave of all.

Rainwater Ramsey (my great-great-great grandfather) bought and settled that ridge during a Civil War that he tried his best to avoid. "Look for the Yankees," he told his son as he worked in the fields. "They're dressed in all blue." Lore holds that he is part Cherokee and though that's never been proven, oral history is stronger than oak to those who believe it.