Decoration Day

By Betsy Sanders

There was a small white wooden church with a green roof and a steeple, surrounded by a very old, pre-Civil war cemetery on one side and a newer, still-open-for-business cemetery on the other. There was a huge live oak on one side and underneath, in the deep shade, was a yards-long, concrete, waist-high table filled with fried chicken, fried okra, black-eyed peas, potato salad, fresh cut corn, tomato slices, yeast rolls, cornbread, assorted casseroles, sweet pickles, watermelon, pound cake, banana pudding, chocolate sheet cake — all of it home-grown and -made.

I’m certain the real table was not nearly as long as I remember, but this vision mingles with the Biblical loaves and fishes story in my mind, and I’m left with a beautiful memory of being loved and fed and of belonging. Dinner on the grounds is not a phrase I hear these days; just reading the phrase takes me back to those times with my grandmother at her church on dinner-on-the-grounds Decoration Day Sunday.

The more I think, the more complicated it gets. I want to go back for one more serving of blackberry cobbler; I feel a deep longing for those days of innocence, of being surrounded by adoring relatives, neighbors, friends, of pats on the head, pinches to the cheek and compliments for my patent leather shoes and frilly dress. A wave of sadness comes over me, but I smile despite it. I recognize this feeling — love and pride mixed with the disappointment that comes with knowing too much and thinking too long, the difference between how things are and how I want them to be. The back story is the one that interests me now.

While I was busy having my idyllic Southern childhood, I didn’t know my grandmother hid her Cherokee ancestry for fear of not belonging. I suspect she learned this unconsciously by growing up in the foothills of the Appalachians in north Alabama, where a few generations back from hers, not assimilating would get you sent, on foot, to Oklahoma.

While I was eating hot buttered homemade biscuits with Golden Eagle syrup before heading to church, I was unaware that years ago my grandfather was shunned by many in my hometown because his father left Alabama to join the Union Army and fight for the Yanks in the Civil War. To this day there are families with the same last name that don’t claim kin even though only the eldest family members remember the story of why.

I grew up in north Alabama in the 1960s. I look back now, and I have no idea how I managed to be completely unaware of the Civil Rights Movement happening all around me. I can only offer the very rural setting, the lack of television, and parents who didn’t discuss news or politics as an explanation. I remember only talk of crops, rain, and Alabama football.

Dinner on the grounds was a special occasion that followed the work of cleaning up the graveyard and placing fresh flowers beside the headstones; it provided a time to remember and celebrate the lives of the dear departed. Thinking of it now reminds me how grateful I am for every branch in my twisted family tree and for my deeply Southern roots. But I know I could not go back to that little church and not question the theology; as an adult I would not perceive it as loving or nourishing. I don’t know how to reconcile the mix of emotions. I just know that no matter how far removed I am from that time and place, I’m still Southern and still trying to figure it out.

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