Little Angels, Coffins, and Mysteries

"Mama also tells me that in addition to Uncle Will, Uncle Sam, Papa, and Aunt Kate, my grandparents had another daughter--I think she was born between the births of Uncle Will and Uncle Sam--who was killed when she was about four years old. The man (or he may have been teen-aged) who killed her was tried for murder, but acquitted. Did you know about that?"
--Alton Alawine, September 16, 1976

When I started this blog, back in November, I promised legends, family lore, stories. Here are two that I bet not many of you have ever heard.

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Shortly after Alton got in touch with me, and before he moved home to Mississippi, he asked me the question I show above.When I asked Daddy, I think I remember him telling me he didn't know anything about that. For some reason, I don't have a copy of my return note to Alton, so I'm guessing there. But in a couple of weeks, he mailed this back:

The ghost story he told me about, later, he described this way:

"Three days before Rena was killed, she went to her room to go to bed, and came running out screaming. After they got her calmed down enough to talk, she said she had seen a big bird outside her window 'as big as I am.' An African-American woman who was staying with them told Grandma [Lucretia Wells Alawine] that it was a 'spirit' Rena had seen and that 'she's not long for this world.' Grandma said they were never able to get Rena to go back into her bedroom after that incident.

"Somehow, tied into this story was the fact that three men (strangers) had stopped by on the evening that Rena saw the 'bird' and had just left when she went to her bedroom. Grandma thought they were members of the KKK on some kind of 'mission.'

"They were returning from wherever they had gone, on the day Rena was killed--in fact, immediately after she was shot--and one of them took Rena from Grandpa's [Andrew's] arms. Apparently he had picked her up and was standing there holding her, probably in a state of shock." 

Alton went on to say that he felt sure the story could be debunked by keeping in mind the type of clothing the KKK men may have been wearing--that the loose "robes" would've resembled a "big bird, as big as I am," if the child had caught a glimpse of them as they left. I tend to agree.

However, as he pointed out, "...there is still unexplained the fact that Rena was dead three days after the woman predicted that 'she's not long for this world.'"

Or, maybe, that too was just superstition!

Please note, RIGHT HERE, that there's absolutely no indication that any of the family was involved with the KKK. Aunt Sadie made it clear to Alton that the guys who stopped off the road were strangers.

I feel as if "Rena" was probably short for "Lorena." She never showed up on any census record because of her brief life span.

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Most of the "legends" or tales I've heard involved someone's dying, disappearing, experiencing a tragedy of some sort. There don't seem to be many stories of serendipity or of happy reunions or whatever. Another one of the unsolved mysteries involves Jim, the brother of my great-grandfather Andrew.

Caution! Be sure not to confuse Andrew's brother Jim with Andrew's son Jim (James Tilden). Maybe my great-grandfather named his son after his own brother. Who knows--family names did get used a lot. (Hence, Andrew Thaggard, son of Kate Alawine who was Andrew's daughter.) At any rate, I had mentioned a story that Daddy told me during one of those long evenings I described in another post. He was clear that this involved his grandfather's brother (Jim). The way he told it to me was something like this:

Jim killed a man, his sister's husband, at some point after the Civil War, and was jailed. There was sympathy for him, though, in the area where he lived. (Daddy didn't know where that might be, however, and he wasn't sure either why the neighbors thought it was wrong for him to be in jail.) So one night a group of men pretending to be a lynch mob broke him out of the jail (as if to hang him), hid him in a wagon, and got him out of the area. His wife and the family finished taking care of crops, possessions, disposition of property, etc., and then quietly left, to join him at some place where they'd learned he wanted them to meet him. Daddy thought that was Texas.

Alton asked his mother, Aunt Sadie, and wrote me:

Later, in another letter, Alton apologized for having held back on what he'd been told. This was all a LONG, LONG time ago; Alton and almost all of his family are gone, and, as you read his letter to me, you'll notice that, first, he did give me "permission" to share his notes; but, second, his mother--being of "that" generation--didn't want him to relate that particular story to many people; and, third, that he regarded keeping the promise he'd made to her a matter of principle.

       

(That last comment was meant as a joke, by the way.)

This post was inevitably going to be a long one, due to the fact that--after I reviewed and read all my letters and notes--I decided to go on and do what I'd been given "permission" to do: share my information. Right before Alton moved back to Mississippi, he and I talked about what "form" a family history should take--I'm referring here to one that we could distribute to everybody. Should it have recordings by people who were witnesses to events (or who had intimately known the people whose experiences were being told)? Should we include detailed family charts? What about a narrative?

He would've been excited about the possibility of a blog; but to get the best use of it, I think I should include even letters that seem to have a lot of picky, maybe boring (to some) little details. So, below, I'm finishing this post with a couple of additional, edited missives in which we attempted to wrap up the mystery of Jim Alawine, Andrew's brother. Read over them carefully. In one of them he indicates that he got the victim's name wrong--it was Herrod, not Herron. He also says his mother recalled that Jim was spirited out of the community that long-ago evening IN A COFFIN, because his rescuers wanted to maintain the charade that he'd been hanged.

Where did he end up? Who knows.

But as Alton himself said, at the end of one of those letters above, in regards to the mystery of his own Grandfather O'Neal:

"It is probably too much to hope to find any evidence concerning his disappearance."And, "Had you noticed...that when you find the answer to one question the answer always seems to raise two new questions?"

In going through all this material today, I found something that brought me back around to why I started the blog. Alton and I had been discussing the Kings, the Crowthers, the Therrells, and how they contributed to our own family tree. He'd sent me copies of notes from descendants of these people, and then he added:

So this is really what I'm trying to avoid. Pass it on!

Ælfwine