My grandfather was born in the early 1900s in a school for “Coloreds” and was delivered by local African-American women who were friends and neighbors of his parents. His father was half-Mexican and maybe they were the only Mexican family in Kentucky at that time in history. I really don’t know. I say he was half-Mexican because his father, who may have been born in South America, actually grew up in Mexico and came here as an orphan at the close of the Mexican-American War with a soldier named James.  My great-grandmother died in childbirth, died right there in that school building, or at least that’s what the birth record says. Later, his father remarried a woman who was said to be half-Cherokee and she raised my grandfather. My dad would later be born in a Share Cropper’s shack that had once served as a slave cabin, about two miles up the road.

I have heard all of my life how my dad considered the Garnet girls to be his “sisters,” and how when their daddy was dying he sent word down the hill for Daddy to bring his guitar and come “sing him home.” So Daddy did. He took his guitar to “Uncle’s” house and sang to him just before he died. In the 1950s my dad’s siblings attended the Rosenwald School that replaced the schoolhouse where their father was born. They may have been the only “White” kids in the school at that time. I never understood any of this as a child. All I knew was that the people living in that community were my dad’s friends.

Seems like that’s the way it should always be, people just being good to each other. Some of the people in the community were my dad’s friends up until the day they died. Most of them passed away before Daddy. I still remember Billy in his wild colored clothes catching a ride into town with Daddy on Saturdays and Cat that Daddy hung around sometimes. The Gradys, the Dudleys, the Franklins and Richards from Gradyville and Jones Chapel Road, from Flatwoods—they were all friends and family.