what she is like, she with her washing of clothes, her baking, her dangling shutter never mended by the husband-carpenter, the broken lamp never fixed by the household electrician, the flowerless, shrubless plot of land of the town gardener. A mystery, but then one does not come home to start work again.
The writer is one of the first-born of the sons of the State of Tennessee. If this seniority brings with it none of the rights of primogeniture, it certainly has imposed the duty of filial veneration and regard for the land of his nativity .
From The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century
by J. G. M. Ramsey, A.M., M.D., 1853
My mother had in many ways the nature of an exile, although her wanderings and displacements had been only in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. I never knew anyone so little interested in memory, in ancestors, in records, in sweetened back-glancing sceneries, little adornments of pride. Sometimes she would mention with a puzzled frown The Annals of Tennessee , by her grandfather with the same name, but she had never read it. Ramsey, this curious son of Tennessee, lived where she also was born in Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, the place of the “widely regarded as spurious” Mecklenberg Declaration of Independence of May 1775.
She must have had a youth and she had those brothers and sisters whose names we bear. She spoke of one brother who had been “very smart,” but that too came to a hazy end.
This brother, out of the blue, began to write letters to my mother. They arrived, unfortunately, from a mental hospital in upstate New York. They were extraordinary for their outstanding beautiful handwriting. These calligraphic marvels, with every letter perfectly formed and set in very straight, evenly spaced lines, were written with a fine black pen. The content was coherent, the spelling flawless and the subject matter a sort of oratory. He liked to write letters on our national holidays, moments which provoked an intense patriotic emotion in him.
Dearest Sister Mary: On this splendid Fourth of July a brilliant sun is shining, as indeed it should shine to honor the heroic War of Independence in which our beloved nation fought itself free of foreign domination. No true American would slight the hazardous, God-protected journey of the Mayflower and the sweetness of the Pilgrims kneeling in their simple attire to give thanks at Plymouth Rock. Yet, the moment of Independence was the true flowering of our great country as it stepped forth to its hallowed future.
I must add that, if you wish to write me, I have not been known for some years as Robert Ramsey, but as Robert Douglas.
Yours in family love,
R OBERT DOUGLAS
What a beautiful letter, my mother said. I don’t see how Robbie could be crazy. He certainly wasn’t when he saw my sister about ten years ago and by that time he must have been forty-five.
We wrote the director of the hospital and after a month or so received an answer about Robert Douglas, an answer which had none of the patient’s grand flourishes. The director didn’t seem to know much about my mother’s brother, but said that he was in a “more or less calm phase.”
A few years later we received a notice of his death and a request for burial fees. So, with fifty dollars, Robert Douglas was buried someplace. Somehow we learned that his change of name was not madness but the sensible urging of practicality that followed a period of financial stress, if stress is the accurate word.
The house is dark. Now all the children are born and she is in one bed, he in another, according to the custom of that time and “class.” They do not know that couples who have no children, or one or two, pride themselves on remaining in one bed, the matrimoniale , until they are separated by some illness of old age.
My father is in the room next to the attic, reading and smoking. He may be a little drunk—it is night. She is pulling the blankets over her
The writer is one of the first-born of the sons of the State of Tennessee. If this seniority brings with it none of the rights of primogeniture, it certainly has imposed the duty of filial veneration and regard for the land of his nativity .
From The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century
by J. G. M. Ramsey, A.M., M.D., 1853
My mother had in many ways the nature of an exile, although her wanderings and displacements had been only in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. I never knew anyone so little interested in memory, in ancestors, in records, in sweetened back-glancing sceneries, little adornments of pride. Sometimes she would mention with a puzzled frown The Annals of Tennessee , by her grandfather with the same name, but she had never read it. Ramsey, this curious son of Tennessee, lived where she also was born in Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, the place of the “widely regarded as spurious” Mecklenberg Declaration of Independence of May 1775.
She must have had a youth and she had those brothers and sisters whose names we bear. She spoke of one brother who had been “very smart,” but that too came to a hazy end.
This brother, out of the blue, began to write letters to my mother. They arrived, unfortunately, from a mental hospital in upstate New York. They were extraordinary for their outstanding beautiful handwriting. These calligraphic marvels, with every letter perfectly formed and set in very straight, evenly spaced lines, were written with a fine black pen. The content was coherent, the spelling flawless and the subject matter a sort of oratory. He liked to write letters on our national holidays, moments which provoked an intense patriotic emotion in him.
Dearest Sister Mary: On this splendid Fourth of July a brilliant sun is shining, as indeed it should shine to honor the heroic War of Independence in which our beloved nation fought itself free of foreign domination. No true American would slight the hazardous, God-protected journey of the Mayflower and the sweetness of the Pilgrims kneeling in their simple attire to give thanks at Plymouth Rock. Yet, the moment of Independence was the true flowering of our great country as it stepped forth to its hallowed future.
I must add that, if you wish to write me, I have not been known for some years as Robert Ramsey, but as Robert Douglas.
Yours in family love,
R OBERT DOUGLAS
What a beautiful letter, my mother said. I don’t see how Robbie could be crazy. He certainly wasn’t when he saw my sister about ten years ago and by that time he must have been forty-five.
We wrote the director of the hospital and after a month or so received an answer about Robert Douglas, an answer which had none of the patient’s grand flourishes. The director didn’t seem to know much about my mother’s brother, but said that he was in a “more or less calm phase.”
A few years later we received a notice of his death and a request for burial fees. So, with fifty dollars, Robert Douglas was buried someplace. Somehow we learned that his change of name was not madness but the sensible urging of practicality that followed a period of financial stress, if stress is the accurate word.
The house is dark. Now all the children are born and she is in one bed, he in another, according to the custom of that time and “class.” They do not know that couples who have no children, or one or two, pride themselves on remaining in one bed, the matrimoniale , until they are separated by some illness of old age.
My father is in the room next to the attic, reading and smoking. He may be a little drunk—it is night. She is pulling the blankets over her
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