Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 13:26:57 -0800 (PST) From: Susan Eversole Subject: Slollum Holler Funeral - Part 3 To: johnny at charm.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-johnny at charm.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: johnny at charm.net My memory of Granny’s funeral is a jumble of names and faces. I noted the differences between mountain grief and my own as my own grandmother had passed less than a year before, and we were to set the tombstone upon the yahrzeit. Customs were so different, I had simply labeled the entire experience akin to my Peace Corps days in a Fijian village. Granny was buried at the Luce Angel graveyard in a polished casket, carried up that dirt path by her grandsons. Her casket had remained open through the entire service at the church. Pap’s funeral was not foreign to me, as I was now a member of the family and not gazing at the surroundings with outsider’s eyes. The homes up the holler, near the graveyard hill, were alien still, even though Jesse assured me that we were probably related to everyone up there some way or another. We pulled off the road to walk around the cabin. I took photos at several angles in the hope of capturing the stillness, the time out of place quality to the log structures, the outhouse, the barn, the brook beside the buildings. The cabin stood in the middle of flat, cleared land still rough with furrows, and the house frozen in mid-breath, waiting for inhabitants. Shadows from the hill blocked the sun, and snow could not melt beside the barn. Running water was only a few steps from the back door, and someone had run wires to the house – there was an electrical usage meter on the side of the house. I’m not sure why the electrical meter offended me, as it was obvious that someone had kept the homestead livable. It was said that the Gay family used the house during the summer. They lived a mile down that goat track of a road, along with their extended family. Turns out the Gay brothers are the same cousins who had blocked the mining of Pap’s land. They owned the surface rights to family land, while Pap owned mineral. They blocked the mining of that land, and mined right next to it, harvesting trees on land that wasn’t theirs. They finally gave in, and the income from that mine had provided for Pap’s last days. Property rights in Kentucky coalfields follow family trees, except where surface and mineral were severed. It seems that a flock of carpetbaggers came through in the late 1860’s, and got families to sign away mineral rights, allowing them to retain surface rights. Not knowing any better, these folk thought they were getting free money, until their coal was sold out, literally, underneath them. Eversoles had been in Perry county before the Revolutionary War, but a land grant in 1816 made it official. Pap’s father, Farmer, had been a lawyer, and all his children went to college. Farmer had made a living tracing the circuitous property trail up those hollers, a feat performed more by oral legend than by documentation. Pap was a chemist, taught in Hazard High, at the Morehead College, and worked as an industrial chemist for DuPont during WWII. Returning to Chavies, he took up his father’s trade, as if by nature, and helped families prove or counter claims on their land. The Gay brothers, now in their 70’s, were legendary – their father, of the generation preceding Papaw’s, had blocked book learning in the holler. They were militantly illiterate, but their children were forced to go to school by the county. These were cousins on Memaw’s side, and had always been looked down on by the Eversoles. Papaw, marrying into that family had incurred his brothers’ wrath, despite the fact that his new bride was a school teacher. The difference ran in the blood of generations, and where class and race were irrelevant due to homogeneity of origin, love of book learning caused a greater family schism. Susan Eversole