ceebeegee | Update on my Big Fat Gothic Southern Family...

...Grandpa John grew up in the city of Buhminhayem, not on a plantation, although he still had a Mammy, as did my mother's first cousins. My great-grandfather had been rich but lost a lot of his fortune due to some shadiness with his partner. Also, apparently he was cordially disliked by pretty much the entire family--my great-grandmother (Mama Hix) didn't actually divorce him, since that simply wasn't done in those days, but she did leave him. None of my mother's aunts (one of whom went to high school with Zelda Fitzgerald) liked him either. My mom said with the exception of my great-grandfather, her father's family was generally pretty progressive regarding race relations--she said none of them ever opposed blacks' right to vote or anything like that. I hope that's true. They were pretty iconoclastic though--Grandpa John was an actor and they all had bachelor's degrees and beyond. But I don't know any of them, except for my great-aunt Dottie--even Grandpa John died long before I was born.

Mama Hix lived to be 95. I met her as a very young child--I was about 2 and Bart would've been 7. My mom told me a story about us running around, in the yard I guess, and we would run by her on the steps, and she'd extend her hand to us and pretend to shock us, and we'd do it right back to her, laughing, and she told my mom how she hated passive children. 95. Wow.