I didn’t know any of my great-grandparents, and I only knew one of my grandparents well. My grandmother Lila Mae Hemphill married J. T. Neely. They had two children, my Uncle J. T. and my mother, Mary Beulah Neely. She is my grandmother who is pictured on the website — looking very grandmotherly in front of her house, in middle age, in Jackson, Mississippi.
This is not the house she lived in when I met her. The Jackson place was a boarding house she ran to support herself after her husband died. At the end of her life she lived in Mendenhall, Mississippi. Her husband, my grandfather Neely, died before I was born.
My grandfather on my father’s side died when I was two or three. My paternal grandmother was named Pearl Mitchell. People called her Granny Pearl. I did know her, but not well. I was a pallbearer at her funeral — she died when I was twelve, and all six of her grandsons were her pallbearers. She was a very large woman, over 300 pounds, so we had our job cut out for us. She was quite a character, given to loud, aggressive talk.
They had ten children, including my six dancing aunts who are pictured on the website, along with my father, Woodrow Wilson Bruce, Jr. He was the third of the four boys, and everyone called him Jody.
My paternal grandfather, who was a doctor by the way, was Frank Bruce — Dr. Frank. Actually, his name was Francis Marion Bruce. He was named after the Swamp Fox, a general in the American Revolutionary War, so called because he operated in the swamps. I like to think he fought in the Okefenokee, but he actually fought in South Carolina. He was very successful in defeating the British in swamp battle.
My mother had me when my father was in Officer Training School for World War II, so she filled out the birth certificate without him there, and she named me Frank Neely Bruce, thinking that my grandfather’s name was Frank! She never knew that he was Francis until after the fact.
My grandfather was the only physician in Clinch County, Georgia, in World War II, which meant that everyone there owed him their life. There is a picture of him with my father as a boy in the Heritage Center at the former Stephen Foster State Park, on the southwest corner of the Okefenokee Swamp. The park has very recently been renamed Okefenokee State Park, but when I was going there it was Stephen Foster, the wild side of the swamp.
Dr. Frank made regular visits to the handful of people living in the swamp at the time, on Billy’s Island, which is accessible only by boat. The swamp is uninhabited by humans now, but lots of animals live there. Pogo, for example!
I vividly remember one family trip when we visited Billy’s Island. It’s a ghost town now, mostly foundations. My father walked around the ruins and said, “Well, that’s where the general store used to be, that’s where the post office was, that’s where so-and-so lived.” My father had a very good memory. I have a good memory too. Good memory is genetic, in my case.
I never played there as a boy; I only went there as an adult. But of course I knew about Stephen Foster. I grew up knowing about him. Perhaps he was the first American composer I knew by name and associated with specific tunes.
The reason the southwestern entrance to the Okefenokee was named for Stephen Foster is the Suwannee River. The swamp, an extraordinary flood of fresh water, is the headwaters of two rivers. The Suwannee empties west into the Gulf of Mexico; the St. Mary’s empties to the east. Ships in the old days would sail upriver into the swamp from either coast to refill their water kegs, because the water is so pure.
I remember hot, humid South Georgia vividly, because we went fairly regularly to visit relatives. We would go to Mendenhall, Mississippi to visit Granny Neely, and to Homerville, the county seat of Clinch County, where my father’s family lived. Homerville had a steady population of 2,000. It was 2,000 for ever and ever! The 2020 census says 2,344.
I remember where the drug store was, where the movie theatre was in the middle of town, where my cousin John Ferdon’s house was, which has since burned to the ground. Homerville was a severely segregated town. There were plenty of Black people who lived there, but they lived on the outskirts of town.
Not in Homerville, but I did know a number of Black people in and around Birmingham.
This is a very important aspect of my life. In my youth my family was very peripatetic. My mother once told me that they moved fourteen times before I was two years old — roughly a three-year period with fourteen different residences. I have no specific memories of the towns I lived in before the age of four.
I know about Wiggins, Mississippi, because that’s where my sister Linda was born, and Hattiesburg, where my brother Woody was born. Hattiesburg is where, in my mother’s youth, Mississippi Women’s College was. She went to college there but did not graduate, and she always regretted it. She was a super-duper secretary her whole life. Her last position was secretary to one of the Majors at Valdosta Air Force Base. If you’re the secretary to a Major, you’re basically running that division. My mother was very happy to tell the Major what to do.
Not all, but some of them were. I was born in 1944; the war was over in 1945. My father considered staying in the Army, but he was not temperamentally suited to it, nor am I. Daddy wanted to be his own boss. He was in the Army Corps of Engineers, and his principal service was in the Occupation Army of Japan. He was part of a team that rebuilt bridges in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He came back and went into the construction business, all over the small towns of the Deep South. After World War II there were still lots of small Southern towns without public waterworks or sewage systems. He built many of these.
That’s correct. What he did was build or upgrade the water and sewer systems of lots and lots of towns. By the time all three of us children were born, he was typically not moving the family all the time. He would leave home early on Monday morning and come back on Friday night.
The Friday night ritual was always the same. We would listen to the Grand Ole Opry.