| Kelly by Tom
Kelly As I grew past puberty and began to learn that Georgia was a real place, a State in the U.S.A., and that our family's early kinfolks came from there in an indefinite past of which I had no concrete references, I made a vague resolution to go there. Someday. Well, "Someday" came in the middle 1980's when job duties included travel around several states in the South and Southeast on behalf of a group of community newspapers with which I had become affiliated. Florida. Tennessee. Louisiana. Arkansas. Oklahoma. Cutting occasionally across a far northwestern sliver of Georgia by way of an interesting sounding little place called Rising Fawn, passing close by a highway sign announcing the village of New England, barely down the road outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. On one of the trips out from the New Orleans suburb of Slidell, I looked at my Triple-A Road Atlas to confirm what I already knew by now by memory: I-59 to Meridian and Chattanooga, I-75 to Knoxville, and . . . and what? There's that Rising Fawn thing again. It's Georgia. OK, I said, this is the time I'll go to Georgia. I located the counties of Jasper, Washington, and Henry, where the old family stories said Grandpap and Granny originated. (If you Piney Woods Kellys are paying attention, my sources claim that "Papa" Jim Kelly named his first son after the counties where Grandpap and Granny were born. Jasper Washington. Uncle Jasper.) If you have a map of sufficient detail, you can find a minute entry in rural Jasper County called . . . Kelly. Gotta go there, I said. So, on the backswing from East Tennessee, I headed southeast from Atlanta on I-20, turned south just beyond Covington, stepped down to county roads headed toward Newborn, and took the right-hand fork toward Kelly, halfway between Newborn and Shady Dale. Travelling through countryside that could as easily have been anyplace in North Louisiana - pine trees, a farm field every so often, not much habitation - I came to the road intersection that should have been Kelly. Nothing, absolutely, except pine trees, and a field of some sort through a break to the left. I started to drive on, thinking perhaps the map was mistaken, or I had read it wrong. But no, I said. This is Kelly. After all these years, I have to touch the soil, even if there's less here than at Gaar's Mill 150 years after the settlement. I got down from the car, not feeling very near anything called "closure" at all, and began to poke around the roadside. I looked through the strip of pine timber beside the road toward the field - cotton, corn, maybe; I don't remember - and something back in the underbrush caught my eye. I jumped the road ditch, parted my way through the saplings, and . . . there in what was once a clearing stood a rusted iron fence enclosing a built-up area probably 30x50 feet, more or less, containing what obviously was a cemetery. Maybe 20 or 30 graves, with handsome marble stones and slabs, weathered gray with lichens, but maintaining their dignity even in this 200-foot or so timbered strip between the roadside and the cotton field. The whole thing was invisible from the road; you had to find it. Examining the stones, I discovered that every grave contained . . . a Kelly. Obviously several generations, husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, the oldest dating from the era when William Nathaniel would have lit out for Louisiana. Probably kinfolks. It was an amazing, even stunning find for me, which was only equaled when I finally mounted up and drove on the eight or ten miles to the little Dodson-like crossroads of Shady Dale. On a whim, I stopped in front of a village store with a screened front stoop, and walked over to a pay telephone station where I looked at the phone book - about the size of the Winnfield or Jonesboro book. My guess is, at least a third of the listings were, you guessed it - Kelly. So, I said, Grandpap, at least one of us came back pretty close to what might be called "ground zero." Did I collar anyone on the street and try to scrape up kinfolks? No. And before I leave this subject: How many "E"s does it take to spell Kelly? During an earlier period, I to a fancy to my probable Irishness - when my first grandchild was born on St. Patrick's Day twenty-something years ago. (Thirty? Gosh, how time flies!) I began to buy books, including tour guides, picture books, lotsa stuff, and began speculating about elves and what not, and of course, the Oglethorpe colony of Georgia - one of the original 13 of the U.S.A. In one of those travel books I discovered a spot in the west of Ireland not too far from Galway called Kelly's Church. Or, as the Gaelic alternative listed it, Cheallaigh's Kirk. Of course, I adopted that name for the company which has been with me in several business ventures, including The Piney Woods Journal. Cheallaigh Shamrock. Not to be confused with an Irish club known as Shillelagh, which most people confuse it with. Note: There is only one "E" in Cheallaigh, just like ours -the right way. I haven't been to Ireland yet. Someday. |