“Reckon We Ought to Dig Him Up and Move Him?”
Many years ago my grandfather gave me a responsibility. He told me that he wanted one of my uncles, my father, and I to accompany him down to the cemetery at the Antioch Baptist Church (located in the Iron Duff Community of Haywood County) in order to take care of some “family business”. At the appointed time, we walked up the hill to the “family plot”. Several years previously, Granddad had secured thirty (30) burial plots for the use of the family. When we arrived at the plot Granddad told us that he wanted us to come up with a drawing of the plot. I sat down on a nearby tombstone and roughly drew a schematic of the plot. When I finished with the drawing, he started naming off the family members to whom the gravesites would belong. He assigned two (2) sites to each of his “youngin’s” and for their heirs as needed. At the time a few of the plots were already occupied by some family members that were deceased. Granddad was concerned that some sense of order be given to the plot as the time would come when the sites be needed. We spent a “good while” taking care of this task, making sure that it was exactly the way Granddad wanted it to be.
As we were preparing to leave the burial plot, Granddad said, “Now Larry, I want you to be the one to take care of this. After I’m gone. You’ll need to be the one to make sure that the right ones are buried in the right place”. Whenever my granddad asked me to do something for him (and the family) I have tried to honor his request to the best of my ability. So I drew up a well-defined schematic of the family plot, labeled each site as he had directed. After his death sent a letter to all of those parts of the family explaining the way I would handle the “family business”.
Through the years I, along with the only surviving brother to my mother, have had to visit the family plot in order to “lay out” one of the sites for a family member. As I see it now, I have been called upon to do that far too often and far too frequently. My mother, father, and brother are there as well. However, I honor my Granddad whenever the task is to be done.
A few years ago I had to fulfill my commitment to Granddad, again. My Uncle Howard (My Aunt Sally Kate’s husband. She was my mother’s sister.) died and we had to lay out his site for digging. Uncle Duane and I measured out the site and staked it off with pegs to mark the boundaries of the grave. When we finished we walked up the hill a short distance in order to cool off in the shade. As we were standing there, talking, Uncle Duane got this funny look on his face. He then begin to chuckle. Regaining his composure, he told one of the family stories we have to treasure. He said, “Many years ago, Pap (Granddad) and I were down here digging a grave. It was that one right down there,” he said while pointing off down the hill towards a gravestone. He went on, “When we had finished the digging, Pap and I came up here and sat down under this same tree in order to cool off. While we were sitting here Pap said, ‘You know we are kin to everyone here in this cemetery, except one. There’s one man that is no kin to us buried here. He’s buried over there on the far side.’” Uncle Duane said he sat there thinking about what Granddad had said for a few minutes. Finally he said, “Well, Pap, you reckon we ought to dig him up and move him? After all, he is not one of us, so he don’t belong here.”