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Young family eating at the table in 1909. |
Descendants of Catherine Young meet for the first time at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture. Approximately 100 descendants and 100 visitors were there for the reunion. It was a packed house. |
When Catherine Young’s eleventh child, Jesse, was six
months old, her husband, Andrew Jesse Young, died of tuberculosis. The year was
either late 1907 or early1908.
I assume that Catherine wanted nothing more than to provide for her children. She held on to those starving aspirations until April 1909, three
months after a social reformer named Lewis Hine snapped a photo of her with her sons and daughters.
She held onto those dreams until she made a decision that probably haunted her until the final days of her life. Catherine Young delivered the seven youngest of her children to the South Georgia Methodist Orphan Home in Macon, Georgia, 100 miles from Tifton, 100 miles from Tift Cotton Mill, 100 miles from the duplex at the mill village she called home.
She held onto those dreams until she made a decision that probably haunted her until the final days of her life. Catherine Young delivered the seven youngest of her children to the South Georgia Methodist Orphan Home in Macon, Georgia, 100 miles from Tifton, 100 miles from Tift Cotton Mill, 100 miles from the duplex at the mill village she called home.
Imagine what the scene might be the night before
Catherine Young gave her children away. She and several children walk home from the mill, tired, dirty, and hungry after working all day. Seaborn, Elizabeth, and Jesse rush to her as she approaches. They hang onto her skirt. She reaches down and picks up Baby Jesse and takes Elizabeth by the hand. With Seaborn behind her, she lumbers up the steps and into the mill house. Outside, smoke from the towering smokestack rises and spreads ghostly over the village.
Has she, in preparation for the event,
put aside enough money to afford to prepare a delicious last supper? Turnips and collards
would still be available in southern Georgia in April. Perhaps she has some sweet
potatoes and has been able to purchase a chicken to fry.
Or maybe she has nothing and can't feed her children a
decent meal the last night they spend together. Love doesn’t cost money, and I believe Catherine Young’s heart is filled
with love, yet tortured on this night. I believe she is starved of hope,
afraid and anguished, after a cold winter with not enough food, not enough heat, and not enough money to purchase clothes for the growing children.
In Tifton and throughout southern
Georgia, dogwoods bloom, shimmering gracefully on layered
branches. Pecan and oak trees put out new leaves, and birds build nests on branches, and in bushes and shrubs. Spring, the
season of new life, new growth, has tiptoed into the mill village. It is ten days after Easter and in the morning Catherine Young will leave her children behind at the orphanage. I like to
believe she hopes to give them new life. After all, it is the season of resurrection.
Perhaps she sings to the smallest ones and holds them overflowing from her arms when darkness wraps around their duplex on April 21, 1909. Does she dare sleep at all and close her eyes to her babies? I
suspect she holds them as long as she can, and, as they sleep, she inhales, one last time,
the scent of their hair. She kisses their cheeks and listens to them breathe. Perhaps delivering her children to the orphanage is the highest act of love Catherine will ever perform. Perhaps.
We will never know for certain the events of that night or the following days. We will never know Catherine's heart, the extent of her pain and how scarred the erosion of poverty and her final sacrifice would leave her. I wonder if she boarded a train to Macon early the next morning with her children. Or did an agent from the county escort them to the orphanage? She certainly would not have been able to afford the train fare for seven children and herself. Help had to have come from somewhere. Catherine's story and the stories of her children are scattered throughout with the word perhaps.
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Eddie Lou Young is on the right. She is Dr. Earl Parker's mother. He never knew until Joe Manning contacted him that his mother ever worked at Tift Cotton Mill as a child. |
We will never know for certain the events of that night or the following days. We will never know Catherine's heart, the extent of her pain and how scarred the erosion of poverty and her final sacrifice would leave her. I wonder if she boarded a train to Macon early the next morning with her children. Or did an agent from the county escort them to the orphanage? She certainly would not have been able to afford the train fare for seven children and herself. Help had to have come from somewhere. Catherine's story and the stories of her children are scattered throughout with the word perhaps.
Descendants of Catherine and Jesse Young came together Saturday
at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture, many meeting for the first time, 105
years after their family was torn apart. One handsome young man said in awe, to
nobody in particular, “We are eating from the same table,” as he chose a few
treats from a spread of desserts. He said it as a person who had never met the
family members crowding around him and certainly had never shared a table of
food with them.
“We are eating from
the same table.”
Because of the perseverance of Historian Joe Manning, who
was determined to discover the identity of the children in a Hine photo taken
in January 1909, approximately 100 Young family members joined for the
first time Saturday to laugh, share family stories, and examine each other for familiar
traits and expressions. They ate from the same table for
the first time since April of 1909 when Catherine and her children shared their
last meal together as a family.
Mr. Manning and many of Catherine's descendants
were brought to tears again and again at the reunion. I witnessed a happy and
forgiving family, a beautiful family, a family overflowing with love and
reaching out with open arms.
Mr. Manning meets Dr. Parker, son of Eddie Lou, the dark haired beauty in the photo of the two girls at the cotton mill. |
Joe and Carol Manning in front of the smokestack at the abandoned mill. |
So how do we thank Joe Manning who spent years
digging through the Young soil, searching through a family’s roots, when "thank
you" amounts to merely 8 letters of the alphabet, 2 syllables, 2 spoken words? He would
tell us the reunion isn’t about him at all and he wants no thanks. He would
tell us it is all about the children standing in bare feet beside their mother
in January of 1909 at Tift Cotton Mill village. He would tell us it is about
family.
“We are eating from
the same table.”
When it became evident there would be standing room only, the partitions were opened and another 100 chairs added to the 100 that had already been reserved for the event. |
Published 3/16/14
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