One week of classes remain, followed by finals.
All that remains in the interim is a current events paper for my Ethics class, a group presentation and case law paper for my Media Law class and a final speech for my Public Speaking class. That speech, which is assigned as a “commemorative speech,’’ follows:
ATLAS IN OVERALLS
The writer Anne Lamotte once wrote about a friend’s response to her complaints about the behavior of a mutual acquaintance. After patiently listening to her rant, the friend smiled and said, “All new people, Anne. In a hundred years, it will be all new people.’’
And so it is. There will come a day when, aside from the exceptional few, our names will pass human lips for the last time and we will be washed from human memory like a name written on the sands of a beach, swept away by the indifferent tide of human experience.
There is one name that will someday remain on my lips alone – a man who, when I am gone, will remembered no more. His name is Webb Thornton. He was my maternal grandfather.
He was born in Tippah County, Miss., and is buried there in a little graveyard called Pleasant Ridge Cemetery. On his fading headstone, his life is summed up succinctly - April, 17, 1890 – April 24, 1955.
A beginning date and an ending date, with only a dash in between to encompass a life. It is all he has, all any of us will likely have - just a dash.
I would like to tell you about Webb Thornton’s dash, for he was a hero of the noblest sort.
In March of 1930, Webb Thornton was 39 years old, raising cotton on a few acres of rented land when his 37-year-old wife dropped dead of a heart attack, leaving him with six daughters, ages 3-16.
Six months in the worst economic depression in U.S. History and without a single broad-shouldered son to help him, he faced the prospects of keeping his six daughters fed, housed and clothed at a time when the cotton he slaved to pick in the fall hardly fetched the cost of the seed he would plant the following spring.
You know that heroes are often born in a moment and an instant’s courage is all that is required to ensure that their feats are extolled to the heavens and their glory is sealed forever.
My grandfather never aspired to nor attained this form of heroism. And yet he achieved a nobler form of heroism, a type largely unnoticed and easily forgotten, the kind that requires not the courage of the hour, but the bravery needed to return to those cotton fields each dawn and toil there under a merciless Mississippi summer sky until dusk - day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
And so it was with Webb Thornton, who emptied himself to fill the tummies of six little girls.
He did this with no wife to sustain his spirits, to share his day, to comfort him in his weariness.
Through those bitter years, my mother never remembers him shedding a tear or uttering a complaint. Yet sometimes at the end of another back-breaking day of labor, she would notice him gazing across the fields for a long moment, his eyes fixed beyond the horizon to a place visible only to the human heart.
Years later, she would understand: In that moment, he was grieving the loss of his mate and the hard and meager life that was all he could offer his young daughters.
Where do the tears go that are never shed? Where to the words go that are left unsaid?
He was Atlas in overalls, stoically holding up the sky, lest if fall and crush his little girls.
And somehow, he endured. The Depression ended, his daughters grew up and got married and while none of his children went to college, all of his grandchildren did, of which I am the last - the last to come, the last to go, to the last to remember Webb Thornton. And give him the honor he is due.
Thank you
a fine man indeed!
ReplyDelete