Butler County: A Short Story

Butler County, like most sparsely populated counties in the South, has its small towns and villages where everyone knows everyone else, and the town of Ridgeville is not any different; we rarely see anyone we don‘t already know. So you can imagine my surprise at literally bumping into a complete stranger as my cousin Jenny and I walked past the new variety store, on our way to the mercantile. When he said excuse me, ma’am and I turned to look at him, I was rendered speechless, whereas moments before, Jenny and I were chattering up a storm. The stranger’s curious eyes lingered on mine for what seemed a lifetime, as I stood there jaw-dropped and dumbfounded; it was all I could do to turn my head around and keep walking. We had walked to town …show more content…
Although I did not get to go often, I always enjoyed the walk to town and back home. The scenery was beautiful this time of year, especially looking across the foothills to the north. Where we lived was more like a compound than a home- Grandma Becky’s house was connected to ours by well-worn path, as was the barn and many of the outbuildings. And, Jenny, her mother, and two older sisters had taken up residence with us after the war; therefore they had been there my entire life. Jenny’s father also died during the war. The move had worked out well for my aunt Georgiana, giving her and her girls the protection of having a man to look after them, and since my mother died a year or so after I was born and Papa only had one good arm, it also helped my father by having them there to take care of me. Becky told me that my aunt Georgiana, who was her daughter, was too weak to be the head of our clan and so were her three daughters. She said that Georgiana had lived too long with a white man and the girls inherited too much of their white father to have the courage it took to head the family. That bunch don’t have any gumption, she said with a scowl.
I did not say anything but thought to myself that she, too, had married a white man and that I was mostly white. And, when I added up the years, with my father being the oldest, she had lived in a white mans world, at the least, forty …show more content…
Papa said that there would never be a woman that could replace my mother in his heart, and I reckoned Aunt Georgiana felt the same way since she had turned down several marriage proposals over the last fifteen years… It’s hard for me to believe that I will soon turn sixteen years old. Sixteen is the marrying age of most girls; however, Jenny is already eighteen years old, and her two older sisters, Margaret and Caroline are twenty and twenty two years old, respectively. The three of them already complain that they’re old maids. Besides church, which they go to once a month, the annual End of Harvest Festival is about the only time they get to meet young men of marriageable age and