Where My Cousins Are From

Whether in the Upper South or the Deep South, storytelling is integral to Southern culture. As children, we are affected in significant ways by not only our experiences and observations, but by the narratives we hear. In this essay, one writer winds through four different, complex aspects of identity — family, place, stories, and mobility — showing how both experiences and narratives can shape us and leave us to wonder well into adulthood about our beliefs and who we are.

Where My Cousins Are From
By Kelly Gerow

This is the version I remember being told as a kid: two girls went out in the woods in West Virginia to look for their lost cow and were scalped after being lured by the ringing of the cow’s bell. I didn’t know when it happened — when my mom was a kid, or just before I was born, or 200 years ago — but it happened in woods like the ones where we played while we visited Grammie. The story made me nervous for a long time. There are a lot of woods in West Virginia.

My mother moved to Richmond, Virginia in 1968 after graduating high school in her small town in West Virginia. She met my dad on what is now the Virginia Commonwealth University campus. He was taking classes there after moving to Richmond with his parents and twelve siblings from Buffalo, New York. My mom’s mom, my Grammie, lived with us off and on, but for most of my childhood in the 1980s and ’90s and until she died when I was twenty-two, some combo of my parents, brother, sister and me would hit the road on a Friday after work or school, drive six hours to Summersville, West Virginia, and spend the weekend with Grammie at her small apartment in a senior living complex.

During these weekend visits, we would take Grammie to the Wal-Mart to shop, hang out at her apartment and watch cable TV, or visit with extended family, where we’d sit in living rooms decorated with browns and reds, and poke around in the yards and creeks around their homes while my mom did all the talking.

One of my favorite places to go was to our cousin Mary’s home. She’s my mother’s first cousin — they look like sisters — and her two youngest kids are close in age to my siblings and me. They still live on a large piece of land previously owned by Mary’s father, with a big, broken-down barn and large fields rented out for cattle to graze. As kids, our cousins, my siblings, and I explored the woods behind their property. I was the youngest of us and often scared to be out in the trees, far from others, because of that story Mom told me about the two little girls. I worried that we could be under attack, alone in the woods like we were.

After Grammie died in 2001, I didn’t go back to West Virginia for years, but missed it.

I finally returned to that part of West Virginia when I was in my late twenties, with my mom and sister. We stopped at Cranberry Glades Botanical Area in Monongahela National Forest for a hike, and then stayed the night with cousins in their double-wide trailer. (All of Mom’s surviving family members are some placement of cousin.) Later, we visited cousin Mary, and my sister Christie and I swam in Summersville Lake like we did when we were kids. We drove out of Summersville to visit our uncle, and on that drive, Mom stopped at a historic marker for the “Morris Massacre”, that read:

Scene of massacre, 1792, of daughters of Henry Morris, early settler and son of first permanent settler in Great Kanawha Valley. Graves of Henry Morris and the Indian victims may be seen from the road.

It never occurred to me that the story my mom told me was famous enough to require a poorly memorialized historical marker. We had been on that road many times and I hadn’t noticed it. (That’s not to say that my mom didn’t point it out before — after all, I had heard the story.) I photographed the sign. It was part of the scenery. I didn’t think about it for a while.

I’m a first-generation Richmonder, if that’s a thing. We lived in the city limits until 1989 when I was ten, and then moved to neighboring Chesterfield County. I moved back into Richmond when I was twenty and attended VCU. Both of my college degrees are from VCU, right in the middle of the city. My parents have moved from the area entirely. I did not intend to spend my life in Richmond, but now I live a mile from the house I grew up in. I take my kids to the library that I still have an overdue book from as a child. I have tried to make “Richmonder” my cultural identity, but that really only means I remember where businesses that aren’t around anymore used to be and I can tell people what museum exhibits and restaurants haven’t changed in forty years or what churches used to be bowling alleys and movie theaters.

Being from Richmond and being from the South don’t feel like the same thing to me since my family isn’t from the South. I have no relationship with the area as it existed before I was born. I do not hold the Confederacy sacred and was relieved to see the Lost Cause monuments taken down.

I marvel at the rich family history that other people have- customs and holidays and traditions that are inviting and special. There is no food festival that I can point to and claim as part of my life. I mostly have had Southern cooking at restaurants and not from home cooks. I once saw a flyer for a potluck at work that invited people to share a dish that represented their culture, and all I could think to bring was napkins. I am just a white person.

My husband’s family is Ukrainian and Chilean in addition to Irish and English. I enjoy making pierogi from his aunt’s recipe. Our two kids have a different background than I do. They will have a different relationship to Richmond than I have.

My mom hasn’t lived in West Virginia since she was a teenager but is still strongly connected to her first home and visits often. She talks about it the same way that immigrants talk about their home country. (Specifically, West Virginia has reminded me a lot of Greece during its recent economic crisis, and I might also make that connection because parts of Greece reminded me of West Virginia landscapes when I visited years ago, moving quickly from lush to dry and scratchy and back.) She is proud to be a West Virginian. She attends high school reunions every year, but has lost touch with many people because of her liberal political beliefs. She roots for West Virginia like her favorite sports team, and is often disappointed by it.

My mom’s home accent gets thicker when she’s with family. My sister and I like to mimic her and her cousins talking sometimes. I have ruined many West Virginia jokes by informing the joke teller that my family is from there. My dad used to say that the West Virginia state bird was a squirrel. I don’t understand half the jokes we tell about it.

When my oldest child was five, we went with my mom to visit cousin Mary. This was the summer of 2016, weeks after massive flooding left twenty-three people dead. I knew about the storms at the time, but wasn’t aware of how it devastated West Virginia. We drove through small towns like Rainelle and saw the aftermath of the water, the red X’s spray painted on homes, the dirt and debris leftover.

Mary’s daughter, who is my second cousin, was there with her daughter, who is my kids’ third cousin. Our two sets of three generations piled together in an SUV, and Mary drove us around to visit familiar places with my mom. Mary brought a bag of pepperoni rolls — pepperoni and cheese baked in little rolls, as simple as it sounds — for us to snack on. Even my mom didn’t know they were a classic West Virginia food, made popular as a lunchbox staple for coal miners.

Mary had been dropping off food to people cleaning storm and flood-damaged properties, and delivering supplies to a church for people who needed it. We drove by Summersville Lake, swelled to twice its size. A while later, I read an article about the impacts of the storm from survivors of the flood, about children being swept away from their families while trying to escape their homes. It was unreal. Events like this happen all the time, and so often, that it only captures the nation’s attention for the first few days. You just hope that there are enough cousin Marys everywhere and that you know when it’s your turn to be one when a community continues to need support.

We drove by Mom’s high school and the street where her house (now gone) used to be. We stood on the banks of Gauley River and watched butterflies puddling, and we saw a school bus stuck on a rock in the river, which has been there for ages. We played in a waterfall. At New River Gorge, we climbed up and down the steps, and watched dozens of goldfinches at bird feeders. The third cousins played together on a playground. We visited Grammie’s grave, and stood over it, four generations in one place. I wrote down the name of the church she’s buried behind, high on a hill, so that my sister and I remember it someday.

We also drove by the Morris Massacre sign. Mom read the marker out loud, and I was shocked that she would tell such a story to my son, and worried that it would scare him like it scared me. He wasn’t paying attention, though.

We stopped at Fat Eddie’s for dinner, which was still open despite its proximity to Summersville Dam and Lake. My mom likes a “West Virginia style” hot dog, which is served with coleslaw, yellow mustard, and chili. We ate a few of those plus milkshakes. That night, we had a bonfire outside Mary’s cabin. Her husband joined us and kept the fire going. We roasted marshmallows, saw many deer, and heard the cows nearby, after seeing hummingbirds flock around the porch of their log cabin during the day. An owl came closer than my kid and I have ever seen in the wild. That’s how he remembers West Virginia.

My friend Sarah and I had been running partners for a while, and trained together for 10Ks and half-marathons. We decided to run a half-marathon out of state, and chose a trail run in Babcock State Park, in Fayette, West Virginia. As the event date came closer, we weren’t sure how prepared we were, and one or both of us backed out only to back right in. On the drive there, we followed the directions I printed. We turned off of the interstate and passed the small Christmas shop that I have never seen open in my entire life, and I realized that we were on the same route I would take to visit family in West Virginia.

I hadn’t pieced it together before we left when I was looking up how to get there, having rarely made the drive myself. I was so excited and told Sarah all the road stories, like how scary the mountain drive seemed to me, being stuck behind small town parades on narrow roads twice, listening to the oldies station with my mom on a Friday night drive in the dark, and pointing out the McDonald’s where we’d get our second breakfast if we left from Richmond on Saturday morning. I told her the story of the two girls and their cow, and how it always scared me.

Sarah and I had dinner in Fayette County, surrounded by young, energetic sporty types — not the normal crowd I was used to seeing on my trips. The town was cute as hell, and I wondered what it would be like if my husband, kids and I moved there. It was so close to the West Virginia I knew and loved.

The next morning as we waited for the run to start, I flipped through the running magazine in our entry packets and read an article explaining how different trail running is from road running, and how much more difficult it is. Sarah and I had completed several half-marathons, but except for one short run on a river trail, only ran on the roads. I was not ready for how hard it would be.

We tripped on tree roots, on paths that were was often on the edge of a cliff. The elevation didn’t help, either. Used to smoother roads with fewer death threats, after the halfway point, I was miserable. Sarah was in the same way. I walked often, and was in such pain that I considered giving up, but there was no one to give up to. No golf cart of race volunteers to come by like we were used to during our city runs. I would have to go to the finish line to tell someone I quit. And we could hear the cheers from the finish for the last several miles, and it was not encouraging. I had even hoped for the sweet relief of a bear killing me.

I had just two years earlier given a pain medicine-free birth following a traumatic pregnancy and nine-week hospital bedrest, and had thought that was the most uncomfortable experience I’d endured. At least then I had crushed ice from the hospital ice machine for some relief. Sarah and I hobbled through, being one of the three last runners in. I threw up in her car on the ride back.

Still, feeling accomplished and proud, we celebrated with a lunch at an Irish pub in Lewisburg. I said earlier to her that I could eat a pepperoni roll, as if I always knew what one was, and was delighted to find it on the bar menu. I felt like I was sharing my culture with someone, even though it was only my second time having one.

The trip with Sarah framed West Virginia differently for me. I didn’t know what it felt like to come home, because I have always been in Richmond. Although an accidental return to familiar places, it felt like I was returning home to something in West Virginia. There is no such thing, but I am a second-generation West Virginian. Maybe there is such thing.

The last time I went to that part of West Virginia was for a family reunion on cousin Mary’s property. My husband, sons, and I camped in their backyard for two nights. My sister and her family were there, and my parents, and so many family members from all my life, and also new ones. (They discovered new cousins — sons from an uncle, now dead, whose entire family was a secret to his family back home.) The young cousins (second, thirds, once-removeds) got along and played like they have seen each other more than twice in their lifetimes. One cousin and her partner, professional musicians, played a set (including, obviously, “Take Me Home, Country Roads”). I ate a lot of good food, but mostly milled around a container of crispy rice treats covered with chocolate and peanut butter. I lost count of the sweets my kids had.

Some family members brought in photo albums for sharing. I love looking at the old photos, and can always pick my mom out. She was rail thin, with big, bright eyes. All photos of Grammie, younger than before she was my grammie, always cause me pause. She was sixty-seven when I was born. In my early years, when she lived with us for longer periods of time, she was able enough to take long walks with us. When she was older, mostly confined to a couch, it was still a comfort to come home and sit close to her and have her scratch my head in her lap. I loved her so much. My mom also loved her grandma, her Mamaw, best of all.

Someone at the reunion mentioned that Mary Morris, formerly Byrd, who was the mother of the two girls who were murdered, was a distant relative of ours. I can’t verify this relation, but our relatives can be traced back to early settlers in the area. This story of the girls ran through my head with each visit, and to learn that the Morris family could possibly be faint cousins stuck with me. Their story as I first knew it is not the story.

According to an account from the Beckley Post-Herald published in 1965, the teenaged girls Peggy and Betsy were tomahawked and scalped, tossed aside in the woods. The Morris family were the first white settlers of the area. Henry Morris fought in the Battle of Point Pleasant against several Native American tribes, and killed at least one more Indian after his daughters’ deaths. It is believed that the one of the girls was killed by a white man named Simon Girty, who had lived with the Morris family the previous winter, and the other killed by a Native American who he hired to seek revenge on Henry Morris. One of the girls survived through the night and was able to tell what happened. It’s also rumored that, years later, the Native American companion was overheard bragging about killing one of the girls by their uncle, and presumed to be killed by the uncle shortly after.

I don’t know why these deaths are memorialized as they are — the girls’ names aren’t even on the historical marker. It is literally a man-made tragedy, two girls murdered because someone was mad at their dad, who also has a history of murderous hostility. Stories like these fuel the “savage Indian” stereotype that creates an invisibility of the actual Indigenous communities who we are among today, whose lands we occupy. I don’t know if anyone in Nicholas County has ever championed to revise the sign, to give the girls names, to note that one of the murderers was a white man, and to put up something that would change the narrative that a band of savages murdered these girls. Surely, daughters of the tribes who were on the land first were taken and murdered, but there are no signs for them.

The history of what led to Peggy and Betsy being killed stays with me now in a different way than when I was a kid. I think of it often as I have worked to educate myself more about the real histories and current lives of Native Americans.

If I never saw the road sign as an adult, I would not know their names and would have forgotten that old scary story that kept me nervous in the woods. But in the same way I can say that my family is not from Richmond, to know that no Gerow and Foster arms lifted up the monuments to white supremacy in Richmond, I know that my family is from a place that raised arms against the nations that already resided on Virginian and West Virginian soil. To know where your family is from is to also know what wrongs they may have committed. All the histories I have read of Morris mention as much about who he killed in war and in revenge, as if those killed aren’t also the ancestors of people still living today, as if taking those lives were the same as hunting an animal. There is no good version of the Morris girls’ story. But now I know there is more to tell about it than I have been told.

During that reunion, both nights that we camped in our tents behind Mary’s cabin, we camped through thunderstorms, but the actual day was dry and beautiful. I had thought about going sight-seeing around the area now that I was there with my husband and younger son, to maybe recreate the weekend I had spent with my oldest son, but we didn’t have enough time for much else. If I could only show them one place in West Virginia, that piece of land with the endless visits from hummingbirds and the hums of other animals was a pretty good choice.

It rained again on the morning we left. I wanted to at least take a walk before we got in the car for a five-hour drive. (The drive is shorter now that the speed limits have increased.) My oldest and I took out in the wet woods, among the ferns and broken branches, old car parts and four-wheeler paths, and walked down a hill and hit a small creek before turning around to walk back.

For a moment, my son and I, we were alone in the woods, the cabin out of sight. But I knew where I was, and I was not scared.

Kelly Gerow is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia. She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BS in Mass Communications (News-writing) and an MA in English. She lives with her husband Richard, two kids, and two dogs. She still eats at the same Golden Skillet fried chicken place she went to as a kid.

This entry was posted in 1980s, 1990s, 2010s, Family, Food, Virginia and tagged Family, Virginia, West Virginia. Bookmark the permalink.

Originally published at http://modernsouthernfolklore.com on August 18, 2023.