Chester Scott, Part Three: In the Footsteps of the Gunters

             For much of the last few weeks I've been looking into my ancestry on my father’s side.  Learning about the criminal history of my great-great grandfather and it’s various reverberations has been absorbing.  Much too absorbing, really.   But I'm glad to have done it.  As Russell Baker wrote, "“We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.”  This research has brought that wisdom home to me, but it is time to move on. To try to tie off this strand of the braid and bring this episode to a conclusion that will allow me to reorient myself toward the present, I want to talk about how these inquiries have me thinking differently about one of the last experiences my father and I shared when he was in relatively good health.

            In the two years between getting my driver’s license and leaving for college, there were a few times when I served as my father’s chauffeur when he had professional business out of town.  He was in his mid 40s and experiencing health complications of type 1 diabetes, notably failing eyesight due to retinopathy.   One spring afternoon in 1981 he engaged me to drive him to a meeting in Atlanta at the state Department of Education (he was working on statewide writing assessments).  While he was in the meeting I was free to do as I pleased with the car (within reason).   I drove up and down Peachtree listening to radio stations we couldn’t get in Athens - what a rube!  When I returned at the appointed hour to pick Pop up, he seemed wistful.  He pointed to the building where his meeting had been – severely rectangular, industrial-looking.  “That used to be a hat factory,” he said.  “I worked there when I was a teenager.”   

 

            At the time my sense of my family origins was thin.  What I knew of my father was that he had come of age in a middle class neighborhood around Grant Park, just southeast of downtown.   He had gone to Roosevelt High School.  His father worked for the highway department.  I knew Pop had disappointed his parents by defying everyone's hopes and expectations and not becoming a Presbyterian minister.  His parents had divorced when he was in his twenties (having met them separately and experienced their dispositions, it was practically inconceivable to me that they had ever been married).  I knew that a member of the household when he was a growing up was his grandfather, James McDonald “Mac” Veal, a widower, lackluster businessman, and Pop’s compadre in sidestepping the severe religiosity that ruled the household.  On Sundays they liked to sneak away to the movies in Mac’s Model A.  For this reason Pop had decided to name me after him. I figured there had to be more to that story, but for now it would do. These few details (plus the Rome clock story and the Winfield Scott speculation) were the extent of my knowledge then, so I didn't have much to say in reaction to this remarkable workplace coincidence Pop had reported.  I did think it was cool.  I told Pop I thought it was cool.

 

            Of course what he had noticed that day about his location had resonances to it that I could not have understood then.  I understand them a little better now, thanks to what I've learned about his ancestors in Atlanta. I always knew that Pop and his parents in their little house on Kendrick Avenue were not the first Veals in Grant Park, but I didn't grasp until recently the full extent of my ancestors' presence in that neighborhood.  The extended families that combined in his little nuclear family were the Veals and the Gunters.  From the 1920s through the 1950s Grant Park was dotted with Veals and Gunters, two generations of them, scattered from Hill Street to Glenwood Avenue to Cherokee Place to Kelly Street.  The Veals, Pop's father's people, had come from Rome, starting fresh in the big city after some family shames and failures.  The Gunters, Pop's mother's people, went way back in rural northeast Georgia.  Among my male Gunter ancestors there are plenty of Confederate veterans (very few were slaveholders, but I strongly suspect that was because they couldn’t afford to be, not because of moral objections).  After the war most of the Gunters continued to be what they had always been -  small farmers, mostly in Jackson County, some of them small landowners, the rest sharecroppers.  It was a hard life.  In the early 20^th century, my great grandfather, Albert R. Gunter, gave up tenant farming (his last place was in the Bay Creek area of Gwinnett County, near what is today the community of Grayson) and he and his wife Vada moved their five children into Atlanta.  My Grandmother Lucy was their youngest.  Albert Sr. sold fruit from a cart (the 1930 census calls him "a produce peddler") and Vada and the older children got work in various industries.  Albert Jr. was a mechanic. Two daughters worked as packagers at a candy factory: Lorraine, who died at 16 in 1926, and Beatrice,  my father's Aunt Bea, who lived long enough to hold our infant daughters in her lap at the age of 90 in 1999.  Vada, their mother, worked for over 20 years as a machine operator at American Hat Manufacturing at 160 Trinity Avenue.  I suppose that connection was how my father could get some employment there in the summers.

 

            In following the trajectory they had as lower class whites giving up the dead end of tenant farming to take a chance on opportunity in the city, the Gunters had a lot of company.  In her book The Temple Bombing, Melissa Fay Greene devotes a chapter to the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan, a young factory worker whose backstory was not unlike that of my Gunter ancestors.  Of the Phagans and their kind, Greene writes that they had been "driven by rural poverty into Atlanta, where urban poverty and cotton mill slums had come as a terrible shock and disappointment.  They endured filthy conditions, enervating labor, subsistence wages for fourteen-hour workdays, and a social standing second to last.  Women and children were forced to work, too.”  The resentments arising from the “antebellum – even colonial – economic and social arrangements” that circumscribed the lives of these transplants transformed the murdered and sexually assaulted Mary Phagan into a full blown symbolic victim (in their eyes) of Yankee exploitation and created hunger for a scapegoat.  One was furnished in the person of the young Jewish industrialist Leo Frank, the manager of the pencil factory where Mary had worked.  He was a suspect in the murder and, for demagogues, the epitome of the “alien” oppressor from the North.  With the prosecution and the jury and the community willing to substitute anti-semitism for their usual racism, Frank was convicted on dubious evidence amid a hysterical atmosphere.  When the outgoing governor recognized the unfairness of the trial and commuted the death sentence, a lynch mob from Cobb County (Phagan’s original home) kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him.  That was in 1915.  In the aftermath, quite a few Jewish families left the city.  Others withdrew from public life.  Along with the mass violence committed against the city's black citizens in 1906, the story of Leo Frank is a case from that era that furnishes reason to scoff at the "City to Busy to Hate" moniker that you can still hear some Atlantans flex every now and then.

 

         In the mid 1990s I interviewed Aunt Bea.  By then she was living alone in a little apartment near Lawrenceville, back in Gwinnett County again after 70 years.  Twice-widowed, childless, the last survivor of her generation of Gunters, she had been a heavy smoker (her brand was Bel Airs) who kept mean chihuahuas and sent improvident sums to shady TV preachers and shocked my mother (difficult to do) with her double-entendre laced conversations with her equally ancient boyfriend Gilbert when Mom took them out for fried catfish dinners at Rio Vista on Moreland Avenue.  However difficult it may have been to keep up with Aunt Bea, Mom found a way - she had been dear to my parents, and Mom doesn’t forget.  When Pop’s mother and father cut him off after he quit seminary, Aunt Bea and her husband K.C. "Kim" Still (a maintenance man at Georgia State University) generously helped keep him afloat while he reoriented his career path  (Pop ultimately reconciled with his parents, who I'm sure were much happier and more pleasant to be around after they split up and stopped being angry that their son wasn't a reverend).  Beyond her long ago kindness to my father, Aunt Bea was a colorful character and I wanted to have some record of her before it was too late.  Her diction alone was worth preserving (Who else did I know who casually used "Sugarfoot" as a term of affection?) and I thought I might catch a detail or two about Georgia politics from the 30s and 40s, maybe a chance encounter with Eugene Talmadge.  But she surprised me by going way, way back.  The Leo Frank case came up, and Aunt Bea began to sing, from memory, “The Ballad of Mary Phagan”, the maudlin propaganda tune made popular by Fiddlin' John Carson around the time of the trial and sung at rallies dedicated to violent retribution for Frank:

 

                         Little Mary Phagan, she went to town one day
                         She went to the pencil fact'ry, to get her little pay
                         She left her home at eleven, when she kissed her mother good-bye
                         Not one time did the po' child think, she was goin' right to die

 

I was astonished that she knew it.  Had she learned it from a record?  But then I did the math.   She must have been six or seven during the trial.  For a moment I was afraid she had been part of those mobs, until she said "I always thought Frank was innocent" (whew!) because "Jews don't get mixed up in that sort of thing" (OK, more stereotyping, but still -  relieved).  She had picked up that song skipping rope as a child.  Everybody knew it.

            The unnerving experience of hearing her sing that song reinforced for me the ways that Aunt Bea and her sisters had been Mary Phagans in their own way - not murder victims, not martyrs to be used in the service of hate, but country girls of very limited means who had experienced the wrenching transition to urban life.  I’m speaking exclusively of the Gunters here.  The Veals struggled economically when they came to Atlanta from Rome, but their immediate forbears were people for whom career ambition was an expectation: the sons became road  engineers and military officers. The Gunters were sharecroppers, peddlers, factory workers. They had little or no schooling.  They seemed far more susceptible to the gravitational pull of proletarian drudgery and a hand-to-mouth way of life.  

 
     And the Gunters were my father’s original connection to the American Hat Manufacturing Company.  In 1981 the old factory building was gone, but the blockish new structure that housed his writing assessment meeting was plenty industrial-looking, and at the same address.  What must he have been thinking in 1981, walking in the footsteps of his grandmother, the cotton-picker-turned-machine-operator, while carrying his professor’s briefcase, heavy with its esoteric content?  He probably thought a lot of things.  Maybe the new building's embodiment of his home city’s well-known allergy to historic preservation flittered across his mind, along with the many similarities between a factory and American public schooling.  Maybe he was just remembering what American Hat was like inside on a busy day - I bet it was hot and loud - and if he was thinking that then I expect he was also thinking at least a little about the Gunters and the improbabilities of a life like his emerging out of lives like theirs.  When he was a striving teenager, a top student at Roosevelt High School and winning speech contests at the Biltmore and looking destined for the ministry, his mother’s family must have been absolutely beaming.  This boy had risen up.  He didn't always handle it with poise.  I know that in his early twenties, with the arrogance that comes with a fresh new college education, he grew vocally frustrated at the provincialism of his parents (I've read some letters that make me wince).  But that wasn't his essence.  In time an interpersonal disposition that his future colleagues called "respectful, sincere, and understanding" became his natural manner with others.  In his adulthood I saw those qualities in his unaffected way of interacting with his unsophisticated mother and her sister.  So I don't think revisiting the site of American Hat would have kindled in him any vainglorious notion that his successes were somehow required to validate the lives of the poor side of his family.  But perhaps, with the ghost of his grandmother Vada hovering about, he took a moment to think of himself as part of the posterity of the Gunters (because he was) and maybe he indulged the thought that to go from tenant farming to professorship in two generations was quite a journey. And now he had circled back around. If entering 160 Trinity as an academic felt to him like a glowing strand in the braided cord of humanity that was the Gunters, I hope he went with that feeling, and I hope he was proud.  

           

            As I say, in 1981 I didn’t know nearly as much about his background as I do today, so the possible enhanced meanings of the meeting location were lost on me. And it takes many more years of living than I had then for compression of the distant past and right-now present to really touch the heart.   But the amazing coincidence was interesting enough in itself, so when memory lane continued to beckon and Pop requested a detour, I was happy to play along.  He told me not to get on I-20 east to head back home to Athens.  Instead, I was to take the evocatively named Memorial Drive, a four lane road that runs east from the Capitol to Stone Mountain.  He told me that he wanted to go to a cemetery, East View, to visit the grave of his grandfather, Mac.  The grandfather I am named after.  I was happy to oblige. It is not every day you get to see your own name on a tombstone.  Pop told me he not been there since the day of the funeral, 20 years before.  

 

            It is about five miles on Memorial Drive from the Gold Dome to East View Cemetery. Mac is not alone there.  His wife Belle and his mother-in-law Mina are there, too, as are my father’s maternal grandparents, Albert and Vada Gunter.  In the 40 years since I’ve been there quite a few times, but the spontaneous side trip with my father in 1981 was my first, and what we discovered when we finally found the gravesite we were looking for was unpleasant.  Mac’s wife, Belle, had a tombstone, so we could easily identify the gravel rectangle of Mac's grave, but no marker had ever been installed.  The amiably reflective mood I had observed in Pop at the site of the old hat factory was gone.  Now he was just furious, as angry as I had ever seen him.  He speculated that Mac’s three sons (his father among them) had remained so aggrieved with him over something from the past that they had done the passive-aggressive thing of never ordering a marker.  Whether it was that or mere neglect didn't matter.  This would not stand.  Once we were home in Athens, angry letter exchanges and phone conversations ensued.  I wasn't privy to what was said, but Pop got action.  There’s a tombstone for James M Veal there now, and has been for a long time.  Today I can visit East View and enjoy the macabre experience of kinda sorta looking at my own grave.

 

            That original visit to East View Cemetery with my father is another experience that I recall with new eyes now that I know some more family history. The hidden drama around Mac's absent marker has long eclipsed any interest I might have had in his wife’s story.  To me, up to now Belle hasn’t even ranked as a sideshow. Her marker, the one that has been there all along, features this saccharine inscription:  "A beautiful life filled with love and kindness to all."  Every time I've read that it has made me think, "She sounds like a nice old lady."  I suppose she was, but now I know more.  The next time I visit East View will be my first with knowledge of Belle’s astonishing childhood.  Whatever the nature of the animosity behind the empty gravel pit where Mac's marker should have been, it cannot have been as enthralling as a little girl having a family breakfast with her fugitive father just before they took him off to jail, or seeing him behind bars handing over to her mother the honest pay he earned while on the run from the law.  

But in 1981 Pop and I had no way of knowing all that stuff (Mom is sure that his relatives from Rome kept him in the dark about Chester Scott).  Belle's "nice old lady" epitaph kept it all hidden, as it does to this day.  Like her father’s unmarked grave a continent away, it would prefer that we know nothing at all about the headline-making dramas of her childhood.  

In a graveyard with the bones of so many ancestors around him, Pop might have been anticipating his own appointment with the hereafter.  It was coming soon: he would suffer a debilitating stroke in just a few months and die within three years.  We didn’t know it that day, but this was the right time to revisit these old places.  I just wish he had known more about Belle.  If he had, I feel sure the rage he felt at East View would have been replaced by something like the wonder he felt at the old hat factory.