A Message to Stonewall
It's odd that my mother, Mary Lou, married a Yankee, because she and her thirteen siblings were still very angry about "the War of Northern Aggression." Stonewall was a common name for men in her family. I had a cousin and an uncle names "Stonewall Jackson" (SJ for short). My mother's father was "Stonewall Jackson Puckett." The first "Stonewall", my grandfather, was a farmer in Lowes, Kentucky. His wife, Sally, had been the only teacher in Lowes, instructing all levels of students in a one-roomed schoolhouse before marriage. Once per year my grandfather would load a wagon with all his extra produce and make the trip through Leder Bottoms to Dukey Town (Paducah). Coming and going, this was a trip of 120 miles. My grandfather met a luckless end from pneumonia in 1938 and went to heaven, aged 51. He was tall and thin, with wavy brown hair and a handlebar mustache. The neighbors in Lowes told my mother that he was "wild." I have often thought about Stonewall down through the years, and if I could have sent him a message up to heaven, I would have said, "I wish we could have met!"