Periodically readers write in to ask if my maternal grandfather really married thirteen times. I never met the man; he died the year before I was born. So all I can say is, that’s what my mother tells me. My grandmother corroborated some of the wilder tales, and told a few of her own, but mostly she didn’t like to . . .
The last time I visited my mother, she had sixteen or seventeen dogs. During my high school years, there were also birds. Hundreds of them. And before she met my father, she kept more than thirty cats in a small apartment. She was encouraged in these animal hoarding tendencies from a young age. Mom was five when my grandmother, who . . .
You know why this old photo of the Kinchens looks even more like a portrait to accompany a Poe story than previous installments? Because my mother was sent, and forwarded to me, a photocopy of the original photo. Never mind print shops, don’t bother with scanners. No, in my family, we’ll just slap that baby down on the Xerox machine. . . .
As far as I can tell, some twenty-odd years after the events of Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and about eight years before the novel appeared, my great-grandfather was hired to manage the plantation Welty fictionalized in it. The book is set in September 1923, at Shellmound, just north of Greenwood, Mississippi. Very little happens in Delta Wedding, and apparently that was intentional. . . .
Here’s one last picture of Granddaddy, the last cotton buyer in Drew, Mississippi. He’s gazing (in adoration? nervously?) at the great-granddaughter (i.e., me) he bragged about to the reporter.