Moonshine, Murder and Mayhem
My ancestors came to the hills of north Georgia in 1782 and built a log cabin on a flat piece of ground in a cedar grove which, by the time I was growing up, had long since been replaced by a chicken coop. They were a rough lot, having migrated from Scotland to the mountains of Virginia/North Carolina almost a century earlier as outlaws fleeing some kind of political persecution—or at least that’s the story the family tells. I’m not at all sure about the political part, but outlaws—yeah, I can see that. The bedtime stories of my childhood were not necessarily fairy tales. Southerners have a notoriously celebratory relationship with the macabre, and one of my earliest memories is the tale of a Creek ancestor of mine who had the temerity to marry into our family. Apparently, he was not widely embraced as an in-law. He was found one morning floating face-down in a creek that bounded our property, “his long white hair streaming out behind him”. The law ruled it suicide, but wa