A Southern POV: Dinner on the Grounds

Ah, Decoration Sunday. What a sweet memory!

Every year, on the third Sunday in May, Hopewell Baptist Church near Ashville, Alabama, held (and still does) Decoration Sunday. That’s when all the families come out, clean up the family graves, and replace the flowers, weed, rake the marble chips, and anything else needed to spruce up the resting places of the ancestors we still honored and respected.

When I was a kid, this also included dinner on the grounds. The long table the church elders had erected would be inundated with fried chicken, green beans, potato salad, congealed salads, coleslaw, homemade biscuits and rolls, and enough sweet tea to put the entire county into a coma.

Not to mention the desserts.

Oh, let’s do mention them. Every cook in the area would array their best dishes with their favorite sweets. Banana puddings, pies of every fruit we could grow, and cakes. Flies would come from miles around, and there is no torture in the world like standing a hungry 8-year-old next to the sweets, handing her a towel, and saying, “Now keep the flies away.”

Right. Nothing said about keeping fingers away, right?

“And don’t touch anything. Not till after the blessing.”

Right . . .

The commanding voice of a preacher who could be heard in town would bless the food, and the scramble for the best bits would begin. As you can see from the table, it was high enough for all ages of kids to scoot under and around, grabbing skirts, teasing each other, and occasionally dropping a lizard on the table, just to see who’d scream.

For the record, my mother never screeched, but she had lightning reflexes. A reptile near her baskets ran the risk of being snatched and flung into the graveyard before it could blink. The kids would race after it, laughter and squeals echoing off the old growth canopy of trees.

Y’know, I was an adult before I saw a cemetery with flat, grass-covered rows, with headstones level with the ground. The ones I grew up around were rolling mounds of sand and grass, dotted with ancient, lichen-covered markers, some that towered into the sky. The only “organization” was that the saints were all buried with their feet to the east, so they could rise facing Jesus upon his return.

The rest was a bit . . . haphazard. Some families surrounded plots with borders of granite or brick. Marble chips, slowly fading from white to black from weathering, covered many humped graves. For a kid, it was a minefield of treasures: not just the aforementioned lizards, but June bugs (which were AWESOME tied to strings), multicolored rocks, old flower arrangements (which made great “wedding” bouquets for the girls). Oh, and there was the cemetery on the other side of the road, which was abandoned and overgrown, ripe for ghost stories.

I remember the uncomfortable stuff as well: crinolines and mary janes, ants, horse flies, and the sweltering humidity, even in May. But all that fades in light of the good, the cherished remembrances of family, faith, fun, friends . . .

 . . . and lizards.