The family in Macon was nervously excited. Family members from Detroit, Cincinnati and Atlanta were coming to their ancestral home in Georgia.

On Friday, several Macon family members spent the day in a basement meeting hall at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church – whose members were Charles, son of Alonzo, and his wife Mary  – preparing for that night’s fish fry. Fried fish is a Southern tradition, and what better way to welcome northerners to the South than with one of our signature dishes?

Some of the family members put together a program for that night. Stevie Howard, son of Abbie Lee Howard. daughter of Alonzo, was asked to play the saxophone. He had played in the Southwest High School band, but we couldn’t persuade him to do so. He was too shy and didn’t want to play, he said.

Tanya Goolsby –  daughter of Joan and John, son of Ceola Goolsby, daughter of Alonzo – was asked to play the piano. She was taking lessons and was a little timid about playing but agreed to entertain us. During her performance, she missed a note. Embarrassed, she began to cry. We consoled her; she had done a beautiful job.

Our reunions were in their infancy. There were no hotel rooms set aside for incoming family members, no hotel banquet rooms for our meals. This reunion was put together on a shoestring, with family members taking money out of their pockets to pull it off.

The Macon family planned a down-home get-together. That Friday was a grand day, as they planned for the gathering that night and Saturday’s cookout at Lake Tobesofkee in Lizella, GA, where many of Alonzo’s family members had lived 15 years earlier.

As nightfall arrived, the out-of-town family members drifted in. We hugged each other, introduced ourselves again and just as quickly forgot each other’s name and who was whose son or who was whose daughter. It would be years later before we knew who belonged to whom.

                      In center, Bertha Green Durrett, daughter of Guss; her daughters Jackie Green Norton (left) and Karen Gillespie.

That didn’t matter, though. There were about 60 of us there, in that church basement, a people whose history and relations connected them but whose lives had been disconnected by time and miles.

The fish fry was a hit – and fragrant, which is always the case when you fry fish. Years later, Jackie Green of Detroit, daughter of Bertha Green (Durrett), daughter of Guss, would remark about how good the hush puppies were. Most of the cooking was done by Abbie Lee Howard and Lonnie Mae Slocumb, daughters of Alonzo’s daughters; Louise Howard, daughter of Obie Howard Sr., and Mary Howard, wife of Charles W. Howard, son of Alonzo.

For Saturday’s cookout, we rode in a caravan to Lake Tobesofkee, where by now houses were being built and sold on the lake for hundreds of thousands of dollars. We took the Thomaston Road route to the best picnic grounds.

Had we taken Columbus Road, those of us in Macon could have pointed out the site of Alonzo’s old homestead, surrounded by acre after acre of land that he once owned but that most of which was now owned by the local Girl Scouts organization. The house was torn down after the last of the family members moved to Macon in the late 1960s and the Girl Scouts built a caretaker’s house in its place.

At the cookout, the group from Detroit wore the sky blue T-shirts they had worn at the previous reunion. Those from Macon wore white T-shirts with blue lettering. T-shirts became a trademark of our reunions, with the family tree bearing the name of Green and Rebecca on its trunk and their children on its branches.

One of the highlights of the reunion was the appearance of three of our elders – Annie Lee Howard, wife of Alonzo; Obie Howard Sr., youngest son of Green and Rebecca, and Irene McClendon, daughter of Green and Rebecca. All were from Macon.

We had our traditional church service and a banquet on Sunday. We all piled into cars and in another caravan drove to south Bibb County to Mount Zion Baptist Church, the church of Alonzo and Annie Lee Howard and Obie and Amy Howard.

After church service, we had our banquet where Obie, Annie Lee, Irene and Amy were in attendance. 

Oliver Howard, son of Guss, remembered part of that speech in which the family was run out of town by the Ku Klux Klan. Oliver said that he and some of the family members from Detroit interviewed Obie on tape, but the tape was lost. You can read Oliver’s recollection of the interview here.

This was probably the largest reunion we’ve had, because most of the family still lives in Macon and many of them attended.