TRIBUTE TO ELIZABETH CAUSEY

When we were young in the early 1960s, my granddaddy Alonzo’s sister would come down every summer to Lizella, GA, where we lived.

Sis – that’s what we called her – made us children clean up the house and haul bricks to the front yard to create borders around Big Mama’s – my grandmother Annie Lee, Alonzo’s wife – black-eyed Susans and other flowers.

As children, we never really knew what place Sis came from, only that she came from “up north” or “up the country.” We just knew that once a year she’d be there making us work when we’d rather be out in the yard playing hopscotch or picking sweet juicy plums and blackberries in the fields out back of the house.

As we grew older, so did Sis, and she stopped coming. But before long, we had other relatives coming down from Cincinnati: Beck (Rebecca, Alonzo’s daughter) and her husband Broadus, Floyd (Alonzo’s son) and his wife Lucille, and Brother (Walter, Alonzo’s son) and his wife Martha, each with their children.

Back then, I’m sure they nor Sis realized what they were doing. To them, they were merely taking a trip “down South,” but their trips were more than that. They had roots in the South, and as Black Southerners, they had a deep respect for family, even if they never really put it into words. It would not have occurred to them not to go back home to see momma or daddy, or their sisters and brothers.

What the folks from Cincinnati and Sis from Detroit were doing was remembering where they came from. They were part of a legacy that started in South Bibb County with Green and Rebecca Howard in the early part of the 20^th century and spread to the children they bore.

Those of us who lived in Georgia have always been close because we all grew up together in the house that Alonzo built in the 1950s. It was a house short on luxuries but long on caring. Then – and even now – our cousins were more like our sisters and brothers, and our aunts and uncles were more like our fathers and mothers.

We’re glad to finally know the people whom Sis left behind in Detroit to come down South to visit us. We’re also glad we’ve been able to keep alive our kinship with our family in Cincinnati.

We truly believe that a family that is close and that loves each other – even though we get a little mad with each other from time to time – is a family with an enduring spirit.

Now that we know each other, I hope that we will try very hard to hold on to each other and never ever again let the years and miles separate us.