One summer Sunday afternoon in 1955, several children were baptized by the preacher of the Klein Baptist Church in Logan’s Creek. As I recall, he had a weekday job at a factory in a nearby town. But on Sunday he preached and inspired the community’s churchgoers. On a previous Sunday morning, we had all walked to the front of the church when called to be saved. My friend, Mary Ann Logan, and I went down; her mother played the piano in the one room church. “Have thine own way, Lord”. Then we found ourselves sitting by the creek bank, waiting for our chance to walk into the water onto the submerged roots of the big tree that marked the edge of the creek, to be baptized by the preacher who followed in the steps of John the Baptist. Those attending sang, “Shall we gather at the river?... where bright angel feet have trod.”

During the summers of the ‘50s, Mary Ann and I went swimming every day in the creek that flowed through the Logan land, the Scott-Bradford place adjacent to Klein from which the Logans are descended. The creek served as our playground, as our bathtub (neither of us had running water), and now it was our baptismal font.

I recently reconnected with Mary Ann after sixty years. She and her husband had returned to live on the land, in the midst of cotton fields, and are pillars of the Klein Baptist Church. She recalled my grandmother’s floating in the creek (the swimming hole was actually too small for an adult to swim), saying how grand it was… and that we are now the same age as my grandmother was. Probably, neither of us would swim in the waters of the creek where snakes could occasionally be seen dangling in the trees or on the sides of the creekbed. I’m sure I wouldn’t…. not that we could as the creek exists no longer. It and the pasture surrounding it are now a backwater of the Coosa River system. Thomas Wolfe was right… “You can’t go home again.”

As I approach the end of 2018 and envision 2019, the Klein Homecoming looms large.

On October 20, 2018, about 40 persons whose ancestors were at Klein when it was a cotton plantation gathered together in the cemetery for a healing ceremony. On behalf of the white side of my family, I apologized for closing off the African American family cemetery for burial some 20 years ago. I also apologized for a much longer, unspoken history from slavery to the present. We rededicated and opened the cemetery with prayers and the singing of Amazing Grace. We then adjourned to the house for a facilitated discussion and meal together. Many of the participants were inside the house for the first time.

Theoangelo Perkins, Peter Datcher and I, along with our facilitator T. Marie King of Birmingham, planned and carried out the event. In the South, we are keyed into who is related to whom, and this was a time to learn about and celebrate these connections. Theo Perkins’ mother is a McGinnis. The McGinnises came to work on the land soon after emancipation and continued to do so for generations. As a child, I had known Theo’s great-grandfather, great uncle and great aunt. Peter Datcher’s great-grandmother was enslaved at Klein, and he has a beautiful picture of her and one of his great-grandfather, who was once whipped for leaving that plantation a mile away to visit her. They had met at the Scott’s Grove Baptist Church where services were still conducted during my childhood. So… in generational time, this wasn’t that long ago.

Here I am, trying to come to terms with the fact that my family enslaved others. We were sitting in the house their ancestors built, without pay. The bricks were made, the cypress milled, the nails forged by them. All part of the economy: the more free labor, the more land could be cultivated in cotton, the wealthier the planter could become to continue that cycle. The part of the story I had heard was of my great-great-grandfather coming down from Tennessee to settle the new territory; of my great-grandmother teaching black and white children to read; of the travails of the family and their persistence in the face of challenge. I had never heard the other sides of the story.

What is the size and nature of this debt? How can it be settled? How can we give back to these families? This didn’t come up in our conversations at the house. However, what became apparent was that respect for each other, acknowledgment of our complicated past, and beginning a new relationship at that moment will sustain us as we enter 2019 together. This year, we will come together again for a Klein Homecoming, bring art to the house, and work to establish our shared home as a community resource through the non-profit corporation Klein Arts and Culture.