Category Archives: Personal

My Black Catholic Heritage

by kaweah

There is a community just outside of Walterboro, South Carolina, known informally as “Catholic Hill”, with a remarkable history. Back in 1856, well before Emancipation, a Catholic church building burned down. The white membership disbanded, leaving the parish, for all practical purposes, defunct.

St. James Catholic Church
St. James the Greater

Fast forward to 1897, across the closing decade of the Slavery Era, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction. A vibrant Catholic community of former slaves and their descendants are discovered. They had been worshipping for over 40 years without a priest or any support whatsoever. Now, after 180 years, the church of St. James the Greater is still going strong.

I was not raised a Catholic, though it might be said that Dad was. As far as I can recollect, his upbringing as a Catholic amounted to being told by a priest that he was going to Hell. His mother had been raised in a very strict Catholic tradition in a Nova Scotia village where Gaelic was still spoken. She had rebelled after the priest had reported to her father that she had been seeing a Protestant boy. She married a Lutheran years later, but she still appeared to retain some Catholic allegiances. I’m told that she was excommunicated, but ultimately exculpated by the Church.

When we moved to Walterboro from nearby Ruffin, we rented a house on the edge of a black neighborhood, near St. Joseph’s, a relatively new church that had been founded as an outreach effort by the Diocese and the Trinitarian Order about ten years earlier. St. Joseph’s had a school program, so I naturally attended kindergarten there. I remember walking down the bumpy dirt road to the church with the Owens boy who was my friend at the time. I remember all the great wooden toys they had, and I remember the processions of costumed giants occasionally passing by. Perhaps I had been there for mass as well.

As far as I was concerned, it was just a great place to play. Years later, I was told that I was the only white child there. Until that time, I don’t think I had given any thought to the color of the people there.

Bishop Hallinan at St. Joseph's
The bishop breaks ground at St. Joseph’s.

Unfortunately, St. Joseph’s did not enjoy the longevity exhibited by St. James the Greater. Sometime back in the 1990s, the Trinitarians left town and the Diocese abandoned St. Joseph’s. It seems hard to see it as anything but a lost opportunity for Walterboro and the Diocese to expand on a unique religious heritage.

Got Roots?

by kaweah

Genealogy is often a silly pursuit, but it can sometimes tell you something about yourself.

I didn’t think too much about researching my family heritage until I was on the cusp of parenthood. It was at that point that I began to wonder what I would tell my kids about it. That was in late 1997, just as the Internet was beginning to make genealogy research a lot easier.

At the time, I didn’t know my paternal grandfather’s birth name, and I didn’t know much of anything about where either of my paternal grandparents were born. They were both escapees of sorts.

As my folks had begun to suspect, Grandpa had been a bastard (literally), and his father appears to have left Denmark for America soon after Grandpa was born. Grandpa’s paternal grandfather was also a bastard, by the way. I guess it’s a Scandinavian thing.

As for Grandma, she rebelled against her strict, meddlesome Catholic father, and was rumored to have left Nova Scotia and crossed into New York illegally. That’s where Grandma and Grandpa met.

I guess it’s little wonder that they had so little to say about their origins.

For awhile, things were really coming together. They bought a farm up in Oneonta, and there had their second child, my father. Soon after that, there was a fire on the farm, and they had to move back to New York City, where it wasn’t long until diabetes hit Grandpa and diphtheria hit Dad.

Though diabetes continued to deteriorate Grandpa’s health, he managed to find work. Though his vision was quite bad when he moved to California, he still worked as a gardener for awhile, then got work in a cemetery, and then got work as a salesman after losing his vision completely.

Dad was blinded nearly completely by the diphtheria, and grew up attending residential blind schools in the Big Apple. He became an excellent wrestler, getting as far as third in the nation (that’s everybody in his class; not just blind kids). It was a wrestling injury that triggered the glaucoma that took away what remained of his vision. When it came time to get a career, he tried massage and then chiropractic. He stuck with the latter, and got to be a very skilled and successful chiropractor.

I would venture to say there were five principal things that Dad brought from New York to California: blindness, wanderlust, chiropractic, the Baha’i Faith, and the Giants (who moved to California at about that time). Each of these has played a part in the character of our family.

Welcome!

by kaweah

At present I am reading three books: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Jack London’s Martin Eden, and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. I suppose they’re all books about knights-errant, be they holy fools or creatures of fate. Not entirely unlike my friend Mr. Norland. It’s slow going, but each book is holding my attention, as disloyal as it is.

I have also been renovating the Kaweah FBI site of late. FBI is an acronym for Forum for Baha’i Investigations. As might be guessed from this title, the site is a more-or-less light-hearted rant on the Baha’i Faith, my religion of birth. The renovation has been a long time coming, as many of the pages of the site are nearly a decade old now.

Continuing on the Baha’i theme, I have recently become a moderator for the Yahoo! group ex-bahai. Imagine that! Do drop by if you can.