MY YOUTH

I was born August 14, 1851. I was baptized John Henry Holliday after my uncle John Stiles Holliday, who delivered me, and my father, Henry Burroughs Holliday, on March 21, 1852 at the First Presbyterian Church in Griffin, Georgia. Uncle John's wife, Aunt Permelia, and Mother were very close. She was there to give strength and help when Mother went through her pregnancy and then coped with my birth defects, a most trying time.

I was born with a cleft palate so was not the perfect child my parents had envisioned. I was a crushing disappointment to them. As an infant, I was very hard to feed, and many infants doubtless died from aspiration pneumonia — a condition associated with cleft palate in which milk gets down into their lungs. My loving mother's patience and love made her excel as my caregiver and mother.

Cleft palate caused shame in many parents. Some feel it is their fault or blame it on the other parent. Far too often, the father leaves the mother and child. My father threw himself into business and away from me, his own child. He showed his Mexican son, whom he'd adopted during the war with Mexico, far more love. He was embarrassed by my looks and the abnormal sounds I made. My adopted brother, Hidalgo, seemed to readily accept me as a brother and care for me, though Father allowed us little time together as he kept Hidalgo close to him in all his business dealings.

Such an afflicted child makes funny noises due to the cleft palate, and few understand any words he struggles with. Far too often, he is dismissed as an idiot, a further source of pain to his parents.

My uncle, John S. Holliday, is the one who diagnosed me with cleft palate. Later, a specialist named Dr. Long, who had great experience with the use of ether as anesthesia and was highly recommended by my aunt Permelia, corrected my cleft palate when I was eight weeks old. Aunt Permelia, Uncle John's wife, was a fun-loving Episcopalian and a ray of sunshine. And Mother was a kind, soft-spoken, devoted Methodist, then Presbyterian. Both were strong Christian women and close to each other and to God.

As I grew older, I could sense my father's shame as he withdrew into business and away from Mother and me. I came to adore my mother, Alice Jane McKey, who was ever so kind and patient with me. Very soon after my birth, she came to see me as her child, the child she cherished. So, as with most mothers, she loved me unconditionally.

Father, like most men of the time, believed in taking a stern hand, an iron hand, with a son. We had few suppers by the time I was five when he did not shame me. He would say, "And what did you learn today, John Henry?" When I replied, he would say, "What? I can't understand you." After I tried again, he would say, "Alice Jane, the child cannot talk. He mumbles and squeaks like an idiot." So much for that evening meal, which was the only time I saw him.

Mother shielded me from my father's shaming and heavy-handedness and offered me her soft hand and embrace. She forbade anyone to make fun of me.

I am told it took an hour and a half to feed me before my palate was repaired, and I awoke every two hours hungry again. This must have exhausted Mother. She and Aunt Permelia became very close through my mother's efforts to feed me.

At one point, Aunt Permelia and Mother thought it good to have a picture of my cousin Robert and me taken, as we looked so much alike. So my cousin Robert Alexander Holliday and I were captured in a picture. As years passed, we became more like brothers than cousins, as Robert's brother, George, was much older than him.

During the war with Mexico, my father, Henry Burroughs Holliday, served his country and brought home an orphaned Mexican boy named Francisco Hidalgo. My father was at that time a bachelor, and this perhaps reflects a compassionate nature that my father seldom revealed to anyone. He married my mother approximately eighteen months later. Francisco was like a brother to me and accompanied my uncles to the battlefield when the War between the States broke out.

It seemed odd that Father had adopted an orphan and accepted him as a son while he withdrew from me, his true son, due to my birth defect. He could not deny the shame of fathering a deformed child who needed help to speak clearly.

Mother made picture books and worked with me each day to improve my enunciation. She also gave me her tremendous love of music, especially the classics, including Beethoven. She taught me how to play piano. She, of all people, treated me like a man and her defender, and she gave me confidence.

At twelve, I was smaller than most boys my age. I was picked on because of my size but was told it was better to come home lying on a shield than to not fight as a knight. Soon, not only was I being treated better by the bigger boys, but they also began to copy my test answers.

Mother made me practice the piano with pennies on my fingers so I would strike the keys more cleanly. I learned how to play trills and turns for hours.

By thirteen, I had shot up in size. Playing the piano and other exercises made my fingers and hands flexible and my forearms strong, preparing me for the future.

For a while, rumors of the War between the States filled every household, causing many of us to worry and react with anger. It seemed that at every gathering with family members, the subject of secession and war was discussed. Few wanted either, but they also refused to give up their state's rights.

It was an uncertain time, and many were quite unsettled by such talk.

In April 1861, my father, who had been in politics and was a very successful land speculator; Francisco; and six uncles all rode away to serve in the Confederacy.

My extended family and I were subjected to the War between the States, loss of possessions due to the same, and occupation by troops, plus the plague of carpetbaggers. Those men used political influence to do whatever they wanted regardless of morals or law, taking advantage of blacks' inability to read or write.

The War Between the States was actually about states' rights — the rights of the Southern states to use slaves to help in their agriculture and to fight what they believed to be an unfair portion of taxes. The North was content to tax them more and to tell them to release all slaves immediately. Lincoln wanted all slaves freed and shipped back to Africa. I liked the view of Robert E. Lee, a Union colonel with a pro-secession family, which forced him to resign from the Union Army and turn down a promotion from the chief of the Union — a tremendous promotion.

He made up his mind to become a farmer but was selected as a high-ranking officer in the command staff of the Confederacy, and later he became the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and of the Confederacy.

Lee said slavery was a curse for the black man but even more for the white man, for it enabled him to do shameful things and to treat others shamefully. It was a cause for his moral decay. He and General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson were against slavery and secession but embraced serving in the Confederacy as a duty. Lee had freed all of his family's slaves on his mother's death and nursed the oldest slave as he became terminally ill, and Jackson established the first Bible school for blacks.

Lee further said that slaves should first be taught to read and write so that no one could take advantage of them and then be freed and paid to work the fields over a period of a year or two to avoid destroying the South's economy, which provided for all the Union.

But the loud-mouthed, tremendous egos of senators on both sides demanded what they wanted, and there was no reasoning with them. So the Southern states seceded, and then war began.

I was so proud that my favorite uncle, Thomas Sylvester McKey, at twenty-one years of age, donned the garb of the Fifth Georgia Volunteers and was off to serve. It could have been a sad time, but that was impossible when Uncle Thomas was around. He allowed no gloominess in a room.

Soon, my uncles Robert Kennedy Holliday, John Stiles Holliday, James Taylor McKey, James Johnson, and William Harrison McKey; several cousins, which included George; and my brother, Hidalgo, were off to fight the war as well.

My father was the last to go. On September 2, 1861, he was commissioned a major in the Twenty-Seventh Georgia Infantry as a quartermaster.

We all strove to hear any word of the war, which we mostly passed from one family to another. My uncle John Stiles Holliday was serving as a medical officer in Company E of the Fayette Dragoons, Second Calvary, assigned as home guard for Georgia. He got to come home occasionally to give us firsthand knowledge. I was able to see my cousin Robert, who respected my father, as I did his father, my uncle John. My uncle Robert was a captain and served with Jackson's men at the Battle of First Manassas. Uncle James and Aunt Martha's house served as a warehouse for army provisions and was a field hospital at the Battle of Jonesboro.

Southern women bore many sacrifices with pride. They were stoic and did what was necessary to "make do." Imagine going to the store to find most of the shelves empty.

My father was the first to return, decommissioned due to dysentery and general disability. He had served during the Peninsula Battles and the Battle of Malvern Hill. He was home in time to settle my grandfather's estate when he passed. The South began and continued to lose battles, and Sherman's March to the Sea had begun.

My father continued to buy land, more and more, with Confederate dollars. He brought Uncle George's wife and family home to live with us. Mattie and Lucy, my cousins, managed to escape St. Vincent's School for girls and roaming soldiers and make their way to us. My feelings for Mattie began to grow, but her family was Catholic and against cousins' marrying. Also, my mother had become an invalid by then. Father decided that we should move farther away from Sherman's march, so we moved to Valdosta, Georgia, from Griffin. My mother, who had been a well-known and well-liked music teacher, didn't want to move, and I sided with her. But father's decision was final.

I was too old for home schooling and so was enrolled in school with others. Although at first I lacked social graces and was shy, I soon became a very good student in of Greek, Latin, French, astronomy, geology, trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, physics, logic, composition, economic geography, history, ethics, reading, and writing. In 1864, my mother's three sisters, Margaret, Melissa, and Eunice, moved in with us. My father had always been involved in politics and investing in land. He felt the move was a wise one for our family and our relatives who had decided to come join us.

I was surrounded by aunts and cousins. Many of my uncles had sent their families to live with ours as the war ground on — "safety in numbers," as they say. All served most honorably. Tom McKey was hospitalized and served as a ward supervisor in a field hospital. William McKey was paroled, a conditional release from service wherein one could no longer fight, at Gordonville, Virginia. James McKey had served as a field surgeon.

As can be understood, all these changes, mother's deteriorating health, and the threats of being attacked by Sherman's army made life less than settling.

The South had fewer and fewer resources for the army and the people.

Perhaps some insight of what it was like can be gleaned from the American Standard Bible. It states, "Let my eyes stream with tears day and night, without rest, over the great destruction which overwhelms the virgin daughter of my people, over her incurable wound. If I walk out into the (battle) field, look! Those slain by the sword; if I enter the city, look! Those consumed by hunger. Even the prophet and the priest forage in a land they know not. ... We wait for peace but for no avail; for a time of healing but terror comes instead" (Jer. 14:17–18).

In northern Georgia, the devastation caused by General Sherman's Blue Bellies affected not only Confederate soldiers and their families but everyone. Homes, farms, stores, properties, and belongings were ruined and pillaged. Blacks as well as Whites were impacted negatively.

Sophie Walton, a black eight-year-old, came late in 1864 to live with us Hollidays. She had been the daughter of a slave woman owned by Mr. Walton, who sought to place his slaves in safe homes. She received room and board and meager wages for caring for all the Holliday and McKey children.

On August 30, 1864, my aunt Mary Anne Holliday and her children, Mary, Roberta, Catherine, and Jim Bob, fled and took refuge with us. Father moved us several times to areas farther from the battles to protect our large contingent of women and children. Uncle Robert served at Fort Manassas, the Seven Days War, Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg.

The rest of my family trekked home after Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

Uncle Robert died five years later, his health ruined by the war. Families were reunited and returned to rebuild as best they could.

There was then the occupation and much lawlessness. Though many rebelled, Father sought to maintain peace. It was a very stressful time.

YOUTH TO MAN

On September 16, 1866, my beloved mother, Mary Jane Holliday, died. I was fifteen, and her death struck me a terrible blow. In the eulogy, the Reverend N. B. Ousley said,

"She was confined to her bed for a number of years, and was indeed a great sufferer. She bore her afflictions with Christian fortitude. It has never fallen to my lot to know a more cheerful Christian. It was a great pleasure to visit her and see the triumph of religion over the ills of life. She was deeply solicitous about the welfare of all she loved. She fully committed them into the hands of a merciful God with the full awareness that God would hear and answer her prayers, and that her Christian example would still speak. She was deeply anxious about the faith of her only child. She had her faith written so her boy might know what his mother believed."

How could I ever lose this faith or abandon her loving gift? How could I not be moved by her deep, everlasting love for me? In my day, husbands and sons wore black for the first three months and then wore gray for nine months more to show that they were mourning a great loss. Anything else was seen as uncaring in a most disparaging way. I followed this tradition. So I was struck with embarrassment and anger when Father married within three months; even worse, she was a young girl, much younger than he. She was closer in age to me. And of course I was aware of whispered rumors. I could not forgive him and for a time became a lonely, reckless youth. Our McKey relatives were also incensed by Father's continuing actions, to include working for the plague of carpetbaggers. I was wild with all these assaults on our honor, and my relatives met and discussed what should be done with me, as all the family who had gone a-soldiering had returned and were returning to their homes. It was decided in 1868 that I would go and stay with my uncle Robert Kennedy Holliday's family, including Aunt Permelia, Uncle John Stiles Holliday, and their family, as well as Sophie Walton. It would for years be a hard time for both blacks and whites in the South. I remember hearing that Robert E. Lee had said before the onset of the war that slavery hurt the white man more than the black, as it brought out the worst in him. I believe he also said that the best course would be to teach the blacks to read and write and eventually convert the south's economy to free blacks and whites for reasonable wages. Oh, but had the South heeded his advice, for then the carpetbaggers filled the black man's head with lies and took unfair advantage of him as he could not read.

It was during this turbulent time that I renewed my acquaintance with my lovely, Catholic cousin, Mattie.

When I was fifteen, Sophie began to teach me and my cousins how to play cards. She taught me several card games and how to compute odds, how to stack the deck. She also showed me how to shave edges off the cards and how to deal off the bottom of the deck. I knew how to identify others who used these tricks and became so good at odds that I could win without using such tricks.

When I was eighteen, Mattie and I were inseparable, and love was beginning to blossom in our hearts. We had grown from cousins who teased each other, to close friends, to two young people attracted to each other romantically. Though our relatives loved us and cousins could marry, there were mixed feelings. Mattie was adored, but a possible marriage between the two of us gave our relatives mixed feelings.