Blame it on an overheated smartphone. Or perhaps it was my grandparents’ ghosts reaching out in a high-tech way to pull me closer to them just one more time in my life.
It was an astounding experience no matter how it happened.
You see, I said my last goodbyes to my grandfather George Lee Waters during Christmas 1969. I was 13. He died the next February. My grandmother, his wife Lena Searcy Waters, left us in 1986 while I was in law school. I was 30.
This past July of 2019 at age 63, I was traveling to Alabama on a last-minute trip for a family funeral. But I made no plans to revisit my grandparents’ graves near the little village of Burnt Corn, Alabama, where they had lived and worked.
The funeral was forty miles to the south in Brewton. There wasn’t enough time left to journey north to the rural area around Burnt Corn where my grandparents had reared my father after he was born there in 1924.
But then my smartphone overheated. It led to one of the eeriest experiences of my life.
As I was leaving for my return trip home, I plugged my Tallahassee address into the Google Maps navigator on my smartphone. I was heading south back toward Florida. Or so I thought.
That was when the phone went haywire. As I followed the navigator’s spoken directions, the phone took on a mind of its own. And the next thing I knew, a road sign loomed ahead of me along the kudzu-covered red clay embankments.
It said “Burnt Corn.” I was shocked. The phone had taken me north instead of south.
I pulled my car into a small church’s parking lot to check out the phone. That was when I first saw it was displaying error messages. None of the apps was working properly. And the entire phone was hot to the touch.
But another thought soon came to mind: I was only a few more yards away from many of the landmarks that were so important in my childhood. – Landmarks that had been elements in my grandparents’ lives.
I had one question in particular. Was my grandfather’s barbershop still there? There in the village of Burnt Corn?
I pulled my car out of the church lot and kept driving north. It was the same direction the out-of-control phone had sent me.
By then, I was only thinking about my grandfather. Among his many trade skills, he was a barber with his own little store. Everyone in Burnt Corn called him by his nickname “Duck.” And so the little shop he kept in the village was simply known as the Duck Waters Barbershop – a small little place with wooden walls, a single fireplace, and an old tin roof.
As I approached Burnt Corn’s little cluster of homes and stores, my heart began to race. I saw the white walls of the old Methodist Church just ahead, marking the edge of town. And then I saw the little old wooden building.
Duck Waters Barbershop was still there. My God, it was still there.
The building was more weathered than I remembered, with a heavier layer of rust on the metal roof. But it still stood there between the now-empty general store and another building painted with an old 5-cent Coca-Cola sign.
A white, blue, and red barber pole sign hung next to the door above concrete stairs that had a hand-shaped look. Were those strokes of my grandfather’s hands I saw there in the concrete?
From that point, I lost all track of time. I got back in my car and found my way to the home my grandfather had inherited from his mother Eliza Waters. It originally was an old dog-trot house built before the Civil War that was expanded over the years for a growing family.
And it still stood almost exactly as I remembered it – gussied up by its new owners, but still the same design from my childhood.
The next thing I knew I was at the Ramah Church Cemetery, standing at the Waters’ family section. I didn’t even remember driving there because my thoughts were so gripped by memories. Standing in the July heat with deer flies buzzing around my head, I looked down at the graves of so many members of my father’s family.
And I paused a very long time looking down at the double grave of my grandparents, Lena and George Waters. Someone had placed carved stones at the base of both of their plots. For my grandmother, the carving said, “Mama.” For my grandfather, it said “Duck.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks as I whispered to the stones. “You wanted me to come here,” I said. “You wanted to be with me again.”
I paused to catch my breath. “And I’m so glad I came.”
It was a long trip back to Tallahassee. I arrived long after dark, much later than I had planned. Was it just happenstance that my smartphone navigator worked perfectly the whole way back to Florida?
© Robert Craig Waters 2019
Robert Craig Waters 