Honest Ridge

Almost ten years ago, I went to Texas, the place my dad was born, to do genealogical research and to meet some of my cousins and other family members. My dad’s half sister – a woman I accidentally found on the internet and had just met – graciously took me around the old haunts. We drove out to Honest Ridge, the small community a few miles outside of Mexia where the family lived and worked as sharecroppers. My aunt showed me the house where my great-grandparents lived. The building was barely standing and the wood weathered, and my aunt warned me not to get too close. It was shadowed under some large trees with some rusted buckets and cans littering the overgrown yard. The windows were broken out and the door was lopsided. I could see my great-grandfather leaning against the door frame smoking a cigarette in his dirty overalls from working all day on the land that wasn’t his. I could see my great-grandmother boiling laundry in a pot on the fire then later walking out to the bright meadow to hang the clothes on a line. I had heard about these people and how they lived from my grandma during her short stay in Texas. She grew up in Honolulu and couldn’t handle the country life. The graveyard was about a half mile down the road, where family members could visit often. About a mile away from the dilapidated structure was the meadow where my grandparents lived and where my father was born. It was just a meadow now, the structure probably taken apart for wood after my grandparents moved to California. Kathleen Stewart writes, “The trash that collects around people’s places, like the ruins that collect in the hills, is imprinted with a life history (and death) and embodies a continuous process of composition and decomposition. They become compelling signs of a past, like the present, where things fall apart and where everything, including power itself is constructed and transient” (96). No one lives there anymore. This community was abandoned when people moved to Mexia or Ft. Worth to find work, leaving nothing but the old building and a cemetery.
-Colleen Murphy