Cordelia’s Giggle
She inherited only three things from the grandmother she never knew: her forehead, her laugh, and the stories told by her three sons.
All my life I have heard I inherited my grandmother Cordelia’s forehead.
My parents named me for her, sort of—Dee is a version of Cordelia. She died before I was born. Mom and Dad spoke of what a ladylike person she was, about her love of reading, and her famous caramel cakes. Mom said she loved to play Scrabble and on one memorable occasion won because she played “shit,” a word she had never uttered.
“It’s in the dictionary,” she had said primly. Mom thought it was hilarious.
Cordelia died three years before I was born, and I am the only grandchild she never laid eyes on and didn’t know about. My five first cousins were alive and thriving, and Mama was pregnant with my older brother, when Cordelia died.
My mother knew Cordelia for only a few years before her death but had grown close to her and loved her. Lucky for me, Mama had a prodigious memory.
When I was about twenty, I was home from college, visiting, and Mama said something funny, and I giggled. Mama got a funny look on her face and looked at Daddy.
“That was her giggle. Dee has her giggle,” Mama said softly. Daddy just nodded.
For the first time, I felt like I was part of my unseen grandmother, like part of her lived in me. How could I giggle like her when I had never heard her make that sound?
My quest to know her began that day and continues to this day. When I learned I had her giggle, it sparked a great curiosity about my grandmother Cordelia, a longing to understand her.
In 1923, Cordelia Henderson, a “spinster” schoolteacher, was 31 years old. She met Algernon Thompson, a 35-year-old bachelor, and fell in love. She was tall and willowy. He was barely taller than her, and barely literate. He had left home as a young teen, after his father died, to work and support his mother and siblings. They were poor farmers from South Georgia. (His family sometimes called Thompson “Slick,” but I’m not sure why; it possibly stemmed from his youthful, failed efforts to become a professional gambler.) Cordelia and everyone else called him simply “Thompson.” He had been all over America and fought Pancho Villa on the Mexican border in 1916 and fought in France during World War I. Cordelia came from a very prosperous farming family, and I don’t think she had traveled anywhere outside the South. It was a genuine love match, though.
“Judge Wyngert liked to get drunk and get under the house and bark. T.K. Mims got drunk and burned to death while sleeping on the roof of the icehouse when it caught fire. Despite being tiny, Hephzibah was a lively place.”
In the next six years, they had three sons, and then came the Great Depression. Thompson got a job at a grocery store, and then opened his own small store, in Hephzibah, Georgia, just outside Augusta.
My dad, Tony, and his older brothers Lewis and Bobby loved to tell stories of their childhood in Hephzibah, Georgia. The Hephzibah of the 1930s and 1940s was a sleepy little town, but it was more reminiscent of something William Faulkner might dream up than Mayberry. Hephzibah was filled with colorful characters, many of them with questionable intelligence and most of whom were “bad to drink.” Big Boy McGee liked to drink hot Pepsis and belch, but one day he fell in the hog pen and got “et by the hogs,” as Dad liked to say (the only time Daddy ever said “et” instead of “eaten”) Then there was the intellectually challenged teenager named “Meat” who liked to throw socks filled with human poo at cars passing through town. Good thing there was no stoplight! Dad’s teacher in third grade was a pretty lady nicknamed “Babydoll.” At home, she often undressed in front of her window, much to the delight of boys like Dad and his brothers. She later married a man who was a drunk and a gambler, who was run over by a train while in his cups. Judge Wyngert liked to get drunk and get under the house and bark. T.K. Mims got drunk and burned to death while sleeping on the roof of the icehouse when it caught fire. Despite being tiny, Hephzibah was a lively place.
Sometimes the stories were more personal. There was the one about Dad and his brother Bobby fighting over the ice creams sold in Thompson’s store, or the one about eight-year-old Dad getting left behind on the school field trip and getting taken home in a police car, much to his delight. Although they were known around town as being wild, my dad and his brothers were all superb storytellers, and their hilarious tales about Hephzibah became even more amusing when they got together to drink whiskey.
Cordelia raised them to be educated Southern gentlemen, regardless of their many bizarre role models in Hephzibah. Unlike most women of her generation, Cordelia attended college—Bessie Tift College in Forsyth, Georgia—though she didn’t graduate. All three of her sons graduated from college and got master’s degrees. They were excellent dancers. The brothers loved to sing, particularly the Baptist hymns they were raised on. All the brothers loved to read. They all had beautiful manners and were successful professionals. Bobby was a teacher. Dad was a banker. My uncle Lewis was a longtime professor of Fine Art at Hollins University in Virginia. Despite their humble beginnings, Cordelia raised fine men.
It astonished me to learn recently that my older cousins knew little or nothing about Cordelia and Thompson. Unlike me, they weren’t told colorful stories about them. My cousins didn’t know Thompson once got mad because a chicken wouldn’t get off his car, so he just shot the chicken. They didn’t know I still have a handkerchief he sent home to his mother in 1918, from France. They didn’t know that Cordelia was famous for her flowers and won first prize every year at the fair, and they didn’t know her gardening secret, which was that she always planted where the outhouse had stood the year before.
They didn’t even know my favorite story: Cordelia had missed seeing a car accident in front of her home in 1939, even though she was sitting right by the window late at night. As she told the police officer, she was reading Gone With the Wind and had not noticed the pedestrian’s death right in front of her house. My cousins likely never heard that after Thompson died, Cordelia couldn’t bear to sleep alone in the house, so every night she went next door and slept in her friend’s guestroom, then crept home the next morning through the backyard, in her bathrobe.
Cordelia and Thompson never had much money, but they had each other. In my parents’ stories, I came to know my grandparents, to feel connected to them.
I did not inherit Cordelia’s willowy figure or her talent as a schoolteacher or her gifts for gardening. All I have is a diminutive version of her name, and her giggle. I am content to be the storyteller, the keeper of lore. One day, I will meet Cordelia and Thompson, in heaven, and I will say, I tried my best to keep your memories alive—now I want to sit on the porch and really get to know you…
Dee Thompson is a freelance writer who earned her master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee. She is the author of five novels, the latest Dancing in the Wreckage. Dee is also a contract paralegal, and she has written a guidebook, Paralegal 411. Dee lives in Atlanta and enjoys cooking, reading, genealogy, and movies.