Keeping Tradition and Memory Alive

By Hemingway Archives

Published: December 6, 2007

By PATRICIA TANNER CANDAL
Correspondent

HEMINGWAY - When my brother Johnny prayed before the Thanksgiving meal last week, he thanked the Holy Father for the memory of our father, Minton Tanner, and the gift of life we still share with our mother, Emily. He thanked Him for the thread of life through Christ that joins the twenty people who came for lunch. Before he prayed, we sang “Lord, Prepare Me to Be a Sanctuary” and heard Psalm 100 read from our mother’s Bible. 
For most of my sixty-four years, I have eaten Thanksgiving dinner with my family: parents, two brothers, four sisters, in-laws, grandchildren - twenty-nine now if all are there. Before Daddy died in 1999 we went to the home place where we grew up in Rose Hill. When we were younger, Momma did all the cooking, except for the barbequed pig, which Daddy stayed up all night to cook on the grill he fashioned from a barrel. Another barrel stood nearby, burning wood for the hot coals that were lifted through a hole in the bottom and spread under the pig until it was done. From the house we carried coffee and hot chocolate and sat around watching him work his magic. Early the next morning we were allowed to pull off a chunk to savor and compliment the cook. 
Other meat included baked ham, turkey and ducks. Daddy had killed the ducks from the woods nearby a few weeks earlier. To accompany the meats, Mom made cornbread dressing, rice and gravy, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, potato salad, fruit salad, and coleslaw.  She added peas, corn, and several kinds of pickles preserved from the summer’s bountiful garden, and served it all with biscuits and sweet tea. Her Christmas fruitcake, nut cake and pound cake were cut on Thanksgiving and served with Maxwell House coffee.
Of course, everything was homemade. When the meal was finished and the dishes washed, we gathered around the old piano and sang for hours.
One of our father’s passions was fishing. He worked hard at International Paper Company and sideline carpenter jobs to provide for our mother and us after serving in the US Navy in World War II. Between the hours of the work, he squeezed in the fishing, anytime and anywhere he could, except on Sunday. Sunday was for attending church and resting after dinner. In fact, a nap on Sunday afternoon still feels like the right thing to do.
Daddy fished Black River and Mingo Creek, catching bream, catfish and shad. He was fishing for shad the day I was born and paid the doctor from the sales. He fished for flounder at the beach, gigging at Pawleys Island on low tide and pulling a net through the surf. We gathered with uncles and cousins and cooked on the shore. He fished with my brothers, Johnny and Frankie, in the creek and at the jetties in Murrells Inlet. He fished with all of us at his pond, catching bream and bass. When the boys grew up and left the nest of home, my sister Camille became his fishing buddy. He told her, “If you want to catch a fish, you have to hold your mouth just right.”  She still tries to get her mouth right as she fishes with her husband, Theron. After the seven of us were out of the nest and returning with grandchildren, Momma became Daddy’s fishing partner at their pond, in the creek and the inlet.
A few years after Daddy died, we began to have Thanksgiving dinner at the Graham House at Litchfield Beach. The Grahams are gracious sisters in Mechanicsville Baptist Church where my brother Frankie is pastor. Gathering at their house at the beach has become our family’s new tradition, a place where old and new memories are woven into a tapestry we treasure. On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Momma will go in with a few family members and prepare the house with sheets, towels and snack food for the folks who will stay the week. Three of the fishermen will come with their trucks and boats, huge buckets of minnows, rods and reels and crab traps, and snacks for their trips to the inlet. Johnny and Frankie will fish with each other, alone, and with Frankie’s sons, Joby and James. Camille and Theron will have their boat in the water, too.
Mom will bait the hooks of her rod and reel and spend hours every day on the dock behind the house, catching flounder. Occasionally she will go with Johnny or Frankie and spend the day fishing in the nooks and crannies of Murrells Inlet where she and Daddy traveled in his boat. Last Monday when I visited her there for awhile, the guys were out in separate boats, trying their luck in different directions of the inlet and keeping in touch by cell phone. Mom had spent most of the day alone at the house, casting the rod and waiting.
At the end of the day when the guys returned with one rather average-sized flounder each, she opened her cooler and showed them the eighteen-inch flounder she had caught from the dock. She told me how she was unable to reel it in and had, in the last minutes, put the rod down and pulled the line a little at a time with her hands until the fish landed on the dock. Our eighty-two year old mother’s fish from the dock fed more people that night than the all-day inlet catch.
On Thursday, the traditional turkey and its trimmings came with children and grandchildren from their homes in Florence, Darlington, Johnsonville, Aynor, Murrells Inlet, Yauhannah, and Mingo Woods. The food on the table tasted like the food we’ve eaten at Rose Hill through the years. Mom’s pound cake and biscuits tasted just like they do at home. Standing together for Scripture and the Lord’s blessing had the same feeling of oneness we have in our mother’s kitchen, because we all were there. Behind us in the living room on a table sat three crosses our daddy made in his woodshop in Rose Hill many years ago. We are a family preserving and changing tradition as we preserve and remember the experiences that bind our hearts together in love. Thank you, Lord.

Patricia Tanner Candal lives on the edge of Mingo Creek  swamp with her husband Steve, dog Shandy, cat Rian, chickens Glory et.al., four guineas, three bee colonies and a bunch of flowers, herbs and other plants. Her E-mail address is