A Place to Call Home

from Bantam
Books

WHEN VENUS FELL

A PLACE TO CALL HOME

SILK AND STONE

BLUE WILLOW

MIRACLE

FOLLOW THE SUN

THE BELOVED WOMAN

CALIFORNIA ROYALE

CAUGHT BY SURPRISE

HEART OF THE DRAGON

HOLD ON TIGHT

HONEY AND SMOKE

HOT TOUCH

JED’S SWEET REVENGE

LEGENDS

MIRACLE

NEVER LET GO

SARA’S SURPRISE

SILK AND STONE

SILVER FOX AND THE RED-HOT DOVE

STRANGER IN CAMELOT

John Power arrived in America from Donegal, Ireland, in 1761, married Rachel Duvall of Greenville District, South Carolina, and together they raised a dozen children. Their adventurous youngest son, James Power, a veteran of the War of 1812, made his home in the wilderness of north Georgia after the 1826 Georgia land lottery opened the Creek Indian territory south of the Chattahoochee River, not far from a tiny pioneer settlement known as Marthasville, which later became known as Terminus, and later still, Atlanta.

James Power was a blacksmith, surveyor, judge, and ferry barge operator who hunted and traded with his Cherokee Indian neighbors across the river. He married an Irish girl, possibly a recent immigrant, whose name and fate are not known. Their only son, Samuel Wesley, was born in 1830 and served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. Four years after General William Tecumseh Sherman commandeered Powers Ferry (prior to the Battle of Atlanta) the first of Samuel Wesley’s six children, Samuel Adam, was born.

Samuel Adam Power died in 1908 when his youngest son, William, was still a baby. William married Agnes Nettie Quarles the day after Christmas in 1926. In their wedding photograph they are a handsome young couple, she in a pale, simple dress with her dark hair pulled back by a small barrette, he in a dark suit with a rosebud pinned to the lapel. He sits and she stands beside him with her arm draped gently around his shoulders. His hands, clasped around one updrawn knee, are large and strong, a workingman’s hands. He and she are smiling.

Their first daughter in a family of four daughters and four sons is Dora Power Brown, and she is my mother. She grew up playing in the river bottoms James Power farmed more than a hundred years before. When I was a child, my brother, sister, and I spent nearly every Sunday and holiday there, in the company of our grandparents, three aunts, four uncles, and fifteen first cousins.

This book is dedicated to them, for the memories and expectations, shared joys, sorrows, and strengths, and to my husband, Hank, and to my Dad. A family whose heart is as deep as its heritage.

I
planned to be the kind of old Southern lady who talked to her tomato plants and bought sweaters for her cats. I’d just turned thirty, but I was already sizing up where I’d been and where I was headed. So I knew that when I was old I’d be deliberately
peculiar
. I’d wear bright red lipstick and tell embarrassing true stories about my family, and people would say, “I heard she was always a little funny, if you know what I mean.”

They wouldn’t understand why, and I didn’t intend to tell them. I thought I’d sit in a rocking chair on the porch of some fake-antebellum nursing home for decrepit journalists, get drunk on bourbon and Coca-Cola, and cry over Roan Sullivan. I was only ten the last time I saw him, and he was fifteen, and twenty years had passed since then, but I’d never forgotten him and knew I never would.

“I’d like to believe life turned out well for Roanie,” Mama said periodically, and Daddy nodded without meeting her eyes, and they dropped the subject. They felt guilty about the part they’d played in driving Roan away, and they knew I couldn’t forgive them for it. He was one of the disappointments between them and me, which was saying a lot, since I’d felt like such a helpless failure when they brought me home from the hospital last spring.

My two oldest brothers, Josh and Brady, didn’t speak
about Roan at all. They were away at college during most of the Roan Sullivan era in our family. But my two other brothers remembered him each time they came back from a hunting trip with a prize buck. “It can’t hold a candle to the one Roan Sullivan shot when we were kids,” Evan always said to Hop. “Nope,” Hop agreed with a mournful sigh. “That buck was a king.” Evan and Hop measured regret in terms of antlers.

As for the rest of the family—Daddy’s side, Mama’s side, merged halves of a family tree so large and complex and deeply rooted it looked like an overgrown oak to strangers—Roan Sullivan was only a fading reflection in the mirror of their biases and regrets and sympathies. How they remembered him depended on how they saw themselves and our world back then, and most of them had turned that painful memory to the wall.

But he and I were a permanent fixture in local history, as vivid and tragic as anything could be in a small Georgia community isolated in the lap of the mountains, where people hoard sad stories as carefully as their great-grandmothers’ china. My great-grandmother’s glassware and china service, by the way, were packed in a crate in Mama and Daddy’s attic. Mama had this wistful little hope that I’d use it someday, that her only girl among five children would magically and belatedly blossom into the kind of woman who set a table with china instead of plastic.