MOTHER’S DAY TRIBUTE
56
RICK CRARY COLLECTION
Talley was a chic big-city girl when the Roaring ‘20s began.
lamenting its passing, and I was homesick for a place I had
known only in our shared imagination.
Her favorite grandfather — the one she loved — had a
plantation in South Carolina. Whether it was half as grand
as Tara in “Gone With the Wind” or whether it was just a big
farm in the middle of nowhere, it always seemed so much
better than home. The old Confederate veteran, Papa Dukes,
wore an air of nobility she craved. Maybe it was the respect
he commanded as sheriff of Orangeburg County. Or maybe it
was the way he sat at the top of those tall steps to his mansion
as his sharecroppers bowed before him on payday. My
grandmother always belonged to that plantation with its
ambience of regal antebellum days.
Every now and then Talley would make statements that
seemed out of place with the picture I’d acquired of our perfect
past. The first, as I recall, was when she told me, “When I was a
little girl, I used to hide in a corner of the house and read.” She
said she would always run away into her books. She said she >>
Talley’s childhood home in Tampa was two doors down from the home of
her future husband, Evans Crary, Sr.
/www.eastcoastlumber.com