The genesis of this particular undertaking lies in a manila envelope my mother handed to me two or more years ago. At the time, my aunt -- her sister-- was engaged in extensive genealogical research of their bloodlines. During a visit, she shared the results of her efforts with us. I was utterly fascinated by what I read, and later wondered aloud if anyone had researched my paternal ancestry to such a degree.
A few days later, my mother presented me with the aforementioned envelope.
“This might interest you,” she said. “It’s about your father’s side of the family.”
The envelope was old, the mailing labels long since faded and yellowed, postmarked Rockville, Maryland, May 18, 1979. My interest piqued, I opened it and sat down to examine the contents. There was no genealogical information per se, but rather a hand-written note from a cousin of mine, addressed to my father. Also enclosed were two thin sheaves of typewritten papers.
Said papers contained excerpts from a book entitled Wright’s Family Medicine or System of Domestic Practice, Containing the Improvements Suggested by an Experience of Forty Years. Notes indicated that the work had originally been published in 1833.
As a boy, I’d heard that an ancestor of ours was a doctor, famous in his own time and place, whose methods were said to have been somewhat ahead of their time. Unfortunately, the events of my time and place -- and other concerns -- drove this bit of information to the back of my mind, so I never found my way clear to investigating it. Here, it seemed, was my chance to do so, and possibly to do some half-ignored, half-forgotten progenitor a measure of justice.
As any regular GH reader knows by now, I have a deep and abiding interest in all things old and obscure. Given this -- in addition to the interest generated by the family connection -- I now had the chance to peruse selections from a medical text dated 1833, a very pleasant prospect indeed. As I read the selected chapters from the book, I was deeply impressed by the author’s intellect, his erudition and his keen powers of observation. Owing to my background and interests in martial arts, survival-oriented subjects and alternative medicine, I found the Doctor’s observations on: the relationship between mental and physical health; food; exercise; and herbal medicine doubly fascinating.
As it had been written in 1833, I reasoned that the work was well within the public domain, so I saw no harm in transcribing a chapter or two and emailing them to some close friends of mine. Neither did I see any harm in presenting them to a rather larger audience at Marc and Dianna MacYoung’s Animal List, as a curiosity. One such post has been reposted to this site, under the "All Things Bean" category, for the record. When I sent out the original mailing, I knew only that the author was an ancestor who had written a book, the contents of which might have been of interest to the readership to whom I was writing.
As we in the Upper South tend to reckon collateral as well as lineal descent, my exact relationship to this Isaac Wright was unknown to me, as were the details of his life. A bit of poking around on the internet revealed that he’d migrated to Tennessee from North Carolina, that he was a man of some standing in his community, and that he was rumored to have had some connection to the Indians. Life went on, and once again, the matter retreated to dimmer and less traveled neural pathways.
Not long afterward, after batting a few ideas back and forth over the telephone with my close friend (and occasional GH commenter) Sluggo -- yes, he is a real person, not a figment of my imagination or one of my multiple personalities -- I received a package in the mail, from the selfsame gent. After carefully checking it to ascertain that: 1.) it didn’t tick; and 2.) that there was no telltale odor of nitric esters or aromatic nitro compounds, I resolved to brave whatever pathogen he’d placed inside (“Surprise, Bean! Bet you’ve never even heard of an airborne strain of the 'bullhead clap' before, now have you? -- Yours Truly, Sluggo”) and opened it.
Inside the package were copies of two books, A USDA Forest Service Research Paper entitled A Guide to Medicinal Plants of Appalachia and Anthony Cavender’s Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia. I began reading both, at which time I found a reference in the latter work to Dr. Wright’s book. Not much, just a paragraph or two, but here was someone else who had heard of the man. Once again, events in my personal life conspired to drive Dr. Wright and his work to the back of my mind, and the entire matter lay dormant again.
Not long ago, my father received two folders of genealogical research from the same cousin who’d sent him the excerpted material from Wright’s book nearly thirty years ago. Also included was a copy of the book itself, a 1977 edition that had been reprinted by a distant cousin, one whom I have never met, and of whose existence I was completely unaware. The man who’d rescued the book from obscurity was one Dr. Oliver K. Agee of Maryville, Tennessee.
Situated in Blount County, Tennessee, just south of Alcoa and Knoxville-proper, Maryville was actually the scene of a less-than savory adventure upon which I’d embarked fifteen years ago. Certainly, I’d known the family was from the Knoxville area, but once again fate seemed to be leading me in the footsteps of my own ancestors, in places of which I was not previously aware. Although I hadn’t seen the area since I was practically an infant, I still remember the odd thrill I felt when we crossed into East Tennessee on US 411, in the dead of night.
I felt as if I had come home.
In a way, I had.
There are several roads in Knox and Blount Counties that bear Dr. Wright’s name. Throughout the general area, street names and place names are virtual roll-call of my ancestors and kin: Wright, Singleton, Ryan, Duncan, Hodge, Iredell, and others. At the time, I thought nothing of it.
Fast forward fifteen years, and add a sheaf of papers in which these names appear time and time again…
Once again, the mysterious Dr. Wright had crossed my path. Some time spent digging through the genealogical material my cousin had sent filled in a number of “gaps” but -- as is often the case in these matters -- gave rise to as many questions as it answered, if not more. If nothing else, my exact genetic relationship to him is settled. As it happens, I am a direct descendant, his great, great, great, great grandson, to be exact. Isaac Wright had a son named Iredell Wright, who had a son named James Knox Polk Wright, whose daughter, Willhemina Josephine (a.k.a. “Willie Jo”) Wright married my great grandfather, William Houston (a.k.a. “Will”) Bean.
Wright’s Family Medicine, however, proved to be a veritable Pandora’s box of new questions. What kind of man was Wright? To be sure, his writing revealed much about his intellect and character, but led to even more questions on my part. What were the details of his early life? What did he look like? What kind of company did he keep? What were his personal habits?
“God’s blood, man! Who are you? Why do you keep popping up in my life?” I asked the book, as if it were its own author. At length, I resolved to find out. As I read the introductory material in the 1977 reprint of Wright’s … -something I often ignore -- a fascinating story began to unfold. Isaac Wright was the last of three Isaac Wrights, all of whom were involved with medicine in one way or another.
For all that the story of the Wright family begins in the mist-shrouded British Isles untold centuries ago, the story of the same family in North America begins on the Georgia coast, during the Summer of 1737. James Edward Oglethorpe’s colony was a mere four years old when the ship bearing the first Issac Wright foundered, leaving him orphaned and alone in a new and strange country.
So here I find myself, in my progenitor’s shoes (moccasins?), metaphorically speaking. I’m taking another of my frequent excursions into yesteryear, and yet for me, this is new and strange country. Before lacing up my boots and hitting the road, as it were, I’ll clue the gentle reader in on a thing or two. Green Hell will still be up and running, but much of what appears in the subsequent posts will pertain to what happens in my present and future, as I take this journey into the past. I believe I stated some time ago that I seldom undertake anything for just one reason. This odyssey in no way deviates from that pattern.
These purposes of mine will become clear as the project and the accompanying narrative unfold. For now, though, let me state only that I have two dominant motives.
As some of you know, my father is very ill, and I don’t know how much longer he’ll be with us. The fifth commandment advises us “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land the Lord thy God giveth thee.” In the age of youthful rebellion and “generation gaps” -- cultural territory with which I am all too familiar -- the very idea of adhering to it seems to be considered slightly “out of touch” at best, and utterly passe at worst. Sad comment on the current state of things, that.
Despite what I’ve related of my own past, I am no longer a frightened, furious seventeen-year-old boy with a chip on his shoulder and a knife in his pocket. I’m a man, nearing forty, with quite a bit of accumulated life-experience, and actual responsibilities. Given these facts, I now see the truth of that commandment, whereas to the aforementioned punk, it seemed utterly nonsensical.
It was easy to dishonor my father -- even to hate him -- when I was eighteen and he forty-seven , he with his interests and I with mine, said interests seldom held in common. It’s impossible to do so now that he’s sixty-eight and I’m thirty-nine. The shouting, cursing, obscene gestures -- and worse -- have long since given way to me administering his doses of saline solution and Heparin. The confused, enraged boy I once was thought him a terrible father -- possibly the worst on earth. The thirty-nine-year-old man whom he unhesitatingly trusts to purge the syringes and administer their contents correctly understands that he is -- which is to say I am -- that man because (even if his method was often terribly flawed), that’s who and what my father raised me to be.
Were it not for my father, I would not exist. That’s not an especially profound observation (it’s retardate-level, actually), and I add it only because among my generation, there exists a singularly unpleasant tendency for any given individual -- even well into middle age -- to hold fast to the juvenile belief that in some miraculous act of reflexive creatio ex nihilo, he brought himself into existence. I’ve long since traded in all such illusions for the cheap booze, trade cloth and glass beads they’re ultimately worth.
Ultimately, my existence and a part of my identity owe themselves to those who have gone before me. My father owes his existence and a part of his identity to the same line of forbears. Therefore, in honoring the fathers of my father, I honor him all the more.
I hope this serves to explain a thing or two.
The regular reader of this blog will note that much of the material contained herein is autobiographical in nature. Judging by the “cloud” archive heading in the right-hand sidebar, it’s rather a popular category, but making that observation is pure “egoboo” on my part, and neither here nor there. This brings us to the second of my two overwhelming motives.
I’ve been over this time and time again, but presenting the often sordid details of my early life to the entire world provides me with a method of catharsis, and a measure of healing -- balm for old wounds, if you will. In writing these oft self-indulgent exercises in purging, though, I’ve come to realize that the story I’m telling -- my story -- is a single chapter of a much larger story.
In every talent, every flaw of character, every virtue, every vice, every passion, every aversion and every inclination of my own, I see, hear and feel those of countless generations of Beans, Talbotts, Wrights, Singletons, Hodges, Kinders, Rileys, Collinses, Comptons, Hipkinses, Pattons, Meroneys, and others too numerous to name. In short, I find that I can’t tell my story without telling theirs. So that’s what I’ll be doing for a while.
As I’ve said, Green Hell will continue, and I’ll still post recipes, gardening tips and observations, the odd rant, and everything else the gentle reader has come to expect. Much of what appears, though, will pertain to this latest undertaking of mine.
I expect this to be “a long, strange trip,” if I may purloin a line or two from the Grateful Dead, so be forewarned. Some of what I relate may prove to be of interest only to Southerners and “kith and kin,” but as the various “tribes” from which I’m descended have, over the course of time, migrated to parts as far-flung as Washington (State), Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and even Alaska, there’s a chance that some distant kinsman of mine will read the forthcoming ramblings and possibly enjoy them.
Even if the gentle reader fits into none of the aforementioned categories, he is cordially invited along for the ride. We Southerners are a hospitable people in the main, and still quite inclined to invite the occasional weary traveler up into the ol’ wagon.
Affectionately and respectfully yours,
David Jefferson Bean
Roswell, Georgia
October 24, 2006
