Back about 25 years ago a very distant cousin of a genealogical put together handsome, leather-bound histories of seven Southern families bearing the Lomax surname.
William Lomax and His Descendants has proven an absolute trove over the years. It’s helped reunite me with cousins hiding in plain sight. (Long story). It’s shed some light on my family’s mysterious origins overseas.
And it’s not just a compendium of marriages and begats and burials — you also get little anecdotes about all these cousins and ancestors and such. The Lomax lynched in frontier Utah, bringing disgrace upon his father. The Mississippi cousin — a pouty flapper girl with mischief in her eyes named Theo — whose husband groused that she fed him only gravy sandwiches.
The branch that married in with the Creek Indians and headed down to Florabama. And so on and on.
And then there is George Washington Andrew Jackson Lomax, son of Absalom Lomax and Cloa Calvert.
George Washington Andrew Jackson Lomax is the Ghenghis Khan of my Lomax family. His descendants are legion. More on that in a bit, but first a thumbnail sketch of this most fecund of Lomaxes.
He was born in the family’s old pre-Revolutionary stomping ground of Abbeville, South Carolina, a rugged and violent Scots-Irish District in that state’s Upcountry, a world away from genteel Charleston. (In the decades and centuries to come, Abbeville and adjacent 96 District would produce both Strom Thurmond and John C. Calhoun, whose family, to my dismay, I found through this book to have entangled itself with my own. But that’s another story.)
Eek.
Anyway, GWAJ Lomax was born there in 1821, and being unfortunate in the ways of primogeniture had little of this world’s goods coming to him upon his birth. His cousin James Avery Lomax, roughly his contemporary, was likewise cursed. And James and most of the other cousins in that same boat headed west, following cotton crops across Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, scrimping and saving what they could, trying to claw their way out of the Po’ White Trash. (A few others headed north to the cornfields of Indiana and Illinois and did quite well.)
Not our GWAJ Lomax. He managed to make it just across the border into north Georgia, and there he stayed, marrying a woman named Nancy Murry and fathering eight children.
And those eight children just absolutely went to Poundtown up there in the kudzu and red Georgia clay. Let’s put it this way. When this book came out, I was in the seventh generation from the patriarch, and neither of my children had yet been born to bring us to eight.
The GWAJ line, on the other hand, pressed ahead. The book is organized by generations, and there are whole extra chapters added on to the end, the better to accommodate the decendants of GWAJ: eighth generation, ninth, tenth, eleventh. The last entry in the whole book is a GWAJ descendant born in Georgia to a 19-year-old mother.
These cousins sent in some sweet and touching country anecdotes, tales of beloved mules plump as butterballs, pranks involving wasps, how one cousin came to be called Whistle Britches, the guitar-playin’, buck-dancin’ cousin who would “make up stories while he danced.”
Salt of the earth folks. The kind of people we all used to be, and the cousins we’ve lost touch with but maybe should get to know again.
But….you also started to see some pathologies visible in the very pictures these cousins furnished for the book. This picture in particular has always haunted me, made me thankful for my ancestors who pressed west to Texas.
Whee doggie. Let’s see, there’s the simple hunger and feral rage in the eyes of the two kids at left and right; the off-putting smirk — is he simple-minded, or sinister? — of the fellow in the middle, and the apparent multiple generations of corn liquor fetal alcohol syndrome with that off-putting Red Clay Madonna and Big Head Kid.
And I’d seen those faces before. Not those faces, but faces identical to those. Maybe you have too. If you’ve ever seen a picture of a lynching, these are the faces you see in the crowd.
And it’s their descendants, these legions upon legions of Spawn of GWAJ, who to this day populate the north Georgia district of Marjorie Greene Taylor. Hell, if her people have been there any length of time, I bet we’re kin! Go see if there’s a George Washington Andrew Jackson in your tree, Marjorie!
But yeah, seriously, this is a problem. MTG (she already has her AOC-like monogram) somehow combinse being the most insane and dangerous freshman congressperson in my lifetime (barely edging out her Rocky Mountain Lite counterpart Lauren Boebert) with perhaps the brightest rising star in the GOP’s political firmament right now.
No shit. She is the new Sarah Palin, revved up with more hate and even more anti-intellectualism!
Going into 2022, this next round of primaries, coast to coast, is going to find an army of these mini-MGTs trying to out-MAGA and out-Q Loon whatever wishy-washy Liz Cheney milquetoasts the crumbling husk of the old GOP has to offer, and then crushing them in those elections, and then winning in gerrymandered districts, so we need to get used to it.
Mike Judge: not a prophet for our times, but the prophet for our times.