Last month I went to Commerce, the small Georgia town where my father was born and raised, to dedicate a park in honor of his mother, Julia Bryson Rollin, who taught in the area for 35 years.
It was a day of contemplating family, memory and legacy.
I met many octogenarians who had fond memories of my grandmother teaching them. My favorite encounter, though, was with a man in his 50s, a parks worker who paused from setting up a small stage before the event to tell me he remembered Miss Julia letting the neighbor kids eat peaches from her tree, unlike “the mean lady next door.”
His Miss Julia was the indulgent woman I knew. She always stocked the kitchen with my favorite Cap'n Crunch and my sister’s favorite Cocoa Puffs, sugary cereals forbidden from our home, when my family visited her in the summers.
My grandmother could be exacting. When her youngest son, my father, wrote home from college in West Virginia, she returned his letters with his grammar mistakes corrected in red ink. She spared my sister and I the red ink when we wrote thank you letters in response to birthday and Christmas checks and gifts. I only remember her expressing pleasure at our notes and occasionally praising our handwriting.
One of the older women I met in Commerce told me that back in the days of corporal punishment in the schools, she received her first spanking from my grandmother.
"But I deserved it," she said. She did not elaborate and though I was curious I did not press.
She remembered my grandmother taking her to her home after school. She would spend afternoons reading.
"She always had books," she told me. That's something I also remember about my grandmother's brick house in Commerce.
Julia Downs Bryson Rollin (1902-1982) earned a master's in library science from Boston University. In the days of Jim Crow Black people in Commerce were not allowed to use, let alone work in, the city library. An exception was made for my grandmother because of her degree. She checked out books for her neighbors.
She regularly sat at her kitchen table with a neighbor to teach him to read. Over evenings with her, the man graduated from mastering the alphabet, to reading simple words, to writing his first letter -- to his adult daughter, who had moved to Philadelphia. When his daughter responded, the man, crying tears of joy, came to my grandmother to tell her that it was the first letter he'd ever read on his own.
My grandfather, Mim Bryson, a mason who died in 1946, built the family’s brick house. It fell into disuse after my grandmother’s death and had to be torn down. The new park sign bearing her name was placed just across the street from where her house had stood. The park plot had originally been acquired by my father's aunt who had a house on it, also now razed.
After my father died in 2024 my husband took on the task of disposing of several plots in Commerce still in my grandmother's name. Most were sold. We donated the triangular plot for the park. Michael Buckhorn, a mason, built a little library for the park at my request, so it also is a tribute to Mim Bryson. City librarian Angel Abounader, who threw herself into the park project with delightful enthusiasm, will maintain and stock the little library, one of a dozen she oversees around town.
Commerce City Manager Matthew Hailey said during the celebrations that parks are what 'help our elders feel young and our young people learn what's important." When did city managers get to be so poetic?
I can imagine my grandmother sitting on her front porch watching children in her park.
"She always cared about her students," a woman told me at the park dedication.
I am confident the neighbors are going to take good care of the park. They will remember the lessons and the books. And the peaches.