Religious Journey

This is a Preview of the Book Entitled

So Much to Be Thankful For

By the Eight Children of
James Robert Frazier
and
Violet Utoka Pearce Frazier
By Edwin Ray Frazier, 2017

ISBN 978-0-9978937-4-8

Dedication

We dedicate these good and uplifting memories to Mama and Papa, in profound gratitude for our heritage.

As we look back, we are eternally grateful that our recollections of yesterday provide us with strength and guidance for tomorrow. We recall a lot of laughter and love, some tension and tears, and overall an admirable and enviable foundation for us to build on. We are thankful to be their descendants, thankful for the farm, for the Rolesville community, and for all the powerful and godly influences that they put in place to make us who we are, and that undergird us still today.

Preface

For decades we eight children of Bob and Violet Frazier, and our children, have dabbled repeatedly in the recording of family recollections that uplift, encourage, and amuse us. We gather and publish those recollections now with the intent to frame them in a more lasting form, both for our own enjoyment, and also for others who may find them interesting. The first of us was born in 1922, so our memories span 95 years.

Roy first had the idea of a comprehensive book about the Frazier family. That idea evolved into the pages before you now. These are the collected thoughts and memories of Mama's and Papa's eight children and succeeding descendants. I've had the privilege of putting them in their final form.

Assembling these writings has been fun, intriguing, fascinating. We hope you enjoy them.

Edwin Ray Frazier, March 2017

Contents

Introduction, page 2

Chapter 1, The Way We Were, page 4

By the Children of Bob and Violet Frazier

Chapter 2, 95th Birthday Tributes

By Violet Frazier's Grandchildren

Chapter 3, The Virtuous Woman of Proverbs 31, page 73

To Violet Frazier, Christmas, 1995

Chapter 4, Recollections of Violet Utoka Pearce Frazier, page 76

Chapter 5, Frazier Words, page 129

Explanations, page 136

Chapter 6, I Remember Papa, page 169

By Winston Pearce

Chapter 7, Bloom Brightly, Sweet Roses, page 178

One of Bob Frazier's Favorite Hymns

Chapter 8, Tobacco Farming in the 1950s, page 179

The Way Papa Farmed Tobacco

Chapter 9, Abbreviated Family Tree, page 213

Aerial Photograph From about 2010, page 218

Photogaph of the House, page 219

The View from 2017, page 220

Afterword, page 221

Index, page 222

Introduction

All recorded history is said to be more like art than like math. It can never be precise, like algebra; it is always interpretive, like a painting.

We fully recognize that three dynamics in particular have significantly impacted both what we recall and also how we tell it. While we have not intentionally misrepresented anything at all in the pages that follow, we're like the several witnesses to a beautiful sunrise: each of us sees from a different viewpoint, and we each express ourselves differently as we relate what we saw.

First, it's a fact that sometimes memory can stray a long way from reality. Later, we will note again the truth of Sawyer Brown's lyrics in The Boys and Me:

We got some tall tales that we love to tell;
They may not be true, but we sho' do remember them well.

A second dynamic is that our writings about the past often reveal as much about those who write, as it reveals about the past. For example, Mama and Uncle Winston had the same father, but their recollections paint different portraits.

A third dynamic is that time actually does change things. My oldest brother Earle and I were born 15 years apart. We grew up with the same parents, in the same house, on the same farm. Decades later, as grown men living far apart, we two met for lunch a few times. We wanted to get reacquainted, to recall our childhood and youth. We concluded that time had changed things so much that the two of us truly had grown up in different homes and in different families. For me, Mama and Papa were not the same people they had been for him. The house, the farm, and the family all were not the same. Time changes many things.

These three and other dynamics were at work as we put our recollections into the words and accounts that are gathered on the pages that follow. Please forgive us when you notice different ones recalling different distances, times, weights, etc.

Introduction to chapter 1:

The Way We Were

by
Bob and Violet Frazier's Children

Thelma Frazier Jones
Lula Barnes Frazier McGhee
Violet Pearle Frazier Keith
Winston Earle Frazier
Syl Vannus Jackson Frazier
Lee Roy Frazier
Myrtas Larue Frazier Baker
Edwin Ray Frazier

We penned most of the 57 recollections in this chapter in the early 1990s, having realized that the way of life we remembered was disappearing. We also understood that it was fading from our own remembrances as well as from a changing world.

So for a period of about three or four years, we each would record a memory and pass the task along to the next sibling. Of course the process was not really that orderly, but each of us did contribute.

We recorded some of these accounts at other times throughout the late twentieth and early twenty–first centuries. Also, we made some changes and additions in the 2017 preparation of the following pages.

Excerpt from chapter 1

Roebuck

I recall going with Papa to Moore's Mill on the wagon. Just up the road from the packhouse, Papa saw our hound dog, Roebuck, trotting along behind the wagon, and told him to go home. Just past the Raines house, there was Roebuck tooling along behind the wagon. Papa, in rather sharp tone, sent him home.

Between Mr. Edwards' house and Mr. Roy Wall's, Papa handed me the lines and said, Just keep going. He had seen Roebuck out in the woods, determined to go with us to the mill. Papa cut a stick with that big knife he carried, stood behind a tree until Roebuck came by, picked him up by a hind leg, and laid a whipping on him until I was ready to start his funeral service.

We saw no more of Roebuck until we were back home. As long as Roebuck lived, when anyone hitched the mule to the one–horse wagon, Roebuck hid under the house. (Earle)

(Some of us recall that Roebuck did what we used to call backtracking.Tracking a rabbit, he could be charging at full speed, baying at the top of his lungs. But when the track grew cold, or Roebuck grew tired, or came to a briar thicket, he would turn around and follow the track backwards, still charging and baying as if he had the rabbit in sight. Roy)

Excerpt from chapter 1

Homemade Baseballs

We did not have baseballs as we know them today. The balls we played with were made from string that had been used to tie tobacco on sticks for curing. Each of us, as we pulled the tobacco off, tried to keep the strings as long as possible. Then we hung the strings on a nail until Grandma got time to make a ball.

She used a small ball of material for the center of the ball, then wound the string around and around and around until the ball was the right size. (I wonder who taught her how to make them.) The balls were good and we enjoyed them until someone knocked – or dropped – it in the drain ditch – then the odor was indescribable! And if someone hit it when it was wet, you got a shower if you were close by. (Pearle)

Excerpt from chapter 1

Peace in the Valley

Often when I'm in Rolesville, I spend a little time with Mama and Papa. Their tombstone reads Peace in the Valley, and that thought has touched me since the first time I saw it. Recently I started looking into the phrase, and came up with some facts and ponderings.

I have no idea whether the phrase meant anything special to Mama or Papa. With most of us remembering less and less as time goes by, I guess we can assign to that thought any story that we like. The best guess might be that when Mama picked out the tombstone after Papa died, she just saw the phrase and like it.

I was able to dig up a few facts. According to Wikipedia (2010), Tommy Dorsey wrote the song Peace in the Valley in 1937 for Mahalia Jackson. Since then, dozens of artists have performed it. Red Foley and the Sunshine Boys made it hit number seven on the Country and Western Best Seller Chart. It was one of the first gospel songs to sell a million copies.

The phrase is like a lot of sermons you've heard in that we could superimpose it on any of several Bible texts. But to be honest about it, it doesn't seem to me to have any real connection to any Bible text. I can't find the phrase Valley of Peace, or Peace in the Valley in the Bible anywhere. The best I found were vague references. (Vague references are about the best that some sermons have too.) Some translation probably has the phrase.

The closest thing I found to an honest connection between the Bible and the phrase peace in the valleyis in the following three passages:

As with cattle going down into a peaceful valley, the Spirit of the Lord gave them rest.

(Isaiah 63:14 NLT)

For my people who have searched for me, the plain of Sharon will again be filled with flocks,
and the valley of Achor will be a place to pasture herds.

(Isaiah 65:10 NLT)

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

(Isaiah 11:6–9 KJV)

The plain of Sharon was a 50 mile long coastal plain in Palestine. It was known for its fertile land and agriculture, also for its beautiful flowers, especially the rose of Sharon (Isaiah 33:9, 35:2, Song of Solomon 2:1).

Achor means trouble. It was a valley near Jericho where they stoned Achan (Joshua 7:24, 26). The prophets wrote of the Valley of Achor as a place of perfect peace and contentment (Isaiah 65:10; Hosea 2:15).

The phrase does suggest that Papa may have been painfully aware always of horrors he saw in France in WWI. From somewhere, I don't know where, I have the idea that those remembered scenes weighed more heavily on his mind all his life long than was readily apparent. Soldiers cope with gory and horrendous memories in different ways, and one way to cope for those who are strong enough and rigid enough to do it, is to just not talk about it. That could have been Papa's case. Surely he must have shared more with Mama than with anyone else.

I became aware of the nature and effect of these war memories in talking with a deacon who was a tunnel rat in Vietnam. These were small men who went into the Viet Cong tunnels to kill the enemy. Nightmare kinds of things happened down there. This man can and does talk about those experiences and memories, but still he struggles with them both emotionally and spiritually. His horror and sadness still come through when he talks about them after almost half a century.

If Papa did have those kinds of bloody memories, then Peace in the Valley is most appropriate. That's what he longed for. That's where he is now. In different ways that's what Mama lived for, as she was the peacemaker in the family.

The song has language familiar to the farmer too: plants growing, clear skies, sunshine, and animals both wild and tame.

There the flowers will be blooming,
And the grass will be green,
And the skies will be clear and serene, oh yes!
The sun ever beams in this valley of dreams
And no cloud will ever be seen, oh yes!
Well, the bear will be gentle,
And the wolves will be tame,
And the lion shall lay down by the lamb, oh yes!
And the beasts from the wild shall be led by a child
And I'll be changed from this creature that I am, oh yes!
There will be peace in the valley for me some day;
There will be peace in the valley for me, oh Lord, I pray.
There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble I see;
There will be peace in the valley for me!
(Ray)

Excerpts from chapter 5

Frazier Words

Our family knows a unique language which more and more people are fast finding less and less meaningful. Lots of people are familiar with these same words, but we associate unique images, sounds, smells, and memories with these words and phrases. Some of these words and phrases are explained elsewhere in this book. Others are explained at the end of this chapter. The index at the back of the book may help to locate definitions and explanations. Ray, mid 1990s

(Here are two of sixteen stanzas of Frazier Words.)

Suckering, topping, MH–30, DDT,

and Paris Green;

Top dressing, side dressing,

and corn laid by;

Eating in the dining room

while the hired help eats in the kitchen;

The little tractor, the big tractor, turning plows,

and gang disks;

Papa's little cultivator hoe,

and the wheelbarrow;

Cultivators, middle busters,

breaking land, and disking.

The hay bailer, the crop duster,

and the wagon;

The smell of freshly broken land,

and going barefoot all summer;

Soda, Guano, burlap sheets,

and washing fertilizer bags;

Damming up the creek (that's not cussing),

skinny dipping, and the dump;

Rhoady, Kate, Mag, Roebuck, fox hounds,

and taking bee hives;

The manure spreader, and cleaning stables

and the chicken roost.

The View From 2017

Gathering these memories has impressed us anew with the realization that the world changes so much and so fast. Just as an example, keys are becoming obsolete. You can equip your car and your house with key pads to lock and unlock a lock: no more big, bunglesome key rings. These keyless locks are a parable of the speed and scope of change.

Similarly, yesterday's realities are likely to be not only transformed, but revolutionized by tomorrow's realities. So we reminisce about a day and an age that already is fading behind the curtains of time. We remember a good day and time, and we are grateful, having so much to be thankful for.

Afterword

After we had finished collecting these memories, after this book was almost completely prepared and ready to be sent to the publisher, the farm that the eight of us grew up on has been purchased by the town of Rolesville. It will become a park named after Mama and Papa: Frazier Park.

So Much to be Thankful For

Paperback   237 pages   15.00

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Edwin Ray Frazier, 4202 Appleton Way, Wilmington, NC 28412
Questions? email: edrafr9@gmail.com phone: 910-232-1258
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