Pap

All my life I have not been proud of my mother’s father. His name was Henry Downs and the children of his eleven children called him Pap. Pap died just before my fifth birthday, so I don’t remember much about him. He had long white hair and a scraggy white beard that was stained by tobacco around his mouth.

It was not his appearance that embarrassed me, but his lifestyle. He and three of his sons made home-made corn whisky. Pap died at the age of 59 because of complications related to alcohol consumption. These three sons died at the ages of 50, 52 and 66 because of similar health challenges.

As I have spent a lot of time over the last 10 months helping to care for my mother, I have learned that my grandfather was a generous man. Everyone knew that he “never made a dime on his corn liquor” because he gave it all away! Everyone in the county knew he made the contraband brew in the hollow just below his home, but no one would turn him in to the authorities because he gave everyone in the county some of his homemade recipe in Mason jars—including the authorities.

But Pap was generous in other areas also. All his life he farmed and logged—that’s Mississippi talk for cutting timber and sawing and selling raw lumber. In the eyes of the world, he was a poor dirt farmer with 80 acres of hills and gullies that yielded poor corn and cotton crops. My mother said that while growing up, she and her siblings talked about their family being rich because everyone that they knew in rural Carroll County Mississippi lived just like them, so they must all be rich!

Pap was, however, generous in other ways. He and one of my uncles cut timber and sawed logs into lumber to build Mt. Olive Baptist Church in Black Hawk, Mississippi. That building lasted for many years until a tornado destroyed it.

In addition to the 80-acre homestead, Pap owned a couple hundred acres of land in another part of the county, and he decided to give that land to his first cousin with the agreement that no houses would be constructed on the land without Pap’s permission. This seems odd to me today, but I suppose he had his reasons for doing this. Even today, Pap’s children (only 4 of the 11 children are still living) must sign off if another member of the Downs family wants to build a house on the acreage.

As I reflect on these and other stories my mother has shared about Pap, I have more appreciation for him. When I was young I was embarrassed to let anyone know that this moonshiner was my grandfather. I am older and wiser now, and I can see good things even among the bad things in people’s lives. The fact is that Pap was indeed a generous man. Some of what he shared with others wasn’t acceptable in my Christian worldview, but the fact remains that he was generous.

I am happy that God is not embarrassed by some of the thoughts that I have, by some of the things that I say or by some of the things that I do. He loves me despite all my faults. I don’t love some of the things that Pap did, but I love the memories of Pap and I love most of all that he liked to give to other people.