The Mystery that Started It All (part 5)

 

Note:  This is a continuation from previous posts.  To start back at part 1, click here.

On the evening of May 19, 2022, I was browsing the newly-released, newly-indexed 1950 census records on Ancestry.  I had already found all four of my grandparents, several of my great-aunts and uncles, two sets of great-grandparents, and one set of great-great-grandparents.  Because finding out more about my Grandma Eva and her first husband is always sitting somewhere in the back of my mind when I am doing family history research, I had a thought — I wonder if I can find G.W. Bryant in the 1950 census.  Maybe I could finally find out where he went after he left my grandmother and they divorced.

Well.  It was a nice thought.

I have still not located where G.W. Bryant was in 1950.  There is a “George Bryant” of about the right age enumerated at Camp Hood, Texas, but my grandmother’s G.W. was discharged from the Army on October 31, 1945, and I have not found a single record to put him back in uniform.  Could he have re-enlisted, or joined the reserves?  Maybe.  I haven’t ruled the Camp Hood fellow out entirely, but for now he is on the back burner.

What I found instead was worth so much more than a census line.  I typed “George Warren Bryant” into the search field, started scrolling through the suggested records, and all of a sudden I was looking straight into the face of the man who broke my sweet Grandma Eva’s heart.

Private George Warren (“G.W.”) Bryant, probably around 1943, near the time he enlisted.
Someone’s copy of this photo is signed in the corner, “Love, G.W. Bryant.”

Well, hi there, G.W.  Nice to finally meet you.

For almost twenty-six years, ever since I first learned he existed, he had been two initials and a shadow.  Now I had a face.  A young one — he was all of eighteen when he married my fifteen-year-old grandmother, and he doesn’t look a day older than that here.  A boy in a uniform, squinting a little into the light.

I want to tell you about that boy.  Not because this is his story — it isn’t — but because he was part of my grandmother’s life, which makes him part of mine, and the truth of her deserves the truth of him.  So let me put a little meat on these dry bones.

Who he was, on paper

The records are stingy, but they agree with each other, which is more than I can say for most of this family.

George Warren Bryant was born February 23, 1925, in Oconee County, South Carolina, the son of Elijah (“Lige”) and Bertha Smith Bryant.  By the 1940 census the Bryants had crossed the river into Hart County, Georgia — the very same county where, that same year, my thirteen-year-old grandmother was living with her mother, her stepfather Snow, and her brother James Jr.  So before the boarding house, before Elberton, before any of it, George and Eva were two Hart County kids a few miles apart.

His World War II draft registration was taken at Local Board No. 1 in Hart County in February 1943 — blue eyes, brown hair, ruddy complexion, five foot eight, one hundred fifty-seven pounds.  His father, E.H. Bryant of Dewey Rose, is listed as the man who would always know his address.  And here is the small detail that made me laugh out loud in the middle of all this sadness: on the card, the government recorded his name as “G.W. (I.O.) Bryant.”  That “(I.O.)” is the board’s own shorthand for initials only.  The federal government of the United States looked at this man and wrote down, officially, that his name was just two letters.

Remember how, back in part 3, I fussed about never being able to find anything but his initials?  Turns out I was in good company.  His initials were his name, as far as anybody — including Uncle Sam — was ever concerned.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army on July 10, 1943, and was discharged October 31, 1945.  There is one more quiet thing the records let me line up: his birthplace.  Three separate documents — the draft card, the census, his obituary — all say Oconee County, South Carolina.  But on baby Bonnie’s birth certificate, in the blank for her father’s place of birth, someone wrote Unknown.  A man knows where he was born.  He could not tell them, because he was not there.

G.W. Bryant WWII draft card (front and back)

Who he was, to the people who knew him

Paper only takes you so far.  For the rest, I have to thank a woman named Nina Jenkins.

In the spring of 2022, some photos Nina had posted started surfacing as hints in my tree.  Her grandmother and G.W. Bryant were brother and sister, which makes Nina one of the very few living people who actually knew him.  I messaged her, told her the whole strange story, and — bless her — she wrote back.

Nina told me that G.W. — “Uncle GW,” they called him — was the oldest of the three Bryant boys who lived to grow up (an infant brother, Elijah Jr., was born and died in 1927), and the odd one out among them.  Where his two brothers were loud and loved to cut up and joke, she said, G.W. was quiet.  Reserved.  “The more tender one,” in her words.  A hard worker.  A man who went off to the Army and came home and just… didn’t talk about the war.

He became a gardener.  Not a few tomato plants by the back porch — acres of it.  Nina told me the local paper ran a piece on him back in the eighties or nineties, because he was still out there plowing his rows behind a mule when everybody else had long since bought a tractor.  She thought the headline was something like “Gardening the Old-Fashioned Way.”

And then Nina told me something that stopped me cold, because I had heard its echo before.  When their father, Elijah, died on September 26, 1945, it fell hard on the family.  Her Nanny — G.W.’s sister Mozelle, the oldest child still at home — took over the cooking, the cleaning, and the raising of the younger children while their mother went out to work.

I have written that exact story.  A young girl handed a grown woman’s whole load before she was grown herself.  That was Mozelle, in the Bryant home after her father died.  And it had been my Grandma Eva, sent off at thirteen to cook and clean and wait on the boarders in her grandmother’s house in Elberton.  Two girls, in two different families, worked past their years by grief and circumstance — and then, improbably, folded into one family, because Eva married Mozelle’s brother.  She and G.W. were both far too young, carrying far too much, and they could not hold it together.  I don’t say that to excuse him.  I say it because it’s true, and because it makes all of them smaller and more human than the villain-and-victim story I carried for so long.

Here is a timeline that has been rattling around in my head ever since.  G.W. was still in the Army when his father died that September; he was discharged about five weeks later, on October 31, 1945.  He and my grandmother were already married by then — had been for nearly two years — and his father’s death came barely eleven months before Eva walked into a courthouse and filed for divorce.  I can’t help but wonder whether losing his daddy cracked something loose in him.  Whether a young husband, just home from a war he wouldn’t speak of, grieving a father, simply could not carry one more thing.  I don’t know.  I never will.  But I’ll say this much for the sake of being honest with myself: he does not show up living with his widowed mother and the younger children in the 1950 census.  So whatever pulled him away from my grandmother, it doesn’t look like he left her to go home and shoulder his own mama’s grief — or if he did, he didn’t stay there long.

The life he got to have

Here is the part that is hardest for me to sit with, so I’ll just lay it out plainly.

After my grandmother, George Warren Bryant went on to live a long and ordinary life.

He married again — more than once, it appears.  His obituary names two daughters, Frances Estell Hughs and Mary Alice Armstrong, both grown and living up in Michigan. But those two are listed elsewhere as stepdaughters to the woman he was married to when he died, which tells me there was another wife somewhere between my grandmother and his last — a wife I have not yet identified, and a thread for another day.  (This story never does run out of threads.)

His last wife was Emily Jean McCannon, some sixteen years younger than he was.

G.W. and Emily Jean Bryant, later in life

G.W. Bryant with family, later years

He drove a truck for Argo Trucking until he retired.  He became a preacher — the Reverend G.W. Bryant, a member of the Eastanollee Church of God.  And on June 9, 1992, at the age of sixty-seven, he died at the Veterans Administration hospital in Augusta, and was buried in the cemetery at Concord United Methodist Church.

G.W. Bryant’s gravestone at Concord United Methodist Church cemetery
(the same stone from part 3), marked simply “G.W.,” beside his last wife Emily

I told you back in part 3 that I stood at that grave and felt, to my own surprise, more sadness than anger.  That’s still true.  Standing there, I couldn’t hate a scared boy who came home from a war he wouldn’t speak of and couldn’t figure out how to be a husband and a father at twenty.  Do I hold on to a little anger, still, over what he put my grandmother through?  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t — and I don’t lie to you.  But here is the strange serendipity of it all:  if G.W. had stayed — if that marriage had held — my grandmother would never have gone on to marry my grandfather, and my father would never have drawn breath.  Neither would I.  The very thing that broke her heart is a link in the chain that leads straight to me.  For that, if nothing else, the man gets a measure of grace.  I can hold both of those things at once.  I think you have to, in this work.

I went looking for him for twenty-six years.  I found his face, his mule, his gardens, his second family, his grave.  I found the boy underneath the villain, and I made my peace with him.

But somewhere in all that searching, I realized I had been asking the wrong question the whole time.

For most of my life, this was the story of the man who left — who he was, where he went, what he did. 

I had made my grandmother the shadow in her own tragedy: the poor abandoned girl, waiting to be rescued or ruined by whatever G.W. Bryant decided to do next.

That was never her.  That was never the story.

I read that obituary more times than I can count, and every time, the same thing catches in my throat.
It names his widow.  It names his two daughters, and his sisters, and his brothers.  It counts up five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.  A whole life’s worth of people, gathered around his name on the page.

It does not mention Eva.  It does not mention Bonnie.

His first wife and his first child — the fifteen-year-old girl he married and the baby daughter who died two days shy of ten months old — are simply not there.  Erased, as clean as if they never happened.  And a few miles across town, in a different county’s cemetery, that baby still lies in her little brick-bordered plot, alone, with an empty grave waiting beside her.

Bonnie Rose Bryant’s gravestone, Elmhurst Cemetery, small and half-covered in lichen

He got the long life, the second family, the paragraph in the paper.  She got the silence.

But my grandmother was never as helpless as that silence would have you believe.  Not by a long shot.  And that — her — is where we’re going next.

To be continued.