A Mississippi Family
The Griffins of Magnolia Terrace, Griffin’s Refuge, and Greenville 1800-1950
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For information about the doings of the Griffin household and their neighbors at the turn of the century, I had the good fortune of knowing and listening to Brodie Crump. He was a worthy successor to Judge John Griffin as a teller of fascinating stories. Through his columns called "Mostly Old Stuff," appearing in the DELTA DEMOCRAT TIMES between 1940 and 1970, he became one of Greenville's most revered chroniclers. Widely read and admired in Greenville, Brodie's short essays and anecdotes capture a sunshine myth of living in the early twentieth century on South Broadway in Greenville. In Brodie’s columns South Broadway residents bore affectionate nicknames. My father George was Oozy, his first cousins were Wittie (Will Hunt Griffin) and Mitten (Lydia Griffin), and the boys in the Paxton household were Kaky and Gallie. Even the adults had aliases. The patriarch of the Griffin family was, as we have seen, Judge John. His daughters were Miss Mimi and Miss Nellie, the Misses a signal of respect for elders. Only Sarah Lane, the namesake of her grandmother, escaped an alternative. She was always known by her baptismal name, and so she appeared in Brodie’s columns, despite a love of nicknaming they shared. After her marriage and move to Vicksburg, she appeared in the columns simply as Sarah Lane Shackelford. Brodie was showing the respect of one great storyteller for another. Brodie’s idyls of South Broadway created a world in which young and the old were both at peace and in league with one another. My father, I learned in one column, when courting a neighborhood girl in 1917, held her father spell-bound by a tall tale about Lim who was imprisoned in Batavia. He spun out the story until the girl’s two younger brothers nodded off to sleep whereupon she was free to go out (June 23, 1950). In another column Brodie described a young business man joining three boys on the levee flying a kite. He removed his suit jacket, laid it on the grass, and helped the boys pull their kite heavenward against the wind. When the string ran out, he sent my father with a dollar to the hardware store to buy ten more balls of string so they could send the kite clear to California (March 11, 1949). Then there was Lancelot Cat who got entangled in flypaper on the Paxton’s back porch. His plight was worse than that of Brer Rabbit when encountering Tar Baby. The neighborhood rallied: the Harty girls, the Paxton siblings, the Griffin cousins, and even the grocery delivery man cooperated to deliver the cat into Miss Mimi Griffin’s arms which were “always open to critters in distress” (September 6, 1961). In another column he recalled that Miss Mimi and Miss Nellie routinely sent twelve-year-old Wittie Griffin out to hail the mule-drawn trolley at the corner of Johnson and Broadway. When the driver stopped, the ladies would apply horse balm to the galls on the mule’s shoulders and send the driver on his way (August 2, 1961).
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About the Book
From a plantation ledger, an abandoned graveyard, a fragile manuscript, and old newspapers, author Mary Helen Griffin Halloran has raised the bones of her ancestors and made them come alive in this memoir that traces the history of five generations of her Mississippi family.
In A Mississippi Family, Halloran has painted a backdrop to the life the family lived. The story begins with the life and times of three men: Jonas Griffin (1762–1815), his son Francis Griffin (1800-1865), and his son Judge John Bettis Griffin (1826–1903). It ends with portraits of two remarkable women, Judge John’s daughters, Mary Lane Griffin (1858–1942) and Helen Knight Griffin (1864–1949). The stories of these five people, whose fates and values shaped the lives of their children, capture the early history of the Mississippi Delta, Warren and Washington Counties, and the town of Greenville.
Telling tales of river journeys and life on southern plantations, Halloran’s meticulous research has provided a record of her fascinating family saga at a crucial period in the history of the county, state, and nation.
About the Author
Mary Helen Griffin Halloran was raised in Greenville, Mississippi, and earned degrees from Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University and Duke University. After teaching literature and writing in Wisconsin, she moved to Fort Myers, Florida. Halloran left Mississippi at eighteen and returned forty-five years later to unearth her family history.