Finding My Way Home

Chapter 1 Growing up in Rural Williamsburg County

I was born on June 16, 1958, in the Johnson Memorial Hospital in Hemingway, South Carolina. My parents were Carley L. Lyerly and Axley Verniece Cox. They were married at a young age; my mother was sixteen years old, and my father was around twenty at the time. They had nine children of which I was the youngest. Actually, my mother had more than nine children, but she had several miscarriages and a baby named Vera Clare that was stillborn. My mom was forty-eight and my dad was fifty-two when I was born. My mother thought she was just going through the “change of life” when she went to see our family doctor, Dr. Bryant. Then he broke the news to her that she was expecting another baby. I can’t imagine being the age of my parents and having a newborn baby. My father would tell the story that when I was born he told one of the nurses he was ashamed at his age to be seen with a newborn infant and that he planned to take the back street home. The nurse said, “If I could do what you did, I would drive right down the middle of Main Street!”

Growing up, I remember Mom, Dad, and Jenny mostly. I had three older brothers, Jerry, Jim, and Sonny and four older sisters, Nina, Mary, Martha, and Juanita. They were all grown and out of the house when I came along. My sister Jenny was ten years older than I was, and she was the youngest in the family until I was born. We all grew up on a little forty-acre farm that my dad loved. He planted corn and tobacco, and we had chickens and some hogs at one time. I especially remember the chickens because it was my job when I was old enough to feed them. We had a fenced-in chicken yard and an old chicken coop. In the summertime I would mostly go barefoot, and it didn’t matter how careful I was, when I went into the chicken yard to feed them, I always managed to step in chicken manure. As a boy, I always loved the summertime (and still do) because I could play outside all day long until dusk. I always managed to find ways to entertain myself. Everything from catching crayfish from the ditch by the road, to riding my bicycle, or chasing the chickens around in the yard were all ways that I kept myself entertained in the summer.

We lived in a little three-bedroom white house about four miles outside of Hemingway. Our house had one bathroom, and I can still remember when we had the plumbing for the bathroom installed. I remember the old outhouse we had out back and taking a bath in a large tin tub. Our house was one of the old time “shotgun style” homes with a front porch and back porch. It was always cold in the winter and hot in the summer in that house. I can still see my dad sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch smoking his pipe. He always loved Prince Albert tobacco and would roll his own cigarettes until one day he decided it was just too much trouble and switched over to a pipe. I can honestly say that my dad never whipped me a single time as I was growing up. My mother was the disciplinarian in our family and she used switches from her peach trees or whatever bush she could get her hands on when it came time to get one. I can remember many times dancing around in a circle as she swatted me with a switch on my legs. We knew we were loved and although we didn’t have much, we had food to eat, clothes and shoes to wear, and a roof over our heads. Our mother firmly believed that “cleanliness was next to godliness,” so she kept her floors clean enough that you could eat off of them. Every week without fail she mopped those vinyl floors.

1One of my favorite things to do in the summer was to go swimming. The nearest public swimming pool was Johnsonville swimming pool some ten miles from where we lived. I would do anything to go swimming there. Often I would pick butter beans or help Mom work in the garden for the reward of being able to go to “the pool.” I almost drowned a couple of times there before I finally learned to swim, but I did learn.