BY THE GRAVE OF UNA PEARL

This is where it begins.  The first scene in Precious Jewels takes place right here, when the inscription on the grave stone was new.  It reads "UNA PEARL, Daughter of Jtun Potts & Carolina P. HOLT, and the dates. 

Una Pearl Holt  was born on Valentine's Day 1895, and died in December of the same year.

There is room around the grave for more plots.  but a hundred years later, Una's grave is a lonely place, encircled only by a ragged wrought-iron fence which has the same crumbling texture as the years-old layering of leaves that cover the sarcophagus.

It is clear that her parents intended to be buried beside her someday, but the family was ripped apart at the seams by the events that came in the wake of this child's death.  At this gravesite.

Instead, her father died in Memphis, and her mother died in the wilderness of coastal Carolina.  Her sisters who were born later, also scattered to the winds, one on the west coast, one on the east.

A hundred years later in the 1990s, my husband Kevin and I found the grave, and I took this photograph.  The grave is located in Yazoo County, Mississippi, on Graball-Freerun Road, across the road from Bethany Church where other family members who died later rest in the newer cemetery in their own enclosed Holt Family section, which has seen better care.  Little Una Pearl appears to have been forgotten, until today as we move aside the brambles and brush aside the leaves, and speak her name. 

Who would have dreamed a hundred years ago, as the young parents mourned beside this same grave, that their great-granddaughter would trace their footsteps to this place?  Would they be surprised to know that their stories mattered so far in the future?

And what about me, I wondered.  Will my life matter later on?  I have no descendents to trace my steps on a sacred journey of discovery a hundred years from now -- but neither did Una Pearl have descendents.  Her life wasn't a year long, yet she changed my entire family history.

Those who change history aren't always the prominent, obvious people, nor those with droves of descendents.  A person whose life impacts future generations could be anyone -- it could be you.  It might even be me.