 from the University. But he became a rather successful newspaperman in Washington, where he lived extremely well thanks to the wealth of his wife, Frances, whose father's investments in West Virginia coal mines had soared after the War. Her family took themselves seriously. They had participated in the XXXX founding of Wytheville, a couple of stops up the Shenandoah from Charlottesville on the Southern Line. With barely restrained disdain, they referred to families that had settled in Wytheville after the War as "the new people." It didn't matter if such people had arrived in 1870.
I believe that Henry, a columnist of some sort and the author of a book entitled The History of the Democratic Party, wielded a degree of influence. He and Frances certainly thought that they ran with a puissant, brainy, pathbreaking crowd -- though the existence of such crowds in Washington of the time is open to question. At any rate, their life there ended in 1929 when the crash erased whatever portion of Frances's fortune that Henry, a gambler and thrower of expensive parties, hadn't already spent. He moved back to Macon, taking with him the distraught Frances and her fine collection of family portraits and Virginia antiques, which looked a bit odd in their new home, a rambling but rustic log cabin-like structure that enjoyed neither electricity nor running water. Frances consoled herself with showing off the antiques, founding a small Episcopal church, and cultivating spectacular irises, the best I ever saw other than ones tended by seven full-time gardeners on the estate of a prep school classmate. Henry sought solace in a project he had labored over for some time, a vindication of his great-uncle, General Longstreet, the second-in-command of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, whom Virginians unjustly blamed for the defeat at Gettysburg. He also assumed the editorship of the Macon Beacon, a lesser challenge than the capital's journalistic whirl; compared to Washington, itself a cultural backwater in those days, Macon was mud-primitive. For a Wytheville heiress conscious of "the new people," a woman who prided herself on reading through the entire oeuvres of Smollett and Trollope every year, the comedown could not have seemed more complete. But unfortunately, she and Henry hadn't yet reached rock bottom.
My parents and I visited them when I was four or so. I remember nothing of that particular trip, possibly because I eluded a little black girl who had been charged with watching me while I played outdoors. Somehow I scampered off into a swamp infested with moccasins, the most venomous and feared of the region's water snakes. Great hue and cry ensued. Mother was still mourning the death of Little Brother; the thought of losing me as well undid her completely. I think even Daddy became alarmed.  I'm sure I either was bawling or rigid with fright; perhaps I'd glimpsed beady eyes, the flicking of forked tongues. Daddy rewarded the rescuer with the princely sum of one dollar.
Uncle Henry's situation did not help him moderate his drinking, a vice he compounded with excessive smoking. He also suffered from a grotesque condition that disfigured his nose -- Mother attributed it to the drinking, but I think it must have been some kind of disease. Whatever the cause, it greatly enlarged his nose to a bulbous, reddish mass, with roseate bumps and irregular swellings. 
One night not long after my adventure in the swamp, Henry must have had a few too many drinks. He accidentally set his house on fire, either with a misplaced pipe or an overturned kerosene lamp. The whole place went up in smoke, destroying all of Aunt Frances's cherished antiques and all but one of her even more cherished family portraits, the sole item she managed to haul from the inferno. They lost absolutely everything except for that painting, including, to Henry's unspeakable anguish, the manuscript of his Longstreet vindication. Perhaps one must be a Southerner to imagine how excruciating -- really, how damning -- that particular loss must have felt.
He never recovered. His humiliation intensified when he was obliged to join the ranks of family members dependent on a modest monthly allowance from Uncle Dent to maintain rudiments of shabby gentility. He and Frances found a new place, as rustic as the burned log cabin or more so, and lived there for several years. Finally, however, Henry couldn't tolerate the multiple disgraces. He took a shotgun to his front porch and blew out his brains.
Henry wasn't the only suicide on this side of my family. William Dent, one of Mother's six brothers, practiced law in Memphis. He never married, drank heavily, probably was gay, and ended up killing himself under circumstances I never was able pin down. Taint control saw to that.
Roy Dent, the runaway to the merchant marine and the best-looking of Mother's brothers, was Grandmother Dent's sixth child and the first to have brown eyes, quite dark ones. Lancelot, the seventh child, had dark eyes as well, as did Mother, the tenth. All the seven other siblings had pale blue eyes, as did, I think, both parents -- although Mother, leery of taint and aware of what I was getting at whenever I queried her on this subject, insisted that her father had "hazel" eyes. I'm not so sure about that. Grandmother Dent may have strayed from her marriage -- a surprising possibility given her devoutness. On the other hand, who could have known what really was going on beneath all that imperturbability? If she did stray it was thoroughly covered up.
Frances Dent, the younger of Mother's two sisters, required the most excuses of the siblings, for she was fairly crazy.  Frances snapped one night; when the husband passed out following a beating, she tried to kill him by pouring lye down his throat. It didn't work. However, she did get a divorce, without alimony due to the murder attempt, but with some child support for their daughter. From that time on she remained single.
When I was nine Frances visited us in Memphis with the daughter, whose physical and mental state horrified me. Grandmother Dent said she had suffered from polio, but I'm sure that euphemized the situation. The girl, about twelve, wore braces on both legs, couldn't stand up straight, and looked deranged, an impression that her incapacity for coherent speech confirmed. Worse, I later learned, she had started coming on sexually to boys and adult men. That put her beyond the pale; Minors and Dents did not tolerate such freakishness. Frances institutionalized her with Uncle Dent's reluctant consent, in the kind of place from which few patients ever returned because of the zeal with which its doctors performed lobotomies.
I think Frances may have been a lesbian. At any rate, she hated all males, including me. She joined the WACS and served at various military bases during the second World War. When she got out she lived in YMCAs in a number of Northern cities for a while, then took on housekeeping for Uncle Dent. They didn't get along, of course, so that came to an end. Frances wound up living in the charming guest house of our neighbors on Yates Road, where my parents bought a place when I was seventeen. She and Daddy avoided each other, as did she and I whenever I was there. But she doted on my sister Anne, and on Ellen, the youngest of my siblings.
Of all the unfortunate fates among Minors and Dents, however, perhaps the saddest belonged to Uncle Dent. His law firm required partners to retire at age sixty-five; Mother predicted long before he reached that milestone that it would be his undoing. She was right. Uncle Dent, the kind of man who upon arriving home from work poured himself not a cocktail, but a cup of coffee, felt compelled to keep his mind in high gear throughout the day. Idleness dismayed him. It magnified the effects of his frequent migraine headaches, which had bothered him for many years; it created a void that no amount of reading, visits with relatives, or travel could fill. Not that he didn't try. He took XXX and XXX around the world aboard the Hindenburg, on what proved to be the majestic zeppelin's last tour before its explosion whitened the night sky over Lakehurst, New Jersey(?).
Well, Uncle Dent gradually found old age less and less tolerable. He made three suicide attempts, spaced about a year apart, and finally managed to finish himself off at age seventy-eight. The first attempt involved dynamite, a common plantation commodity used to remove tree stumps, the bane since the dawn of time of anyone wresting arable land from forest. Somehow he failed to blow himself up -- perhaps the sticks also were elderly, for he suffered only singes. In the second attempt he employed a triple effort that he considered foolproof. He downed a bottle of sleeping pills, slit his wrists, and walked into the pond his cattle drank from. But faithful Buss, long his Briarfield factotum, a gangly man ten years younger than he, pulled him from the pond, bound up his wrists, and got him to a hospital before the pills induced permanent sleep. In the third try, Uncle Dent took no chances. Like his brother Henry, he said goodbye to the world on his front porch with a shotgun blast through his brains.
Mother didn't inherit Briarfield, a major disappointment. The plantation went to Sally Starr Minor, daughter of Uncle Dent's brother L