where a story began

Yesterday we buried my mother in Hopewell Cemetery, Hanceville, Alabama. She lies next to her husband, Carl Edwin Jacobs, who died in 2009 on their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. Next to them are the graves of my father’s parents, Elisha Creel Jacobs (1902-1971) and Margaret Doran Jacobs (1909-1997). But why are they all here? Not one of them ever lived a day in Hanceville. The answer may be found on a small stone on the opposite side of my grandparents’ graves from my parents’ graves: Bobby Bobby Jacobs — more formally Robert Alan Jacobs — was the second son of Elisha and Margaret, born nineteen months after their first, my father. I am named for this uncle I never knew, but with the first and middle names reversed. Bobby was born with a club foot and could never walk properly; my father, who early on assumed the role of Bobby’s chief caregiver, used to pull him around the neighborhood in a wagon. But the club foot was only the first of Bobby’s misfortunes; later he contracted…