C.G. and Ethel, A Family History, focuses on the lives of C.G., the son of a sharecropper, orphaned at a young age, and Ethel, who grew up in the log cabin her grandfather built in the 1800s on land he homesteaded in the Florida wilderness. Though C.G. was still a high-school student at age tw...
C.G. and Ethel, A Family History, focuses on the lives of C.G., the son of a sharecropper, orphaned at a young age, and Ethel, who grew up in the log cabin her grandfather built in the 1800s on land he homesteaded in the Florida wilderness. Though C.G. was still a high-school student at age twenty, he refused to give up on his education. After meeting Ethel, the girl of his dreams, he spent an entire night helping her father unload a tobacco barn—“to get in good with her daddy,” he said. “We didn’t have a pot to pee in when we married. So we bought one.” The mortgaged farmhouse the bride and groom moved into in 1941 had no indoor plumbing, no screens on the windows, and no electricity. But together, the couple struggled to improve their lot and that of their three daughters, born within a four-year period. The couple’s frugality will amaze, and their gritty determination to overcome hardships will warm your heart.