Uncle Will by Janet Sarjeant THIRD P LACE Bonaparte was a long way from France. The small town in Virginia was not even that old by the standards of other Virginia towns, only incorporated in 1904. When the railroad finally made its way into that part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the town started to grow along Chestnut Creek, and someone thought it was a satisfactory name. A Frenchman in the New World? An historian in those mountains? A lover of exotic names? Well, so be it — Bonaparte it is. I entered the town in the 1950s, born into an extended family of relatives because both my mother and father were born there. My Uncle Will lived there. My people may have lived there, but I never did because my parents moved away ( but not very far away ) when they married in the 1940s.Visiting, however, happened frequently, and my brothers and I did not even mind that our parents packed us into the car and made the thirty- mile trip many times a year. My Granny Ada’s home on Main Street never failed to entice: Coca-Colas in the fridge, treats from the “filling station” sitting catty-cornered just across the street, cousins living nearby within walking distance, and an attic dark and mysterious to explore whenever we wished. And Uncle Will was there.
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Hard to explain our feelings toward Uncle Will. We children knew he was different, but he was ours and we accepted him “as-is”. “As is” — that phrase for accepting something just the way it is, maybe fixable, maybe not. Anyway, Uncle Will was there when we visited. We children called him “uncle” as we did many adult relatives who were not really uncles. Uncle Will was first cousin to my father and just a few years younger. Will’s older brother and younger sister had their own lives by the time I was born, so Will was the only one of his generation in the house. His crutches leaned against the wall beside his rocking chair when he sat in the living room.They leaned against the wall in the kitchen when he sat at the table, or against the outside wall of the house when he sat on the porch, or against the wall in his bedroom when he went to bed at night. The crutches leaned close by not for Uncle Will to pick up and use, but because someone always had to pull Will upright from a chair and place them under his arms for him. His mother, my great-aunt we called Aunt Ruth, would pull him up out of the chair, hold on to one hand or arm, and reach for the crutches. The crutches needed to be near. Once he had them, he could walk, sort of; the braces on his legs that kept his knees locked and his legs straight helped support him so he would not fall. His heavy walking movements went like this: one crutch forward, then a leg, the other crutch forward, then the other leg. A rhythmic four-beat measure. As a child, I could not have lifted him from the chair. None of us children could have. But we would grab the crutches for the adult who raised him, never giving much thought to it. In my early years, a Black man named Clarence came morning and nighttime to help him dress and start the day and undress him and end the day. After Clarence left each morning, it fell to Uncle Will’s mother or to my Granny Ada to help him. Ruth and Ada. They were sisters who lived together with Will in the Main Street house in Bonaparte
