The weather and simply time has taken its toll on the legacy house that Aunt Ada was born in. The house that the other children were born in had been destroyed by the tornados of 1932.

Over the years the old legacy house finally gave up. Its roof had split open. Bright sunlight now poured in where a ceiling once was.

We felt it was not safe to walk in. Annette had warned me several times to not go into the house. I actually promised her I wouldn’t. I did stand in the threshold. There was not a steady floorboard in sight.

We were there because we knew the property itself held a century of family history.

Years before, Valerie had forayed into the house and there was only one piece of salvable furniture, and it was the chair. It was heavy, worn, and deeply anchored in the family’s soul. She saved the legendary piece before the house collapsed entirely. The Chair was more than just wood and fabric — it contained a throne of memories. Almost everyone who spent some time in Alabama sat in that chair, leaving behind a piece of themselves.

Charles Martin sat leaned back in the chair, looking perfectly at home as he reviewed the mail coming to the house. In another photo, Annette Slaughter smiled from the very same seat — a testament to how the chair connected the family. But the chair’s true magic came alive whenever it was dragged out onto the front porch.

When we went back in 2023, nature had already started to take the house back in earnest.

It was at the back door that Valerie stopped us. Half-hidden in the damp leaves and vines where the back steps used to be was the clean, white skull of a whitetail deer. Antlers still attached, weathered to bone. No one knew how long it had been there, or how it came to rest on the back steps of the house — as if it had come to the back door looking for shelter, too.

She picked it up with a stick and carefully posed with it like a trophy.  It didn’t feel eerie. It felt fitting. The woods were reclaiming the house board by board, and this was proof. The house that had birthed and sheltered so many of us was now sheltering something else.

I remember back in  the day as darkness fell it was darkest we had ever seen, evening fell and the cool night air rolled in, you could sit there and listen to the rhythmic, distant rumble of the trains passing by in the dark. It was during those exact nights that DaJoe would spin his legendary tales. He’d point out into the shadows beyond the one pole light near the outhouse to exactly where the haints used to be. Until the movie Sinners DaJoe was the only person I had ever heard use that word. He actually added sound effects into the stories. I belive he enjoyed telling the stories as much as we enjoyed listening!

Today Thanks to Valerie, the house may be all but gone, but the spirit of Mama Delia’s chair — and the ghosts DaJoe saw from it — lives on. Even now, with a deer skull keeping watch at the site of Paradise Temple that DaJoe founded about 50 years ago!