Well said!
All in all this has been a very, very enjoyable read. You asked for criticism so I will give some, good and bad.
As others have said and as you realize, you will benefit from a good editor. A part of this, a minority I should add, does drag a bit.
The time portal stuff didn’t work for me. I think that you should scrap it. That doesn’t mean that you should drop the historical references. The stuff about the mules was outstanding for example.
In no particular order, the anecdotes that I like the best from this thread and earlier ones:
-The one about your sister buying the soda fountain.
-The eggplant story (don’t change a word). In general I would like to hear more about Garland.
-The story about your parents teaching at the all black school and how they came to teach there. It was better told in the previous thread about that. I loved how the percentage of kids who went on to college was higher in the all black school.
-The funeral insurance stuff.
It might be interesting to start at the funeral but before getting too far into it go back and fill in all of the background. Then it ends with the funeral in detail.
I wouldn’t worry too much about blurring the line between truth and fiction. It’s not like you’re giving testimony in Court.
Hysterical Fiction
Tabby
I appreciate your respect, and I agree with you for exactly the reasons you stated. I just couldn’t think of anything better at the time.
How about - “Edited for clarity and flavor.”?
That I like!
I don’t care what you call it. Just, please, write it and publish it. I will buy a copy for every person I know.
I’m not sure if this link will take you there, but I’ve added a pic on my Myspace account (jsampiro) taken on my sister’s graduation night (May 1976) that has some of the key players from this. It’s very poor quality unfortunately because it’s a 30 year old small image taken with a cheap camera and put in a non-acid free album, but it’s taken in the front room of K&C’s house. (The bed that’s visible to the right is the one that caused a fight between my brother and Lou Ida.)
From left to right: My brother, my evil [paternal] grandmother (looking amazingly clean and pressed as she’d been held hostage that day to ensure presentability), Mustang, me (the one Mustang’s holding by the elbows) and Kitty and Carrie. Over the mantel is the picture of K&C’s grandparents (though any details are regrettably impossible to enlarge.)
I’m adding more in a few days. One of my favorite’s is the 100+ year old photo that I recently learned we still had of K & C; it’s in perfect condition.
Me either. It worked in the abstract but not in practice, I fear.
Well, one reason I’ve considered calling it fiction is strictly so it WON’T lead to testimony in court. 
Casseroles for the Dead
-stories of a post antebellum family.
Drilled into my head in any writing is to write to your audience. So far so good, the Dope community is your audience. Your fan club here is encouragement enough that you have a good voice. A question to ask yourself is who are you writing to?
My $.02 is to write and write and write. Get all of the stories you have on paper. Then edit and frame some of them into a book. Like an art exhibit.
An artist takes a body of work and decides what to exhibit, not the other way around.
Cheers.
I found it pretty good, actually.
While it doesn’t work so well for the purposes of explaining your family, I think it would make an excellent central theme for an interesting series of short stories. You could easily combine ‘real enough’ with total creative fiction in that kind of setting.
Just something else to think about. 
Sampiro,
You might take a look at the last chapter/section/story in Wallace Stegner’s Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs for a really nice meditation on the blurry lines between truth and fiction, memoir and autobiography, etc.
Tabby
Apologies for the bump, but in case anybody’s interested I wanted to share a some newly added pics to my Weokahatchee photo page.
I went to Cotton’s Alabama Barbecue last weekend for the express purpose of taking a photo of my ancestor, St. Marion the Muleslayer, and I’ve added his pics. (Unlike some folks in the tales I used his real name in case you’re interested, so all info about him is correct.) I couldn’t get pics of the tintype of MB and his wife to look at all decent as its faded so, but there’s a hand painted life-sized photo of the old man on the wall that’s pretty cool. The original version was identical to one that Kitty & Carrie had (also their real names, incidentally) though not the one from my childhood.
Anyway, pointless story long, I reverse engineered it on PhotoShop to the original sepia and raised the brightness a bit to resemble the one I knew with the “glowing face”, not very well but I’ll work it on later perhaps. The picture is here (and there’s a color copy on my myspace account, Jon Darby (jsampiro) on Myspace.
The pictures I took of the pasture turned out eerie but pretty and are on the same page. Must give a back-story to one but for now must run, back later, take care, stay in school and don’t do drugs.
PS- If you’ve ever heard the expression that supplied the title You Can’t Go Home Again, there are two reasons for it.
- You can go to the physical place but you’ll find that you’ve changed, the people there have changed (whether they’re the ones you remember or not), nothing is the same, there is fading familiarity but no sense of connection.
OR
- You asked for driving directions to your former home at Cotton’s Alabama Barbecue on KowaLiga Road outside of Eclectic, Alabama.
Cotton’s is way out in the boondocks of county roads and crossroads and it’s changed a lot. I couldn’t figure out which way was correct. Like so many ruralites the world over the staff there was exceptionally courteous and accomodating and did not let the fact they didn’t know how to get to this road or that keep them from giving directions, consequently I spent about 2 hours and put about 110 miles on my car trying to drive the 28 miles from Cotton’s to where I grew up, which is why I arrived at twilight. The advantage was that I got to see some names of communities and crossroads that like Weokahatchee you won’t see on a map (they’re named strictly because just enough people or buildings were there that you had to call 'em something). They include but are not limited to:
*Short Squaw Creek
Mt. Hebron Crossroads
Balm-of-Gilead (a church and tiny trailer park)
Fawn Lick
Dancing Star Hill
Jehoram Road
Old Plank Bridge*
Kitty & Carrie’s house is especially spooky now, the sensation you’re being watched not aided by the unmistakeable sound of footsteps coming from inside it’s totally uninhabitable ruin. They were probably due to a raccoon or squirrels or stray dog or a 32nd generation descendant of one of their many inbred cats, but still odd, as were the not very distant gunshots in the woods behind the place (hunting season- borders are meaningless).
The light in one of the pics of the pasture in front of K&C’s house is interesting. It wasn’t there when I snapped the pic. I don’t attribute any supernatural explanation to it- probably a camera malfunction or reflection of something (there were no lights, car or otherwise, there’s no ambient light out there, etc.), but cool nonetheless. And the disembodied voice coming from where the light appeared in the picture gave me a recipe for Pork Chops’n’Lemon Rice that was pretty darn good (could use more sage and mint though).