Paternal Lineage
My grandpa Elton (Buck) Poston was a descendant of Jarmin “Jarfly” Haigler (1710 – 1806.) My grandpa was orphaned and grew up in Toad Harris’s household with close cousins. I am acquainted with Blanche Bryson’s granddaughter Trisha Bryson. Although I consider myself Cherokee, I grew up hearing many stories about our Catawba cousins only family would know.
Our aunt Blanche (Harris) Bryson lived in the corner house on Cemetary Street. My family used to come visit her to help feed and water her animals. She would send my father and his siblings down the hill beside her home to fetch buckets of water from an old watering hole. A naturally formed spring that was surrounded by neatly placed rock. Dad said the water was so clear you could see the sand at the bottom when he was a kid.
Blanche taught my family how to make pottery and it is said she was very frugal in her ways. My father has some sort of sundial or watch she showed him how to make when he was a kid. One of the most impressive techniques she taught us was how to form clay around a blade of onion grass. The rigidity of the onion would maintain the integrity of a hole in the clay that would form once the onion would wilt or was burned away making it possible to hollow out complex pottery like twisted pipestems.
When my family moved to Pineville it is said members of the Harris family would come visit often. They would walk the fields in search of clay deposits. Clay that was gray in color and so fine it almost didn’t need to be sifted except to remove bits of roots, leaves, and stems. My father specifically remembers an uncle on the Harris side that only had one leg and an aunt named Charsey who worked at the corner store off Red River Road. Charsey’s husband had got into some type of minor trouble that landed him in jail.
He would end up dead from being hung in his jail cell by his belt. A very odd event since inmates were not allowed to have belts in the first place. This was also during a time in the south when there was a saying on how not to end up with a belt wrapped around your neck.
I also heard a story about Blanche Bryson’s son who was murdered. I’ve heard different variations of the story from different people but according to my family. Blanche had a son named Stanley who had been in some type of altercation that ended with him being beaten to death. His body had been dropped off in front of Blanche’s house where it had also been run over. It was rumored a corrupt Pineville police officer was behind it and Stanley’s death was avenged by the murder of this officer’s son in a drive-by shooting.
I have also made it part of my family’s tradition to visit the old railroad trussell. A very sacred place where my family’s ancestors once lived. For me, my ancestry is not about money, status, or anything of that nature. It’s about reconnecting with family, and I feel I have proven myself by donating 2 priceless Catawba effigies back to the tribe. I delivered them directly to a lady named Wynona who worked at the Catawba Cultural Center under the condition they would be shared with the tribe.
My Poston lineage is supposed to be European in descent with another Catawba ancestor who went by a name that translates to the Indian term for “Screech Owl”, but I have yet to find her. South Carolina records are terrible and, in many cases, all we have are our stories.