Jake Keeling TAGHS Meeting: Growing Up in Jumbo, Texas

“Jumbo is located about half-way between Mount Enterprise and Clayton on Highway 315, right on the Panola-Rusk County line. The Handbook of Texas History calls Jumbo 'a dispersed rural community', which means that no one is really sure what its boundaries are, so if you want to say you are from Jumbo, no one can dispute it”, laughed Jake Keeling as he began his talk at the April monthly meeting of the Timpson Area Genealogical and Heritage Society. “Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, which is still active and strong, is located where downtown Jumbo used to be and our church sign says 'Jumbo Community' on it, which is Jumbo's only signage”.

Keeling continued, “I was born with cerebral palsy and that's the reason for the wheelchair”, he explained. “I've had it all my life and I'm used to it. This is normal for me. After I was born, my parents brought me back to Jumbo where most of our extended family had lived for many years. I had a lot of cousins but because of my disability I couldn't go outside and run and play and throw balls as they could. So I would sit and listen to the adults talk and tell stories and these stories became important to me, much like a child might become fascinated by dinosaurs or baseball.  I began to make connections between the people in the stories rather than just the events. Eventually I began to ask questions to fill in the gaps. I especially liked talking to my grandfather, Curtis Keeling Jr.”.

“Curtis, or Pawpaw as we called him, was 69 when I was born, so he remembered people who had been born in the 19th century as well as the stories and events they had told him about from that era. Hearing these things from a man who had heard them from those who experienced them made them seem much more real and alive to me than something I read in a book.  They were a part of his life and he was a part of my life. Pawpaw was a hard-working man who spent most of his days on a dead run from one task to another, so getting him to sit down and talk to me was difficult but I learned how to ask him questions that would spur recollections that he would share with me,” Keeling continued. “I have told many of Pawpaw's stories to other members of the family and they often exclaim that he had  never shared that with them. The reason is simply that he certainly wasn't a man who dwelled in the past and they were always involved in other activities, but I had the time and interest to draw them out of him.”

“My love of oral history followed me to East Texas Baptist University where I majored in History and am now a part-time instructor in the History Department. After graduation, I completed a Master's Degree in History at SFA, where I learned that, while oral history is important and it is what I do best, it must be documented and researched,” Keeling said.  “That is where my disability presented problems because I can't read for long periods and my hands don't manage books very well. I wish I had recorded my grandfather telling some of his stories but I didn't know at the time how important that documentation would be in the future”.

“I'll share one of the many stories my Pawpaw told me with you today. Uncle Edgar Keeling had a service station on the corner of 840 and 315. He was my great-grandfather's first cousin. He also farmed in the late 1950s and raised cattle. One year he had a big crop of sweet potatoes. When he dug them up they had black spots on them. He called it the blight and he couldn't market them so he decided to feed them to his cows. He had about 50 head of cattle and not long after he had fed them the sweet potatoes they began to die. He lost nearly his entire herd. Pawpaw went to see Uncle Edgar and said 'I'm so sorry about what has happened! ' Uncle Edgar said 'Oh don't worry about it. I'm better off that a lot of folks'. 'How do you figure that?,' Pawpaw asked him. 'You've lost your crop of sweet potatoes and nearly all of your cattle!' 'Well', he said, 'I do have a good pair of mules to drag them off with'”.

Jake Keeling brought two books of Christian fiction that he has written and published with him. “You might wonder how I went from history to writing novels. I have always been interested in people and their interaction with each other. When I was an undergraduate at ETBU they had some Christian writer's conferences which I attended. I learned two things from those conferences. One, write what you know and two, write about something that not everyone has experienced. That is what I did in my two novels, which are about a boy with a similar disability to mine living in East Texas. However, another thing they emphasized in the writer's conference was that conflict is what drives the plot. This is difficult for me because I like my characters and I don't want to create problems for them,” Keeling chuckled. “In my novels, the main character does not have the support system that I had and has to make it on his own. With these novels I was able to develop a set of characters and let their story play out”. Both Horseback Days and Lightening Bug Nights,  his first published novel, and the sequel, Beyond the Parmalee Bottom, are available from Amazon.

The Timpson Area Genealogical Society meets at 2PM on the third Wednesday of each month in the meeting room of the Timpson Public Library on the corner of Austin and Bremond Streets in downtown Timpson.  The TAGHS library is located within the Timpson Public Library and is open and staffed from 9AM until 5PM weekdays. Telephone 936-254-2966 and ask for the Genealogical Library.