Where Memories Live

Where Memories Live
264 Pages
ISBN 978-I-947309-15-9

Rayflin, now a forgotten place like a ghost town, was a vibrant, busy farm of over five hundred acres at the beginning of the twentieth century. This novel, based on true events and real characters, tells the story of life in the backwoods of South Carolina. The black waters of the North Edisto River bounded the property of Kel and Peninnah Gantt. They raised a family of nine children, two girls, and seven boys.

The story begins in 1910 on a stormy October night with the birth of their first grandchild, Leon. It is the true story of the way a desperate people worked hand to survive. The sons of Kel were tough, fighting with knives when cornered, hard drinkers, and hard workers. This is the first of the trilogy of my forbearers, fifteen years in the making; it is their story, true and uncensored and including pictures of the real characters and details of their personality, as provided by a master storyteller, Leon.

Kathy G. Widener

About Kathy G. Widener (Aiken, South Carolina Author)

Kathy G. Widener

Kathy Gantt Widener was born in the small town of Batesburg, South Carolina. One month after graduating from high school, she married the love of her life and spent the next seventeen years raising their three children. At age nineteen she developed an obsession for genealogy and spent endless hours in cemeteries, archives, courthouses, and interviewing older family members. After eighteen years she decided to attend college part time. In 1990 she received an Associate Degree with High Honors, her major was history. Kathy and her siblings grew up in the same old house built by her Granddaddy Kelly Gantt and his brothers in 1912. She and her siblings grew up listening to their Uncle Leon's stories about his youth, making moonshine and his service in World War II. Uncle Leon had a phenomenal memory and loved to share his stories. He kept Kathy mesmerized for hours with his fantastic tales. After his death at the age of ninety-one, Kathy decided his stories deserved to be shared and began to weave them into a narrative based on true events and real characters.