Thursday, June 12, 2014

TIGER RIDGE



A few days after an unprecedented March ice storm pummeled the area, the ground crunched underfoot. The season reminded Earnest Edwards of the days when he went to school here, and how he used to stand out from the other children due to his patched pant knees, torn T-shirts, and the fact that he sometimes walked to school barefoot, even in winter.
“We were just low-class people, come from a — I don't really know how to put it into words, to be honest with ya,” Edwards said on an unseasonably bitter day here in America's Deep South. “Like I said, our clothes were a little different because they had patches sewn on them, but they were clean. We didn't have the finest shoes to wear.”

Teachers at Effingham County High School in Springfield, Georgia, felt sorry for him and his family. In the 1960s the entire county, comprising some 482 square miles, went to the one high school, which for Earnest's class of 1964 had about 160 graduating students. More damning than the clothes or the isolation that comes with being part of a small community in a spread-out rural area were the unfettered rumors about Earnest's family.

The Edwardses live in Tiger Ridge, a community of Effingham County withdrawn into seclusion by topography and by choice. About forty family members live in this far-removed corner of the state. There are longstanding rumors throughout Georgia about the people of Tiger Ridge; as with plenty of other backcountry towns, they mostly have to do with inbreeding. Ask a resident of Savannah, Atlanta or Athens about Tiger Ridge, and more often than not they’ll bring up “kissin’ cousins,” with some folks swearing up and down that the residents here are all married to their brother, sister, father or mother, and that the enclave is full of one-eyed yokels with gruesome deformities.

For much of their lives, those who lived in Tiger Ridge faced ridicule for something they were not. They were taunted, and on several occasions drew their firearms in defense, standing guard outside the property to scare away reckless passersby who ventured to see something that was not there. Thanks in part to a yearly holiday light show, that has since changed.

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