This story was authored by my late uncle Bill in his Romanian book "un leu, un leu...". His wife, my Aunt Susan, recently found the English transcription of the story and shared it with me. This is the first transcription I could get my hands on of one of the chapters in my Uncle Bill's mysterious book that has been sitting on my bookshelf collecting dust, because I am unable to read Romanian. Today I would like to share a story he wrote with you.
'The Webster Dictionary's definition of a ring is as follows: A circlet, usually of precious metal worn on the finger. The following are two unusual stories about rings going full circle that I am personally familiar with.'
'When I graduated from Douglass High School (the southernmost high school in the U.S.) in Key West, Florida, in 1956, I received a class ring with the date 1956 and a green stone (Green being the school color) on its face, and the heads of "Douglass Tigers" embossed on each side of the stone. The ring was inscribed with the initials WEE (William Eugene Edwards) inside the band. In September of 1956, I matriculated to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) at Tallahassee, Fla. At the end of my first year at FAMU, during the spring semester, following a series of events, understandable only to young people totally involved with themselves and love and life, I loaned my high school ring to a friend. This friend had borrowed and lost the high school ring of a girlfriend, and he did not have his to immediately give her as a replacement. So, I magnanimously loaned him mine to palliate the young lady, who as it was, was a graduating senior. Of course, this was the last that I saw of my class ring... that is for twenty years.'
'After graduating from FAMU in 1960, I went to graduate school at Atlanta University (AU) in Atlanta Georgia, and then into the United States Air Force until the mid 1970's. After coming off of USAF active duty I began a civil service career with the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington D.C. On one of my many trips home to Key West during the period, my father, whose name is also William Eugene Edwards, said to me, "Son, I have something of yours." When I asked what it was, he replied, "your class ring." I said that this was impossible, as I had lost that ring twenty years before at FAMU, seven hundred miles to the north in Tallahassee. This conversation took place in my father's tailor shop and when we were home that evening, he produced the ring he had paid for twenty years prior. The ring was much the worse for wear, the green stone was gone, but Douglass High School, Class of 1956, the "Tigers", and the initials "WEE" were still plainly legible. I have the ring, though an extra hundred pounds of weight over what I was in 1956, prevents me from wearing it.'
'How did the ring return to Key West? I have since given the sequence of events some thought and this is what I believe happened. My father said that a young boy brought the ring to him saying that he had found it under a sugar apple tree in the yard of a man named Van Dyke. Van Dyke, a barber and friend of my father recognized the ring as a Douglass ring, did some fast arithmetics and came up with my name and so advised the young boy who returned it to my father. How did the ring come to be in Mr. Van Dyke's yard under a tree and full circle back to me? Well, in the early 1960's when schools were still segregated in Key West, black instructors came form all over the state to teach at the now defunct Douglass High School. Van Dyke also rented rooms in his home to some of these teachers, there being no other adequate rental facilities in Key West at the time for blacks. I have since been told that during the 1960s, a young lady who fit the description of the girlfriend of that friend of mine in that long gone time at FAMU, was teaching at Douglass School and she rented a room at Van Dyke's. The rest is speculation, but the facts fit.'
'The other tale of a ring going full circle is one that was told to me in 1989 by a friend of mine who is a foreign service officer currently serving as a diplomat in Central America. I left the civil service and the Department of Commerce in 1980 and joined the foreign service of the United States Information Agency (USIA). While serving as Public Affairs Officer (PAO) at the American Embassy in Georgetown, Guyana in 1986, I was selected as a member of a State Department team to prepare for President Ronald R. Reagan's official visit to Grenada following the U.S. rescue mission. During my two weeks stay there, I met and became good friends with this friend, now stations in Belize in Central America. At the time, he was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Barbados, and had also been called to Grenada for the same reason I had. On both our returns to Washington, as fate would have it, we became neighbors in the same area of Southwest Washington.'
'On an occasion when he was visiting my home, for some reason or another, I related my ring story to this friend and a look of amazement came over his face. He said to me, "Bill I have a similar tale, only it happened to my mother and father." He then related the following story:'
'He said that his mother came to this country from the Caribbean Island of Antigua in the 1940s and married his father. They took up residence in a small town in Georgia where his father worked. He said that the white man that his father worked for was a very decent and kind and understanding person, considering the time and place. My friend said that there was an incident in which a white woman was supposed to have been raped by a black man and a lynch mob of white men set out to find the black man who was alleged to have committed this rape. My friend's father had been at work throughout this time and was on his way home when he was seized by the mob and was about to be lynched. He was only saved when his employer showed up and convinced the mob that my friend's father to be could not have done this thing because he was with him. The mob released my friend's father, who was so shaken by the event that he rushed home and had his wife pack their belongings and that evening immediately left the town for New York. When he arrived home his wife told him that she had lost her wedding ring, she thought, down the kitchen sink. Well the father said he had no time to look for the ring and he would get her another later.'
'My friend said that years passed and his mother and father raised a family. They never revisited the town in Georgia where the event had occurred until thirty-some years later. On a whim, they decided to visit the house where as a young couple they had lived so many years prior. They were surprised to find the owners of the house there, and were invited in. The lady of the house asked that they please excuse her, as she was having problems with the sink in the house. This was the same sink my friend's mother had used years before. When the plumber opened the elbow trap below the sink he found a diamond ring. Yes, the diamond ring was the one that my friend's mother had lost before he was born, on that hectic night when his parents rushed out of town without time to search for the young black wife's wedding ring.'
My copy of the transcription
Thanks for reading! If you've made it this far, find out how Uncle Bill and I are similar in my previous post. I never spoke with the man himself about it, but my Aunt claims that he was also pursued by the IRS, even to the point that they would show up at his house looking for him, and threaten to revoke his diplomatic visas.