Granddad Witnesses a Wedding — That Wasn’t

 

G.M.C. Massey

As a lay minister, my grandfather, G.M.C. Massey, would perform a few marriages during his life. Witnessing one scene of wedding vows going wrong impacted him enough as a young man to write about it years later in his memoirs — and to come up with his own way of avoiding the problem in later ceremonies.

I am made to think back when I was nearly grown that we were taking our wheat to a flour mill at Oak Grove, east of Quitman, at old man John Malone’s and I got acquainted with Jim Malone and I liked him very much.

So one time I planned it so that I went to Malone’s on Saturday so that I could get my wheat ground on Monday. That arrangement allowed me to spend Sunday and according to a pre-arranged agreement we were to go to a wedding on Sunday evening. As I understood the girl had been an old sweetheart of Jim’s. He told me that he had just got negligent and had not been to see her in several weeks and he thought that she was trying to get even with him.

We stayed at his house till about 30 minutes of the hour and we got there about 5 minutes of the time. We slipped in very much unobserved and when the preacher announced that it was time for the ceremony they came marching in. The preacher used the double ceremony and he got the man married; but when it came to the girl and it was her time to say “Yes” she turned around and ran back into the other room and burst into tears and she would not go on with the ceremony and her mother and the preacher and the groom-to-be all of them did all that they could do to get her to go on with the ceremony, but she just simply said that she would never go on with it.

And that was all that there was to it. But a few months after that, Jim Malone and the girl got married and then I knew what was the matter all the time.

So that taught me a lesson that I still remember. So when I am called upon to perform a ceremony, I always marry them both at the same time by saying, “Do you and each of you,” and when I get one of them hitched I have both of them hitched.

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