A father and daughter pay their last respects
Southern winter storms affect both legs of our road trip from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Plains, Georgia, where we pay our respects to President Jimmy Carter. My four-year-old daughter and I would have started the drive on Monday, but snow and ice blanket Kentucky. This delay is fortuitous. It encourages me to extend our stay until Saturday. A second winter storm brings snow as far south as Birmingham and Atlanta on Friday.
Driving 1,800 miles with a four-year-old to the funeral of someone she has never met is my idea. We are not going to the official service. My plan is to stand along West Church Street and watch the funeral procession to and from Maranatha Baptist Church. She starts asking whether we are in Georgia before we enter Indiana. It only takes her a couple hours to get the picture. “We should have taken an airplane,” she says in Indianapolis. But road trips are more memorable.
Born in Americus, Georgia, in the same hospital from which Jimmy Carter began his final journey to Atlanta and Washington, D.C., Evelyn has no tangible connection to President or First Lady Carter. Unlike my nieces and nephews, she has no signed copy of Jimmy Carter’s children’s book, The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer (1995). Unlike her little sister, Eleanor, Evelyn’s name doesn’t nod to Eleanor Rosalynn Carter. After moving to Michigan at the age of three, Evelyn will have almost no memory of the place of her birth.
And yet, I remember how she loved the Peanut Festival in 2022 and how she still loves it when I find peanuts to boil so far from peanut country. She seems to remember the duck pond in Plains, the mules at the boyhood farm, and finding arrowheads. She will grow up in a house with the framed yard sign, “Jimmy Carter for Cancer Survivor” above a letter from the Carters congratulating my wife and me on our marriage and wishing us a happy life together.
My debt of gratitude for President Carter and the Plains community have put us in the car, alongside a nagging feeling that I owe Evelyn this experience. I play hooky from Western Michigan University and hit the road with An Hour before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood (2001), narrated by Jimmy Carter himself, playing in the background. When Evelyn is older, I will tell her how a seasonal park ranger job at Andersonville National Historic Site first brought me to Georgia. Southwest Georgia gave me a second lease on a public history career that had an uncertain future in 2015. Or, to put it bluntly, Jimmy Carter saved my career. For now, I just tell her that President Carter tried to make the world a better place.
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This quixotic journey brings a flood of old memories that increase in Alabama and Georgia as we pass the ruins of tenant houses. There was the morning in December 2015 when I stopped a neighbor, Mark, and asked for directions to an old dump locals called the “bottle graveyard.” It was one of many places the extended Carter family and their friends mentioned over dinner or drinks. Everyone knew my interest in history and my love of finding things. From our earlier conversations, they welcomed me with tall tales of what could be found in the plowed fields and woods. Permission to explore was implied in the oft-repeated phrase, “no one will care if you go out there.” I went to see what old bottles might be sticking out of the ravine.
Soon I became lost in the pines. It is hard to underscore the stupidity of going into a forest of unknown ownership during hunting season. While I eventually found the right gully, I also passed deer blinds and corn feeders. There must have been cameras too. The next day, while running, I noticed fresh “No Trespassing” signs secured into the trees along the road. I stopped and walked up to one. The signature block read, “JC – Plains, GA.”
Running back into town, I saw Mark walking down Church Street. “Mark, you didn’t tell me that was Jimmy Carter’s property!” “Oh, I thought you knew that, Evan,” he replied calmly.
Jimmy Carter might have been inclined to forgive trespassers. That still left the U.S. Secret Service to worry about. I asked a mutual friend to pass along my apology when she saw the Carters later that day. Afterwards, she assured me the signs were only there to deter poaching. I knew better. I never went back to the bottle graveyard.
North of Plains, December 10, 2015. Photograph by trespasser.
Passing the rural churches heading into Americus, I remember good mornings—and a few painful ones—at Maranatha Baptist Church. I volunteered there in 2015 and 2016 to help with Sunday school. Sometimes this meant directing parking. Other times I greeted visitors after they came through the Secret Service checkpoint. I held the door, pointed out the location of bathrooms, helped them find seats, and passed the collection plate. One weekend, while working as a seasonal park ranger at Andersonville National Historic Site, I gave a visiting couple a tour of the infamous prison on Saturday, showed them their seats in church on Sunday morning, and ran into them at a coffee shop in Americus that afternoon.
My memories of Sunday school have blurred together. It began with a church member giving instructions about how to behave during Sunday school. This person told guests to stay for church services if they wanted photographs with the Carters. Visitors could take photographs of Sunday school only while President Carter polled the room to see where people had come from. Do not repeat place names or else Carter might scold, “we’ve already heard that one.” If he asked whether ministers were visiting and you raised your hand, be prepared to lead the whole sanctuary in prayer. After these instructions, President Carter quietly entered the room while heads were bowed in prayer. Carter’s message was often similar regardless of the specific lesson. Every day, we choose what sort of life we want to lead for the rest of our lives. This choice is a gift of Jesus Christ.
Sunday school and photographs were a small part of the lived theology Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter put at the center of their long lives. As Carter got older, he hinted that Sunday school and pictures wore him out. “I used to say I’m happy to take photographs,” Carter would say with a long pause. “Now I’m willing to do it.” That line, with a smile and perhaps some truth, became a regular joke in his final teaching years. He taught Sunday school and took photographs with visitors until an injury in 2019 made this act of faith and kindness no longer possible.
My memory of June 12, 2016, is clearer than most. My future wife, Amanda, and I were there with my mother and stepfather. With hundreds of people waiting for a picture, guests knew from prior instruction not to say anything to the Carters beyond a greeting unless the Carters initiated conversation. President Carter slowed down enough to say hello to us.
“Good morning, Dr. Evan,” he said.
“Good morning, President Carter. I have some special folks with me today.”Â
“We like having him in town,” Carter told my guests.
The photograph taken seconds later became the last one I have of my stepfather. Born during the Great Depression, he was a Princeton-trained Presbyterian minister before turning to child and family protection services in Los Angeles. His complicated faith after leaving the ministry contributed to my own skepticism, but he never missed church choir. For this reason, and because I became an irregular churchgoer in my adolescence, we almost never sat together in church. He entered hospice that week and died ten days after Sunday school. The folded church program sat behind the photograph in my office at Georgia Southwestern State University for the next seven years. It now sits on our mantle in Kalamazoo.
My regular experiences with the Carters between 2015 and 2020 were not ritualized public events, unlike Sunday school. Living for two years in a boarding house where the Carters often came to dinner meant a seat in the room, if not always the main table, dozens of times. These informal dinners, like Sunday school, have blurred together. Volunteering with the Carters on the Friends of Jimmy Carter National Historical Park allowed me to work with them on the mundane day-to-day matters of a nonprofit board. The latter experience convinced me that we might add public history to the list of the Carters’ post-presidency occupations.
These semi-private experiences, a tremendous gift to me as a public historian, ended by the time the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. President Carter fell in October 2019, and he looked like a different man the next spring. I never saw him again at a board meeting after March 2020. Rosalynn Carter participated for a couple more years.
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We arrive in Americus. Evelyn and I stay three nights in the home of friends. Southwest Georgia is important to me independent of Jimmy Carter. For most of the trip, I focus on seeing more than fifty old friends and doing activities Evelyn can enjoy too. She plays most with Charlie, our host family’s lively three-year-old, and Eliza and Isaac a few blocks away. Our three families go to our favorite pizza place for the beer, but—importantly for the kids—an M&M dispenser and staff who do not mind four kids rolling the pool balls across the table. We attend “Cookie Club” (or “Feral Friday”) with a dozen parents and almost as many young kids. The kids eat a cookie, do table activities, and run wild (hence the alternate name) while the parents find an hour or two to converse at the end of the week.
President Carter’s death brings out reflections that are typical of reunions and funerals. Everyone in Americus and Plains has a Carter story. It is a pleasant surprise when friends remind me that I helped arrange some of these special memories. On a few occasions, I brought people to dinner in Plains. Or there was the stretch of time in 2018 when Maranatha Baptist Church needed to find a visiting pastor each week. I told a layman friend who attended the Mennonite church about the problem. He said he could fill in. Whether this initial offer was serious or not, I connected him with Maranatha. He followed Jimmy Carter’s Sunday School with a service only a few weeks later.
On the day of the funeral, we watch the service at the National Cathedral from a living room in Americus. Then we drive to Plains. In 2023 Jill and Andi sold the Queen Anne boarding house where I once lived, and they moved into the 4,000-square-foot office building of an empty biodiesel plant. There we learn that the flight from Washington, D.C., to Fort Moore, Georgia, is delayed. Seven of us, representing three states and two countries, tell stories about old times with the Carters while Evelyn watches a dinosaur show with a three-year-old from Portland. Plains is still a crossroads of many people—at least for today. CNN plays in the background, and the coverage has already shifted from Jimmy Carter to the California wildfires.
Evelyn and I walk through downtown. We steer our way past the media crews to West Church Street where the procession will arrive. I find another old friend standing on the porch of Kim and Mark Fuller. The Fullers are animal lovers, and my daughter makes friends with a fluffy cat lounging on the front steps. She meets Emily and Cyrus, who are President Carter’s great-great niece and great-great nephew. The trio create the sort of organic fun that children make anywhere. They climb a tree and chase each other around a truck. Emily brings out one of the puppies her Fuller grandparents—away at Maranatha—are fostering.
The procession arrives from Fort Moore at about 5 pm. Unmarked SUVs roll through with police lights flashing. Then come motorcycles and the hearse with the American flag over the casket. The Airforce flyover, in missing man formation, is scheduled to pass after the service, but the planes arrive on the original timeline only minutes after the hearse arrives. The roar of the F-16s gives me chills. Evelyn stares upwards too. One plane breaks formation and shoots up into the sky symbolizing the loss that has occurred.
West Church Street, January 9, 2025. Photograph by Sydney Scott.
Most people go home after the procession moves on to the church. For people coming from Atlanta or farther north of the city, or dependent on its airport, the approaching winter storm cuts short any lingering. But Evelyn and I have come too far to leave so soon. Our persistence comes at the price of comfort. Evelyn’s light jacket, sufficient during the afternoon hours, is no match for the sudden drop in temperature at sunset. By the time the hearse returns, Evelyn wears her jacket, my sweatshirt, and the coat of a former chemistry colleague—despite her protests that she is just fine with two outer layers.
The family walks behind the casket. I wonder if any of them think about how cold it was on Inauguration Day in 1977. Except for the motorcycles and the occasional military cadence, everyone and everything moves in silence. Dark shadows of crouched photographers pass us on foot with only the clicking of their cameras to be heard. A few minutes later, the film crews pack up. Our walk back to our car, a half mile away, is cold and treacherous in the dark. Evelyn rides on my shoulders as she has much of the evening. As we walk through a dark field, she asks with a touch of sadness whether she can still ride on my shoulders when she turns five this spring.
West Church Street, January 9, 2025. Photograph by Sydney Scott.
Plains becomes more solemn on Friday. Stillness has replaced yesterday’s cameras, crowds, and movement. The town looks—and feels—empty. There is only one news agency, WALB, and perhaps a half dozen people. At the Boyhood farm in Archery, two miles west of Plains, park rangers outnumber visitors. Evelyn and Charlie go through Carter’s boyhood house. They marvel at the replica food. They gawk at the goats and chickens. They pet the ponies that have replaced the old mules in the pasture. A cold wind and sprinkles push us back to the car. Heavy rain arrives by early evening.
Playing with the ponies at the Boyhood farm, January 10, 2025. Photograph by author.
Sunset near Archery on Jimmy Carter’s preferred walking route between Plains and his boyhood farm, January 2017. Photograph by author.
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We leave Americus at 4:30 am on Saturday morning and drive through Plains on the way to Alabama. I think again how empty it looks with all the fences and tape but no people. There will be crowds again at Plains, Trains, and Fireworks in July and the Peanut Festival in September. I suspect locals will continue the “Peanut Drop” at 8 pm on New Year’s Eve. And while it will never be the same without Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, the town will remain a living monument to their exemplary lives for a long time to come.
We drive on. My daughter sleeps in the backseat as I watch the sunrise near Birmingham. Snow appears in the adjacent woods. If the roads are clear, we might make the return trip in one day. I turn An Hour before Daylight on as Evelyn stirs. Carter’s reading reminds me why we came on this long journey. May this trip be a lasting memory for Evelyn. May she learn to give back to this world. May she have exemplary leaders in her life who push her to always do her best. And may Jimmy Carter not be an outlier.
The sun sets as we pass Indianapolis, northbound for Kalamazoo.
Evan Kutzler is a public historian and an associate professor of history at Western Michigan University . He is the author or editor of several books, including Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).