Local author captures father’s essence in first book
Reprinted from The Island Packet, June 27th, 2004.
BY JANUARY HOLMES
The late Merritt Hamilton was known as a man of his word. Filled with a ready laugh and plenty of entertaining stories to share, he also was a hero and best friend to his daughter, Vasilisa.
So when Merritt, a longtime Jasper County farmer, died in 1999 at age 73, a great void was left in Vasilisa’s life.
“My dad and I were very close,” she said.
Wanting to turn her sadness into something good, she decided to write a book about life with her dad and the lessons she learned from him.
To get started, she used an essay she wrote about her dad for a Father of the Year contest a year before his death. The essay appears in the introduction of her first book, “Papa Didn’t Preach: Words of Wisdom for Daddy’s Girls."
The title is a play on the Madonna song, “Papa Don’t Preach,” a favorite of Vasilisa’s.
“He didn’t preach,” she said, “but he made a lot of important points, and I learned a lot from him."
Fifty-six of those lessons are listed in her book, which gives advice for practical living, love and the pursuit of happiness. Each lesson is applied through a story about her father, making each point come to life.
Vasilisa, an editor and writer for the University of South Carolina publication department in Columbia, said her father was a well-known and respected man in Jasper County.
Merritt owned and rented more than 100 acres of farmland in the Point South area. He also owned a produce shop and often would travel, taking a young Vasilisa with him to deliver produce to stores as far away as Savannah.
“It’s a positive, uplifting story,” Vasilisa said of the book, which teaches common-sense things, such as never begging for anything (Lesson No. 3) and not letting people take advantage of you (Lesson No. 11).
For Lesson No. 11, the book tells the true story of a man who always expected to catch a ride to Savannah with Merritt during his produce delivery drives. He always promised to pay Merritt $5 for the ride, Vasilisa said, but never did. He reasoned that her father was heading there anyway, so it didn’t matter.
One day, her father told the man, “Well, the bus is going there, too, but if you don’t pay in advance, you can’t get on board."
The man got the hint, though he never did pay her father what was owed to him.
“He stopped riding,” she said.
Vasilisa absorbed a lot of wisdom from her father just from sitting beside him during his delivery runs. When they would talk about working, relationships or other things Vasilisa brought up, his words were always worth their weight in gold to her.
Merritt grew and sold a variety of vegetables on his farm. The land he worked yielded collards, squash, cucumbers, string beans, corn and even tobacco, which turned Vasilisa’s fingernails brown when she gathered the plants from the fields.
“It was very demanding on the farm,” she said.
Vasilisa and her older sister spent many of their summers helping tend the fields. During the fall and winter, they helped run the produce stand in front of the farm, which sat along U.S. 17.
When people stopped to buy something, they’d stay for a bit and talk with Vasilisa’s father, who was known by many as “Hamp.” She would listen intently to the conversations, many of which were laced with jokes and funny sayings, such as, “ ’I would go to (fill in the blank), but I have to attend a hog killing,’ “ Vasilisa recalled. “People would look to him for laughter."
Besides laughter, music was an integral part of the Hamilton family’s life. The family owned a night club in Yemassee called Dixie Crystal, where Merritt, a former radio disc jockey, played his records.
The family still owns Dixie Crystal, which opened in the 1960s as a place for black people to hang out during the days of segregation.
Music also was a presence in the Hamilton home.
Vasilisa said her parents always treated her friends to “good food and wonderful music” when they came over.
That music included James Brown and Gladys Knight and the Pips. As the music played in the background, her parents would sit and chat with her friends, asking them how they were.
Her parents’ generosity became another lesson Vasilisa shares in the book. Merritt told her he cared about her friends because “if they were good to his loved ones, that’s the same as being good to him” (Lesson No. 29).
Out of all 56 bits of wisdom, Vasilisa believes the most important lesson in the book is Lesson No. 18, which states: “Remain connected to family and loved ones all the time, not just when bad things happen."
“He stayed connected with childhood friends though their lives took different paths,” she said of her father.
A pillar of the community, Merritt was an example to many young boys in Jasper County, who worked on his farm and helped him with produce deliveries. It was there they learned the value of honest, hard work.
He loved to share stories of his childhood, of a time when his family had the only radio in Jasper County and people would come from all over to listen to it. Vasilisa shares this and other memories in the introduction of her book.
Even through the bad times, such as the deaths of family members and friends, Vasilisa said her father’s quiet strength never wavered.
“He was the true measure of a person,” she said.
Contact January Holmes at 706-8134 or jholmes@islandpacket.com.
