Ed Haynsworth Jr.

Some lives take root in one place. Ed Haynsworth Jr. grew up in the tidal marshes and salt creeks of the South Carolina Lowcountry — a landscape where stubbornness is considered a quiet kind of virtue. He eventually settled in Columbia, making his life in the Piedmont and building everything he had from the ground up. He earned his degree while working full-time with a young family, became a Certified Public Accountant, and then kept going.

He has since traveled through all fifty states and across five continents — through European cities and Southeast Asian rivers, South American coasts and Middle Eastern medinas, Caribbean islands and the quiet mountains of Idaho. Some trips were to see the world. Others were to help it: medical missions to the Garifuna villages of rural Honduras, a Habitat for Humanity build in Nicaragua.

Jazz and blues have been the soundtrack of his life. So has opera. And the ballet. And a good piano, late in the evening. He plays tennis with the same tenacity that carried him through harder years. He believes in simple, whole food — honest and unadorned. He believes in knowing what you stand on before you move.

He believes, above all, in knowing where you came from. Which is why he spent years tracing family genealogies back six generations, preserving his mother's poetry in two languages, and writing down the stories before they could be lost to the tide.

These books are those stories.