A Southern Salt on the “Sweet Pea” (working title)

Charles A. Tennant, Jr., was Christina’s maternal grandfather, and her childhood memories of him became her first children’s book, Blueberry Man. Some years before his death at the age of 93, she discovered that he was secretly recording his memoirs onto audiotape. With permission, Christina copied the material on the flaking tapes (he, being a child of the Depression, refused to use new cassettes) onto new ones, and then set about transcribing them with the help of a friend.

The result was over one hundred single-spaced typed pages of her grandfather’s first-person account of growing up in early 20th-century rural Alabama and his adventures thereafter. Having joined the US Navy in 1936, Tennant was assigned to the USS Portland (which he fondly referred to as “the Sweet Pea”), where he spent the early years of World War II, participating in the pivotal Battle of Midway and the Battle of Coral Sea, in addition to landing Marines at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. He received a special citation for bravery and resourcefulness in performing emergency repairs to another ship in the midst of stormy, German U-boat infested waters. After 11 years of exemplary service, he left the Navy as a Chief Machinist Mate.

After the war, Tennant and his wife (about whom Christina wrote the children’s book Tea Cakes, Quilts, and Sonshine) moved to middle Georgia, where they would spend the rest of their lives. He retired from the local VA Hospital as a maintenance supervisor, then worked as a construction company estimator until the late 1980s. Thereafter, he was a full-time farmer. Due to his diligent use of his God-given abilities to maintain abundant blueberry bushes, many locals affectionately called him "the blueberry man." In the 1980s and 1990s, he and his wife attended ship reunions all over the U.S., reconnecting with former USS Portland shipmates. Christina was delighted to attend one of these reunions with them.

Tennant entrusted Christina, his eldest grandchild, with his continuous service certificate and honorable discharge certificate. After he died in 2010, she also formally received the rights to his memoirs. She shared the lengthy transcript of the tapes with her relatives, but considered that his story might interest a broader audience. Once she had completed another (unrelated) memoir project—translating Maria Shelyakhovskaya’s Being Grounded in Love: A History of One Russian Family, 1872-1981 into English and seeing it into print—in 2023, Christina begin research on her grandfather’s life story, seeking contemporary documents and materials that would contextualize his later recollections of events.

A Southern Salt on the “Sweet Pea” is scheduled to be completed in late 2025 and published in mid-2026, shortly before the 110th anniversary of Charles A. Tennant, Jr.’s birth.