The State of Jones (41 page)

How Serena felt about the deed is lost to history. But with so many mouths to feed, Newton, Rachel, and Serena weren’t left with much time to argue over domestic emotional dramas. There was just too much work, and too little privacy.

In all, eleven bodies jostled for space in Rachel’s log home, the children so numerous they always seemed to be “in the way, constantly shoved and pushed around,” her granddaughter Anna Knight remembered.

The cabins in which Newton’s dual families dwelled were packed with hungry-mouthed youngsters in coarse hand-me-down homespun. He now had seven children with Serena ranging in age from their eldest boy, Mat, born before the war, to a toddler named Cora. Rachel’s five children by Newton, meanwhile, were all under the age of eleven. Also living in Rachel’s cabin were her teenaged children by Davis Knight, Jeff and Fannie, and the two eldest who had been purchased with her in slavery, the boy Edmund, and Georgeanne, now a full-grown woman. Lastly, there were two more babies. These were Georgeanne’s own infants, a daughter named Anna and a son named John Howard.

The Knights, white and black alike, worked in an endless circle of arm-wearying, hand-callousing toil, plowing and chopping cotton. The youngest did their part by ferrying water in tin buckets up and down the hill from the spring and carting jugs to their elders in the fields. As soon as a child was big enough, he or she took a place in the line, hoeing or chopping weeds with an old pickax. The Knight children picked the cotton in the late, hot summers; one child remembered picking a row every half hour, filling her sack. The family together could make a bale in a day. When they weren’t working cotton fields they tended to crops of turnip greens, mustard greens, string beans, and tomatoes.

Often, it was work without much recompense. When the crops didn’t fail, they fetched paltry prices: Mississippi was locked in an agricultural depression that lasted from the mid-1870s until the 1890s. Cotton, once king, sold for just six to eleven cents a pound depending on the year. Pay for a field hand was twelve dollars a month, but nobody had cash. Mansions buckled and peeled, while sharecropper families starved in dogtrot cabins. Mississippians were worth only $286 per capita in 1877, compared to an average of $1,086 in the North.

Nevertheless, over the next ten years other members of Rachel’s family also became independent. Georgeanne eventually purchased eighty adjoining acres and moved her children into a one-room
hewn-log cabin there. In time Newton also deeded land to Rachel’s eldest son, Jeffrey. This meant that Rachel and her children were part of a tiny class of independent, landed black yeomen, while so many others were trapped in the stasis of tenant farming. By 1890, the proportion of blacks who owned their own farmsteads in Mississippi would still be just 11.4 percent.

The white and black Knight families were now neighbors and equals in all but one respect. Their children worked and played alongside one another, but Rachel’s children and grandchildren still could not attend school. Instead they picked up their education secondhand from the books the white Knights brought home, poring over their copies of the
Blue Back Speller
, or McGuffey’s reader, and learning by drawing words in the sand in the yard.

On Sundays the neighboring families would gather and hold their own church services. Afterward they held dances, or card games, or spelling bees for adults and children alike as entertainment. For a blackboard, they nailed boards together and painted them with soot, and they dug out natural white chalk from the mud banks. After the spelling matches, they had ball games, or threw stones, or had country sing-alongs from an old beloved songbook,
The Sacred Harp
, voices rising in the choruses of “Awake, My Soul” and “A Charge to Keep.”

As the homestead grew by the acre, it became less rustic and more gracious. An apple tree stood in Rachel’s yard, with a bench in the shade, where she would do her hair. A yard full of flowers, spikes of iris and herbs, was enclosed by a picket fence. A cedar pinwheel hung on the gate and spun when there was a breeze. Flowering vines twined up the porch to the gallery, and a cedar water bucket and gourd hung by the door for the thirsty.

There were more tragedies over the years for both families. Two children died: Serena’s son Billy was trapped in a fire, and Rachel’s son Edmund would not see 1880. The cause of Edmund’s death is uncertain, but he was probably a casualty of an epidemic of yellow fever in 1878 that took several lives in the area.

Newton grieved; he was a tender parent, and an attentive one
when he wasn’t too tired from work. His daughter Molly had vivid memories of tussling and giggling with him, and stories of his gentleness with children survived for generations. But he was also burdened and could become laconic and morose. He called these “thinking” periods and would shoulder his shotgun and wander off down the hill toward the spring and disappear for a day or more at a time. He may have been visiting Rachel, with whom he “was forever having business.” There is some evidence that Serena complained about these solitary trips.

Newton’s loyalty to Rachel was becoming a well-known scandal in the county. Ben Graves, his old neighbor, was appalled by rumors that Newton “took a Negro as a wife.” Accounts of Newton’s behavior circulated among the black community, too: Martha Wheeler, the former slave who had worked for Jackie Knight, heard that Newton had begun to live almost entirely “among the Negroes” and that his children with Rachel “were given advantages.”

Neighbors began to shun them, and some of Newton’s relatives and oldest friends refused to have anything to do with him. His old guerrilla compatriot Dick Yawn, who had married his loyal younger sister, Martha, announced that he would no longer visit Newton’s farmstead, even though they had fought in the war together. Cousins denied they were kin with him. “So many vile things were said of Newt” that even one of his own brothers, James, supposedly refused to acknowledge him because he had “married” a black woman and “mixed the blood of the races.”

There would be more intermingling as the combination of social pressures and political dangers drove the Knights inward. Increasingly isolated in the hilltop enclave, they began to intermarry. In 1878 Rachel’s son Jeffrey courted and married Newton and Serena’s white daughter Molly. Shortly afterward, Newton’s eldest white son, Mat, wed Rachel’s daughter Fannie. The couples shared mutual experiences and sympathies and had been encouraged to view each other as equals. Socially cut off from their peers, they perhaps also shared a sense of loneliness, in which affection grew.

The couples moved to land adjoining Newton’s and started their
own homesteads. By 1880 Jeffrey and Molly were farming 140 acres and had the first of their seven children, a daughter they named Altimirah after their aunt, the antebellum mistress who had cared for so many slave children. Mat and Fannie were next door farming 48 acres. The Knight households had become so interrelated that it was hard to keep straight who lived where, and with whom. A federal census taker in 1880 tried to get a headcount of the people living in the cabins that now dotted the Knight acreage but became hopelessly confused, getting their relations wrong and scribbling some names down twice.

As the young marrieds started their own families, Newton and Rachel seem to have hoped that their children and blended grandchildren would inherit a world with fewer racial classifications. It was a fantasy. Instead, Mississippi was becoming ever more obsessed with racial purity and blood quantum. New Jim Crow laws erected impassable barriers between white and black and defined even a fractional trace of slave heritage as an intolerable pollutant. The Knights weren’t becoming safer and more racially invisible to the rest of the world. On the contrary.

The Redeemers asserted their political will with statutes reminiscent of the Black Codes. Sweeping new vagrancy laws took effect: Rachel’s son Jeffrey could be jailed simply for not having a job, or for leaving one before his contract expired. Rachel was liable to wind up in prison if she herded the wrong hog under Mississippi’s new “pig law,” passed in early 1876, which defined the theft of any farm animal worth more than ten dollars as grand larceny and made it punishable by five years in the penitentiary.

The statutes were calculated to bend the sweating backs of freedmen on behalf of planter-merchants again. Under a draconian convict-lease system petty offenders found themselves in bondage, hired out for involuntary hard labor and whipped by overseers for “slow-hoeing.” The number of state convicts quadrupled. Men and women were thrown into jail and then had their sentences extended when they were unable to pay bureaucratic fines. Newton’s family
didn’t have to look far to see the abuses of the convict-lease program: Covington County had its own chain gang. One small-time thief in that county found his servitude lengthened to a lifetime when he couldn’t pay the sixty cents a day board he was charged while working on it.

But it was the extralegal justice system that worried Newton most. He continued to fear for his own safety, and for that of his family. He played the role of watchman, habitually sitting on his galleried porch with his shotgun across his knees. He became a fitful sleeper and insisted windows and doors be barred at night, the latchstring pulled inside. He was so on guard against an attack from his old enemies that he took to camping in the woods like a guerrilla again. Once, he climbed into a treetop to spy on a group of white men who called at the farm for him. When they were finally satisfied he wasn’t at home and left, Newton called out to a relieved Rachel and Georgeanne. He seemed to be ever alert and kept anyone who addressed him in front of him.

A description of Newton in these years suggests how uneasy he was living in the midst of his old adversaries. He was “never seen outside his house without his trusty revolver and rifle, and though he seeks no quarrel with any one, he would be a bad man with whom to debate,” wrote a historian who published an early account of Jones County Unionism. “His home is some distance from Ellisville, where he has lived in retirement since his dethronement, working industriously on his farm … He has lived in the midst of his enemies in defiance of their threats, almost under the shadow of the revolver. His past is as a sealed book with him, and nothing will induce him to talk of the war.”

It was a sign
of the times that Robert Lowry was back in a position of power again. In 1881, Lowry, now a graying, heavily mustachioed corporate lawyer and father of eleven, became the Democratic candidate for governor. Lowry was the ultimate Confederate company
man, a friend to railroad magnates and to L. Q. C. Lamar, and no friend to blacks. He ran on a platform that stressed big business and white supremacy. Political equality between whites and blacks, he declared, was unworkable and would “ruin both races.”

Lowry’s opponent was an independent named Benjamin King, whose supporters were a coalition of dissident farmers, Republicans, and blacks. Lowry viewed this opposition as gutter trash, and his stump speeches reawakened all the old rivalries and internal strife of Reconstruction. “As the stream could not rise above its source, neither can the candidate rise above his constituency,” Lowry sneered.

A Democratic newspaper urged the party to stuff ballot boxes, “stuff them, cram them, shake them down with votes for Robert Lowry.” Democrats again conducted a campaign of fraud and political terrorism, using, as they later acknowledged, “repression, intimidation, and other … illegal devices … to overcome the Negro majority.” Lowry won by 17,000 votes after 68 percent of all registered blacks stayed away from the polls. Even some in Lowry’s own party were appalled by the campaign. “We have won, but I am disgusted, and never again will I make such a fight,” one man wrote to the
Greenville Times
.

Yet in an inaugural speech that must have soured Newton’s stomach, Lowry bragged that it was an election Thomas Jefferson would be proud of, because there had only been one case of “criminal violence.” In the very opening words of his address after taking the oath of office, Lowry launched straight into a racial tirade, recruiting Jefferson into his argument. The founding father had believed the two races “could not live equally free under the same government and shuddered to contemplate such an experiment.”

Lowry’s administration, which lasted for two terms, was undistinguished and so marked by corruption that one Mississippi newspaper branded it “weak and wicked.” His main agenda was to enable industry while maintaining white social stability. Farmers like Newton resented him bitterly as a lackey for the railroads and enemy of agriculture. And that was on top of his actions during the war. It was
said that Lowry never dared campaign in the Piney Woods, where the yeomen hadn’t forgotten the hangings. Newton’s old friend Jasper Collins was still so embittered that he said he would “get up on the coldest night he ever saw to kill Lowry if he ever knew he was passing through Jones County.”

Newton felt the same. At the end of his life, asked if it was true that Lowry never came into Jasper County for fear of meeting him, Newton replied, “I don’t know about that. But I do know that I never saw Lowry knowingly.” The implication was clear: if he had seen him, he might have killed him.

Lowry’s presence in the governor’s mansion stirred Newton to what seems to have been his last act of political involvement. In November of 1884, Newton won an appointment in circuit court as an election supervisor for Jasper County. Presumably, he fought for the appointment so he could try to guard against fraud in Lowry’s campaign for reelection. He may also have been agitated, as so many Mississippi farmers were, by Lowry’s generous tax exemptions to industry, while the state’s farm economy remained depressed.

Newton plowed all day just to sell a bushel of corn for less than a dollar, thanks to Lowry’s policies, which gave huge breaks to railroads and textile mills, while small farmers were bent double under taxes, crop liens, shipment levies, etc. Life remained interminably hard for the yeoman farmer. Torrential rains ruined half of Newton’s crop in 1886. He lost a grandchild and several neighbors to the yellow fever epidemic. His elder brother Albert died of age and exhaustion in the winter of 1887 and was buried with honor by the Freemasons. Through it all, Newton struggled to cadge his small living from the ground. Corn went for seventy-five cents a bushel, bacon twelve cents a pound, potatoes fifty cents a bushel, peas one dollar. Meanwhile coffee cost him twenty cents a pound and molasses fifty cents a gallon.