The Invisible Line (9 page)

Freeman had been working his land for several years when two men took some of his children away. In December 1836 Thomas Strong petitioned the Clay County court to force two of Freeman's sons, Washington and Hiram, to become his apprentices, “to learn the art and mystery of farming.” At the same time Strong's brother-in-law Edward Davidson asked the court to bind Freeman's “infant child” Elizabeth to him, “to learn the art and mystery of spinning and weaving.” Each petition yielded a onesentence order from the judge, turning Freeman's children into servants.
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The men who petitioned the court for Freeman's children came from farming families that owned thousands of acres of land on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. The Strongs and Davidsons had a long history of feuding with some of the local salt-making clans, starting in 1806 with pitched gun battles over cattle rights and periodically reigniting, generation after generation, for nearly a century afterward. Thomas Strong's father had been a county leader and justice of the peace. They were powerful people—the state worked for them.
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Perhaps Freeman had offended Strong and Davidson in routine business dealings, was allied with one of their enemies, or had been too conspicuously successful a free man of color in Clay County. Whatever the reason, Strong's and Davidson's actions were devastating to Freeman. Not only were the apprenticeships a personal affront—taking his children away as if they were on the auction block—but they also threatened his basic aspiration to rise in life. A large family was an economic engine. With sons and daughters working on the farm, Freeman could produce more corn and eggs and wool and timber, raise more cows and sheep and pigs, make more money, and buy more land. By taking his children, Strong and Davidson were turning Freeman's labor force into their own, increasing their wealth and power at his expense.
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Kentucky's laws were designed to keep Freeman—and all free blacks—poor, and the local court was actively enriching Clay County's wealthiest citizens. Freeman could easily have deferred to the status that the legislature had fixed for him or shied away from a fight with two men from powerful families who held grudges. Instead, he found a lawyer fifty miles outside the county to appeal the court's ruling.

Freeman's lawyer, James S. Henderson, did not challenge the wisdom or fairness of the apprenticeship law—that would have been a losing proposition, given the general hostility toward free blacks that prevailed in Kentucky. Rather, Henderson focused on the procedures that the county court had followed, arguing that the judge's ruling had been too informal. In order to establish the court's jurisdiction over Freeman, Henderson asserted, the decision would have had to record a series of specific findings, among them that the children were poor, that Freeman and his wife could not care for them, and that Freeman had been given the opportunity to appear in court and contest the apprenticeship petitions. Even if the judges agreed with the substance of the apprenticeship law, they might balk at lax procedure, which could harm whites just as easily as blacks.
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A little more than a year later the Kentucky Court of Appeals agreed that “the record is altogether too meagre” to support the decisions to bind out Freeman's children. “These orders,” wrote the chief justice, “tested by the record alone, as they must be by this Court, are clearly erroneous.” Strong and Davidson did not retain a lawyer to argue their side. Apprentices were supposed to be cheap labor, so it made little sense to spend money on litigation over them. They could always petition the court for custody over other children, children whose families lacked the money or the will to hire an attorney.
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Although Kentucky law forbade Freeman to raise a hand in self-defense against a white person, he still found ways to defend himself. He could not challenge the broad injustices he faced because the law classified him as a free man of color, but the simple act of mounting an appeal, however narrow and technical, boosted his status. Just by hiring a lawyer, Freeman showed that he was not too poor to care for his children. The law defined Freeman as something less than a full citizen, but his ability to litigate protected him and his family from the world beyond their fifty acres of hillside. The Kentucky high court's decision was short and crisp. It made no reference to Freeman's color.

 

 

WOMEN IN THE HILLS might marry at age twelve and live through ten or even fifteen childbirths, not to mention malaria and dysentery and typhoid. They spun and wove clothes for the family, weeded the cornfields, rooted for ginseng, foraged for herbs, and milked cows that roamed freely in the forest. They cooked and cleaned and carried water from the spring to their cabins. “Only the lowest peasantry of Europe can show anything to parallel it,” wrote anthropologist Ellen Churchill Semple at the end of the nineteenth century. “The mountain woman . . . at twenty-five looks forty, and at forty looks twenty years older than her husband.”
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Travelers marveled at how isolated Appalachian women were from the world outside their mountain hollows. Many never ventured more than a ridgeline or two from home through their entire lives. “They are as rooted as the trees,” wrote Semple. But Clarissa Centers had walked and ridden thousands of miles before she was twenty-five. Clarsy had been born in the western hills of South Carolina, but her family soon moved to North Carolina, then eventually up through the Cumberland Gap, where Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky meet.
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The Centers family was not alone in their journey. In the decades after 1830, exhausted soil, declining tobacco and cotton prices, and financial panics drove tens of thousands of people west—on northern routes stretching from Ohio to Minnesota, along southern routes to Louisiana and Texas, and through mountain passes into Kentucky and Tennessee. From North Carolina and Georgia, an entire nation of dispossessed Cherokees was making its way toward Oklahoma. The routes could be crowded with people, carts and carriages, and horses, cows, pigs, and sheep. Often they were “more like the leading avenue of a great city,” wrote one observer, “than a road through rural districts.” Families slept under canvas tents on roadsides and in fields. Travelers drank and fought and gambled and conned and killed. Great and small, educated and ignorant, good and wicked—old distinctions mattered little on the road west. Everyone was traveling the same path, in search of new lands, new luck, and new lives.
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The Centers family reached Clay County shortly before 1840. Although she was still traveling with her parents and siblings, Clarsy Centers was no longer a girl. She was in her early twenties and had a baby boy on her hip. A child born out of wedlock was hardly uncommon on the frontier. At the very least, the boy showed that Clarsy was fertile, and with only one child, she remained relatively young and strong for her age. If her situation carried any disgrace, she could have devised a story of widowhood, and no one in her new community would have been the wiser.
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By 1841, Clarsy and her son had moved into George Freeman's cabin. She was twenty-five and pregnant with his child. George was twice her age. His first wife was probably dead. Eleven people lived with him, some of them his grown daughters—right around Clarsy's age—with children of their own. His family was becoming a clan.
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Although Freeman and Centers were not married, that fact in itself would have merited little comment in their hollow. Many others in the wilderness had dispensed with such formalities. Having children and struggling through life together made them man and wife. Even if they had wanted to, however, they could not have married. While George Freeman was a man of color, Clarsy Centers was white. Kentucky law prohibited their union.

Freeman and Centers were not the only ones in Clay County breaching the color line. Several free black women were living with white men. It was less common, however, for black men to have families with white women, and their relationships were perceived as a far greater threat to the social and racial order. After all, the mixed-race children of black women became, more often than not, pieces of property, markers of wealth, for their owners. But the children of slave men and white women were free under Kentucky law, and they blurred the physical distinctions that made racial status conceivable and enforceable. As a result, all such relationships were subversive, even those involving free men.
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Moreover, the control that white men had over their families, something that approached ownership under the law, helped maintain the idea that all white men were equal citizens in a country increasingly stratified by wealth, where the salt barons of Clay County could buy and sell the typical small farmer hundreds of times over. That control was undermined when white women had children with black men. From seventeenth-century Virginia onward, politicians, planters, and other groups of white men had publicly fretted about sexually aggressive blacks and expressed “honest indignation,” as ten North Carolina men wrote in 1825, at the prospect of black men making “any approach towards a connection with a white woman even by her consent.”
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At the same time white communities did not always respond to these relationships with reflexive deadly violence. They were capable of tolerating difference or pretending it did not exist. Across the South in the early decades of the nineteenth century, black men and white women were forming families and living in peace.
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Clarsy Centers gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1841, and would have nine more children with Freeman over the next dozen years. While anthropologists years later would dismiss relationships between husbands and wives in the mountains as “very elemental, betray[ing] little of the romantic spirit,” Clarsy's situation likely fell closer to that of the woman who would marry Centers's nephew a generation later. Asked why she married him, she responded, “Just like all other people do, because I liked him.”
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George's rise in the world required strength, intelligence, and will. He offered Clarsy security after a life of wandering. His grown daughters and their children were nearby; Clarsy had women her age to talk to and would not have to raise her babies alone. The fact that Freeman had brown skin or had once been a slave was of little consequence. In Clarsy's home state of South Carolina, the high court ruled in 1835 that a person's status “is not to be determined solely by the distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man ... [A] man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability should have the rank of a white man.” The judge could have been describing Freeman. If his emancipation papers listed him as “mulatto,” whites in Clay County were also dark after lives spent working in the sun.
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Clarsy Centers's parents left the county soon after she moved into George Freeman's cabin. They may have disapproved of the union or found themselves unwelcome among other whites because of it. But Clarsy's younger sister Malinda stayed behind, suggesting that Freeman's family was better able than her parents to provide for her.
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THE JOURNEY WEST WOULD have been the easy one—macadam-paved highways that led to rambling farms for Thoroughbred horses, bustling cities and anonymous crowds, the Ohio River flowing into the horizon. But Jordan Spencer and Malinda Centers chose to head northeast, deeper into the wilderness, through rivers and over hills, along Indian traces, creek beds, and mountain paths, along mud ruts deeper than wagon wheels and steep deadly falls. They had to brave poison snakes, wild animals, and a whole range of human predators—desperate men as well as perfectly respectable people who could choose to give them trouble. They may have had a cart, or they may simply have loaded up a couple of mules or horses with their three babies and everything they owned.

When Clarsy Centers started having George Freeman's children, Malinda had been as young as ten years old. Four years later, in 1845, she was pregnant by Jordan Spencer, who was about a decade her senior. In three years they had three children: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Elizabeth. Two presidents and a queen. Proud names.
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When Elizabeth was born, there were close to twenty people living on George Freeman's land—three generations, too many for fifty acres to sustain, too many for the neighbors to ignore, in an unsettling progression from dark to light to white. Hot-tempered and fond of whiskey, Spencer may have fought with Freeman or, worse, with someone else in the community. After years of giving Freeman and his family some breathing room, the local authorities again took an interest in them. If Spencer wanted to be left alone, he had to find another hollow in a different set of hills.
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In 1852 Freeman was prosecuted for fornication. Because he could not marry Clarsy Centers, having children with her was a crime. Again, he hired an attorney and mounted a vigorous defense. But fighting back cost money. To afford the legal fees, Freeman had to mortgage everything he owned. He paid off his creditors, and when he died soon afterward, he left property to Clarsy and to his daughter Alice. But a few years later Alice was prosecuted for hog stealing, an easy charge to make where pigs ranged freely in the hills. She had to give up her land to pay her lawyer.
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Jordan Spencer, Malinda Centers, and their children were gone by then. They made their way north and east through five counties and did not stop until they were a hundred miles away. Malinda managed to stay in contact with Clarsy—no small feat for two illiterate sisters. But they lived in different worlds.