The State of Jones (43 page)

According to the vague, tangled story passed along by the gossips in the county, Newton “ran his wife who was old man John Turner’s daughter, away from home and took a Negro as a wife.” It’s not clear exactly when Serena finally gave up on the husband who had been partly absentee for years, but she was no longer in his house sometime after 1890. As he coped with Rachel’s death Newton was probably more inattentive and neglectful than ever, and he
may have abandoned Serena altogether in favor of his black family, whose claims on him had possibly become greater. He had his two youngest children with Rachel, Augusta Ann, sixteen, and Hinchie, fourteen, to comfort and finish rearing.

By then, Serena’s own children were grown and she may have felt no longer needed in Newton’s home. The final straw perhaps came when she realized that Newton had no intention of severing his relationship with Rachel’s family and was instead closer than ever with them—especially with Georgeanne, with whom he all but set up house. According to Martha Wheeler, after Rachel died, Georgeanne took Rachel’s place “and separated him from his wife.”

Newton’s relationship with Georgeanne was that of an aging, solitary man who needed someone to care for him and his children, and perhaps more. For years he had divided himself between Rachel and Serena, and now he found himself without either of them. Georgeanne became his caregiver, and in 1891, after a sixteen-year hiatus in childbearing, Georgeanne became pregnant and delivered a daughter, Grace. In 1894, she had a second daughter, Lessie. Who fathered Georgeanne’s children was an unanswered question, but they may well have been Newton’s.

Serena moved in with Molly and Jeffrey Knight, the young couple who had fused Newton and Rachel’s families by intermarrying and who now had a thriving farm and five children. Whatever Serena’s feelings about Rachel and Newton, she seems to have made her peace with her daughter’s marriage and accepted Jeff as her son-in-law, which was a testament to the sheer affableness of the man. A photograph of Serena shows her seated in the front yard of their cabin, a galleried plank home enclosed by a picket fence, surrounded by Jeff and Molly’s family. Jeff was a tall, tawny man with cheekbones so prominent they seemed hewn by a knife, and a disposition so pleasant that even Newton’s withdrawn, taciturn son Tom liked him. Tom and his brother Mat both had “a certain respect for Jeff, because he was good and honest in his dealings, and was nice to them.”

But race increasingly divided the family. Tom also bolted from
the farm, aggrieved by his father’s relationships and tired of impoverished yeomanry and of being unwanted by white society. He moved to Ellisville, where he ran a small store that sold candy and newspapers, and refused to acknowledge his relationship to Rachel’s family.

Mat’s feelings on race also turned sharply and ruined his marriage with Rachel’s daughter Fannie. In 1895, after more than fifteen years, Mat deserted his wife and their several children, the youngest of whom was just a year old, because he wanted to live as a white man. Mat was so determined to shuck his interracial bonds that he left with nothing but the clothes on his back. Fannie was left to work the eighty-acre farm, which was heavily mortgaged, on her own. Fannie rarely saw him again, though he married a white woman (a Knight fourth cousin) and lived on in the area.

Mat was not alone in his desire to escape painful racial definitions. As the mixed-race Knight children and grandchildren grew into adulthood, many of them sought to separate themselves from the darker-skinned side of the family. Fannie, too, would attempt to redefine herself later in her life. When she was asked during a real-estate court proceeding in 1914 if she was black, she described her racial makeup instead as “Choctaw and French,” which is perhaps what she believed her heritage from Rachel to be. When a lawyer insisted she was black, she replied, “Well, you will have to do your own judging.”

Those who tried to evade their family history did so for the simple reasons that it was stigmatic and dangerous to be a Knight. It was the lynching era. Statistics on lynchings are unreliable; only those that got press attention were counted. But Mississippi led the nation in documented hangings with 581 between 1882 and 1962—and those were just the ones reported.

Some of the highest citizens and officials in the state condoned lynching as a method of controlling blacks. A longhaired, withered-armed haranguer named James K. Vardaman, a prominent lawyer and newspaper publisher, would be elected to the governorship
in 1903 by championing violence against blacks. Vardaman called the Negro a “lazy, lying, lustful animal” and urged white citizens to take the law into their own hands, which they did with heinous consequences. Vardaman would defend a notorious incident in Rocky Ford, near Tupelo, when a man named Jim Ivy, accused of raping a white woman, was burned to death without a trial. Ivy was captured by a mob, wrapped in heavy chains, and staked to a knee-deep woodpile as six hundred spectators looked on. Three men tapped gasoline cans, dousing him and the wood, and set him on fire. “Oh, God!” Ivy cried. “Oh God damn!” A journalist who was an eyewitness to the burning wrote: “His scream … was the only sound from a human voice that I thought might, by sheer strength alone, reach heaven … Jim screamed, prayed and cursed; he struggled so hard that he snapped one of the log chains that bound his ankles to the stake.”

One public official did attempt to contain the violence. Governor Andrew H. Longino devoted much of his inaugural address in 1900 to lynching, decrying it as “the most demoralizing, brutalizing, and ruinous species of lawlessness known to any brave and free people,” he declared. The stance cost him his career—he never won office again.

In 1900, the Census Bureau again visited the Knights. This time, the sprawling mixed-race family living in the hills on the Jones-Jasper county line did not confuse the census taker. Everyone who lived there was simply classified as black, including every last child and grandchild, and Newton himself. He had officially become a Negro. They were the “white negros” or the “Knight Negroes,” as the locals called them. Or just the “Knight Niggers.”

Despite this, one member of the Knight family chose to come back to the farm instead of leaving it: Anna Knight had grown into a forceful, bell-voiced young missionary who felt called to improve her Mississippi hill country people. She had spent six years training as a nurse, teacher, and missionary in Seventh-Day Adventist boarding schools in Chattanooga and Battle Creek, Michigan, and
she had a tough mind and unbreakable will. In 1898 she built her private school for black children, a project that excited the hostility of local whites, as did her preaching against moonshiners.

The school began as a dilapidated old cabin on one of her uncles’ farms. After a year, with profit from four acres of cotton she planted herself and the broadax labor of Knight men like Newton and Jeff, she was able to build a new schoolhouse of plank wood with glass windows. She taught twenty-four pupils at eight grade levels and charged them one dollar a month. Even so, only one parent could afford to pay in cash; the rest worked it off.

Anna taught adults as well as children, holding tutorials in penmanship, reading, and arithmetic, as well as hygiene, nutrition, and temperance. She taught women how to can fruit and on a biological chart showed them what liquor did to their kidneys. Soon local moonshiners sent her a message to quit preaching or “they would put me out of business.” Anna, who was nothing if not a Knight, sent back word that “I covered the ground I stood on, and when they got ready to shoot, I was ready.” Her family and friends urged her to shut the school down, but she replied that she was not “a quitter.”

Anna began traveling armed with both revolver and shotgun, which she kept close by even in her classroom. On one occasion after teaching a Sunday school class, she had to race on horseback through a gauntlet of white men who stood in the road and fired their guns in the air. Soon afterward, three glaring men entered her schoolhouse while she was teaching and took seats on the back bench. They listened to her lesson for several minutes, boring holes into her with their eyes. One of them deliberately spat on the floor. Then they stood up and left, walking into the woods. Certain that they meant trouble, Anna dismissed the class and summoned two of her male relatives. When the three angry whites returned, they were drunk, and a pitched fight resulted. “They soon found that the two ‘Knights’ were too much for the three of them, and finally gave up and left,” Anna wrote. After that incident, various Knight males stood watch over the school building every night, while Anna “took
my books and guns each day and carried on the work.” Still, despite tireless efforts to protect the building, in 1902 someone burned it to the ground.

The flames devoured the pine board structure, burning to black ash every joist and window sash that they had painstakingly fashioned with their own hands. With her work destroyed, Anna left for missionary work in Calcutta, India, where she spent the next five years. But Mississippi was never out of her thoughts. When she returned from overseas in 1908, her relatives implored her to return to teaching. She built a new school in the village of Gitano in Jones County, and this time it stood, providing a generation of Knights with the only education they would receive.

Only Newton’s protection and his repute as a dreaded enemy saved the Knights from worse persecutions. Even as he neared seventy, with his once-dark beard turned white, Newton remained capable of fearsome acts of violence if circumstances demanded it, especially where his family was concerned. Any neighbors who were tempted to harass the black Knights thought twice after an incident in a churchyard one morning, when Newton demonstrated that he still possessed a killer’s disposition in defense of his sons.

As Tom Knight tells the story, Newton had just attended Sunday services near his home with Tom and one of his younger brothers when some local toughs accosted them. Tom doesn’t say whether the “younger brother” in question was white or black, but given that the incident took place late in Newton’s life, it almost certainly concerned a mixed-race son. One of the toughs had a dispute with the young Knight boy over some hogs. As the Knights left church, the antagonist approached the boy and feigned friendliness, saying to him, “I want to talk with you a minute.” He walked the boy to a corner of the churchyard, where he began to curse him and then struck him from behind with a pine limb.

With that, the rest of the Knights charged across the yard. A melee ensued, as men windmilled their fists at one another and rolled on the ground. As they churned up the dust, the attacker lashed out
with a boot and caught Newton squarely in the shin, peeling off some of his skin.

Newton didn’t utter a cry. Instead he reacted silently. There was a glitter of metal and an almost imperceptible wave of his hand, and an instant later the man was gurgling from his throat and covered in his own blood. Newton sheathed his knife, the fight over. Newton said, “He would learn him that it was Newt Knight he was kicking.”

Newton had slashed the man’s throat—if he’d have cut an eighth of an inch deeper, the man would have been dead. As it was, he wounded the victim so badly a doctor had to be summoned to stop the bleeding, and the man would be in bed for a month.

“So my father said it looked to him like it was a free for all fight and he was old and had been crippled up and he just did not feel like being kicked about by anyone and especially by a big young man,” Tom Knight related.

But though Newton continued to travel well armed, in general he avoided quarrels; any fight he was involved in was bound to end with bloodshed, and so he sidestepped confrontation and tried to live quietly. He particularly avoided the subject of the war; there were no fond reminiscences from Newton, or condemnations and indictments either. It remained a dangerous matter in a small community in which so many families were cross-knitted to one another and everyone had lost something. Also, Newton knew too much.

“He toats his old gun,” said the ex-Confederate Maddie Bush in 1912. “I think Newt could make big money if he would just tell what he knows about it, but he won’t. I don’t reckon he is to blame for it, as there are a good many people living here that have kinsmen that were killed and might want to get revenge.”

Even if Newton’s old foes were tempted to forgive him for his sins in the war after a half century, his continued crossings of the color line were fresh offenses. For instance, Newton sat proudly for a studio photograph with one of his mixed-race grandsons, a strict taboo for a white man. The old man, stern faced and upright in his clean
white shirt and jacket, posed with a handsome boy of about twelve leaning against his shoulder.

Newton’s grandchildren would always remember the kindness of the old man, who refused to disown them. One granddaughter would sit in his lap and comb his long white beard. At Christmastimes, Newton loaded his wagon with fresh fruit and drove around to hand it out to the smallest children in the family. A boy named Amos, the son of Martha Ann, Newton’s eldest daughter with Rachel, recalled the quiet old man with a wagonload of gleaming apples, drawn by a light-colored horse. “Do you know who I am?” he said gently, as he gave Amos the apples. “I’m your grandfather.”

His family remained frighteningly vulnerable. A fresh tide of racism swept the country after World War I, as the trigger-tempered men who hung around drugstore counters found new subjects for outrage in immigrants, godless evolutionists, and uppity blacks. After the war black veterans who had tasted more liberal society in France returned home to find that Southerners intended to put them back in their place. In 1915 D. W. Griffith’s blockbuster film
The Birth of a Nation
glorified the Klan as an American institution rescuing the South from savages, and by the 1920s the Klan would grow to between 3 and 4 million members. In one incident during the era, white-capped Klansmen paraded into Baptist churches in Jones County, swearing to protect the “purity of womanhood and 100 percent Americanism.”

The “Knight Negroes” lived with the knowledge that their closest neighbors were capable of racial bloodthirstiness. In 1919, one of the most vicious lynchings in the history of the South took place right in downtown Ellisville. John Hartfield, accused of assaulting a white woman, was pursued through the woods of three counties for ten days before he was caught. A committee of vigilantes announced they intended to hang Hartfield outside of the courthouse, and the state’s biggest newspaper, the
Jackson Daily News
, advertised the event in an eight-column front-page streamer of a headline. “John Hartfield Will Be Lynched by Ellisville Mob This Afternoon at
5 P.M.,” it read. “Negro Jerky and Sullen As Burning Hour Nears.” Other papers picked up the news, and correspondents made the journey to Ellisville for the event, including a writer named Hilton Butler, who recorded his memories for
The New Republic
.