The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey

by Bland Simpson

  If an uneducated black man can do THIS. . . was the caption beneath another of the pamphlet photographs. It was of a black man in dark baggy pants and a collarless white cotton shirt with thick suspenders and sleeves rolled. He was holding a hoe and standing in front of fifty bushels or more of peas they said he brought in from one unfertilized acre.

  Is it any wonder Papa wanted to drop everything and move here to farm? Just scratch the earth, they said, and crops would come in almost by themselves. Potatoes could be in the ground by late February so Papa said there could be three crops a year on the same land. He was going to grow potatoes, he said, and have a big garden. We’ve always had big, beautiful gardens, over at Seven Pines and then around the point at the house we lost when Uncle Andrew died, and out here on Southern Avenue too. I remember Papa calling us out to the porch at Seven Pines when he brought in the ripe, round tomatoes. He would polish them with his handkerchief and hand them to us saying, here’s one for my lovely daughter and here’s one for my lovely daughter, and so on till each daughter had a tomato and we’d thank him and laugh.

  When our furniture finally did arrive, we had to saw off the tops of the posts of our lovely four-poster beds so they’d fit in the house. It was spring and everything was so lush here, and Elizabeth City was so busy then.

  FIRE AND ICE

  William Cropsey, new to town, picked up the local papers and saw columns after column of ads seeking game, waterfowl, fish, and terrapin for the great markets of the northern cities.

  Great seines in the Albemarle stretched four miles end to end when let out fully, and the herring came in at fifty to a hundred thousand in a single haul. Where once it had taken boats with sixteen or more oarsmen to shoot the nets, now, with steam engines, five hauls could be made in the time it had taken to draw three.

  And now, with refrigeration, ice-making by condensers, and tubes and steam compressors unknown to the world before the 1870s, and the railroad with all its sidewheel steamboat connections, the Albemarle’s lands and waters could be opened up like never before. Out of Elizabeth City came Doctor Palemón John’s Republican weekly, the North Carolinian, ceaselessly trumpeting to the world the resources and possibilities in a land devoid of industry and money, its people broken and broke from their War of romantic and delusive conception and its ruinous, fatal conclusion.

  Steam, ice, and the railroad made it all possible.

  Fish, produce, and game could be in New York within twenty hours of a day’s picking or shooting or seine hauling. Shad, rockfish, mullet, blues, Spanish mackerel, chub, perch, sturgeon, menhaden, trout, spot, hog-fish, croaker, flounder—they were packed on ice and shipped fresh. Twenty thousand acres in the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds yielded oysters, hard- and soft-shell crabs, prawn, and shrimp.

  Professional gunners called market hunters brought their kill into Elizabeth City from Currituck, fowl they had bagged from blinds in the shallows of the sound, from sink boxes in the shoals, the reward for waiting and freezing and sipping whiskey in the cold wet fall and winter dark before dawn. They broke the mornings’ silence with their muzzle loaders and their double-barrel breech loaders and their punt guns, homemade cannons with barrels up to ten feet long and two-inch bores that, filled with chopped nails, did not give the birds a second chance. The market hunters brought their kill in and the birds were stuffed in barrels around ice-filled stovepipes and shipped away to Baltimore and Philadelphia and New York City, where drummers banged tavern tables and called for meals of feathers and oysters.

  The Narrows: Pasquotank River at Elizabeth City, about 1905

  This tideland, this coastal plain, was a cornucopia inexhaustible, the commercial circulars said, and steam, ice, and the railroad made it fully exploitable. By the turn of the century, Elizabeth City was booming.

  And William Cropsey was new to town and glad to be, glad to have brought his big family down to Pasquotank and into the heart of the horn of plenty.

  JIM WILCOX

  I liked em all, but it was Nell I liked from the first.

  She had older sisters more my age. There was Louise and Alletta, but they were both big, broad women, and there was Ollie. Now Ollie was a good-looking girl, but she was tall and towered over me. I’ve heard she’s right much of a looker yet, but I ain’t seen her. All I asked since I come back from prison was just a little time with her to talk about it and get it straight. Just ten minutes.

  Nell was sixteen and pretty and about my height. I was twenty-one at the time and my daddy was high sheriff of all Pasquotank County.

  I just had two sisters, Sadie and Annie Mae, but the Cropseys had a big family. I never paid much attention to the younger ones, except maybe Will Cropsey. He was younger than Nell, and we went duck hunting or boating together once, I can’t recall. Now Will, he knew a lot more about this thing than he let on. He could of cleared it up. He was staying up in Norfolk when Mama was getting up the petitions to the governor for me to be pardoned. They told me that when Will Cropsey heard I might be getting out, he poisoned himself to death.

  Up at the old Monticello Hotel on Granby Street in Norfolk they told me, the one burned down New Year’s Eve 1919, and the water from the firehoses run down the side and froze and that old hotel looked like a ice castle. That’s where he done it.

  I got introduced to Nell one evening in June ‘98, and I come calling on her one afternoon two weeks later. Sent a boy around with a card inviting her out buggy riding with me and she said yes. I could rent Beam S., the thoroughbred stallion, out of Fletcher’s stable and a cariage, that’s what. I’d come on Sundays and Tuesdays and Thursdays, then, after a while, I come by every afternoon. By then I guess I’d asked Nell to be my girl and she said yes she would.

  We went to whatever shows come through town. Up to the Academy of Music. The Real Widow Brown, that was one. Jolly Night, there were always shows trouping through. I took her to all of em.

  We’d go out sailing, too, when there was enough of a breeze. We only went by ourselves twice and we stayed out way late, ten or eleven at night both times, and when I brought her in I caught hell from her old man, all six foot six of him. I wish old man Cropsey had come out and told all he knew. I told Johnny Tuttle I’d like to get the old man out in a boat and tell him if he didn’t explain to me what happened with Nell that night I’d put a blowtorch to his feet. That’s what I said, but I knew I’d never do anything like that, never get away with it if I did. He wouldn’t talk anyway.

  We’d go swimming there at the sandy beach once they’d moved to their own place. That was the old Preyer house with the tower, but the Cropseys called it Seven Pines. Water was real shallow straight out, and you could go out toward the river channel thirty yards or more and it’d only be four foot deep. Old man Cropsey anchored a raft out where it was deep enough to dive off.

  There was baseball at Waters Park just around the bend, downriver a bit from the Cropseys. I played infield and Roy Crawford who used to call on Ollie did too. He was there that night Nell disappeared. Went crazy years later after I was off in prison and shot himself dead. I didn’t like him much, but he was a crackerjack first baseman. Our ball club played teams got up in other towns, like the Kitty Hawk club from down the Banks. They give us a good run once.

  That summer of ‘98 when I got to be good friends with Nell and all the Cropseys, they had moonlight cruises on the steamers with singing and dancing and the town cornet band playing. My aunt died along about then, the one that was married to my uncle James that I was named for. He was a deputy sheriff, but that fall they voted Daddy out and the Democrats were in. Didn’t bother the Cropseys none—they were Democrats up north from way back.

  NEWBEGUN

  Newbegun was near Weeksville in south Pasquotank County, and the township pollkeeper John Brothers lived there.

  One Monday in October of 1894, Deputy James Wilcox came to Brothers’s house wanting a look at the voting rolls, but Brothers argued with him and told him to get out of the house and that he di
dn’t have to show any Republican deputy the voting rolls.

  James Wilcox stood his ground, so Brothers got a cudgel out of a closet and came at Wilcox with the big stick raised. He backed Wilcox out onto the porch, where Wilcox drew a pistol and shot as Brothers struck him head and body with the cudgel. Brothers got hit in the arm and stomach, and before he died the next day, he swore that Wilcox had been standing when he fired the pistol.

  Wilcox swore it was self-defense and said he had fired only when Brothers attacked him and knocked him down. Ginnie Perkins, who was in the kitchen, said she heard a couple of blows from a stick, then the pistol shots, and then she heard Brothers’s mother saying that if her son had minded her, this wouldn’t have happened.

  Three justices of the peace, including Teddy Wilson and Harry Greenleaf, held a preliminary hearing four days after the shooting and bound James Wilcox over to superior court, where he was tried for murder in March 1895. Lawyer Ed Aydlett defended him, put him on the stand in his own defense. Then they put a doctor up to testify who told the court that the wound in John Brothers’s arm could only have been made if Brothers had his arm raised.

  The jury went out fourteen hours and came back with a verdict that James Wilcox was guilty of murder in the second degree. The judge sentenced him to fifteen years in prison, but Lawyer Aydlett appealed to the state supreme court. A dozen men went Wilcox’s ten thousand dollar bond, among them Doctor John, the Republican editor, and Cale Parker, a farmer friend of the Wilcox family.

  A year later James Wilcox was acquitted. Six months after that he was hauled in on and pled guilty to a charge of assault and battery. Six weeks later, he pled guilty to carrying a concealed weapon.

  This was the man for whom Jim Wilcox, Nell Cropsey’s new beau, was named. People talked about bad blood in a family, and how it could flow quietly for years and then suddenly just flare up, crazy like. When Jim went down to south Pasquotank for his aunt’s funeral in ‘98, the Cropseys couldn’t help but hear the talk.

  OLLIE CROPSEY

  The first Christmas we were down south, Jim gave Nell a dish with a silver frame and handle. The second Christmas he gave her a gold pin with a red jewel of some sort set in it. She’d show me the photographs they exchanged every so often, just cheap little five-and-dime-store pictures.

  Our family stayed down on the Outer Banks in the summer of 1900, and Jim made regular Sunday trips to Nags Head to see Nellie. One Sunday she came in after a walk with him and said she had something to show me.

  It was a ring he had just given her, with her initials E.M.C. on the inside.

  TRUCK FARMER

  William Cropsey marveled.

  Farmers were studying chemistry just as Jefferson and Ruffin, who fired the first shot at Sumter, had urged them to do long ago. They were improving their tools, draining and fencing their flat boggy lands. They used manures and fertilizers, rotated their crops, and they tried a diversity of crops theretofore unheard of.

  Truck farming, it was called.

  Pasquotank was growing crops that could be picked, cut, graded, boxed, barreled, and then shipped right out from the field: tomatoes, cabbages, blackberries, Big Blues from the huckleberry savannahs, Chickasaw and wild goose plums, dewberries, peaches, cantaloupes, and muskmelons. And in one pamphlet was a picture of a three-year-old pear tree bearing fifty-nine fully matured pears!

  There was something called the soja bean, though local farmers quickly disregarded the second syllable. Bayside Plantation, downriver from where the Cropseys settled, was the first place in the United States to grow soybeans, which were found to be an economical horse and cattle feed.

  Just scratch the earth . . .

  Cropsey marveled, and the produce kept coming in. Irish potatoes in the summer and fall, peanuts standing in brown harvest shocks to dry, midwinter cukes for extravagant northern tables, six cuttings of alfalfa a season, Norton and mouseleaf yams, horsetooth corn.

  Years later people would see the old man William Cropsey selling vegetables door to door from a basket he carried slung around his arm.

  —Do you recall the mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey who vanished one night and Jim Wilcox her beau who suffered for it? Yes? Well, that vendor is her father.

  But that was much, much later.

  When William Cropsey answered John Fearing’s ad in 1898 and rented sixty-five acres from Fearing between the black river and the fairground racetrack and moved his huge family south that April, he became the largest truck farmer in the Albemarle section, with expectations of a June 1899 Irish potato crop of ten thousand barrels.

  JIM WILCOX

  I always heard a trip to Nags Head was worth ten days in the best hospital in the land. The Cropseys must of heard it, too, they were staying down there during the summer of 1900.

  I’d catch the steamer Neuse, dark old thing, Saturday evenings when it pulled out for Manteo after the southbound came in from Norfolk. Never had to wait much, it was pretty fair about being on time, except for that time the cyclone stranded the boat up on Paupers Point for half a year. On the way down to Manteo Captain Davis’d get all sweated up telling about it.

  At Manteo, there’d be Captain Daniels smoking a pipe and sitting under a fig tree like he won’t expecting anything even though we come in every Saturday night right at that time. Me and whoever else was going over would hire him to take us to the soundside landing at Nags Head. He’d make twenty knots I bet in his sailboat.

  It’d be eleven or so when he’d leave us there where the shanties and shacks and pier was falling in and we’d go on over to the hotel and wake the night clerk and get stowed away.

  This one time, it was July 17th, 1900, I’ll never forget, Sunday morning after breakfast and Nellie and I went out walking on the wide hotel porches where it smelled all mixed of salt spray and kitchen and somebody’s morning cigar. I pulled a little package, all wrapped up, out of my pocket and give it to her.

  —It’s your birthday, Nell, I said. It was a ring I got at Hathaway’s and had em put her initials on the inside.

  —Why, Jim, ain’t you something? she said, and she gave me a little hug when she opened it and saw what it was.

  HURRICANE SEASON

  It was hurricane season, September 1900, late that summer after Jim Wilcox had given his girl a ring, when a bicycle mechanic named Wilbur Wright from Dayton, Ohio, showed up in Elizabeth City asking directions to the Outer Banks village of Kitty Hawk. Storm winds were raging as the autumnal equinox approached, flooding the low country, and in town the creeks had risen enough to overflow yards and streets and thin, drooping willow branches were everywhere dragging in the water.

  Wright hired Israel Perry and his schooner Curlicue, and they made their way slowly through two days of awful weather, the cordage and spars creaking all the way and both foresail and mainsail ripped loose by the storm. Wright wouldn’t eat Perry’s foul-smelling food—he was half starved and drowned when he finally got to Kitty Hawk. People said it was crazy as hell to go down there during hurricane season doing what he was doing, working on gliders till late October. But he came back again for six weeks in ‘01, for two months in ‘02, and for three months in ‘03 when, a week and a day before Christmas, this man Wright and his brother Orville brought a glider with a motor strapped to it out of their hangar at Kitty Hawk and flew the world’s first aeroplane.

  Back in hurricane season, 1901, the news came that a crazy man named Czolgosz had gunned down the president up in Buffalo, New York. And it was about that time when Nell Cropsey and Jim Wilcox started to go sour on each other.

  OLLIE CROPSEY

  Along about in September that year, I heard them arguing.

  —If you’re going to act like this, then you’d best stay home the rest of the season, I heard Nell tell Jim. But he kept coming and calling on her. Then Uncle Andrew brought our cousin Carrie and left her for a visit with us. She had been down the year before, so she already knew Jim. With Nell and Jim a bit shaky, he paid Carrie almost as muc
h attention as he was paying Nellie those days.

  Once in the kitchen we were talking about how queer Jim could be, and Mama told Uncle Andrew she was becoming fearful of him and that she had forebodings that he would harm Nell someday. Imagine ,forebodings!

  And Nell said, Uncle Andrew, I’ve made up my mind not to have anything to do with Jim. Sometimes he’s very nice, but then he’s eccentric and has such a peculiar way.

  With Carrie there, Nell and Jim seemed to get on a little better, and they went around all three of them together. Sometimes I’d make it four. It was lovely then, that warm lapse after the harvest, when the cypress trees along the river turned a rusty gold.

  THE SOULWINNER

  In early October 1901, the churches in Elizabeth City pooled their money and brought one of America’s most famous evangelists to town for a ten-day revival.

  His name was George Rutledge Stuart, and good God was he popular.

  In Memphis, the building where he spoke was so packed a man fell through a window where he had been watching from outside and was arrested, whereupon he begged to see Stuart.

  —Is this the first man you ever arrested for breaking in to hear a preacher? Stuart asked.

  —Yes, said the police.

  —Well, turn him loose for good luck.

  In Dayton, it took the great dining hall of the Cash Register Factory to hold the eight thousand who came back for more after Stuart’s regular lecture series had run its course. In Portsmouth, Ohio, the church was so jammed when he arrived that he had to be lifted and passed above the congregation by hand in order to reach the platform.

  Stuart was tall, rawboned, blue-eyed, with a long nose and drooping ears and a mustache, his hair swept back to the left. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt and waistcoat, and a dark, thin bow tie. He chartered buggies, automobiles, whole trains: whatever it took to get him and his message to the people.