The Invisible Line
Page 21
Back home in Clay County, Letch Davis had spent much of the 1870s running a “blind tiger”—an illegal saloon—and making his pale face familiar in the criminal court. He collected tippling, assault, gambling, and weapons charges as if he were foraging for roots. At the end of the decade he killed a man in a fight and was charged with murder. Although the charges were eventually dismissed, he left Clay before his victim’s family could exact revenge.17
If Johnson County had emerged from the war in relative peace, other mountain counties continued to bleed. The war had deprived sheriffs and judges of their monopoly on justice, and private killings spiraled among feuding families, business and political rivals, and criminal gangs. Bushwhackers continued to target their perceived enemies. Returning soldiers on each side were ambushed or assassinated or found themselves settling scores as they had on the battlefield. The decline of farming and the rush to clear-cut and mine the hills fueled the violence.18
From the 1860s into the next century, the hillsides cracked with gunplay, as everyday frontier violence crested into waves of revenge killings. There were more killings in Kentucky in 1878 than in all of New England. In Clay County, for instance, rival salt-making families and political opponents, the Whites and the Garrards, repeatedly turned to their shotguns and Winchesters, and by the 1890s they would be engaged in pitched battles that drew national attention. Just north of Clay, on the way to Johnson County, was “Bloody Breathitt,” where forces led by a former Union irregular named Captain Bill Strong fought a host of rival families, staged their own courts-martial and executions, waged a gun battle in a county courtroom in 1873, and occupied the courthouse in 1874. Twice in five years the governor had to send in troops to establish order, but the feuding continued for decades.19
At some point in the 1870s Davis gave Johnson County locals a glimpse of this darker world. The man he had killed in Clay County would not be his last victim. After settling near Lee City, thirty miles west of Johnson County, he participated in a point-blank shoot-out at a picnic in 1905 and in a separate incident turned his twelve-gauge shotgun on a man at such close range that the victim had to have his leg amputated. Davis’s son Letcher Jr. was reputed to have cut a man’s throat for looking at his wife. People fled their cabins at his approach.20
When Davis reached the hollows west of Paintsville, he was a hundred miles from home, but his wild blue eyes landed on a familiar face. He knew exactly who Jordan Spencer was. Although Davis had been born right when Jordan and Malinda Spencer were leaving Clay County, he grew up just over a hill from the Centers and Freeman families. Davis frequently socialized with them, for good or ill—George Freeman’s sons were repeatedly called to testify at Davis’s criminal trials. Maybe Davis had heard about Jordan and Malinda while growing up, figured out who they were after talking with them or their neighbors, or recognized Clarsy Centers at the Spencers’ cabin. It was even possible that he was staying with the Spencers.21
Whatever the connection, Davis spent enough time at Rockhouse Creek to pick a fight with Jordan Spencer. When they “got into a difficulty,” Davis could have shot Spencer—he had done worse—but it made little sense to kill a man on his home ground. Far from Clay County, without friends to defend him, testify on his behalf, or vote on a jury to acquit him, Davis might have hanged for the crime, from a gallows or a tree. Instead, Davis started telling people along Rockhouse that their neighbor was a “negro.”22
For years, Spencer’s neighbors had maintained a code of silence, accepting Jordan as white so long as no one ever really had to think about it. Spencer gave them no reason to, always asserting a strong place for himself in the community and creating the circular logic that made it unthinkable that a man with whom whites worked, prayed, drank, and gambled could be black. When Letcher Davis started talking out loud—shouting, even—it seemed that by spreading this forbidden knowledge, he would force a moment of reckoning along Rockhouse Creek.
Men like John Horn, whose farm adjoined Spencer’s, heard Letcher Davis out. Horn had spent the Civil War in a blue uniform but was hardly radical. While many Republicans favored voting rights for blacks as well as the ability to make contracts and buy and sell property on an equal footing, almost no one, white or black, would admit to advocating what came to be known as “social equality,” which included the right to attend integrated schools or marry across the color line. Horn, who had known Spencer from his first days in Johnson County, was not looking to spend time with black people. “I never fooled around them but little,” he would say. “I always had something else to do.”23
Confronted by Davis, Horn could have rethought his relationship to the Spencers and stopped socializing with, working alongside, and relying on his neighbors. Or he could have decided that he had no problem living with people of color. Instead, Horn simply shook his head and dismissed Spencer’s accuser as “a wild, drinking kind of a dissipated man.” Horn did not know Davis and had no reason to believe that Davis came from Clay County or even that Davis was indeed his name. Other neighbors followed suit in ignoring the talk about Spencer’s blood. Jordan’s ancestry stayed his own business, and the Spencers—like everyone else along Rockhouse Creek, whether or not their skin was pale—remained white.24
It was more than a convenient fiction. For a generation, the Spencers had lived in the same place. The hollows were filling up with Jordan Spencer’s sons, daughters, and grandchildren. If they were suddenly relabeled black, their neighborhood would reveal itself as one that did not guard the line between black and white. And if it were admitted that one family had slipped through, many others had surely walked the same path. Few families would be immune to the kind of talk that Letcher Davis was spreading about Old Jordan. Even as outside demands for segregation and racial purity grew louder, it made little sense to redraw the definition of “white” to exclude dark people. Instead, communities buried the hazy, ambiguous, barely documented past and, in essence, allowed almost everyone who had been living as white to stay white. People could remain secure in their status, safe enough even to give reflexive support to the emerging hard-line politics of race.
With his neighbors standing by him, Spencer had no need to retaliate. And by letting the controversy pass, Spencer helped his community embrace the idea that nothing was amiss. Like a rattlesnake at first frost, Davis disappeared from Rockhouse Creek. The neighbors returned to the everyday struggles, mostly silent, that truly defined their lives.
A WEDDING IN THE MOUNTAINS in the 1870s began with a procession from the groom’s family home to the bride’s. Two by two, under a new day’s sun, the groom’s party walked or rode through the hills. They were simply dressed. “If there were any buckles, rings, buttons, or ruffles,” went one account, “they were relics of old times.” The path might be rugged, the journey slow, through thicket and mud, fording creeks, shrouded by forest, or up steep rises to ridgetops with views for miles. It was a ritual of resolve, a reminder of the struggles of marriage and the countless ways the hills had shaped and would continue to shape the bride’s and groom’s lives.25
When the procession reached its destination, the groom stood with the bride, a teenage girl in a homespun dress, and they exchanged simple vows. Sometimes a preacher solemnized the wedding, but often the couple did without and jumped over a broomstick to signify their union, a custom shared by, among others, blacks across the South. The afternoon and evening passed with what one woman remembered as a “heap o’ doin’s”—feasting and games and dancing the Virginia reel, horse races through the woods for a whiskey bottle, and groups of young men and women tucking the bride and groom into bed. The next morning, after camping in the fields, the wedding party traveled back to the groom’s house for the “infare,” a dinner where the entire community turned out to celebrate the marriage. They would gather again soon afterward to raise a cabin for the young couple.26
Mountain weddings bore traces of Elizabethan country life, as did the ballads people sang, even the words they spoke. In 1878 J
ordan Spencer watched one of his boys marry a girl with a seventeenth-century Scottish name. Alafair Yates was all of fifteen when she decided she liked Jordan Spencer Jr. enough to accept his proposal. In many ways the wedding was typical, two teenagers reciting vows outside a log cabin, surrounded by hills and fields and forest in the early days of autumn. But their union bucked tradition in a crucial way. Alafair and Young Jordan married at his family’s home, not hers. Her father did not approve of the union. Perhaps he felt she was too young, or that she deserved more than an illiterate farmer who offered a life of back-breaking labor. He never told his daughter his reasons. But neighbors suspected that Yates did not want his daughter marrying a black man.27
Relationships that blurred the color line had once been local matters, subject to whispers and rumors and occasional prosecution by local officials but also to tolerance. After the war, however, the phenomenon became part of a national political struggle and, accordingly, more abstract and dangerous. As the “White Man’s Party,” the Democrats fixated on interracial sex, or miscegenation, a word an anti-Lincoln pamphleteer coined in 1864. Resistance to civil rights for newly freed people expressed itself through a vocabulary of sexual deviancy. The “degeneracy” of black women and the “depravity” of black men required laws separating and ordering the races and excused—even compelled—brutal force to maintain white supremacy. Race-related violence was repeatedly described as retribution for sexual transgressions, necessary to protect the purity of white womanhood. In the decade that followed the war, a black man or woman was lynched somewhere in Kentucky just about every two weeks.28
Right at this moment—just as traditions of local toleration confronted the mass politics of racial purity—Jordan and Malinda Spencer’s children were reaching marrying age. Old Jordan’s neighbors had accepted him at the poker table and stood up to Letcher Davis. Once again, however, they had occasion to classify the Spencers and consider whether they should remain on the white side of the line. Living near and working with the Spencers did not necessarily make it acceptable to marry them.
Although Dick Yates did not want his daughter marrying a Spencer, his objections remained a father’s qualms and nothing more. Elsewhere in the South white fathers were threatening to kill or imprison the black men their daughters were marrying. But Dick Yates did not enlist the courts to void the marriage or prosecute Young Jordan, nor did anyone else in the county. Once the couple had exchanged vows, breaking up the union would have been just as damaging to Alafair as to Jordan, rendering her unmarriageable and dependent and potentially exposing her to prosecution too. As long as her husband remained white, she would be a respectable woman. Although lynch mobs constantly invoked the purity of white womanhood, it was also preserved by silence and accommodation.29
Other people had less trouble becoming kin to the Spencers. Among Rockhouse Creek families, Spencers married members of the Collins and Ratliff families, who were regarded as dark, but also Esteps and Blantons, who were not. Ben Franklin Spencer married a Hopson girl from John’s Creek, several miles south of Paintsville; two members of another John’s Creek family, the Seabolts, also married Spencers. When Dick Yates would not accompany his daughter to get the marriage certificate, one of the Seabolts helped Alafair with the paperwork. Given the choice between what they were hearing about racial purity and what they knew about the Spencers after living with them for a generation, most chose everyday experience over abstract ideas.30
Young Jordan and Alafair Spencer settled on Rockhouse, next to John Horn’s farm. All his life Jordan had worked his father’s fields—no schooling, no rest. Marriage freed him, if only to hire out his labor on other men’s farms. Two of Young Jordan’s sisters, Minerva and Sylvania, lived nearby with their babies and supported themselves as washerwomen. George, Jackson, and Ben were farmers in their own right, with children who would soon be old enough to push a plow.31
Although neighbors provided work and support for the Spencers, no one was more important than family. The Spencers might all gather for Sunday dinners. If one had a particular skill, like shoeing horses, he might shoe the horses of everyone in the extended family. At hog-killing time, when the weather got cold but before the creeks froze, the Spencer men might get together to slaughter and clean dozens of pigs. Family members nursed each other through illness and cooked and cleaned and cared for older nieces and nephews when babies were born. They spent more time talking with family than with anyone else. They spread news and gossip and advice first and foremost among themselves. They joked and dickered and debated and fought. And they came together in times of crisis, natural and man-made.32
With the children who remained at home, Old Jordan continued to make his crop. Even the ones who had left the Jordan Gap continued, in a way, to help their father. Their labor had created a working farm, income, and collateral—a basis for forming business ties with neighbors and merchants and claiming Jordan’s status as a productive, equal, and white citizen. By marrying, they cemented his status. They gave him a white extended family, in-laws and cousins who had a direct stake in the Spencers’ racial classification and would insulate and defend their Spencer kin from outside attack. Jordan and Malinda found their place in the vast tangle of local relations. As their children had children, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish the Spencers from everyone around them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
GIBSON
Washington, D.C., 1878
THE HOUSE WAS A fortress, a three-story brick cube with only the arch of the windows and the bare decoration below the roofline hinting at the “ample and somewhat gorgeous” rooms inside. Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, had built the mansion in fashionable Franklin Square, five blocks from the White House. The president had visited often, usually waiting for Stanton in a carriage outside but occasionally venturing into the library, its high bookcases lined with volumes on military strategy and the laws of war.1
In the library on a winter evening, Randall Gibson sat and read by lamp and firelight. His forehead and heavy brow, fringed with a wave of hair, caught most of the light. A thick bristle of walrus whiskers separated his patrician nose from a proud chin, giving way to the barest gray hint of muttonchop. His blue eyes—and the dark rings beneath them—appeared enormous. Whenever Gibson entered the library, it was never far from his mind that this was where “Stanton lived + carried on all his devilment during the war and after.” The thought always cheered him up. A bare decade after Stanton had crushed the South with total war and Radical Reconstruction, Gibson was living in his house. His wife hosted elegant suppers in Stanton’s dining room. Gibson’s daughter and two boys ran up and down the hallways where Lincoln’s secretary of war had paced. Federal troops no longer occupied the South. Former rebels had retaken the statehouses and legislatures. Democrats—Southerners, some three dozen of them Confederate generals—once again controlled the House of Representatives. Gibson was serving his second term in Congress. In early 1878 he was contemplating another run for reelection that fall. “Good Confederate likenesses” were now hanging on the walls of Stanton’s library, mounted with a keen sense of irony by its new occupant. “When I am seated here,” Gibson wrote, “I cannot help but dwell upon the change—for the better.”2
There was a knock on the door, and Gibson’s solitude was interrupted. A man walked in, a reporter for The Washington Post. The calming effect of a warm room on a cold night was lost on the reporter. He would remember his mood at that moment as “fluttering through the circumambient atmosphere,” jittery in anticipation of the interview to come. Gibson welcomed him inside. The man unfolded a copy of the day’s New York Times and approached. The lead story on the front page described the College of Cardinals assembling in Rome to select a new pope—a matter not without interest to Gibson, who had embraced his wife’s faith. But the reporter directed his eye to the story at the top of the far-left column, entitled “The Louisiana Officials.” “Look at this, Mr. Gibson,” he said. He shook the paper
, in his words, “as a matador might shake a red rag in the face of a bull.”3
SIX YEARS EARLIER, when Grant won a second term as president, Gibson had despaired that “the day for our redemption is far distant ... I see no road of escape. I see no power to resist. We are undone.” Despite his foreboding the rise of Gibson’s South had been remarkable, and Gibson had been instrumental in its triumph. He had arrived in Washington in the fall of 1875 ready to battle “the infernal Republicans, the hostile Party,” and help the newly elected Democrats to “get together and agree upon a Southern Policy—+ keep it to ourselves.” “It will not do for us to be merely counted as so many votes for this or that Northern aspirant,” he wrote. “We must be a power—behind the throne if need be.”4
While Gibson resolved to “hammer away” at “restor[ing] . . . our power + influence in and on the Government,” his blows had a gentle touch. Almost from the beginning, he relied on a lesson from his college days: a Southerner who could talk to Northerners would never want for influential friends. In Gibson’s opinion, the “shallow, puritanical pretentious snob[s]” who dominated Washington “labor[ed] under the prejudice . . . that our culture is local, limited + provincial—+ not catholic nor cosmopolitan.” In the Yankee view, the “poor + benighted South” was the antithesis of the North, “the world of thought + culture + modern methods of investigation.” As a Yale man, a gentleman, and a professional, Gibson would never fail to confound expectations. Where Northerners were frustrated by resistance to their efforts to remake the South, Gibson appeared to be the kind of person who understood their concerns and could be trusted to fulfill their vision for a unified nation.5