by Macy, Beth
He had an older, mixed-race sister named Lelia—nicknamed Tea—born to Julie just a month before C.C.’s wife gave birth to a daughter, Dorothy, in 1909. By 1920, Clay’s light-skinned sister Tea was living with a different family, presumably relatives, out in Horsepasture, and it took several visits to Junior and Mary’s house before I learned what had happened to her.
“It’s quite well known that Mr. Ed Bassett had a half brother who was black,” longtime town barber Coy Young said, speaking of Clay Barbour. “They say he was in the same crib [with a Bassett] as a baby.” Clay’s mother, Julie Barbour, remained in C.C.’s home and was “taken care of” throughout her life, numerous townspeople told me.
But what did that mean, exactly? The last mention I found of Julie was in the 1940 census, ten years after C.C. and Roxie Bassett died in a car accident. She was fifty-five, living in Bassett with C.C.’s daughter Dorothy Rich, and cooking. She made $520 a year, about $150 less than the average furniture worker. Her son, Clay, worked as a driver for a Bassett-owned trucking company and earned $500 a year—about $8,000 today, adjusting for inflation.
When Clay Barbour needed money, he staggered up the steep hill and appeared at the back door of the house he’d been reared in—C.C. Bassett’s, by then occupied by Mr. Ed and his wife, Ruby, who shared Clay’s weakness for alcohol. She gave Clay money on the back stoop, no questions asked. “The family didn’t shun him, but he wasn’t invited to dinner either,” Coy said. Several people said Ruby Bassett left Clay money in her will, but a search through the Henry County courthouse documents revealed no Barbour beneficiaries named among the white relatives. The Thomases pointed out that Mr. Ed was the Bassett executive who finally got the dirt road where they lived paved, in the 1960s. “Before that we had to drive across the creek three times just to get up the holler,” Junior said.
Ruby Bassett was Clay’s biggest supporter in the family, Estes recalled. “Clay could go to any store in Bassett and buy anything he wanted, and Miss Ruby would pay for it.”
Clay wore the furniture maker’s uniform of denim overalls every day of the week, and his light skin and blondish-brown hair gave credence to the rumors everyone talked about—but never within earshot of the Bassetts or the Barbours. Mary Thomas remembered Clay waving to her from the door of the Carver Lane shack where he lived as she walked to school in the morning.
He was friendly, but he drank too much, usually with Hodge-Muse’s stepfather, William “Pork Chop” Estes, who was Ruby’s chauffeur. The Bassetts accommodated his alcoholism the way one might help out a distant cousin who’d fallen on hard times. They gave him easy factory jobs and the freedom to sleep off hangovers when he needed to, the Thomases said. They tried to promote him to foreman once, but he couldn’t handle the responsibility, and it didn’t take.
“Clay was caught between two races,” recalled Carolyn Blue, a woman whose father and grandfather worked in Bassett factories and who has traced her own lineage back to a Bassett-area plantation called Hordsford, where miscegenation was also common. “Clay was a very tall, slender man, and he could pass for white. It was just like Thomas Jefferson, only this was the twentieth century.… But it was the elephant in the room.” The Bassetts weren’t the only patriarchs who practiced it, she said, citing a textile mogul in the region who also sired children with his maids.
When Carolyn and her sisters arrived at their historically black colleges, friends teased them and called them “redbones” because of their white lineage. “This was 1968 and people were saying to us, ‘Y’all must be from Martinsville,’ and ‘That white man really did a job on y’all,’ because most [black] people from Henry County are fair-skinned.”
But to college they had gone, thanks to the hard-earned money of their factory-worker parents. “Whether they were nice or not, or whether they slept with the maids, you have to give the Bassetts and the rest of them credit,” Blue said. “That work was a viable income for blacks. We were no longer a sharecropping community, and I really appreciate that. It allowed me to go to college.”
The Thomases are similarly conflicted about the Bassett family. The industry employed many of their kin, and while they weren’t paid as much as their white coworkers, there were times when they benefited from the paternalism that blanketed the town like smoke from the chimney stacks. After years of having no children, Junior and Mary adopted their son, Kim, with help from their Bassett bosses, who not only paid their legal fees but also gave them a brand-new crib for the boy.
I asked what it must have felt like to be Julie Barbour working in the C.C. Bassett home, and this seemed to be a scenario Mary had played out often in her mind. Having picked up extra work cleaning in the homes and offices of some Bassett managers herself, Mary reasoned that Julie must have felt trapped and alone, especially once she had her own children to raise. She doubted Julie was raped outright, but she was probably the victim of a subtler, more long-term form of coercion. Maybe Julie Barbour and C.C. Bassett loved each other—who knows?—but Mary doubted that.
“You would be surprised with these men and how they’ll wanna try to molest you,” she said. “I have left [cleaning] jobs because I could see they was gettin’ fresh. They’ll wait till the wife leaves and then be all, ‘Come here, I got something to tell you,’ [and I’d say,] ‘Why couldn’t you tell me that while your wife was still here?’
“You see, you have to work until you can get your money and so you just don’t say nothing,” she said. “They’ll do it. You’d be surprised.
“They were just that slick.”
Junior Thomas remained silent as his wife of sixty-three years spoke, occasionally nodding but mostly staring blankly at the evangelist preaching on his television screen. He nodded when Mary talked about the person she’d worked for the longest, a wealthy woman (not a Bassett) who never paid employer taxes or Social Security taxes. Decades later, a lawyer advised Mary to bring it up with the woman because Mary’s Social Security benefits amounted to less than three hundred dollars a month.
So Mary did. “Are you threatening me, Mary Thomas?” the woman had said. Reluctantly, she agreed to meet Mary with her “pension,” not in her actual home, but down below it, on the other side of the Thomases’ cement bridge. Her retirement? An envelope containing a hundred dollars in cash.
The only time Junior raised his voice came near the end of our first two-hour interview.
“We made ’em what they had,” he boomed.
“We made ’em rich.”
Mary Elizabeth and Spencer Morten, Mr. J.D.’s granddaughter and her husband, conceded the critical role of African Americans in the making of Bassett Furniture Industries. They quoted from a recorded family interview in which Mr. J.D. himself echoed Junior Thomas’s assessment, nearly word for word.
“The Negroes made me,” they recalled him saying, pronouncing the word “nee-gres.”
His competitors to the south were using white labor, and he could cut his overhead by hiring workers who were even cheaper than the Scots-Irish coming in from the countryside. Like the Asian competitors who would take his own descendants to the mat a century later, he knew cheap labor was the key to outmaneuvering his rivals.
“The blacks didn’t work harder per se, but they were paid less, and they tended to have the worst jobs,” Spencer said, like pouring the nasal-burning silver nitrate on glass at Bassett Mirror, a family-run company Morten headed for decades, and where Junior Thomas spent the bulk of his career. “I’d walk in there and get a headache, but the blacks used to tell me, ‘You get used to this.’ ”
In fact, they said, working amid the fumes seemed to prevent them from catching colds.
But when asked about the genealogy of Clay Barbour, Spencer Morten seemed sincerely incredulous. “A black man who was Uncle Ed’s brother and C.C. Bassett’s son? I never heard of it.” After our meeting, Spencer even called around, questioning blacks and whites alike about the story, wondering why he and his wife seemed to be the last to know.
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p; “Things floated around town through the employees and through the townspeople, and sometimes management was the last to find out,” Pat Ross, a town librarian, explained to him and, later, to me.
Bassett was a company town with two distinct narratives: the prevailing one, told by the Families and the local media (owned by friends of the Families), and the whispered one, discussed on front porches and in the bleachers at John D. Bassett High by everyone else.
Pat Ross, who is white, grew up hearing hints of the story, and she can now recite most of the Bassett family tree—even those members who were never written in. Like most people in Bassett, she has her own connection to the early days of the furniture company. Bassett Furniture is, in fact, the reason she exists.
Bassett lured both sets of her grandparents to town in the early 1920s. Her paternal grandfather, J.G. Clay, had been the boiler man for Broyhill Furniture in Lenoir, and word of his skill reached the ear of J.D. Bassett himself. For a few more cents an hour, J.G. would become Bassett’s boiler man—a position so hot and so important that he was given two black assistants to carry his wood and coal as well as the rare permission to wear sandals to work. As another incentive for him to leave the North Carolina competition, J.G. and his family were allowed to live in one of the coveted two-story, company-owned homes.
“If you worked for Bassett, you got a house as part of your pay,” Pat Ross explained, though rent and electricity were deducted from gross earnings. If you lived in Bassett Heights, along the southern edge of the town, the company even gave you a ride to work, courtesy of a truck called the Old 97. It had a wood-frame room built on its flatbed, complete with open windows and a door, and it was covered in black tar paper.
North Bassett homes shared power with the north Bassett factories, and when J.G. shut down the boiler for the day, the currents surging from the early electrical system caused ripples throughout the community. His wife, Addie, knew when she saw her lights flicker that she had five minutes before her husband would arrive home, five minutes to get her boys to the supper table.
The power company, the doctor, even the police station in the company parking lot—everything was Bassett operated and Bassett owned. Like Rich Uncle Pennybags from the board game Monopoly, Mr. J.D. put everything in town under his purview—especially the community chest.
Pat’s other set of grandparents arrived in Bassett the same way the typical white line workers did: They heard there were paying jobs that came with houses, albeit small ones (though nothing as ramshackle as the Carver Lane homes), and the probability of an easier life than the one sawmilling and farming provided in Patrick County, an afternoon’s mule ride away. Early white workers lived near the Smith River banks, mostly across the river from the factories, and teamed up in groups of four or five to build boats together, then pooled rides across the Smith. Eventually, they walked to work on company-owned swinging bridges.
“J.D. Bassett was a large man with a large presence,” Pat Ross recalled. When relatives of Bassett employees died, he would allow them to be buried in the Bassett family cemetery—not far from his sprawling Victorian home—but on its outskirts, reserving the inner circle for family.
Clay Barbour is buried ten miles away from the Bassett family mausoleum. His final resting place is in Martinsville, in a segregated cemetery named for George Washington Carver. A few years before he died and just after Ruby Bassett’s death, his Carver Lane shack was burglarized. Thieves waited till he left the house on a day shortly after the first of the month, knowing his Social Security money was inside (and that his door wouldn’t lock), then ransacked the place.
The next day, Naomi Hodge-Muse took him a box of food, some cash, and a lock for his door, with a bar that extended across as extra security.
“Why would you do that, child?” Clay asked her, tears streaming down his face.
“Because God loves you, Mr. Barbour.” And because of Pork Chop, Clay’s old drinking buddy. He was her stepfather and the only daddy she’d ever known.
What she didn’t say was that she knew, with Ruby Bassett dead, Clay had no one left to turn to.
Clay’s only surviving relative is a niece, an eighty-five-year-old widow living in nearby Fieldale. When Junior Thomas and I visited her, she warmly welcomed us into her brick ranch, decorated with pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and President Barack Obama. She and her husband had lived in Detroit, where he worked for General Motors, but they retired and moved back to Henry County not long after Clay was robbed.
“I don’t remember the way I used to,” she said when Junior and I gently asked about her family history with the Bassetts. Her mother, who was Clay’s older sister, Tea, had a job in Martinsville at Jobbers, the sewing plant. Her father worked for sixty years at Bassett Mirror.
“Mama spent all her time worrying over her brother and her son,” she said, both of whom were alcoholics. She produced several photos of her mother, clad in a plaid dress and wearing a beret, with her arm around her much-darker son. When I noted that her mother could have passed for white, she said, “Yeah, she was right white-looking,” but she did not acknowledge the miscegenation in her family tree. (Even to friends, she describes her family as simply “mulatto,” said Carolyn Blue, whose mother is the woman’s friend and contemporary.)
Asked directly if she was related to the Bassetts, she said, “Here lately, I can’t remember nothing. I’ve been suffering so with my legs, it keeps my mind all messed up.”
As Junior and I drove off, Junior Thomas observed that the Barbours seemed to live a kind of self-imposed exile. Clay drank his loneliness away, while his niece prospered by marrying a hardworking man and moving far away from Bassett. When she returned home to Henry County, she was an old woman with a foggy memory—and every right in the world to let the uncomfortable facts of her past slip away.
“She know it true,” Junior said after we left her smiling at the doorstep. “Everybody know it true.” Months later, Junior returned to the old woman’s house alone—“She’ll tell me things she won’t tell you”—but she did not want to discuss Bassett genealogy with anyone.
“I asked her if C.C. Bassett was her granddaddy, and she claims she don’t know who her granddaddy was.” Asked to sign a form granting me permission to request her uncle’s and mother’s death certificates—though it was unlikely C.C. Bassett’s name would have been listed as her father on any official document—she declined. Junior told me she was worried the Bassetts could still, somehow, find a way to take her home away if they wanted to, even though she owns it free and clear.
I’m not in the business of keeping eighty-five-year-old ladies awake at night, so I asked him to relay the message that I would not use her name in this book. (She’s hard of hearing and can’t talk on the phone.) When I brought up the issue with Hodge-Muse, who traces her own ancestry back to the slave owner Pete Hairston, she wasn’t surprised.
“Part of it is shame. And part of it is just pissed, because how dare you have relations with a woman and care nothing about your offspring? You give them nothing. N-o-t-h-i-n-g. Not a piece of land. Not a piece of money. Not education.
“Why would you acknowledge they’re in your family tree when all they did was take out their animalistic lust on your ancestors who had no way of protecting themselves?”
After all these years, I wondered: Did it even matter who Clay Barbour’s daddy was? It’s a question I wrestled with as I researched the growth of the furniture dynasty, with its roots in Southern plantation history and land grants that helped turn all that lumber into cash.
Does it matter how the powerful treated their employees—whether they paid them a living wage or remembered them in their wills, what they tried to do to them when their wives left for the store?
Does that history matter when a century passes and the workers’ descendants are replaced by fax machines, Mandarin-speaking interpreters, and plane tickets to China?
In the end, I believe, these stories are part of a larger one about power
and paternalism. Even Mr. J.D. acknowledged it when he said the Negroes made him. And having done so, they are part of the foundation on which his family’s wealth was built.
The men in the family made the beds. But they never had to lie in them.
Unless they wanted to.
The help was such a critical part of the Bassett family fabric that the extended clan took the servants along to their winter enclave on Hobe Sound, Florida, on the street locals still refer to as Bassett Row. After taking his family to Palm Beach to escape the 1918 flu epidemic, Mr. J.D. decided he liked Florida so much that he bought an entire line of lots in a community called Hobe Sound on Jupiter Island—he said the fishing was better there than in Palm Beach—and gave a parcel to each of his kids.
The Bassetts brought along their cooks and maids, and the mothers took turns arranging tutors for the children. The first time Mary Hunter saw the white Florida sands, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at, according to family lore. “Lawdy, Lawdy. Miss Pokey’s done fooled me. There ain’t nothing here but more snow.”
In one set of extended-family pictures from 1945, the entire Virginia furniture-making clan gathered to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday. Flanking Mr. J.D. and Miss Pokey is an eight-year-old JBIII, on the right, and one of his cousins, three-year-old Patricia Vaughan Exum, on the left. Patricia’s father helped manage a Bassett spinoff in Galax, ninety minutes away, begun in 1919 by her grandfather Bunyan Vaughan. He was a brother of Taylor Vaughan, who had the good fortune to marry Mr. J.D.’s daughter Blanche.
Further twisting the family tree, Miss Pokey’s sister was Patricia’s great-grandmother, and Miss Pokey was JBIII’s grandmother. Taylor Vaughan began Vaughan Furniture in Galax a few years after his brother started Vaughan-Bassett Furniture, both men with the help of start-up cash from Mr. J.D.
