The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  The wolves never came. But some whites in Gibson County decided that the Griers and all of the African Americans in Gibson County should have some hurt. So they inflicted the indignity of registration on them.

  The new state constitution required that every free person of African descent be registered starting in November 1851. African Americans had to show proof that they had entered the state before 1851 and submit to bodily inspection by whites. Some counties chose not to enforce the new law; others were slow to start or lax in requiring people to register. But whites in Gibson County started as soon as they could in 1851.48

  This registry would have been hauntingly familiar to the Lyles family in Gibson County, who had seen such registries in use against free people like them back in Tennessee. Had any of them thought that one day such practices of prejudice might arise in Indiana?

  Charles and Keziah Grier and their son John waited awhile before coming to the courthouse to register. When they did, it was not easy. The county clerk wrote down Charles’s information: “Negro, dark complexion, stout built, 5´ 8 ½ inches high.” But Keziah refused to let the clerk get near her with his measuring stick. In the end he had to content himself with writing down, “Negro, dark complexion, light built.”49

  Their daughter Mary Jane, now twenty-seven, waited even longer—maybe hearing of her parents’ experience. And Malinda refused outright. Her parents had seen so many changes for freedom and equality—they had created them, they had lived them, and now they were seeing them destroyed. She would not take part in this.50

  Despite all of this, or maybe because of it, their friend Jacob Hawkins was going to build a church.

  Jacob Hawkins could certainly afford to build a church. He now owned 600 acres of land, at least 180 acres of it cleared and under cultivation. This man, forced onto the frontier as an enslaved child with nothing, not even his own body, to claim as his own, was now one of the most successful farmers of any color in Daviess County.51

  But his story, his success, had more than symbolic power. Jacob and Ellen Hawkins, Charles and Keziah Grier, and the hundreds of other successful African American farmers in the Northwest Territory states were also managing massive engines of production, creating wheat, wool, corn, meat, and more. They were not merely feeding their families or communities—admittedly a good measure of success for most farming families of any skin color; these farmers were feeding the nation. Whether it was their hogs going to Cincinnati and Chicago or their wheat going to New Orleans and Pittsburgh, free African American farmers were affecting markets and people far outside their own states. And now Jacob Hawkins was going to use some of the wealth he had grown to build a church.

  Like the Griers, the Hawkins family had started off attending a church where blacks and whites worshipped together. But something changed. Perhaps their home church started to force segregation or even reject African American members. This was certainly becoming more common. But their involvement with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church probably began with Bishop Paul Quinn.52

  Richard Allen had founded the denomination in Philadelphia back in the late 1700s, soon after the Revolutionary War. As a very young man, Reverend Quinn had known Bishop Allen, although the elderly bishop and the young pastor had not always seen eye to eye. Quinn was the first AME circuit rider to make it out to the Great West, coming from his training ground in Philadelphia in the early 1830s. He was a man of color, vague about his background, but bold about his calling.53

  They never knew when he would arrive, but when he did it was wonderful. He was a magnificent sight, beautifully dressed from his fine beaver hat to his supple gloves, riding a huge, half-wild horse. He would gallop into their midst, calling out Bible verses in that big voice of his, bringing his horse to a rearing halt and jumping off before it had even settled.54

  In many ways, Reverend Quinn was the embodiment of Reverend Hosea Easton’s magnified man. For a start, he was large—over six feet—but he was also so very free. And he knew how to found churches.

  Whether it was Bible study meetings in log cabins or raising a beautiful clapboard church, he helped African Americans across the Northwest Territory states achieve great things. In eleven years he founded almost fifty churches, from frontier outposts to the slave port of St. Louis—all places of great danger for a finely dressed black man preaching truth, justice, and freedom. Because of his work and the work of hundreds of African Americans across the frontier and rural Northwest Territory states, the AME was able to create a new “conference,” the Indiana Conference, its formal founding ceremony held in the Indiana African American farming settlement of Beech in Ripley Township, Rush County.55

  In 1844 the AME made Quinn a bishop; by the 1850s he was based in the town of Richmond, Indiana, a Quaker stronghold known for its thriving African American community and Underground Railroad activities. Jacob and Ellen Hawkins may well have hosted Bishop Quinn as he rode through, putting him up in their lovely large home, where many could gather for services in the parlor.56

  The Griers had also been meeting with traveling AME pastors, possibly including Quinn, who came through Gibson County ministering to the African Americans there. For years the Griers had worshipped with the white Elder Wasson, that friend of Reverend James Grier, who had freed Charles back in 1813. But something had changed for them as well.

  The Griers, with a large family of grown children and many more African American neighbors, may have freely decided to celebrate on Sundays with a pastor and a congregation that looked more like themselves. But like many of their generation, they were probably comfortable worshipping in a diverse church—just as the Morrises had been over at Fort Allison—for such a congregation reflected the values of equality they would have been familiar with in those heady days of the early republic. But Elder Wasson may have died and his small congregation disbanded. Or whites in his church, like so many others across the North, may have rejected the ideal of integration.

  Whatever the reason, both the Griers and the Hawkinses were now members of the AME, connected through ties of faith to African Americans across the Northwest Territory states and the nation. Their traveling preachers would have brought them news from all the other states, updated them on family and friends in other communities, and spoken words of comfort and encouragement. And now, Jacob Hawkins was going to build an AME church.57

  This took extraordinary courage. Jacob Hawkins’s wealth alone could endanger him and his family as more whites used violence to gain the status and power they desired. But a church was worse. It was not safe. Everyone knew that a fine frame church, its windows filled with glass, seemed to be a tempting target for prejudiced whites.

  But Jacob Hawkins was going to build that church. The Griers knew that Jacob Hawkins was never one to pick the safest path. And, like the Griers, he was not going to give in to the powers of prejudice that were rising in his state. At least he wasn’t starting a newspaper.

  And now Keziah Grier hoped the church might be finished in time for the wedding. Malinda, her dear eldest child, was engaged to Jacob’s son Charner.58

  There may have been some surprise about this. Charner was not the Hawkins family’s eldest son but the fourth born in a family of eleven children, and he was a good twelve years younger than Malinda. But the Hawkinses and Griers were friends, and they must have been so glad that they would soon be kin.

  Malinda had certainly waited long enough, she was almost thirty-five by now. But she was careful, and Keziah must have been grateful to have her at home for so long, working with her and Charles to help the refugees they aided. And Charner, well, Charner was like his father and Charles—a hardworking man who loved to farm. He would not take Malinda away to a city but would stay close and work his father’s land as well as his own.

  It was a blessing that Malinda had fallen in love with Charner and not some visitor from out of state. Some of the kindly and handsome young preachers pastoring to them could well have caught her eye. But if Malinda had
married a man from out of state, she would have been lost to Keziah. The new constitution banned even visiting family from entering Indiana.

  And marriage didn’t help, as a young couple over on the east side of the state had discovered. When Elizabeth Keith and Arthur Barkshire were married in Indiana in Arthur’s hometown close to the Ohio border, white officials in Indiana came after them because Elizabeth had been born in Ohio. Not only did the state force Elizabeth to leave, but it fined her husband $10 for breaking the new law banning anyone in Indiana from entering into contracts with African Americans from outside the state—even the holy contract of marriage.59

  The Grier and Lyles families must have wondered how their communities could keep growing. Their own Gibson County had seen its population grow with African American pioneers drawn to the good land there. As these pioneers grew their farms, they would have dreamed of the family and friends they hoped would join them. But now that was stopped.

  But nothing would stop Jacob Hawkins from building his church. And he was determined it would be done in time for the wedding. And it was—a handsome frame building with its clapboard sides gleaming in the sun, a far cry from the log cabins that many white settlers in the region still lived in.60

  Then a date was chosen: December 22, 1853, just before Christmas. Keziah would have been baking for days, the house warm and fragrant, her daughter Malinda and many other women helping. But Ellen Hawkins, Charner’s mother, must have baked the bread for the first communion in the church. At that first communion celebrated in the new church, they would have eaten bread made from their grain. Each loaf broken for them by their pastor held years of hard work and hope, from the earliest clearing of the land to that fall’s harvest.

  Harvest, that rich time of bounty, as long as there was no freeze, no storm, no flood, no hail, no swarm of insects or birds landing on the tender crop to consume it. If the conditions were just right, then they would move out with their scythes sharpened, cutting the grain so it could be gathered and bundled up. The harvesters stepped, bent, and swung, scraping their blades low along the ground, the rhythmic song of their scythes rising across the field.

  The Hawkins family would have had to hire almost every able-bodied person in the county, and maybe beyond, regardless of the color of their skin, to harvest all of the acres they now had under cultivation. And much of it was in grain—a risky crop but valuable if all went well. In 1850 Hawkins had harvested over one hundred bushels of wheat. He must have hoped for even better in 1853.61

  Jacob and Ellen Hawkins would always have looked at the sky as they worked with the other harvesters, for rain could ruin everything, rotting the ripe wheat as it lay in the field, waiting to be gathered in. If the rain held off, then the drying stalks could be taken to their big barn, where the floor was cleared for threshing—men and women lifting their flails high in the air to bring them down hard to separate the ripe grains of wheat from the stalks. Then there was the winnowing done out in the wind. The laborers filled large flat baskets with the grain and threw it high in the air, where the breeze blew away the chaff as the grain fell back into the baskets to be caught and tossed up over and over again. Just the right amount of wind was needed: too much and the grain would blow away with the chaff; too little and the chaff would not blow away at all.62

  Even if the wind was perfect, it often shifted, blowing the chaff into their faces, causing everyone to cough and sneeze as they tried to turn with the wind. Soon chaff was everywhere, in hair and ears, scratchy behind collars and stuck under damp arms. At the end of a long day, the younger laborers must have fairly run for the nearest creek to rinse off, the chaff rising to the surface of the water, specks of gold swirling away downstream as they dunked their heads, gasping with the cold and laughing.

  If all went right, the grain could be taken to the mill for grinding. And then, finally, Ellen Hawkins could make her bread.

  By 1853 Ellen almost certainly had a fine wood cook stove where she baked her bread, the loaves rising high with the starter she had kept going for years. She would have kept that starter yeasty and alive even in the coldest winter months, wrapping it carefully at night and tucking it close to her body to keep it from freezing.

  There might be talk of miracles and the holiness of communion bread, but the African American farmers in the church that day knew that the loaf of bread Ellen Hawkins had baked was a miracle in itself, as wonderfully improbable as they were.

  They must have been thankful indeed as they took it into their mouths, chewing it, tasting its rough sweetness against their tongues as they prayed. This day must have felt like an answer to prayer as they knelt in their church celebrating together. Villages forming, churches being built, children getting married. All of it just normal, except in the minds of so many whites, who had decided that the United States should be a nation divisible, with liberty and justice for only a few.

  But Ellen and Jacob, Keziah and Charles, Malinda and Charner were still going out to their fields each spring and planting. And they were joined by thousands of others whose names echoed back through the centuries: Lyles, Roundtree, Goins, Nolcox, Allen, and Roberts. They planted even if the future might bring blight, drought, freezes, loss. Still they planted; still they built churches, founded schools, married. Still they walked the long miles forward through their fields behind the plow. Still they hoped, even as the blight of prejudice and injustice infected the land and threatened to spoil everything they had grown.

  9

  “A history of repeated injuries and usurpations”

  Vanderburgh County, Indiana, Summer 1857 to Spring 1861

  There was so much blood.

  The attackers had finally gone, but there was still so much blood.

  The Lyles family knew there would be an attack, but not this, not the children.

  That hateful newspaper, the Evansville Daily Enquirer and all those other organizers in Evansville had been working for a while now to gather a fighting force against them.1

  Now it was over, and the outside of the house was pretty much ruined. There were bullet holes everywhere, bullets still stuck deep into the wood. The front door was battered, the log the attackers had used to break into their home still lying on the ground.

  Daniel and four others were the only grown men inside, all the rest were women and children. The wounds were terrible.

  It was not just their blood either. There had been others wounded as the Lyles family defended themselves. The attackers were gone, taking their dead and wounded with them, but they had left their blood everywhere.

  There had been some powerful leaders among them, including Alexander Maddox, the county commissioner. Daniel Lyles was pretty sure he had killed Maddox. But he hadn’t been able to protect Nancy, and she was hurt, badly. She had been hit on the head with a gunstock and fallen as the attackers had wielded bowie knives and guns in the close quarters of their home.

  This was not about some hogs.

  Although by 1857, the Lyles family would have been known for their fine livestock, their hogs included. They were good farmers, that was evident. Evident in their good land that they kept improving and adding to. Evident in their profits, in their success. Evident in all that they had been doing since they had arrived in Vanderburgh County from Tennessee twenty years before. They had worked so hard for their successes and risen far on their new frontier.2

  Daniel and Nancy and most of the Lyles family had decided to settle in Vanderburgh County on land close to the Ohio River and the village of Evansville. They had picked a two-hundred-acre plot that was practically an island. It was set on a rise and back a bit from the Ohio River to safeguard it from flooding, a creek winding in a loop around three sides of their land, their home on a high point in the middle of that land. The water acted as a natural boundary, a way to keep livestock from wandering out, or those who were unwelcome from easily wandering in. Some said that such land was unhealthy, too close to water, too full of bad vapors that could cause disease and d
eath. But their twelve children were evidence of the goodness of their land and their family. They were thriving.3

  They were not all living there. Daniel’s brother Joshua and his family had found land near his wife’s kin in Gibson County, about twenty-five miles north. But they were close enough to visit and did so with some frequency. And Vanderburgh County suited Daniel and Nancy and all the Lyles family scattered around them. Their nearest white neighbors were fairly tolerant, some even working with them, and there was now an AME church nearby where they could worship. Being close to the Evansville docks made it easy to get their hogs to the lucrative markets of Cincinnati on the many boats that traveled the Ohio River.4

  But then their hogs had started to go missing.

  The hogs ran loose in the woods of all of the local farms. Anyone’s hogs might wander onto someone else’s land, but this was so common that the county kept records of the various “hog marks” the farmers used to keep track of their livestock, including the Lyles family mark. The day of “marking” the hogs would have been a noisy one on the Lyles family farm, as each young pig was held firmly while members of the family did their skilled knife work, putting a smooth crop on the right ear and two slits in each ear.5

  There would have always been whites interested in those hogs—interested in purchasing them and interested in stealing them. But “hog squeaking,” while not uncommon, was a serious offense. And the Lyles family had registered its hog marks with the county, making very clear who owned those fine animals.6

  Then their hogs must have started going missing in numbers much higher than before. This was more than illness, injury, or some stray dog picking off a pig or two.