Forbidden Fruit (14 page)

In William Styron’s novel
Sophie’s Choice,
the Nazis force a female concentration camp prisoner to decide which of her children
will live and which one will die. The act of choosing between her baby daughter, who
clutches a one-eyed teddy bear, and her young son, who can read both German and Polish,
leaves Sophie permanently scarred and gushing guilt. Charlotta’s choice must have
been almost as agonizing. There really was no right choice: whatever she did would
wound someone. She loved her kidnapped son, but he was a single man without children.
Her sons-in-law had wives, children and responsibilities: they needed to be with their
families, and their families needed them. But would Benjamin understand if she refused
to free him? Or would he feel doubly betrayed? Charlotta finally chose her sons-in-law.
She sent Benjamin a letter, probably through Underground Railroad agents, urging him
to ask God for the strength to run away on his own. She never heard from or saw him
again. In 1870, he still lived in Waverly, Missouri, and had married a woman named
Adeline and fathered four children.

Meanwhile, Charlotta, armed with letters of recommendation from prominent citizens
in Iowa, traveled to Philadelphia, New York and New England. Wearing a black bonnet
over her shiny black braids, she raised money for her sons-in-law, speaking in churches,
halls and homes about the evils of slavery. “It was a difficult task for a poor, ignorant
woman who had never had a day’s schooling in her life, to travel thousands of miles
in a strange country and stand up night after night and day after day before crowds
of men and women, pleading for those back in slavery,” Grace Jones noted. During her
travels, Charlotta met Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave who had become a great
writer and orator, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony, suffragettes and abolitionists,
and many other leaders in the struggle for human rights. It is possible that Charlotta
Pyles’s association with Douglass continued. On April 12, 1866, Douglass lectured
at the Chatham Square Church in Keokuk, and in February 1869 he also visited Keokuk
on his way to Des Moines.

And Charlotta must have picked up some of Douglass’s ability to sway audiences as
well. In six months, she raised three thousand dollars.

Frances Gordon accompanied Charlotta Pyles to Kentucky to purchase her sons-in-law.
However, Charlotta, her husband and Gordon soon made another difficult decision, this
one laced with danger. In 1854, the Civil War that broke out in Kansas Territory,
southwest of Iowa, had pushed more Iowans to take sides on the slavery question. The
conflict between forces who wanted Kansas to become free territory and those who wanted
it to embrace slavery became so violent that Kansas became known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
Meanwhile, by the middle 1850s, abolitionists had become strong enough to establish
a working Underground Railroad in Iowa. The Pyleses decided to make their home a stop
on the road.

The main line of the Underground Railroad entered Iowa at the southwestern corner
near Tabor, where the Reverend John Todd, a Congregationalist minister, hid slaves
in his barn. It passed through Lewis, Des Moines, Grinnell, Iowa City, West Liberty,
Tipton, DeWitt, Low Moor and Clinton, the home office of the U.S. marshal and a place
where slave catchers often lay in wait. Slave-freeing John Brown of Kansas, with his
long broom of a nearly white beard and straight-ahead eyes, sometimes stayed at the
home of George B. Hitchcock, a sympathetic Iowa Congregational preacher. Hitchcock’s
house had two basements, one of them secret. While Brown traveled to Canada in the
winter of 1858–1859, he stashed his arms in U.S. congressman Josiah B. Grinnell’s
“liberty room,” and his company of runaway slaves slept there. William Maxson, who
shipped blacks as potatoes in railroad box cars, got a scare one day when one of the
sacks of potatoes sneezed, but the load went on its way all the same. Reverend Todd
once dressed a runaway slave woman to look like his wife, swaddling her in a veil,
cloak and gloves, and drove her over fifty miles in his buggy in daylight. Deacon
Theron Trowbridge of the Congregational Church in Denmark, Iowa, strapped on his gun
after a slave girl arrived at his house wailing that she had been forced to abandon
her baby at a Missouri farm about fifty miles southwest of Fort Madison, Iowa.

He rode off on his horse, returning two nights later with the woman’s baby. In May
1857, the
Fort Madison Plain Dealer
ran an editorial lamenting the fact that the town of Denmark “has the name of being
the rendezvous of men who occasionally engage in negro-stealing, at the same time
professing the religion of the gospel.”

Sometime between the middle 1850s and 1860, the Pyleses and Frances Gordon joined
this slave-assisting network, too. They don’t show up in the 1860 census, a year when
their house is described as vacant. It is possible they avoided census takers during
their most active years on the slave-aiding network. However, in Iowa, which still
contained many proslavery elements, they ran a real risk in welcoming fugitives. Yet
Charlotta, in particular, became a legendary figure.

“Many a slave, coming from Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri,” wrote Grace Jones, “found
at the gateway into Iowa an enthusiastic member of their own race in the person of
Grandma Pyles. She received them into her own home and, with the aid of many white
friends she had made on her trip, helped them to make their escape to Canada.”

But the most remarkable thing about the Pyleses and Frances Gordon is that they never
really died. Oh sure, Charlotta, Harry and Frances eventually passed away: Harry Pyles,
eighty-seven, died in 1870 of “old age,” according to his medical records; Charlotta
Pyles, seventy-six, died in 1880 from heart disease; and Frances Gordon passed away
in the 1870s. But they haunted their families and haunted Iowa, too. Nobody in the
Pyles family could forget their stories or shake off their influence. Tales about
their adventures and achievements became the rhythm to which their descendants rowed
through life. Charlotta Smith, one of Charlotta and Harry Pyles’s daughters, went
to war with the Keokuk school system. In 1874, Smith’s son, Geroid, was one of two
black boys denied admission to the Keokuk schools, which were open and free to whites
between ages five and twenty-one. After Charlotta Smith took the case to court, the
Iowa Supreme Court ruled that black children could not be excluded from the public
schools or compelled to attend a separate school.

However, it was Grace Morris Allen, granddaughter of Charlotta and Harry Pyles, who
would carry her family’s courage all the way to Mississippi and help a young man who
loved her on sight create a miracle amid pine-scented woods. Grace was the daughter
of Mary Ellen Pyles, who’d obtained an education by working for a Quaker family, and
James Addison Morris, a steward on a line of steamboats operating between St. Louis
and St. Paul. Grace had taller, wider dreams than her mother or grandparents. She
taught school, opened a short-lived industrial school for blacks in Burlington, Iowa,
and spent several years rallying support for a black school at Cave Spring, Kentucky.

It was during a 1905 Baptist Missionary Society meeting in Iowa City that Grace, by
then a young widow, met Laurence Jones, a junior at the University of Iowa. Jones
would later write that he had never been so moved by anyone as he was by his first
glimpse of Grace, a brown-skinned wisp of a woman who was, in some ways, his mirror
image. She was the smartest and most upbeat black woman he’d ever met and had come
to the meeting to raise funds for an industrial school in the South. She also was
slightly shorter than Jones, who stood about five feet five inches. Laurence had nothing
to offer Grace when they met; he was still a student while she was already a widow.
Yet over the years, they would exchange letters and meet “occasionally,” according
to author Leslie Purcell.

After graduating, Missouri-born and Iowa-educated Laurence Jones surprised everyone
by turning down a job at Alabama’s well-established Tuskegee Institute to teach in
a small school in Hinds County, Mississippi, determined to help the poorest of the
poor. He found his mission, though, in the pine-covered hills of Rankin County, Mississippi,
where 80 percent of the people could neither read nor write. Unable to add or subtract,
they had no way of knowing if they received their full wages or if stores charged
them correctly. In lean winters, they often lived on cornmeal and dried peas, never
having learned to preserve wild berries or summer vegetables. Laurence wanted to start
a school where people would learn to use their heads, their hearts and their hands,
but he seemed destined for failure. The black farmers didn’t trust the educated stranger,
figuring he was working some kind of scam and would run off with any money he managed
to raise. Whites, most of whom weren’t that educated either, saw no need for black
education.

Then, one day in 1909, Laurence sat on a pine log under the shade of a one-hundred-year-old
cedar tree, going through his mail. A sixteen-year-old boy showed up and stood staring
at Laurence’s newspaper. Jones handed the paper to the boy, who held it upside down,
unable to read a word. So Jones began teaching the young man the basics of reading.
The next day, three youngsters sought out Jones, and he taught them, too. He might
have been inspired by his maternal grandfather, Prior Foster, an Underground Railroad
operator in Coshocton County, Ohio, who with his brothers, Joseph and Levi, founded
Woodstock Manual Labor Institute in 1846 in Woodstock Township, Lenawee County, Michigan.
Foster’s school lasted ten years. Laurence Jones, known to his students and neighbors
as the Little Professor of Piney Woods, would be a lot luckier, in part because of
the gift he’d one day receive from long-dead Charlotta and Harry Pyles.

As more and more people, young and old, began showing up for lessons in the woods,
Jones’s dream took shape: Ed Taylor, a black man most people considered mean, donated
an old abandoned cabin being used as a sheep shed, forty acres and fifty dollars.
It became Jones’s first schoolhouse. A white sawmill owner donated ten thousand feet
of lumber for a new schoolhouse, which Jones and his students built. A University
of Iowa alumnus donated eight hundred acres. A millionaire industrialist shipped down
a small herd of cattle to provide milk for the children. Another businessman sent
fruit and pecan trees. This became the nucleus of the Piney Woods Country Life School,
slightly more than twenty miles south of Jackson and set among pine and hickory, sweet
gum, sassafras and magnolia trees.

However, starting a black school in Mississippi in 1917 was, in some ways, more dangerous
than escaping to freedom in a covered wagon with bounty hunters and wolves on your
trail. Between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the United States,
3,437 of them black and 1,293 white, according to figures from the Tuskegee Institute.
Some died for trivial offenses such as “disputing with a white man” or “peeping in
a window.” In 1916, fifty-two black men and one black woman were lynched, including
Jeff Brown in Cedar Bluff, Mississippi, whose “crime” was accidentally brushing against
a white girl as he ran for a train. In 1917, the wolves came after Laurence Jones,
armed with cocked rifles and rope. Two white youths raised up a mob by claiming they’d
overheard Laurence Jones urging blacks at a religious revival to riot. Jones actually
had told the group that life was “a battleground” and that they must stay “on the
firing line.” The youths assumed that he was gathering an army to attack whites. A
mob of fifty men soon surrounded Jones. With a noose around his neck, he talked about
how he’d raised money to buy supplies for his school. He mentioned the names of prominent
white men who’d helped him and explained how the white boys had misunderstood his
remark. He even tossed in a pinch of humor, making the grim-lipped crowd smile. A
lynch mob with nothing but murder on its mind wound up collecting fifty dollars for
the school.

But the “Little Professor” had never forgotten Grace Allen, granddaughter of Charlotta
and Harry Pyles. In one of Grace’s letters, she mentioned that she would be spending
the summer in Des Moines. Laurence met her there, and she was all that he remembered
and more. The school she’d founded for black children in Burlington, Iowa, had been
so successful that white families had sent their children there. And she seemed to
find the short, brown-skinned and handsome “Little Professor” equally fascinating,
despite the long hair and bushy mustache he’d grown to make himself look older. On
June 29, 1912, twenty-eight-year-old Laurence Jones married the thirty-six-year-old
woman who had learned the value of schooling from her mother and aunt, the need to
make bold leaps from her grandparents and the power of commitment and compassion from
tales about Frances Gordon. Laurence believed Grace would help him put meat and bones
on the skeleton of a dream. He was right.

She taught all the English classes in the upper grades. She also taught sewing, domestic
science, weaving and textiles and basketry courses to girls in homemade gray uniforms,
showing students how to weave rugs they could sell and how to make baskets out of
pine needles. She wrote several essays about her grandparents’ escape from slavery
with Frances Gordon, preserving history that might have been lost otherwise. As part
of Grace Jones’s work with the Mississippi State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs,
she taught mothers about child care, sanitation and nutrition. She managed and traveled
with the Cotton Blossom singers, a group that raised funds for the school. She was
the mother of three children, Turner Harris, Laurence Clifton Jr. and Helen, a girl
the Joneses had adopted when she was six months old. Under Grace’s leadership, the
number of local clubs in the Mississippi Federation grew from seventeen to seventy-three.
Grace Jones was fifty-six when she died of pneumonia in 1928. Mourners wrote letters
to the
Pine Torch,
the school’s newspaper, recalling her gentle ways, her charm, her creativity and
her skill at fund-raising. She was buried under the cedar tree where her husband began
his school in 1909.