The State of Jones (42 page)

Lowry’s political success was also galling because it was evidence of the degree to which ex-Confederates had reintegrated into public life. Everywhere Newton turned, it seemed that old rebel “colonels”
were publicly congratulated as patriots who had defended states’ rights. Southern veterans built war memorials to themselves on every village lawn, including Ellisville’s, where there was a marble statue of a rebel with a gun. They wrote self-justifying memoirs in which they revised history and the war’s causes, conveniently omitting slavery. Much of their “corrected” history would make its way into textbooks in Southern public schools.

Some of Newton’s former comrades—men who had pledged allegiance to the Union—now treated Lee, Jackson, and Forrest as heroes and hung Confederate flags from their porches. These men had even become Confederate sentimentalists, collecting prints with such titles as “First Interview between Lee and Jackson”; “Last Interview between Lee and Jackson”; “Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee”; “Jackson Accepting Lee’s Invitation to Dinner.” These Southern Unionists moved closer to Southern conservatives to preserve their sense of honor and their sense of difference from Negroes as a class.

The worshipful Confederate revival reached its height when Lowry escorted Jefferson Davis to the state legislature to give an address on the condition of wounded and indigent ex-rebels. Davis, who had retreated to his estates in Vicksburg and the magnificent mansion of Beauvoir on the Gulf, was greeted with reverence by Mississippi’s lawmakers. As Lowry led him into the statehouse chambers, “cheer after cheer resounded through the building.” Lowry would eventually serve as a pallbearer at Davis’s funeral.

Even as Mississippi was trapped in the antebellum past politically, in the 1880s new industry dramatically altered the state’s landscape and especially ravaged the primeval forest area around Newton. The Southern Railroad arrived in 1883, and crossties began to lace the countryside. One Jones County woman who had never ridden on a train before marveled at the whistling and chugging. “I bet that thing is tired, it is puffing so,” she said.

The Piney Woods experienced a lumber boom. Sawmills and logging camps sprang up all through the woods and toppled large swaths of the great forests for their yellow pine and turpentine.
Newton could hear the buzzing even on his hilltop. Next, iron mines opened in Jasper and Clarke counties. The noise of all the new mechanization bothered Newton, but the machinery intrigued him, as he wrote in a letter to his elder brother John.

“I lie in herren of 4 steam sawmills, and can hear the cars at a still time when they pass Talahoma Creek,” Newton scrawled. “I tell you they are sla’en them big pines. Know they have cut them all from Ellisville to the Buffalo Hill along the Old Mobile Road.”

As trains made the Piney Woods more accessible, missionaries arrived bringing new doctrines, while preaching against an old enemy, the thriving backwoods whiskey business. “The stills is too numerous to talk about,” Newton wrote. Proselytizers knocked on farmhouse doors, talking of martyrs and temperance and seeking to reform worshippers, especially blacks. The notion of a “social gospel” had become popular, and revival meetings lit up the countryside. “John, I tel you our county is filling up with all sorts of people and Missionaries from everywhere and skillet-head doctors, and you can gess at the balance,” Newton wrote.

What Newton neglected to add was that the religious makeup in his own family had begun to change. The Knights, whose devotions had been makeshift for so long, were open to these visits from interesting strangers who offered fresh thoughts as well as company. They began to experience sudden conversions.

Rachel listened intently to the Mormon elders who regularly came to Jones and Jasper counties preaching the revelations of Joseph Smith. The proselytizers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints traveled in pairs through the Mississippi hill country, pausing wherever they found a welcome. Although the Mormons taught that dark skin was a curse from God, the missionaries emphasized that all souls were of the same spirit family. The Book of Mormon specifically stated that the Lord “denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.”

The Mormon missionaries told Rachel that their saints did away
with pride and with class distinctions and dwelt in righteousness, with no poor or rich among them. According to Joseph Smith all those who converted were brothers and sisters, all socially equal, and all would be grafted onto the chosen family of Abraham. The light and dark skinned alike would join the house of Israel to build a new world. What’s more, these Mormon missionaries saw no obstacles to intermarriage between the races, or to polygamy in the case of a responsible male provider such as Newton.

The Mormon missionaries found a willing listener in Rachel, and perhaps also shelter and protection in her home. Blacks shared mutual sympathies with the Mormons over persecution from the Klan. The Mormons received hostile welcomes in Jones and Jasper counties from Klansmen, who sought to whip the blasphemers out of the area. Two elders named John William Gailey and William H. Crandall were set on and beaten by a mob in Jasper County. The elder Crandall and his fellow missionary Thomas Davis were “fired on” while traveling in Jones County.

In July of 1881, Rachel was baptized into the Church of Latter-day Saints. An elder named William Thomson Jr. recorded Rachel’s baptism in a logbook, as well as the name of her father, so that she could be “sealed” to her family in heaven. Within a year, Rachel’s daughters Fannie and Martha Ann also converted to Mormonism and submitted the names of their fathers for sealing and endowments: Fannie put down Davis Knight, and Martha Ann named Newton. Fannie was so enthusiastic a Mormon that she may have named a child for John William Gailey, one of the men beaten by the mob in Jasper. In 1884, she and Mat Knight had a son and called him William Gailie.

It is not hard to understand why Mormonism appealed to Rachel, given the nature of the Knight farm. Her baptism as Mormon would allow both the white and black members of her Knight family to be integrated in heaven, after they had been severed on earth owing to segregation. Also, marriage to Newton was prohibited on earth, but the Mormon Church would allow them to be married in the after
life. And, possibly, she converted because it helped reconcile her to Newton’s polygamy.

Newton himself did not convert to the Mormon Church, and it’s impossible to know what he made of Rachel’s Mormon awakening, whether he considered it “skilletheaded” or not. He remained a devout Baptist, and according to his son, in 1885 or 1886 he joined a new Primitive Baptist church that was built about three miles from Ellisville.

But it makes sense that Newton would have accepted Rachel’s Mormonism, given its vision of community and of the role of a male leader whose chief duty was to protect and provide. Newton and Rachel embraced many Mormon-similar values even before Rachel converted. Their daily ethic was Mormon-like: they not only abstained from alcohol, they practiced industry, frugality, and charity with neighbors. Mormonism sanctified their love and reflected their notion of community as sacred and defined by sharing and faith.

Newton demonstrated tolerance in the face of another religious conversion in the family. Young Anna Knight, daughter of Georgeanne, was an intellectually starved girl who read a pamphlet given to her by Seventh-Day Adventists and became captivated. She began to question her family’s approach to religion, especially after a cyclone tore through the area, stunning her with its force and the damage it wrought. She became a full-fledged convert who forswore dancing and work on Saturday. This provoked a fierce battle with Georgeanne, who tried to force her to plow, but Newton apparently supported the girl and told her to follow her conscience. Anna eventually used savings from the sale of a bale of cotton to buy a ticket to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she enrolled in a missionary school. She would spend the rest of her life as a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary, a calling that took her to Asia and India. But she did her most important work at home, returning to the Piney Woods in 1898 to build a school for the community’s black children, an accomplishment that must have been deeply gratifying to Newton.

The Knights may also have been open to religious conversion
simply because these non-mainstream missionaries treated them as brethren. It was obvious to Rachel that she would have to wait until the afterlife before most Mississippi whites viewed her and her children as anything but servile. The state’s color line was growing ever more rigid.

Jim Crow statutes already decreed the races eat, drink, travel, study, and even get sick separately, but as the 1880s wore on, a series of determined attempts by blacks to organize for self-protection convinced white supremacists that even stricter laws were needed to govern black behavior. In 1886 in Carroll County, ten black citizens had the temerity to accuse a white of murder. For that transgression, supremacists opened fire on them in open court when they showed up to testify. A Colored Alliance sprang up in Leflore County in 1889, dedicated to fostering economic independence. The members dared to bear arms, threatened to organize a cotton-pickers’ strike, and boycotted certain stores. In response the local sheriff, backed by troops dispatched by the governor, massacred twenty-five of them and broke the organization.

Once again, James Z. George organized the political response, calling for a convention to draft a new state constitution, where the main business would be to deprive blacks of voting rights. Democrats dominated the convention—any other nominees were threatened or murdered. In Jasper County, a prominent white Republican named M. F. B. “Marsh” Cook, a farmer known for “speaking words of prudence, wisdom, and calmness,” announced his candidacy for delegate. Democrats warned him to withdraw. He refused. A few days later his body was found riddled with bullets on a deserted country road. The
Clarion-Ledger
celebrated his death and assured readers that he was not missed.

“At the time of his death he was canvassing Jasper County as a Republican candidate for the Constitutional Convention, and was daily and nightly denouncing the white people in his caucuses and speeches … Then one or more persons decided that Cook must die. The Clarion-Ledger regrets the manner of his killing, as assassination cannot be condoned at any time. Yet the people of Jasper are to
be congratulated that they will not further be annoyed by Marsh Cook.”

The special convention neatly circumvented the Fifteenth Amendment and reversed black enfranchisement. Under a new polling requirement, any voter had to be able to read a section of the state constitution and give a reasonable interpretation if asked. This meant that examining registrars had the discretion to disallow black voters, which they proceeded to do in monumental numbers.

But Rachel didn’t live to witness this last, ultimate indignity. In 1889, not yet fifty years of age, she died suddenly of an unexplained cause. It’s possible that her constitution was weakened by so many years of childbearing, servitude, and hard work. There is a vague family tradition that she died of having too many children, having given birth to at least nine between 1856 and 1875. An observation by another woman who was born into slavery in the Knight family household, Martha Wheeler, sheds some light on Rachel’s wearying existence: she “never knew such slavery as she experienced as the mother of thirteen children.”

Rachel left behind a color-proscribed world the Confederacy still governed, and race divided every realm, including death—in 1890 the first separate cemetery for Negroes would be dug in Jackson. Lowry’s election and the etching of the Jim Crow laws across every aspect of Mississippi life had meant that in her last years she lived in a far more segregated world than the antebellum one she’d grown up in. No wonder she stepped into the grave early.

Hymns were sung over Rachel’s grave in a small family cemetery on Newton’s hillside in a copse of oaks, privet, and sweet gum trees. She lay among other family members who had died untimely deaths, the children taken by fire and epidemic. At the rear of the little cemetery there was a row of unmarked graves, some ill-fated travelers stricken by typhoid as they passed through the county, who had been taken in by Newton. Still other markers in the graveyard were said to belong to two of Newton’s guerrillas and six Confederates he and his men had killed in battle.

Her headstone was a plain gray tablet that read “In Memory of
Rachel Knight, Born March 11, 1840, Died February 11, 1889.” It was one of the few documentary or physical traces of her existence, along with a thin sheaf of slave and census records. It could not adequately explain who she was, or the dynamic role she had played as a lover, soldier, mother, and self-liberator who shed the heavy encumbrances of her enslavement, only to be caught in the dissonant fugue that was postbellum Mississippi. Whites outside of her immediate family, scandalized by her liaison with Newton, chose to render her nonexistent, omitting her from their versions of local history. Newton’s son Tom, who had seen his mother cast aside in favor of Rachel, would be so ashamed of her he would write an entire memoir of Newton without directly mentioning her. On the one occasion when he
was
forced to speak of Rachel publicly, he tried to deny his father’s relationship with her and derided her as “just an old Negro woman.”

Nevertheless, impressions of Rachel lived on in the deeper fathoms, in the memories of her children and grandchildren and their oral traditions passed down in the family. She had conjuror’s eyes. She was “extraordinarily intelligent and industrious”; she was independent even in slavery; she was captivating. She was Newton’s woman and he had loved her, and he had been more hers than anyone else’s.

Newton carried on with
his seasonal plowing and harvesting, but with Rachel’s death the fragile interracial community he called a family began to splinter. At some point in the next few years, Serena left him.