The State of Jones (45 page)

The crime Davis was charged with, racially polluting a white woman, was no mere misdemeanor to the many Mississippians who still carried a sense of outrage at the betrayal of Newton Knight. They were further disquieted by a series of headline-making events in 1948 that challenged their social order. The Supreme Court had ruled that religious instruction in public schools violated the Constitution. Scientists Ralph Alpher and George Gamow published a paper describing an agnostic theory of creation, called the Big Bang. The House Un-American Activities Committee was rooting out “subversives” in the first political hearings ever held on TV. Emboldened blacks home from the war agitated for social justice with acts of civil disobedience, moving President Harry Truman to issue a pair of executive orders ending discrimination in the armed services and federal employment.

But there wasn’t a more threatening or distasteful topic to Jim Crow Southerners than interracial sex. According to Mississippi’s senator Theodore G. Bilbo, intermingling meant nothing less than the ruin of civilization.
Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization
was the title of Bilbo’s book. In 1946 Mississippians had reelected the five-foot-two bantam, cigar-biting Ku Kluxer Bilbo, nicknamed “The Man,” to a third term in the Senate as reward for a career of race-baiting. He had filibustered against an antilynching bill, promising “the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate.”

Bilbo didn’t just rail against blacks, he also inveighed against “farmer murderers,” “poor-folks haters,” “shooters of widows and orphans,” “international well-poisoners,” “charity hospital destroyers,” “spitters on our heroic veterans,” “rich enemies of our public schools,” “European debt cancelers,” “unemployment makers,” pacifists, Communists, and “skunks who steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms.” Bilbo had at last stopped babbling in 1947, when he contracted, appropriately enough, mouth cancer. Five thousand people attended his funeral.

Most Mississippians in the Ellisville courtroom believed, like
Bilbo, that African blood was quantifiable, and as different from pure white blood as a muddy creek was from a stream of spring water. Mississippi legally defined anyone with one-eighth or more African ancestry as a Negro. If found guilty, Davis could be sentenced to five years in Mississippi’s Parchman Farm, the hell hole of the South.

It was the job of District Attorney Paul Swartzfager to establish just how black Davis Knight was. In order to make the case that Davis was a fractional one-eighth Negro he had to prove that Rachel must have been of full African ancestry. That necessarily meant that both Rachel’s racial identity, and her liaison with Newton, be discussed in open court.

Day after day, Swartzfager grilled witnesses about Rachel’s features and her relationship to the Knights. Was she more Creole, Indian, or African? And what did that make Davis?

Testimony of Knight neighbor H. V. Welch:

Representing Davis Knight was a prominent Mississippi defense attorney named Quitman Ross, a good lawyer with a sure sense of the illogic of the entire proceeding. He struggled to cast doubt on Rachel’s racial classification, as hostile witnesses described her dark skin, the thickness of her lips, the flatness of her nose, the texture of her hair. Among the most hostile witnesses was Newton’s eighty-eight-year-old white son Tom Knight, still ashamed of and embittered by his father’s defection. Tom, who had refused to go to his father’s funeral, seemed intent on preventing Davis Knight from passing as a white man, as he described Rachel’s “wooly head.”

To many witnesses, just living in close proximity to Rachel’s family
seemed to mean they might have tainted blood. A witness named D. H. Valentine, descended from one of the old Jones County Scouts, responded defensively when asked if his father had been a friend of Newton Knight’s. “Not so much friends as associates—my father was a White man, altogether.” He added, “I was raised white myself.” Ross continued his cross-examination of Valentine:

Relatives called Rachel “ginger cake,” and friendly witnesses strove to emphasize her “white” features. The friendliest was a local physician named Dr. John W. Stringer, who had traded hogs and syrup with Rachel, given the Knights medical care, and shared family meals with them. He described Rachel as a woman of indeterminate race, perhaps Indian looking, “of a brown color, with long hair hanging down on her shoulders, long hair hanging down her back.”

Another defense witness, Rachel and Newton’s grandson Henry
Knight, denied that she had any Negro blood whatsoever, calling her part Creole and part Indian. He said, “Her hair was curly, wasn’t no kinky about it.” While he was on the stand, Henry, the son of Mat and Fannie, acknowledged that his grandfather was indeed Newton Knight. Asked if Newton was white, he replied, “He was a thoroughbred.”

The jury found Davis Knight guilty.

But on November 14, 1949, the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the conviction. Quitman Ross asked that the verdict be reversed on the grounds that the statute was unconstitutional and threatened to appeal. Fearful that such an appeal would invite federal interference in Mississippi’s segregation laws, the court reversed the verdict, using the excuse that it was impossible, sixty years after Rachel’s death, to establish her racial identity. Prosecutors “failed to prove beyond all reasonable doubt” whether Davis Knight was one-eighth Negro. Essentially, the court ruled that everyone had just been dead for too long.

The trial solved nothing; various Knights continued to take different paths, some lived as blacks, some whites. Despite winning his case, Davis Knight lost everything else. His marriage and his business failed. He moved out to the old Knight family area near Soso, Mississippi, at the Jones County line, where he lived much of his life among Newton and Rachel’s people. He drowned in a fishing accident in Houston in 1959.

In 1960, Davis’s sister Louvenia Knight launched a five-year battle with the state over whether her children were white and thus could attend white schools. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission viewed the case distastefully—these “white Negroes” presented a dilemma. If the children were allowed to go to a white school, they would taint it. Yet, if they were forced into a black school, Jasper County would be unintentionally integrated—the last thing Mississippi officials wanted. During a lengthy investigation of Knight genealogy, the commissioner identified Rachel as the “villain” and source of all the trouble. She was the one who “infused Negro blood
into the white blood of the descendants of Newton Knight,” he wrote. In the end, state officials swallowed hard and decided the children should be enrolled in a white school—in order to preserve segregation.

It was just one more mixed verdict on the life of Newton Knight.

Over the years, memory
, and the need to revise a too-painful past, blurred the facts of history. Mementos were scattered, keepsakes disappeared, pictures went into lockboxes or into attics, stories were forgotten or altered. Newton’s gun disappeared. No one was quite certain what Rachel looked like anymore.

Knights continued to marry, and intermarry. Cousins married cousins, grandchildren married great-grandchildren, family lines and generations crisscrossed, and gradually the racial classifications became ever more ambiguous. One “black” descendant of Newton and Rachel’s from Biloxi recalled being taken to the country to see her grandmother and wondered, “What is that picture of a bearded old white man doing on the mantel?” Her parents explained who Newton Knight was, and the Knight history. When her brother cursed whites for the way they had treated his family, their mother marched him to a mirror. “Look at that,” she said. “How can you hate something that’s in you?”

Some Knights married descendants of his old enemies. “Newt’s seed is all over this county,” remarked his great-granddaughter Vermell Moffett, in 1977. The difference between white and black Knights grew ever more vague and indiscernible. And in that, finally, was a victory for Newton and Rachel, who lay in the small graveyard on the hill, moss covering their tombstones. “We’ll all die guerillas, I reckon,” he said.

Genesis 22:17: “I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies.”

Generation succeeded generation, blood poured through old
veins and pulsed in new heartbeats. Still the genetic matter of Newton and Rachel Knight spun on, twined and parted, and then intertwined again, dual spirals and strands, parallels and anti-parallels, in a never-ending hourglass shape, running like ribbons through the whole country.