The State of Jones (44 page)

Six thousand spectators congregated in a pasture near the town courthouse, many of them with picnic baskets. District Attorney T. Webber Wilson of Laurel, later elected to Congress, stood on the running board of a car and gave a speech to the mob.

When the hour reached 5:00 p.m., Hartfield, clad in nothing more than a pair of olive drab pants, was dropped from a sycamore—the same tree, according to locals, from which Robert Lowry had hanged three of Newton’s men. As Hartfield’s body twisted on the rope, men in the crowd began shooting at it, and the journalist Butler had to scramble down from another tree to escape the hail of fire. “Every time a bullet hit an arm, out it flopped like a semaphore,” Butler wrote. The writer estimated not less than two thousand bullets were fired into the body. “One of them finally clipped the rope. John’s body fell to the ground, a fire was built around it, and John was cremated.”

That night, as Butler strolled through the town of Laurel, he encountered a ghoulish exhibition on the sidewalk. A grinning man exhibited a quart jar filled with alcohol, in which bobbed a finger cut jaggedly from a Negro’s hand. “I got a finger, by God,” the man said. “And I got some photographs, too.” He was selling the pictures for twenty cents each.

“We ’orter kill more of ’em around here,” he said. “Teach ’em a lesson. Only way I see to stop raping is to keep on lynching. I’m goner put this finger on exhibition in my store window tomorrow, boys, and I want you to drop around.”

Just a few months after the Hartfield lynching, Newton’s efforts to safeguard his family failed. In November 1920, Newton and Rachel’s son Stewart was found murdered. Stewart Knight was an industrious farmer and businessman, dapper in a dark mustache and suit with vest and watch chain. A neighbor found his body: an ax had been sunk into the back of his head, which was also partly
shot off. A white man from nearby Stringer named Sharp Welborn was arrested and convicted—of manslaughter. The apparent motive was robbery, but Stewart’s family believed an incident with a white woman was the real cause of the attack.

We can only surmise Newton’s grief and anger over the murder of his son; there is no record of his feelings, or his reaction. But it’s safe to say that the terrible events of 1919 and 1920 made the insomniac old man, now nearing 85, more vigilant than ever.

One of his granddaughters, a child of Fannie and Mat’s, remembered sitting on the porch with “Grandpa Newt” as he stared out over the fields at the road, his rifle at his side.

“If you see anybody coming, don’t say anything,” he said. “Just touch me.”

By the time Meigs
O. Frost made his way up the dirt road to Newton’s farm, the old man had become reclusive. He preferred to wander alone through the woods for days, rather than venture into society. In his forest retreat he seemed to Frost a figure of almost mythic isolation.

“In simplicity primeval he has lived, and in simplicity primeval he will die,” Frost observed.

Newton still farmed, growing the peas and sweet potatoes that had always sustained him, and he remained strong enough to fell an oak tree by himself. He carved ax handles, which he sold to friends. He was hearty; he needed only the old Civil War remedies he had always used: blue moss, castor oil, and calomel.

In his seclusion he had quit following the progress of the larger world. He had only made three trips in his life to Laurel, which had become the biggest town in Jones County with a population of 14,000. Newton marveled that such a place had grown up in what was once the thickest forest and brush where he had ranged as a guerrilla.

He confessed to Frost that he had never ridden in a trolley car, or used a telephone, or seen electric lights at night.

As the two men talked through the morning, Newton finally allowed
himself to reminisce about his actions during the great conflict. He remembered sixteen sizable fights, he told Frost. Then, too, he recalled, “There was a lot of skimishin’ that you couldn’t properly call battles.” He kept track of the dead, but he hadn’t counted the wounded—they were too numerous. “I used to treat their gunshot wounds myself,” he said. “There were a number of those.”

He remembered being conscripted, and the Twenty Negro Law. He remembered the swamp hideouts, and the hounds—forty-four of them had once come tearing through the woods after him. He remembered the Lowry hangings and the battle that he had fought after Alpheus Knight’s marriage. “Not that I ain’t heard that lots of other weddings ended up in battles, too,” he said, grinning.

He had almost been killed twice, on one occasion when a bullet tore through his coat, and another time, when his gun jammed. “I remember once when a big fellow was coming at me, and my gun hammer spring wouldn’t work. It was a homemade spring I made after the first one broke. He pretty nearly got me.” His voice drifted off. He didn’t want to dwell on the encounter.

Was it true that he and his men had executed a Baptist preacher who told the Confederates about one of their hiding places? Frost asked. Again, Newton lapsed into silence.

There were other details Newton refused to divulge. He remained circumspect about the makeup of his company—most of his old compatriots were long dead anyway, he told Frost mournfully. Just seven were still alive that he knew of, and he was the only officer. “I keep my old muster rolls out here in the woods in one of my old places,” he said. “Whenever I hear one of the boys has died, I mark him off on the rolls.”

He was reluctant to name names when so many descendants still lived in Jones, some of them prominent. It could lead to nothing but trouble. “Who are the ones left? I’m not tellin’ that,” he said. “No use naming a lot of names and getting people worked up again.”

He sighed. “The Civil War’s over long ago. No use stirring up that old quarrel this late day, is there?”

Frost reluctantly guessed not. He rose to go. Newton walked him
out into the yard and cordially told him to “drop in again” sometime. Then Newton gestured to “one of the folks” who dwelled on the place. A sack of peanuts appeared out of an old log storehouse, and Newton pressed it on Frost as a gift.

The two men shook hands, and Frost climbed into his car. As he drove away, “the gnarled old figure stood erect by the hand hewn picket fence, waving good bye.”

Less than a year later, on February 16, 1922, Newton passed away. He went, he told friends, to a truer life in the hereafter. He supposedly left instructions for how he wished to be buried: with his head elevated above his feet, ever at the alert. His son Mat and his grandson Amos placed Newton’s body in the casket and closed the lid. Then they sat up with Newton all night, passing the time by playing cards, because Newton had always watched over them so faithfully at night.

He was buried in the small family graveyard, near Rachel, under a cedar tree. It was said that just two whites attended his funeral. One of them was his cousin, George “Clean Neck” Knight, the son of Jesse Davis Knight. Somehow Newton and the son of the old Confederate planter had remained close, perhaps because Clean Neck understood his familial connection to Rachel’s children. The mulatto Knight relations, children and grandchildren, cousins and second cousins, stood around the gravesite as Newton was lowered in the ground, the only white man buried among former slaves. Knight’s stone was a simple gray tablet etched with his name and vitals: b. 1829, d. 1922. Fittingly, even the stone would become a source of debate: the birth date was probably wrong.

His engraved epitaph, however, was simple and true: “He lived for others.”

Newton had so withdrawn from white society that it took almost a month for the news of his death to make it into Ellisville. On March 16, 1922, his obituary finally appeared in the
Ellisville Progress
, and even then, the details of his passing were vague, and the newspaper apologized for not having brought the story to readers sooner.

“A unique character of national repute passed away at his home
several miles north of Soso, Mississippi about three weeks ago,” the obit read. “For some unaccountable reason the newspapers failed to hear of his death or else the account would have been given wide publicity. Newt Knight was about ninety years of age when he died. His claim to notoriety was due to the fact that he walked off from the Confederate army sometime after enlisting, and organized a band of deserters which held together until the close. Capt. Knight and his followers held that after the Twenty Negro Law was passed during the war they had no interest in the fortunes of the Confederacy.” The newspaper observed that “there was a great deal of truth” in the position taken by Newton and his men.

But it added in closing, “Knight ruined his life and future by marrying a Negro woman.”

Newton was not at
rest in the ground. Over the years his tombstone was stolen, replaced, vandalized, and, according to oral tradition, perhaps even moved so that it would not be too close to Rachel’s, the woman for whom he’d fought his Civil War. Few whites in the county ever visited his grave, including his own son, Tom.

With Newton dead and buried, the Klan targeted the black Knights who remained on the hilltop. Word went around that the KKK had decided to “burn them out.” Fannie Knight’s granddaughter, Ardella, was taught early how to shoot a Smith and Wesson .32. One evening in 1923 white men surrounded her home and threatened to torch it. She and her mother fled into the night to an uncle’s home.

The Knights survived, but their community became increasingly cut off and split from within and without by racial divisions. They existed in a social netherworld, disdained by whites—but neither were they accepted by other blacks. When they went into town they were stared at, and pointed at, like anthropological specimens. So they stayed to themselves, worshipped by themselves, schooled themselves at Anna Knight’s schoolhouse, and even delivered their children by midwife. One of Newton and Rachel’s great-granddaughters
would grow up without a birth certificate or without ever having formal education other than the lessons she got from Anna Knight. Her family history was a matter of virtual secrecy. “Back then it was just taboo,” she says. “It was just hurt.”

Decades passed. Knights were born and died, and the genealogy of the family grew ever more tangled, even as branches of the family spread. Some stayed in Mississippi in the places they were born, others struck out for Texas or California and passed as white. Mat and Fannie’s son George Monroe went to Texas, where he lived as a white man and even sought to escape the Knight name, eventually changing it to McKnight. He never told his own children who their grandparents were.

Some Knight branches grew lighter, and some grew darker. Classifications developed. There were the “fair Knights” and “not-so-fair Knights.” The fair Knights were also called “half-white Knights.” The whitest Knights proudly did their family trees, guarded the family’s history and secrets, and tended to its Confederate dead. The other Knights feared the Klan, wrote names in a family Bible, traded oral histories, and kept secrets, too. Some Knights ignored others in an attempt to keep the color line. Some never knew they were Knights at all.

But on December 13, 1948, the Knight family’s mixed-race heritage became the subject of open discussion in Jones County. With the bang of a gavel, Newton Knight’s conduct with Rachel effectively went on trial in a courtroom in Ellisville. Sitting at the defendant’s table was his twenty-three-year-old great-grandson, Davis Knight, charged with the previously unspoken offense of his ancestor. Davis was under indictment by the state of Mississippi for the crime of miscegenation, the mixing of racial blood. Davis had married a white woman.

Davis Knight was the grandchild of Jeff and Molly Knight. Newton Knight had never been properly punished in his lifetime for crossing the color line and producing children of mixed races, and now Davis Knight was going to be held accountable for him.

Davis Knight, lean-facedly handsome with a pencil mustache,
looked no different from all the other chain-smoking, prematurely worldly young men who returned from World War II to start their peacetime lives. In 1946, he had received his honorable discharge from the navy after a three-year stint and come home to wed June Lee Spradly, a blond, blue-eyed eighteen-year-old, in the presence of her mother and a civil clerk. The clerk had not thought to ask him his race, and Davis considered himself, and passed as, white. According to
Time
, “a relative, irked by an old family feud” had dug up Davis’s genealogy and reported him. “In Mississippi,”
Time
noted, “that kind of marrying was against the law.” County police arrested him.

For four days,
The State of Mississippi v. Davis Knight
was heard in the courthouse in Ellisville, Mississippi. The seat of Jones County was now a dowdy old whistle-stop with a few galleried Victorian buildings, such as a slant-floored relic called the Hotel Alice, built in the 1880s, where gossipers lounged on the porch. At Ward’s Pharmacy, a turn-of-the-century fixture with a soda fountain and a brass cash register, thick-bellied white men sat drinking coffee, cup after cup, as they discussed the case so controversial that even
Time
magazine had taken notice of it.

The county courthouse was just around the corner from Ward’s and the Alice, a cream- and redbrick redoubt with wide steps anchored by two water fountains, one for whites and one for “coloreds.” Fronting the lawn was a white marble Confederate monument with a rebel sentry perched at attention. Inside, polished banisters of facing twin staircases gleamed dimly in the bureaucratic light as they ascended to the main courtroom. White citizenry, businessmen in Arrow shirts and wide-striped neckties and farmers in bib overalls, craned to see around women in padded shoulders and pancake hats, packed in rows of comfortable drop-seats bolted to the floor as in a movie theater. A smaller set of stairs continued upward to a stifling, low-ceilinged gallery. This was where the coloreds sat. Whites were loath to admit it, but there were Knights in each of these divided audiences, as testimony would make clear.