However, the fact that Looney could think of his whisper campaign as vengeance for his dead brother suggested that Buchanan County was less isolated than most outsiders could imagine. Although hardly any blacks lived in the mountains—although the South’s highland counties had fewer slaves before the war, were less likely to support secession, and were more likely to ally themselves with Northern Republicans after the war—upcountry whites had long resented the counting of blacks for apportioning seats in the state legislature, which tilted political power to the plantation regions. “This hill folk were ... opposed to slavery,” wrote Harvard geologist and Kentucky native Nathaniel Shaler, “and even more to negroes.” Fifty years after the war, industry and capital and the outside world were steadily creeping closer to the mountains, bringing with them the politics of segregation and a rigid vocabulary of difference. 15
Just as their lives were changing, the people of the mountains associated blacks with an uncertain future. Although southwestern Virginia had a minuscule black population, more blacks were lynched there between 1880 and 1930 than in any other part of the state. Although isolated from the surrounding counties, Buchanan was not untouched by the killing. When two Buchanan County merchants were robbed and murdered in 1893 by a train depot in nearby Tazewell County, more than one hundred Buchanan men rode to the scene of the crime and lynched five blacks. As the mob rode home, they proudly proclaimed Buchanan “altogether a white county.”16
Looney did not want to kill the Spencers, but his accusation threatened to turn the Spencers back into outsiders. Looney also understood that community standing and security were not the only things that hinged on the issue of race. He had something bigger in mind, something that would require traveling beyond Home Creek. He enlisted the aid of a younger cousin in Grundy—an attorney at law named Glenn Ratliff—as well as a trustee of the Rock Lick School District. Together, at Looney’s expense, they traveled eighty miles to the northwest, until they appeared one summer day at a Paintsville hotel. After asking the proprietor a few questions, they found themselves riding through the Jordan Gap, looking for people who knew the Spencers.17
Before the school on Home Creek opened for the fall term, Looney approached his third cousin the teacher and told him to tell the Spencers that he had called them “damned niggers.” Because there were Spencers enrolled there, Looney declared, he would have to take his children out of school. “They shan’t go with negroes,” he said.18
While each Appalachian hollow appeared to be entirely self-contained, Looney understood that the people in Home Creek lived in direct daily contact with outside authority. For about forty years there had been public schools in Buchanan County. More than the railroad or the revenue inspectors who periodically raided local moonshiners, these schools connected the mountains with the world beyond. George Spencer signed his name with an X. His wife, Arminda, could not read or write either. But they were sending their oldest son to school. He would learn to read and write. This opportunity—this relationship with the state—was one of the few things the Spencers had. Looney intended to take it away. When Looney returned from Kentucky, he asked the Rock Lick school trustees to convene without telling Spencer. Looney produced sworn affidavits from the men he had interviewed in Kentucky and convinced the board to expel Melvin Spencer from the third grade.19
If George Looney had a modern outlook on the world, his neighbor George Spencer resembled a stock character in a silent melodrama about feuding mountain families. Spencer was thirty. He spent his days farming the hillsides and came home to a pregnant wife and a cabin full of children. He had a taste for whiskey and was not above going on “a drunk.” George Looney had essentially ambushed him with his affidavits and the school board decision. For most whites anywhere in the country in 1910, “God damned negroes” were fighting words. In the mountains one might have expected an illiterate farmer to kill over them.20
But once again the Spencer-Looney feud did not follow the standard script. Instead of loading his rifle, George Spencer mounted his horse and rode out of the hollow. He went to Grundy and discussed his situation with a man named William Daugherty. Daugherty was Spencer’s age, and like Spencer, he had recently moved to Buchanan County from Kentucky. In his younger days Daugherty had taught school. But in Virginia the law was his business.21
Daugherty would eventually gain a reputation for his “legal prowess,” and in a few years he would help coordinate the World War I draft in Buchanan County. But when Spencer met with him, he had just escaped discipline from the Virginia Bar for practicing law without a license. Although Daugherty was barely established, he had formed a partnership with one of the most experienced and well-known lawyers in the region. Roland E. Chase had practiced for more than twenty years, and unlike most attorneys in the area, he had actually attended a law school. Long active in Republican politics, Chase was serving his second term as state senator for Buchanan and three other mountain counties. He lived forty miles away in Dickenson County, in a massive brick mansion that he had built next to the courthouse. He routinely traveled throughout Virginia in his capacity as grand master of the state’s Odd Fellows.22
Spencer retained Daugherty and Chase. He was not going to kill George Looney. He would sue the man for slander.
Perhaps Spencer was following Looney’s lead. Looney, after all, had hired a lawyer, taken evidence, and presented his case before the school board as if it had been a trial. The school board’s decision resembled a legal verdict. Independent of Looney’s actions, however, Spencer knew full well the power of the law.
Although Buchanan County appeared untouched by the modern world, attorneys had spent two decades burrowing into the jagged landscape. The county’s hardwood forests and billions of tons of coal—the potential for millions of dollars from out-of-state investors—meant that land titles had to be clarified, competing claims resolved, and mineral rights bought and sold. Outsiders filed claims for hundreds of thousands of acres based on long-forgotten colonial land grants, leading to litigation that took upward of fifteen years to work through and subjected even the most obscure hollows to judicial scrutiny. Much of Chase and Daugherty’s practice was devoted to title disputes. The litigation was all the more intense because the Grundy courthouse and all the county’s property records had burned to cinders in 1885. Before there were loggers, there were lawyers. Before the railroads, before the mines—before modernity—there were lawyers.23
In laying the groundwork for industry, attorneys were altering what it meant to own land in Buchanan County. Land was becoming less of a means of survival, a guarantee of independence, a representation of kinship ties, an expression of honor and self. More than ever it was a commodity that could be cashed out. As George Spencer talked with his attorneys, they determined that George Looney’s accusations and their consequences—the affront to Spencer’s status and security and rights—could be distilled into a number. Spencer’s vengeance had a price. He filed his complaint in Buchanan County Circuit Court, demanding $10,000 in damages.24
THE OLD MAN WOKE up early, while the air was still cool. Spring mornings had always been like this. Even before the first blinks of light over the hills, birds were warbling and roosters crowed, their songs damped by the rustle of leaves still new in early May. It was cloudy and calm as John Horn started riding through the Jordan Gap into Paintsville, Kentucky. The eighty-two-year-old would not be spending his Saturday doing chores around the farm, visiting with neighbors, or sitting on his porch.25
Behind Horn, above him, receding in the distance, was a steep clearing. Hand-knapped stones clustered like mushrooms on the hillside. All it would take was one year of neglect—one spring, summer, and fall—and no one would ever know that there was a graveyard on Horn’s land. The man the Gap was named for—Horn’s longtime neighbor—had been buried there some two years. Horn was heading to town because some men could not let Old Jordan Spencer rest in peace.26
After a short ride Paintsville started to spread out be
low. The surrounding hills were lush green, Paint Creek swollen with rain. The town was also swelling. Coal was starting to make many locals—and many more Yankee shareholders—rich. The coalfields extended several miles south into Van Lear, the town that had just risen along Miller’s Creek, named for a director of the Maryland-based Consolidation Coal Company. The flood of cash had the curious effect of making the town appear newer and older at the same time. The buildings that were just being built evoked the architecture of older, more settled communities, suggesting that the mountains were no longer a perpetual frontier. At the edge of the business district, Horn passed by an enormous new colonnaded mansion that resembled a plantation house in the bluegrass country west of Lexington. Over the previous decade its owner, John C. Calhoun Mayo, had amassed a twenty-million-dollar fortune by selling hundreds of thousands of acres of coal rights to Northern partnerships and corporations. Next to his mansion was a vaulted and turreted Gothic church that Mayo had also built, hewn from local rock and adorned with exquisite stained-glass windows. The pipe organ inside was a token of appreciation from Andrew Carnegie.27
Past the church were a few sturdy blocks of businesses. Horn stopped under the shingle announcing Howes & Howes, attorneys at law, and entered the offices of Paintsville’s most successful law practice. Frederick and Henry Howes did legal work for Mayo and represented the coal companies with the largest holdings in the area as well as local and national banks that did business in town. In May 1912 the firm had also been retained by George Spencer, the illiterate mountain farmer from Virginia, in matters relating to his slander case against George Looney.28
Horn was taken into a room that was already crowded with people. He recognized Old Jordan’s son—had known Jordan Jr. since the day he was born. George Spencer, who looked just like his father and grandfather, was also a familiar face. In addition to a lawyer from Howes & Howes, George Spencer’s two Virginia attorneys had accompanied him. George Looney was also there, as was his lawyer. A few other old men were waiting their turn to testify. 29
Horn raised his right hand, and the shorthand stenographer administered an oath to tell the truth. Horn informed the lawyers that he had known Jordan Spencer fifty or sixty years, “ever since he came to this county, up to his death.” For most of that time the two men had lived a quarter-mile apart. Horn said he could remember Old Jordan “when he was hot and when he was cold, when he was drunk and when he was sober.”30
Because George Spencer’s slander suit hinged on whether Looney’s accusation was false, the lawyers had to gather evidence about Spencer’s ancestry. While the Spencers were new people in Buchanan County, Virginia, they were well known across the line in Kentucky. Was George Spencer white in Johnson County? Was his father white? Or his grandfather? The case would turn on the memories of old men—and the lawyers’ ability to get them talking.
George Spencer’s lead attorney, Roland Chase, followed a simple script. He asked Horn and the dozen witnesses that followed about Old Jordan’s skin color, hair, nose, lips, and eye color, and whether he had a “smell peculiar to the colored people.” He also asked whether the Spencers had gone to white churches and schools and how they had been regarded by their neighbors. Whether someone was black or white was about how he or she looked, but not exclusively. It was also about how someone acted—character and reputation and the exercise of particular rights that had been reserved for the dominant race.31
Horn had no trouble answering Chase’s questions in detail. Old Jordan had “tolerably straight” red hair, thin lips, a nose that was “a little fuller” than his son’s, and blue eyes; he “smelled a little bit, when he was a little hot.” “I did not see any negro about him,” Horn said. Jordan’s wife, Malinda, “was a very clever lady and as white a woman as you find anywhere.” The Spencers prayed, ate, went to school, and visited with whites in the community. “I never heard of any objections to them,” Horn declared. “There never was no racket in the neighborhood or school district.”32
On cross-examination, Looney’s lawyer Glenn Ratliff quickly established that Horn knew nothing about Spencer’s ancestry. He asked whether Horn could say for sure whether Jordan “was a full blooded white man or not.” When Horn said no, the lawyer subtly changed course: “Did you ever hear it questioned at any time in your life?”
Horn did not seem to understand. “There was nobody here that knew anything about it more than I did,” he said.
Ratliff paused to rephrase the question. “I mean,” said Ratliff, “did you ever hear it reported he had negro blood about him?”
“I might have heard it,” Horn replied, “and I might not.”
Ratliff was getting impatient with the old man. “Just answer the question,” he said. “Did you at any time to your remembrance, hear it said that Jordan Spencer, Sr., was mixed blooded?”
“Well, I will tell you,” Horn said, “I don’t think a man has to swear over what he heard somebody else say.”33
If Ratliff had expected Horn to be an unsophisticated witness, he was disabused of the notion. The eighty-two-year-old mountaineer understood the objection to hearsay testimony. The seductive rhythm of Ratliff’s cross-examination—the string of easy yes-or-no questions designed to lure a witness into giving testimony that he was not planning on giving—had little effect on Horn. The old farmer was outwitting the young lawyer. Perhaps Horn was thinking back to being cross-examined once before, almost half a century earlier, in a congressional election contest involving allegations that disenfranchised rebels had illegally voted. Perhaps he had watched a trial or two over the years in the Paintsville courthouse, as had many a country farmer looking for entertainment in town. In any case, even in the hollows of eastern Kentucky, people knew how the law worked.34
The witnesses who followed Horn were equally cagey. J. Q. Horn, age sixty-five, declined to say whether Spencer was “a man of pure Caucasian blood”: “That I don’t know anything about, I don’t bother with.” Asked the same question—“Judging of what you have seen of Jordan Spencer, Sr. would you class him as a man of pure Caucasi[a]n blood?”—sixty-eight-year-old Tom Horn replied, “I don’t know anything about anyone’s blood, no matter who the man is.” Despite admonitions not to evade Ratliff ’s questions, John Estep, Old Jordan’s neighbor for forty years, also refused to comment on Spencer’s “pedigree.” “I have not formed any good opinion about it,” Estep said. “It was none of my business.” Even though racial purity was supposed to be everyone’s business in 1912, Spencer’s neighbors were determined to protect his family and, ultimately, to protect the community’s decision to accept Old Jordan as one of their own.35
Only after repeated questions did the old men acknowledge the rumors that had long followed Jordan Spencer. John Horn remembered the time when Letcher Davis claimed that Spencer had “mixed blood.” Another neighbor remembered when Jordan’s sons tangled with a set of boys and their father went after Old Jordan with a gun, saying he was “going to kill a ‘damn negro.’ ” Although in day-to-day life no one treated Old Jordan differently, the idea that he was black was never far below the surface. Asked whether “it was the general report that [Spencer] was not a man of pure white blood,” seventy-one-year-old A. L. Rice had to admit, “No, I could not say, that it was. If him and anybody had any trouble, I have heard them call him a negro or a darkey on account of being mad at him.” “I think there was something about him that was not pure white blood,” Rice said. “He was of some other race, but I don’t know what race.”36
George Looney had seven of his own witnesses to depose in Paintsville. While the plaintiff called many of Old Jordan’s neighbors to testify, the defense witnesses all lived in town. While just as plainspoken as the farmers from the hollows, they included some of Johnson County’s leading men. They held official positions such as postmaster, county judge, circuit court clerk, member of the board of health, and public schools trustee. They had made money in timber. Two had been the coal baron John Mayo’s business partners. They
knew Jordan Spencer because he had worked for them. The witnesses had no trouble testifying that Spencer was “a little bit negro.” His skin was dark. His hair was “kinky” and unconvincingly dyed. “When he was sweating,” one remembered, “something red ran down over his temples.”37
The reason his neighbors had accepted Jordan, a witness suggested, was that many of them were dark themselves. The people living along Rockhouse Creek could have been “the darkey race” or Indian or something else entirely, “neither black nor white.” Although people in Johnson County “boasted and felt proud of the fact that they had a white county composed of white citizens,” the area’s leading men knew better. “It has a right smart sprinkle of African and Indian blood, or that is my opinion,” said a seventy-six-year-old retired businessman. The witnesses claimed to remember Old Jordan as “a good man, a good worker, and he did good work.” But that was not enough to gain him social acceptance. “We took from his looks, general appearance, and demeanor that he was mixed blooded,” said Mayo’s partner John Castle, “and we did not associate a great deal with that class of people.” It was as if wealth and exposure to the world outside made a person more likely to care about the purity of a man’s blood. In the mountains in 1912 disdain for black people did not signify backwardness. To the contrary, it was a measure of enlightenment.38
IT TAKES TIME FOR the August heat to seep into a county courthouse. For a judge on the bench or a spectator in the jury box or gallery, it can be hard to detect summer’s grip until it is too late. One moment an onlooker might be following the testimony, objections, and rulings from the bench. The next, his collar is soggy and wilted, and he has to hold his head up, hand on cheek, to maintain any hope of staying awake. The fight for consciousness in the suddenly still air can be especially dire when depositions are read aloud in open court. Testimony that had been angry or heartbreaking or sly has a way of coming uncreased when repeated, word for word from the transcript, in halting monotone—a flat expanse of language, always on the verge of losing its meaning.
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