Goat Castle

by Karen L. Cox

  The trouble began when Dockery went to the office of J. C. Chew, a Houston attorney, where the two men argued about issues of compensation before Chew insinuated that Dockery was a liar. According to the New York Times, Dockery “dealt Mr. Chew a lusty blow to the face,” followed him into the hallway when he tried to get away, and then “knocked him down, kicked him, and pulled his long beard energetically.” When another man interfered, Dockery hit him, too.22

  The following day, Thomas was arrested for abandoning his young wife. Frederika had filed a complaint against her husband for deserting her, and, in fear for her life, she went to live with the couple for whom she worked. According to Frederika’s testimony, her husband abandoned her because he said he was “broke.” In his defense, the general stated that he never cohabitated with his wife. Nonetheless, the judge in the case decided in Frederika’s favor, and Thomas was made to pay her ten dollars per week. After leaving his wife, Dockery briefly stayed with Nydia and Octavia in the city’s Buckingham Hotel. His dire financial situation — as evidenced by his fight over compensation and Frederika’s abandonment suit — was so severe that the hotel held his daughters’ trunks of personal belongings for a two-hundred-dollar debt he owed.23

  His reputation as a Confederate hero was about all Thomas Dockery had left, and occasionally it paid off. When President Grant died in August 1885, a group of ex-Confederates living in New York selected Dockery and others to represent southern soldiers in the military parade that was organized in Grant’s honor.24 The New York World also printed his story about Grant’s kindness to him after his capture in Vicksburg. While Dockery was a prisoner of war, his first wife, Laura, traveled there in hopes of seeing him. When she met General Grant, he assured her that Thomas was alive and well and that she would soon be reunited with her husband. “For the gentle and feeling manner in which General Grant treated her,” the paper reported, “Mrs. Dockery never ceased to bless the brave man who today will be laid in his last resting place.”25

  Confederate nostalgia, however, did not pay bills, and Thomas Dockery was unable to care for his daughters. The sisters remained in New York for a few more years and then left following Nydia’s marriage to Richard Forman in Manhattan. Forman, a resident of Jefferson County, Mississippi, was already widowed and had adult children. At fifty-five, he was the same age as Nydia’s father. Forman had been pursuing Nydia since 1885, when he first asked the general for his daughter’s hand in marriage, writing, “I would be happy to have her father visit us at any and all times, and it would be my earnest desire that her sister Octavia would make our house her home until married.” Unbeknownst to Forman, one of Thomas Dockery’s friends wrote him a letter about the man who had just proposed to Nydia. He described Forman’s appearance as “quite old,” noting that he was “homely and ill shaped, displaying the tremulous activity of an old man.” Dockery may not have desired such a marriage for Nydia, but he was unable to care for either daughter, and so in January 1888 she wed the much older Mr. Forman.26

  As promised, Octavia was welcomed into the home of her newlywed sister. The Formans first returned to Richard’s hometown of Fayette, Mississippi, in Jefferson County, before moving to Natchez around 1896. The sisters’ father stayed in New York, where in February 1898, at the age of sixty-five, he died penniless in a rooming house. Nydia arranged for Thomas Dockery to be buried in the Natchez City Cemetery, a city where he never lived but where his daughters could pay their respects.

  In many ways, Thomas Pleasant Dockery’s life was a symbol of what became of the Civil War generation — the generation who hoped to maintain the slave economy of the Old South in order to sustain and increase their own wealth. Like so many of the men he led into battle, he lost everything in defense of that dream. Still, for generations of southern whites who knew of his exploits as a Confederate, he was a hero. Dockery may not have been able to leave his daughters an inheritance, but his reputation as a war hero was intact, and Octavia wove this into her own life’s narrative. It would prove valuable indeed during some of her darkest days.

  By the time Octavia returned to Mississippi, she was a young woman in her mid-twenties. When she was born in Lamartine, Arkansas, the daughter of a successful planter, it was 1866. Confederate defeat had changed the world around her. Not only did she not grow up to be a plantation mistress, but she had also spent her life moving from state to state as her mother died and her father fell apart emotionally and financially. Bound to her sister’s household, she returned to Mississippi with no means to support herself.

  Even so, Natchez seemed to suit Octavia Dockery, a slim-figured redhead with angular facial features. She was a “New Woman,” a term used in the late nineteenth century to describe women who were educated, were more carefree than their mothers, and dreamed of a career before marriage. Octavia fancied herself a writer. This is not to say that she didn’t have her suitors; she did. It is just that the attention she craved wasn’t from men but from publishers. A Natchez attorney named Richard Reed found this out the hard way when she cut short his attempt to court her after declaring his “supreme love.” Octavia’s response, he told her, left him feeling that “a companionship socially was decidedly obnoxious.” The harshness of her reply, Reed told her, “caused a pain that almost deadened my sensibilities to suffer (and I wish sometimes that it would).”27

  Octavia Dockery as a young woman, ca. 1890s. (Courtesy of the Thomas H. and Joan W. Gandy Photograph Collection, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge.)

  Octavia’s “ambition to gain a standing as a writer,” as Reed noted, nonetheless impressed him even as his efforts to gain her affection were met with resistance. The two remained friends, and he even offered her advice on how she could achieve her goals. In a letter to her dated 1892, when she still lived in Fayette County, Reed wrote, “I think, Octavia, that it would be difficult for you to get a paper accepted by the Leading Monthlies,” noting, “There is such a crowd of writers seeking to gain recognition in the well-established publications.” So he suggested a different plan of starting their own publication. “You cannot expect success all at once,” he admonished. “A gradual improvement & progress is the surest and most stable,” he wrote, adding that she should become an editor.28

  Reed’s letter also impressed upon her his true motivation for writing. “Having all these matters in mind and realizing my love for you, and believing you love me, I again bring up the subject of our getting married, and make the proposition that we do so, and without further delay.” He insisted that the matter be decided swiftly, and he would make plans to take her to New Orleans “where they could be married.” His persistence was never rewarded.29

  A few years later, another attorney named Thomas Bulger began to pursue Octavia. “I have fallen in love with you and am getting most anxious to know if you are willing to be my darling,” he wrote her in the summer of 1896. His letter suggests the slightest hint of her motivation for considering marriage when he says, “If you mean what you say about marrying a lawyer I will promise to love you more than you can ever know.” The two seem to have had a courtship that lasted until the fall of that year when, in the only other known correspondence from Bulger, he writes how happy he was to receive her letter. “This is the sweetest letter of [all]. . . . I know you are the sweetest little woman in the world and I love you so devotedly as can be,” he wrote, adding, “I will bring your ring when I come. I must put it on your finger in person and you must give me a sweet kiss. Then I know you are mine.” Yet in spite of his best efforts, Thomas Bulger was no more successful than Richard Reed. He, too, failed to secure a marriage with Octavia.30

  Why Octavia never married is unclear, yet her determination to be a published writer never waned. And she did have modest success. While the regional literary magazine the Sunny South, published in Atlanta, turned her down, her work was printed in the Philadelphia-based magazine The Blue
and the Gray. In 1893, the magazine carried a few of her writings, including a short story titled “Held by the Enemy.” Significantly, Octavia named the protagonist “Laura,” after her mother. It is a story of romance set during the Civil War in which Laura is rescued from the Yankees by a Confederate captain, whom she falls in love with and marries the following year. Like many stories of the era, it invokes the trope of the loyal slave speaking in dialect. While it is amateurish, it shows how Octavia, a woman just one generation removed from the war, romanticized the era in which her mother lived (and continues to live in her story) rather than seeing it as the devastating time that it truly was for women like Laura Dockery.31

  Octavia published other short pieces, including one about sugar production on Louisiana plantations, but little else. As the Saturday Evening Post recounted several years later, “Her verse was bad, but she esteemed it more than her beauty.” Her writing never really brought her the public attention she hoped for. She couldn’t have known it, but a few decades later, she would find it after all.32

  As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, Octavia’s chances of marriage swiftly dissipated. Now thirty-three, she claimed she was twenty-seven. She continued to stretch the truth about her age when, a decade later, in 1910, the census recorded her age as thirty. One can only imagine the incredulous look of the census taker when Octavia, nearly forty-four, insisted on such a youthful number. At the time, she listed her occupation as “magazine writer.” Despite the fact that Octavia had become an “old maid” while living in Richard Forman’s household, he kept his promise to her father that she would have a home until she married. He probably did not anticipate that his sister-in-law would still be there twenty-two years later.33

  Sometime during the first decade of the new century, the Formans moved from their first home in Natchez at 145 Wall Street to 1016 Main Street. Richard Forman rented the homes he shared with his wife, his daughter, and sister-in-law, and at both locations they also took in boarders. At the house on Main Street, a forty-year-old bookkeeper at the local lumber company, Archibald Dickson, boarded with the Formans. Their other boarder was thirty-seven-year-old Dick Dana, who did not work but had his “own income,” likely the remaining funds he inherited from his mother. It was during this time at the Forman residence on Main Street where Octavia Dockery and Dick Dana probably first met, marking the beginning of their peculiar relationship — a relationship that lasted for the rest of their natural lives.34

  The fact that the Formans took boarders in their rented homes suggests that they struggled financially. This is supported by the fact that between May 1910 and February 1911 the Formans moved again, but this time to the home that was Dick’s inheritance. Weathered clapboards, cracking plaster, and other signs of decay had taken their toll on the house, but they could all live there at no cost if only Richard Forman paid the property taxes on the place. And so, Richard, Nydia, his daughter Sadie, Octavia, and Dick Dana moved to the antebellum house on the outskirts of Natchez called Glenwood.

  Sadly for Octavia, her sister, Nydia, with whom she had lived her entire life, died at Glenwood after a long illness, very likely cancer, in February 1911.35 She was just fifty-one years old. A year later, Nydia’s husband, Richard, also died. By now, his daughter Sadie rented a home on Rankin Street. Octavia and Dick — two people with no significant means of income and no one to support them — were left to fend for themselves.36

  It had been clear to Octavia for several years that Dick Dana was unable to take care of himself, personally or financially. A diary he kept not long after he moved in with the Formans revealed a man whose brain was cluttered with incongruent thoughts. His scribbling was a stream of consciousness. “Mr. Forman insulting dog. Passed through streets of Natchez don’t look at anyone. A piano toy at kitchen door.” He was obsessed with dogs and snakes. And, in a surprisingly lucid passage, he wrote, “Doc says I am an old fool and got no sense. I am not a fool and got sense. He may think they can change me.” Only he knew who “they” were, but Dick clearly suffered from some mental deficiency.37

  Whatever income he now had likely came from Glenwood, because he never appeared to have had any gainful employment. The small estate Dana inherited from his mother, which could be rented to raise livestock or harvest timber, was barely sufficient to live on. And Octavia, now forty-seven, was past a marriageable age, and she had never earned much from publishing small articles in insignificant magazines.

  It was time for her to face reality.

  For a few years following her brother-in-law’s death in 1912, Octavia boarded briefly at a home on Pine Street and even spent some time in Mobile, Alabama, with an extended family member. Dick’s whereabouts for that time are unknown. He may have worked out a deal with Duncan Minor to stay at Glenwood now that Minor owned the property after paying the taxes. But Octavia returned to Natchez and pursued legal means to force Duncan to reconvey the property back to Dick Dana. Despite Dick’s later recollections of a promise he made to Nydia on her deathbed that he would take care of her sister, the truth of the matter was Octavia looked after him — in part because she likely felt genuine concern for the man who had lost his grip on reality, but also because her own situation was precarious following the deaths of Nydia and Richard.

  Glenwood passed through several owners during the years that Dick and Octavia lived on the property, often under threat of eviction. Yet Octavia was savvy. She countered every court order by locating loopholes in the law and, later, by using the local press to garner sympathy from the Natchez community. She had no choice, really, because eviction presented a scenario even more tragic than the derelict state of Glenwood.38

  Living at Glenwood brought challenges of its own. First, there was the condition of the house, described in court papers as early as 1917 as “dilapidated.” The house had no electricity or running water. The furniture that Dana’s parents owned was still there, as was his father’s library, which included hymn books and religious titles like Twenty-Five Village Sermons by Charles Kingsley, a well-known Anglican priest. The rector’s collection also included books given him by Robert E. Lee, when the elder Dana first left for Port Gibson.

  Yet the roof was rotten, and year by year Glenwood’s condition worsened. Outside, chimneys crumbled, the second-story balcony became increasingly unstable, several windows were broken, and the front porch was rotting away. Inside, the wallpaper was falling off while dust and cobwebs gathered on everything. Octavia slept in an upstairs bedroom on a mildewed mattress she perched between chairs, even though it laid next to an impressive four-poster mahogany bed. Over the years, various animals — cats, chickens, geese — took up residence inside the home, including the couple’s herd of goats, which chewed the wallpaper as far up as they could stretch their necks and ate pages from rare books they had pulled off of the same bookshelves where chickens had built their nests.39

  Octavia never thought of herself as a housekeeper and, for reasons only she knew, appeared resigned to the filth that gathered year in and year out. She also had to figure out a way to support herself and Dick, whose behavior became increasingly erratic. Although he was finally declared non compos mentis in 1917, she did not become his legal guardian until 1923. Prior to that time, Dana was the ward of two consecutive chancery clerks in Adams County, including Pat Mulvihill Jr., who later became an Adams County sheriff’s deputy. In early 1919, Octavia went to Mulvihill to seek a five-year lease on Glenwood and proposed “that she would take care of [Dana] for the use of the property.” Very likely, she knew that the estate could be sold out from underneath them, so she sought to strike a bargain with Mulvihill. He agreed and petitioned the chancery court, which then leased the home to her. As he noted, “[She] has lived on said property for several years and has supported and taken care of . . . [Dana] without any compensation,” adding that if she “should decide to leave the premises, there would be no one to take care of [him]” and it would “be necessary that he be confined in the asylum.”40
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  Glenwood, or “Goat Castle,” 1932. (Courtesy of the Earl Norman Photograph Collection, Historic Natchez Foundation, Natchez, Miss.)

  At the same time Mulvihill secured a lease for Octavia, she borrowed money in order to pay off encumbrances against the property, including the amount owed to Duncan Minor, who paid not only taxes on the property for a few years but also court costs to defend himself against Dockery when she filed a bill of complaint to have the property returned to Dick Dana. All told, taxes and other liens against Glenwood amounted to more than six hundred dollars, which Octavia promised to pay in full at the end of her five-year lease. Those five years came and went, and Glenwood was sold for debts owed. In fact, the property went through several owners while Dick and Octavia remained. At various times, she worked out an arrangement that allowed them to stay. Rents went unpaid, eviction notices were issued, and through it all, Octavia managed to hold on to the property by issuing her own bills of complaint and reminding the court that Glenwood was Dick Dana’s inheritance.41

  Dick was never much help to Octavia and had the potential to physically hurt her. In early 1931, people who lived nearby found her “knocked out in their small field.” When deputies were called, she claimed it was a “negro,” but they were convinced that Dana had beaten her.42 Neither was he able to earn a living, and he spent the bulk of his days in the wild vegetation that grew around Glenwood — a gothic landscape of gnarled trees draped in Spanish moss and of palm fronds, weeds, and vines. The trees were his favorite. He climbed them and hid in their branches, where he stayed even when Octavia called for him to come inside after dark. His hair and beard grew long and scraggly. He rarely bathed and was rumored to wear little more than a burlap sack with a hole cut out for the head as he romped through the woods. Dick Dana was the human equivalent of what Glenwood had become.43