Goat Castle

by Karen L. Cox

  Octavia supported them both by milking cows and selling eggs and other produce that could be raised on the open land around the house. There was also a small shack on the property that sat adjacent to the Kingston Road, which she occasionally rented out. The old building had been a roadhouse in the nineteenth century nicknamed “Bucket of Blood” because of the frequent fights that broke out there. In the early 1920s, the building took on a new nickname: the “Skunk’s Nest.” Sheriff Clarence Roberts eventually shut it down, remarking, “It was as unsavory in reputation as it was smelly in name.” Still, the building produced a smidgen of income for Octavia and Dick. For three weeks in July 1932, a ruddy-faced unemployed logger named John Geiger rented the place before Octavia forced him to leave for nonpayment of rent. He had originally moved into the old roadhouse with his family, but on the following morning his wife left him. Later, in his rush to vacate the premises, the twenty-eight-year-old Geiger left an old mattress, some broken furniture, and an old brown overcoat. No sooner had he left than Dick and Octavia showed up to scavenge the place for anything valuable. They dragged the filthy mattress back home and laid it across two chairs on the rotting front porch of Glenwood, where it became a perch for napping kittens. They also took the overcoat.44

  At the time Octavia requested the five-year lease on Glenwood, the surrounding property badly needed a new fence both to keep in the livestock she owned — cows, hogs, and goats — and to prevent the destruction of crops she had planted. The lack of secure fencing meant that her livestock frequently traipsed elsewhere. They regularly made their way to the property next door, which led to even more headaches for her since the law required an Adams County sheriff’s deputy to confiscate her errant hogs and goats.

  But Octavia was no pushover. All she had been through had hardened her. The last thing she needed was a writ of seizure, so she returned the favor by contacting the sheriff for her own purposes and filed suits of replevin that forced Jennie Merrill to return livestock she kept as payment for the alleged damage. Glenwood was all she had, and she was prepared to defend it against a woman who looked down on her and who had known only wealth and privilege. So, Octavia scratched out a living at Glenwood, did her best to look after Dick, whose mental state continued to decline, and, as needed, met with local attorneys seeking loopholes to prevent their eviction.

  Octavia’s grievances with her neighbor, however, seemed to never end. Jennie’s complaints to the sheriff’s office were relentless, and every few years there would be another lawsuit for the damage caused by trespassing hogs or goats. That they were neighbors at all was a constant irritation for both women. By 1932, during the depths of economic depression, the costs of going to court with Jennie likely caused Octavia additional stress. “Miss Jennie” might be able to afford the constant stream of legal fees, but for the woman who eked out an existence on the neighboring property, enough was enough.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PINK AND SISTER

  While the descendants of Mississippi’s antebellum elite had experienced steep economic and social decline in the decades following the Civil War, the descendants of slaves barely moved the needle of progress in their favor during those same years. True, they were now free, but their former owners sought to curtail that freedom in every way possible through restrictive laws, discriminatory labor contracts, incarceration, and racial violence. These conditions made it extremely difficult, though not impossible, for black Mississippians to determine their own destiny.

  Emily Burns and George Pearls represented the different paths southern blacks took in the twentieth century when they came of age. Born and raised in Natchez, Emily remained there, married, and worked as a laundress for white families in town. George was also born in Adams County, on one of its many plantations, under the name of Lawrence Williams. Yet around the time of the First World War, he left for Chicago seeking a better life. He joined the mass exodus of African Americans in the Great Migration, relocating to northern cities in search of jobs and the promise of personal freedom they were unable to experience in the world of the Jim Crow South.1

  Emily was born around 1895, and like most black Natchezeans of her generation, her grandparents had been slaves. Her father, James Black, was born in Louisiana in 1865, just as the Civil War ended. Census records show that his father came from Mississippi and his mother from Maryland, though both ended up slaves in Louisiana. In the case of James’s mother, her birth in Maryland meant that she was one of nearly one million men, women, and children who were transported to the Deep South as prime commodities in America’s domestic slave trade in the decades before the Civil War.2 It was a trade fed by the cotton boom that peaked in the 1830s and again in the 1850s, sending black lives to Louisiana and Mississippi to cultivate the crop that made millionaires out of families like the Merrills and the Minors of Natchez.

  To put it another way, the life of Emily’s paternal grandmother followed the pattern of other slave women who were born in Maryland. She was bought by a slave trader from a Maryland planter, separated from her family, and taken from the only home she had probably ever known. She was shackled alongside other slave women and men and put on a ship docked in Baltimore that was bound for the Port of New Orleans. Once in the Crescent City, she was placed in one of its slave pens. Then, as had happened to other slave women, her hair was combed, she was dressed for sale, and she was made to stand on the auction block. There a planter purchased her for the purpose of laboring in the fields of a Louisiana cotton plantation. She may even have made the journey by steamboat to Natchez, where she would have been enclosed in a slave pen at the Forks of the Road, the second-largest slave trading post in the Deep South outside of New Orleans, before finally being auctioned to a local planter.3

  Emily’s family history was woven into the fabric of American slavery on her mother’s side, too. Her mother, Nellie Smith, was born in 1877, twelve years after the end of the Civil War and just as white leaders in the state reassumed control over state government and went to work dismantling what little progress had been made by Reconstruction. And while she was not born into slavery, her mother, Agnes Smith, born in 1852, and her grandmother Abigail Bell, born around 1835, had most certainly been slaves.4 In fact, is it very likely that Emily’s grandmother Agnes may have been fathered by a slave owner, since she was listed as “mulatto” in U.S. Census records. After growing up on a farm her mother owned out on Liberty Road, Nellie married James Black in 1894, when he was twenty-nine and she was a young woman of seventeen. A year after they married, they welcomed their daughter, and only child, Emily, into the world. So Emily grew up in an extended family of her parents, her grandmother, aunts and uncles, and numerous cousins.5

  To understand the world into which Emily Black was born, one must understand Natchez as a place. Large as its black community was, it was a community relegated to the outskirts of town — in and around the Forks of the Road at the intersection of Washington and Liberty Roads. Washington (now D’Evereux Drive) fed into St. Catherine Street, which later became the center of black life — the very same street down which newly imported slaves were once driven from steamships on the Mississippi River to be sold.

  Smith family photo, ca. 1913. Emily Burns, eighteen, sits on the far left of the center row, wearing a shirtwaist and tie. Her mother, Nellie Black, stands behind her. Emily’s uncle George “Doc” Smith stands in the center, and her grandmother, Agnes Smith, sits on the far right. (Courtesy of Birdia Green and Phyliss Morris, Natchez, Miss.)

  The black population of Natchez grew in the aftermath of the Civil War as former slaves tested their newfound freedom through the simple act of moving from plantations to town. While most freedmen stayed on those lands as sharecroppers, many others chose to leave the places where they had been enslaved. They sought out more urban environments and new work arrangements, rejecting the grueling toil of cotton production. Among them were men and women who had labored on the plantations of Concordia Parish, Louisiana, just across the river f
rom Natchez, or who had been slaves on plantations in Adams or nearby Jefferson Counties. They moved to the town of planter millionaires, where they saw for themselves the luxurious homes their former masters enjoyed, direct products of their slave labor.6

  They built churches and schools, too, institutions that fed the spirit and the mind. On the outskirts of town along Liberty Road, they erected Antioch Baptist Church, the church Emily grew up in and where her extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins worshipped. Organized on August 1, 1900, Antioch was initially a wooden structure that doubled as a school for local children. Emily herself may have learned to read and write there. And while the road on which Antioch was built was named for a town in Mississippi, there was a sweet irony in building a black institution on a thoroughfare named “Liberty,” given that coffles of slaves were once marched in chains along this same route to be sold at the Forks.7

  In the decades after the war, Natchez freedmen needed places to live. Few had the resources to build their own homes, so they relied on rental property — often no more than wooden shacks — erected by local whites. Most of them were located on the edges of town along St. Catherine Street and its alleyways and close to the old slave trading post where area planters had purchased their parents, or perhaps even them. By the early decades of the twentieth century, men like Charles Zerkowsky, a Polish Jew who ran a grocery store on St. Catherine, owned those properties and continued to rent them to African Americans, most of whom would never know the pride of home ownership in their lifetime. So they rented those little houses and duplexes that by the 1920s were already run-down shacks.8

  Still, St. Catherine Street emerged as a vibrant corridor of activity and promise for the black community. It ran from the Forks to Zion Rest African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded and led by Hiram Revels. Revels, a free black man from North Carolina, had served as a chaplain to black troops during the Civil War and became the first African American U.S. senator in the history of the nation. Along St. Catherine, one could find O’Ferral’s grocery, a gristmill, a filling station, churches, saloons, and mortuaries. African Americans made up the vast majority of inhabitants, yet there were also Italians, French, Irish, and Poles. Jews, Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists were all represented. Holy Family Catholic Church, the first African American Catholic church in the state, was among the houses of worship along St. Catherine. It was the most diverse area of the city.9

  Whether with his parents or as a young man, Emily’s father, James, was one of many African Americans who left behind the Louisiana plantation on which he was born for possibilities in Natchez. At least by 1912, and perhaps before, he worked as a laborer at the National Box Factory — a company that built wooden crates for shipping goods. The factory employed a large black male workforce yet paid them poorly, which is why thirty of them went on strike for better wages at the factory in 1920. Whether James participated is unknown; however, his income was such that he never owned a home and his small family always lived in rental property in and around St. Catherine Street near the Forks.10

  Southern black women like his wife, Nellie, had far fewer employment choices. The vast majority of black women worked as domestics — cooking, cleaning, washing, and ironing for white families. They often labored long hours for little pay, as little as four dollars for six days a week and ten- to twelve-hour days, only to go home to do the same tasks for their own families. Being a laundress was unique among domestic work in that it gave black women the most autonomy, even if it was arduous, because the work could be done from home and away from white supervision. Nellie Black was a laundress, and as soon as Emily was old enough, she became one, too.11

  Emily, who went by the familiar “Sister,” grew up moving between those shacks along St. Catherine Street before her family eventually settled in one located between Cedar and Junkin Alleys, literally a stone’s throw from the Forks. She was a short woman, around five feet tall, and carried a little extra weight, though not much. She had a fifth-grade education, so she could read and write. Like most black girls, her childhood was cut short in order to support her family. Probably between the ages of twelve and fourteen, she went to work helping her mother. She had no choice. Then, sometime in 1911, at the tender age of sixteen, she married a farm laborer named Edward Burns, who was ten years her senior. The couple never had children and lived with her parents on St. Catherine Street during their entire marriage until Ed’s untimely death sometime in the late 1920s. Her father, James, also died around the same time, very likely in 1929.12

  When the 1930s began, Emily Burns was thirty-five, widowed, and living with her mother, Nellie Black, now fifty-three and also a widow. They did what most black women with insufficient income in Natchez did: they took in boarders. In 1930, twenty-six-year-old Ed Newell became a lodger in the home Emily shared with her mother. He worked as an embalmer for the Bluff City Undertaking Company, one of several local black-owned businesses in town. His full name was Edgar Allan Poe Newell, a name appropriate to his occupation and one that foreshadowed what was to come from his association with Sister, even though he generally went by “Poe.”13

  So when summer came in 1932, Sister, now thirty-seven, was barely eking out an existence as a laundress. By then the country was in the depths of the Depression, and she and her mother were hanging on by a thread. In late July, her life took a turn for the better, at least so she thought, when a nice-looking man from Chicago came to town and showed her some attention. Not long after, he moved to the home she shared with her mother on St. Catherine Street. He introduced himself to her as Pinkney Williams. She called him “Pink.”14

  Pink was twenty years older than Sister when they met in the summer of 1932. A handsome man, he stood just five-feet-seven, and at 140 pounds he had a slim build.15 He had dark brown skin, kept his hair cut short — typical of the time — and sported a mustache. While she knew him as Pink, she would later discover that he also went by Lawrence Williams and, in Chicago, was known as George Pearls. Nicknames and aliases were not unusual in the black community, since naming one another became a way of rejecting the history of having names given to them by slave masters. Sometimes they were needed to outwit the law, especially at a time when black men could be arrested and sent to jail — or worse, lynched — for the slightest affront to a member of white society. They may have also needed one for wooing women who weren’t their wives. For Pink, it appears to have been a little of both.16

  Pink was born in 1875 in Mississippi, and both of his parents were Louisiana natives, where they most assuredly had been slaves. Like Emily’s parents, Pink grew up in Mississippi during a time of rapid social, economic, and political change. When the Civil War ended, the state’s black population stood at 55 percent of the entire whole — in Adams County it was closer to 70 percent — and white Mississippians were hardly willing to accept the idea of former slaves circulating among them freely. For two years following the war, the period known as Presidential Reconstruction essentially left former Confederates in control of Mississippi. And only seven months after the war’s conclusion, in November 1865, the state legislature enacted Black Codes with the intent of replicating the control whites had over blacks under slavery. These codes restricted freedmen’s newly won rights of citizenship as they were unable to own guns, needed a license to preach the gospel, and had to prove they were employed by producing a written contract to authorities or else be arrested for vagrancy. The vagrancy laws were especially pernicious. If found guilty, a person could be fined as much as one hundred dollars, a sum most freedmen simply didn’t have. Those unable to pay were punished at the discretion of the local sheriff, who could “hire out said freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to any person who [would] . . . pay said fine.” This was simply another form of slavery, since white men who paid the fines found ways of ensuring that freedmen would never be able to work off the debt.17

  George Pearls, also known as Lawrence Williams and Pinkney Williams, or “Pink.” This photo, printed in the Natc
hez Democrat on August 23, 1932, likely came from the trunk of his belongings taken as evidence by sheriff’s deputies.

  Black men and women who remained on plantations after the war, and for decades after, were afraid of their white employers, whom they still referred to as “master.” Planters continued to hire “riding bosses,” men on horseback whose job was to ensure productivity even if it meant flogging black tenants. Their fear of “white folks” was very real. “We had to mind them as our children mind us,” one woman recalled. “It was just like slavery time.”18

  Federal officer Colonel Samuel Thomas saw this firsthand. The U.S. government sent Thomas to Vicksburg, about seventy miles north of Natchez, to open an office of the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist former slaves in their transition to freedom. When he testified before Congress in late 1865, he explained how whites in Mississippi not only defied attempts at Reconstruction but also willfully used violence to maintain control over freedmen. “The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right,” Thomas explained, “and however much they may admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and the President’s emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.”19