by Karen L. Cox
Arriving at Parchman just before night
Oh, dear me: what an awful sight
Convicts like Zebras, dressed in stripes
Kerosine [sic] lanterns were used for lights.
The loneliness of prison was all too real, even among the group of women at camp. “Reluctant I sit on my bed tonight,” Walden wrote,
Looking up at the prison’s gray walls
No hope of release, no friend to cheer
Ah, an Unseen Friend is never near.7
Women like Sister also prayed for mercy, hoping that one day they might be released from prison and allowed to go home. During her sentencing, Emily had asked for the court’s mercy but received none. She left Natchez believing that she would never see her family or home again. But when she arrived at the prison, she learned that the governor occasionally came there and held what he called “mercy courts,” where he sometimes set prisoners free. So she held onto this sliver of hope and prayed that she might be shown the mercy she never got in Adams County.
Governor Mike Connor started the tradition of holding mercy courts the year Sister began serving her time. Occasionally throughout the year he traveled to the state penitentiary, where he interviewed convicts, reviewed their files, and read petitions from citizens who vouched for prisoners they believed should be set free. And Connor did pardon some convicts and suspended their sentences. But not Sister’s. A word from a sheriff or a prosecutor generally prevented any commutation of a prisoner’s sentence. Had Sheriff Roberts or District Attorney Clay Tucker warned against her release? Perhaps. But this did not keep Emily Burns from seeking mercy, because she was innocent. So, she clung to hope in a hopeless place.8
Year after year she went before the governor’s mercy court to plead for her release. She had no success with Governor Connor or his successor, Hugh White. But there came another governor, one who saw her case differently than the others had.
Paul B. Johnson Sr. was sworn in as governor of Mississippi in January 1940. A former attorney, judge, and U.S. congressman from Hattiesburg, he had also grown up poor and identified with the plight of tenant farmers and sharecroppers. In his previous campaigns for governor, he called himself the “Champion for the Runt Pig People,” and when he finally won he did so on the promise of instituting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms to help the poor and working class.9
Governor Johnson was no doubt familiar with the Merrill murder and the conviction of Emily Burns when he held what was called his “Christmastime mercy court” toward the end of his first year in office. He went to Parchman expecting to pardon or suspend the sentences of prisoners with records of good behavior. There, on December 18, 1940, he met Emily Burns.10
Dressed in her striped prison uniform, Sister got down on her knees and through her tears told the governor that she was “as innocent as a newborn babe.” “I was convicted of something for which I was not guilty,” she said. Governor Johnson carefully examined her record. Emily had proven her trustworthiness while in prison. She received a suspension of fifteen days in November 1938 and returned to prison a day early. This was followed by a ten-day suspension that December. It is unclear why she was offered these brief respites from the penitentiary — perhaps there had been a death in the family — but her good behavior made it possible.
Previous attempts to secure her release had been blocked by unnamed Adams County officials, and another group of Adams County citizens entered their own protest against granting her clemency during Governor Hugh White’s term of office. Sister had gone before that governor and been rejected. Now she stood before a third governor, and what came next made Sister believe that her prayers had finally been heard.
Governor Johnson suspended Emily Burns’s sentence indefinitely. As long as she maintained good behavior, she was free to go home and never return to Parchman. In suspending her sentence, he remarked that he did so “at the request of a large number of reputable citizens of Adams County.” He also stated that he was “thoroughly convinced of [her] innocence” and that “she convinced him that she had been convicted on circumstantial evidence.” In making his announcement, the governor also dismissed previous petitions against her release, saying, “When I am convinced that I am right, no man or a group of men can put pressure on me to make me change my mind.”11
Emily Burns was free.
Sister was probably still in shock when she left Parchman the following day. She had labored there for eight solid years, from December 1932 to December 1940, doing backbreaking work, especially in the steamy heat of the prison sewing room. She had begged for mercy at every opportunity, from every governor, since she arrived. Year after year, her prayers went unanswered, but her faith was strong. Now she was free and headed home.
When Sister returned to Natchez, not much had changed in her old neighborhood. St. Catherine Street was still bustling with activity, even though the Rhythm Club that hosted jazz bands had burned down the April before her release. More than two hundred men and women had died in the fire, including several former friends and neighbors, devastating the black community. Her cousin Alfred Smith pulled several people to safety before the club was engulfed in flames.12 The home she shared with her mother, on the corner of St. Catherine and Cedar Alley, was still standing. It was also where she returned to live, despite its memories of Pink and her arrest there eight years before.
Sister learned that Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery, who went free while she lost eight years of her life to a prison sentence, were still making money on tours of their disgusting house out on the Kingston Road. But she had no desire to ever set eyes on them again. She also had to earn a living, and her time in Parchman’s sewing room had provided her with a new skill. She no longer had to take in boarders or wash clothes; rather, Sister became a seamstress.
She was now forty-five years old. While St. Catherine Street had not changed much, she was changed forever. She might tell friends, family, and neighbors about what it was like on that prison farm, but only she knew its brutality. It was probably best to try and forget, if she could. She did that, in part, by returning to her home church, Antioch Baptist, where she could worship with her family, give thanks to her Lord, and replenish her spirit.
Sister knew all too well that freedom could be fleeting, especially for black men and women in Natchez. It could be taken from them in the blink of an eye. So she silently cherished it and put her faith in God to help her make a way forward.
EPILOGUE
Natchez was unable to escape the southern gothic narrative of Goat Castle for decades following Jennie Merrill’s murder. Americans remained captivated by the spectacle of a dilapidated antebellum mansion teaming with animals, the quirky ramblings of Dick Dana, and the social decline of once respected southern families. Some may have also concluded that William Faulkner had been telling the truth.
White Natchezeans, especially members of the garden club, did their best to ignore this story of southern degradation. Their annual pilgrimage of homes celebrated Old South romance. It, too, garnered national media attention. Year in and year out, thousands of tourists traveled to their small town on the bluffs of the Mississippi River to see the mansions of another era. Nonetheless, the specter of Goat Castle continued to cast its eerie shadow over the pageantry of antebellum splendor. And the touring public found both fascinating.
After escaping a murder trial in 1933, Octavia Dockery and Dick Dana went back to their lives at Glenwood and continued to offer tours, making money under the guise of restoring their shell of a home to its former glory. Yet they didn’t own the house. Charles Zerkowsky had held the mortgage to the property since the 1920s. He died without taking complete ownership, so his heirs now had the burden of what to do with a ruinous estate and two well-known squatters who refused to leave.
Years passed and Dick, Octavia, and the goats remained at Glenwood. From time to time, one of Zerkowsky’s heirs went to the estate to try to convince them to leave. After one of these visits, Octavia and D
ick staged a “sit-down strike” to avoid eviction. She fought, tooth and nail, any attempts at foreclosure. In 1937, likely at Octavia’s behest, journalists reported that she and Dick were being threatened with eviction. Isaac Zerkowsky, one of the men who helped pay the $1,000 bond that set her free in 1933, reassured the press this was not the case. “I am no Simon Legree,” he said. “I did try to persuade them to leave, but they refused,” he stated, adding, “Many of my friends have almost stopped speaking to me on account of this ‘Goat Castle’ business. I am not going to throw those old people out.”1
Octavia Dockery repeatedly proved herself to be a formidable adversary, and a litigious one at that, all in an effort to hold onto Glenwood. When another heir, Seaman Zerkowsky, succeeded in getting the Adams County Chancery Court to foreclose on the property, Octavia filed an appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which later upheld the lower court’s decision. She may have lost the battle but not the war. She and Dick held on to Glenwood for another decade, even as the house was literally falling down around them.2
During that time, in 1939, Duncan Minor died. He spent three years fending off Nellie Grist’s claim to Jennie’s estate until she finally withdrew her lawsuit in 1935. She once said she had no idea why she was told of Merrill’s death but later claimed that she was Jennie’s illegitimate daughter. Her attorney, Ed Jackson, the former governor of Indiana, told reporters that Merrill traveled to his state in 1902, where she had a baby girl. Minor pronounced the story “preposterous” and Grist’s challenge to Jennie’s will an attempt at blackmail. Still, it took three years of litigation before Grist finally dropped her suit, eventually saying that it was a case of mistaken identity. By then, the story had generated even more rumors about Duncan’s relationship with Jennie.3
Dick Dana, like Octavia, was growing old and frail. On October 10, 1948, at the age of seventy-seven, he died of pneumonia and other complications, still a resident of Glenwood. The New York Times recounted the life of the “Master of Goat Castle” in an obituary that recalled the details of his arrest in the murder of the “ambassador’s daughter” as well as his Dana ancestry. His funeral was held at the church his father once served, Trinity Episcopal, before he was laid to rest in the family plot in the Natchez City Cemetery. The Times also referred to Goat Castle by saying, “Most of the goats have died, and Miss Dockery continues to live there alone.”4
The Zerkowskys likely believed they could now assume control of the estate. Because public sympathy had long rested with Dick and Octavia, they never forced an eviction, even though they had legal title to the property and could have done so. They had paid property taxes for years with no hope of recovering their money from the impoverished and aged pair. Certainly, in the wake of Dick’s death, the Zerkowskys thought they could move forward. They were wrong.
At eighty-three, and in failing health in the months following Dick’s death, Octavia had one more card to play. In February 1949, she filed a bill of complaint asserting that she now owned the estate because she and Dick had been man and wife. Her suit claimed the two were wed in a ceremony in 1902 and had lived at Glenwood as man and wife since that time. Octavia also claimed she and Dick were “generally recognized as man and wife and assumed all the duties and relationships of husband and wife to each other.” She named Isaac, Sam, and Seaman Zerkowsky in her suit, along with Jeanette Habas, all of whom now co-owned the property. In it, she asserted that as Dick’s widow, she was entitled to the property that had been left to him in his mother’s will. The Zerkowskys answered that she had never been known as “Mrs. R. H. C. Dana” and that her claims to the property were “wholly fictitious, false and pretended,” which they were.5
Only a few weeks after filing this lawsuit, Octavia Dockery died. The news of her death, like that of Dick Dana, made national headlines. The New York Times carried her obituary, as well as the story of her connection to the Merrill murder and, of course, her herd of goats. Yet it was the headline in the Delta Times-Democrat (Greenville, Miss.) that captured her resolve to keep Glenwood. It read “Death Won Case for Miss Dockery.” This was not hyperbole. She had literally maintained a death grip on Goat Castle.6
In June, the children of her paternal uncle filed a claim to her personal belongings and came to Natchez, where they held an auction on-site at Glenwood. The Zerkowskys immediately dispensed with the estate, selling it to a developer. Then in 1955, Goat Castle was razed and a modern housing development of ranch homes took its place. They named the new neighborhood “Glenwood,” so that today “Goat Castle” is nothing more than a memory.
Events in Natchez in 1932 demonstrated how little progress had been made between former masters and former slaves since emancipation. There, as it was throughout the South during the era of Jim Crow, the lives of blacks and whites remained intertwined even with laws meant to segregate them. And, in many ways, race relations looked as they had a century before. Jennie Merrill, whose ancestors had been wealthy slave owners, was still wealthy, and she maintained a relationship with African Americans similar to that of her parents in that she saw them as a servant class of people. She had a live-in cook and black families who worked and lived on her estate. On the other hand, black women like Emily Burns and her mother, Nellie Black, whose ancestors were slaves on plantations in Adams County and Concordia Parish, may not have had to pick cotton, but in town they were relegated to domestic work for white families as their maids, cooks, and laundresses.
In truth, opportunities to work independent of whites were few and far between in Jim Crow Mississippi. Ed “Poe” Newell had such a job, as an embalmer for a black funeral home. Others, like Lawrence “Pink” Williams, left Natchez for Chicago, where he changed his name, to escape the “southern way of life.” He found work in a corn refinery only to lose it during the Depression, which forced him back to Mississippi in hopes of finding work with his former employer, Duncan Minor, whose parents owned slaves — perhaps even Pink’s own parents.
Dick and Octavia, poor whites believed to have a respectable lineage, frequently interacted with local blacks, too. From time to time, they hired men to help them with farming, livestock, and, later, to collect admission from tourists at the front gate of Goat Castle. Sheriff Clarence Roberts, too, relied on his relationship with local blacks. He hired a trusty at the jail, for example, because he knew very well that African American men and women had good reason not to put their faith in white men who upheld laws that held them down. So, what appeared to be willing assistance from members of the black community was very often predicated on fear, since they, too, could find themselves in jail.
Jennie Merrill, Duncan Minor, Dick Dana, Octavia Dockery, Lawrence Williams/George Pearls, and Emily Burns — white and black — are forever connected by a crime. But it was one that revealed the everyday interactions between the races in a place like Natchez, where the majority of the population was African American. Williams had interacted with all of them. Sister, much to her regret, had accompanied him on an evening stroll that placed her at Jennie Merrill’s home along with Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery. Then there were Octavia’s dealings with Williams. They met and talked and plotted together. She probably planted the seed of robbing Jennie Merrill—a neighbor she despised and whom she knew was wealthy. She may have pretended later not to know Emily Burns, but she could afford to plead ignorance because her word as a white woman trumped anything a black woman might say. And yet, Octavia knew who Emily Burns was and carried with her the memory of that evening at Glenburnie whether or not she ever admitted to it. Sister carried that memory, too, as well as the injustice she endured. She was the other victim in this crime, wronged not simply because of her interaction with Octavia Dockery, but by merely being born black in a place and at a time when black women were particularly vulnerable to the dictates of white society.
Emily Burns and Octavia Dockery lived far different lives in the aftermath of the Merrill murder. Aside from the double standard of justice that sent one home and the other to p
rison, Octavia Dockery, and not Emily Burns, is the woman who never escaped her ties to the murder of Jennie Merrill. Whites in Natchez swiftly forgot about the woman who was punished, but have yet to forget Octavia Dockery and the fact that she and Dick Dana were implicated. Even her headstone reads “Mistress of Goat Castle,” which would lead the curious to ask, “Why?”
Within the black community, the memory of Sister’s involvement and incarceration seems to have vanished except among family and a few others. Duncan Morgan, a respected member of the African American community and of Holy Family Catholic Church, recalled knowing Emily Burns from when he was a young boy in the 1950s. She lived across the street from him. Children from the neighborhood, he remembered, sometimes made cruel comments to her about the crime, and she defended herself, he said, by saying, “All I did was carry the lamp.”7 Several of Emily’s second cousins, including Birdia Green, learned very little about the case other than that “Cousin Sister,” as she knew her, was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”8
While Octavia Dockery engaged in one legal battle after another, Emily Burns served eight years in prison. She might have spent the rest of her life there if not for Governor Johnson’s suspension of her sentence, so it is a testament to her inner strength that she survived Parchman and returned to Natchez to carry on with her life in light of what she had been through.
The signs of her reentry into society after her incarceration appear in Natchez city directories. Sister first returned to 228 St. Catherine Street, the home she shared with her mother before her arrest, where she lived at least until 1947. Public records of Emily’s mother, Nellie Black, stop in 1939, but it is likely that the two women lived together when Sister returned from prison. Whereas city directories documented Emily’s occupation prior to her trial as “laundress,” she was now listed as one of the city’s dressmakers. By 1950, Sister, now fifty-five years old, had moved to Liberty Road, where she was listed as a “householder,” which meant that whether she owned or rented her home, she was the head of her household.9