by Tim Bryant
It took a week but I was able to find a copy of the 1870 census in the courthouse. It covered all of Nacogdoches County, but I found Pattonia at the bottom of the last page, above only Saints Rest. I was surprised by how many people lived in Pattonia. Four or five hundred people in an area where only one or two families now lived.
The lady behind the counter didn't want to give me access to any records. At first, she didn't even want me in the building. I had to use a side door. I had to stand at the back. I had to wait until all of the white customers had been dealt with. If she thought I would give up and leave, she was mistaken. At last, she allowed me to look through their books, but only after I made her think I was trying to trace family.
"The name?" she said.
"Conray."
She stopped flipping through the book.
"Most of the Conrays around here are white."
I nodded. I would say she eyed me with suspicion, but she had already been doing that. Now it became a glare.
"I thought you were looking for family."
She was speaking loud enough that another lady who was typing away on a typewriter stopped to listen in. It made me self-conscious. I lowered my voice, hoping she would get the hint.
"Yes."
"Your own family?" she said. Louder.
I glanced at the lady with the typewriter who quickly resumed her tapping.
"They used to own my family, ma'am," I said.
It was a lie, but a calculated one. A lie brought about by this lady's stubbornness. The suspicion slid from her face as she grasped for something suitable to replace it. She came up with the usual.
"Oh, you poor thing," she said. "I'm sorry."
Sorry for what, I wanted to say. Was she apologizing for her attitude when I walked in? For questioning what valid reason a colored boy might have for walking into her place of business? For making me stand at the back door. Drink water from a separate fountain. Or was she apologizing for hundreds of years of enslaving my people?
I thought about Art's comment. How the Conray family had named him just as they had named their dogs. What were the dog's names? I couldn't remember. But why had the Conrays not let Art's mother name him? What about his father? And would they even be on the census?
She handed me a book, a large black book. One of many on the shelves behind her.
"This is very old, so be extremely careful with it."
She stepped to the side, propped against a wall and waited. Close enough to make sure I did exactly as told. I flipped to the back of the book and started at the end.
The Conrays were long gone from Pattonia by 1870, but John Thomas Conray was still listed in land records as owning sixty acres on the southwest end of Patton Landing Road. Seeing his name written into the ledger made Art's stories feel even more alive. Just this one piece of information was enough to drive me further, deeper into the past.
I found out that most of the land where the Conray farm had been located was now owned by Temple Industries, an oil and gas company. There didn't seem to be a way back to the family. I decided to take a drive back out to the area, just to nose around. I didn't tell anybody but my brother Paul where I was going. I knew my parents wouldn't like the idea of me going off toward Woden in the family car, a Dodge '53 Coronet. I tried to get Paul to come along, but he had other plans.
I knew the Patton Landing Road well enough, even if I was more familiar with the east end. The Pepper Pot end. I took off with a few notes, landmarks to look for that might lead me to something identifiable. I figured if I came up totally empty, I could always head for the juke joint and have a beer or two. Maybe ask around if anyone had heard from Art Patton.
Patton Landing Road is almost completely under tree cover. The trees from each side of the road grow over and meet in the middle, making for a green canopy. As a result, the area is always in shade, and, with the river nearby, it's usually a good bit cooler than summer in town.
I parked less than a mile down the road, off the road to Woden, and got out of the car. There was a small tin sign tacked to a fence post announcing that I was stepping onto Temple land. I knew the river snaked just north of the trees and that if I walked back toward the big road, I should be walking right across the old Conray property.
The undergrowth was thick once you got into the trees. It was obvious Temple was doing nothing with their acquisition. At times, it was hard to make progress, and I had to alter my route. As a result, I got more and more off course, and by the time I reached the river, I knew I had backtracked too far.
I had seen an old house back along a fence line, but I knew it wasn't anything from the Conrays. There was a truck parked in front of it and a couple of dogs rustling around. I turned right and headed deeper into the woods, but back in the direction of Patton Landing Road. That's when I stumbled upon the remains of a couple of old cabins. I say remains. One of them had fallen in, but the other was in unusually decent shape. It didn't have a floor, but I knew it probably never did have one. There were no panes in the windows. Again, it's likely there never had been. I was pretty sure I was looking at slave cabins. What Art Patton had called the Quarters.
I pulled the Kodak Brownie from my pocket, a new purchase at the Gazette that I hadn't exactly gotten clearance to take. I snapped a handful of shots, some inside and some out. Vegetation had taken over much of the walls, trying to hide the past from the present day ghosts still inhabiting the area, but all but one of the walls were still standing. The better of the two looked about as inhabitable as the house with the truck and the dogs.
I was pretty sure that, having found a remnant of the slave quarters, I would be able to find something of the main house not too far away. I started off in the direction where I suspected it would be, with the intention of making a circle around the area until I walked up on something else. I quickly discovered an old well and peered down into a blackness that I couldn't see the end of. I remembered Paul telling me how most old wells in the area had skeletal remains at the bottom of them. It gave me a creepy feeling.
Stepping back from the hole, I heard movements coming from the direction of the road. If I had been closer to the old slave houses, I might have either ducked into or behind one, but there was really nowhere to go. I hoped it was a deer. Maybe one of the hunting dogs. Anything but a wild boar or even a bear.
"Oh my God," I heard someone say, "it's a nigger."
I had nothing to shoot anybody with except for a camera.
There was only one man, and I knew he had come from the little house I had passed, because he was talking to the two dogs, which were circling around him in opposite directions. He was carrying a rifle, and he was looking right at me. I decided to play friendly.
"How are you doing, sir?"
Ignoring the question, he pointed the rifle back at the two old buildings.
"What you doing, messing around out here, boy?"
The thought flitted through my mind that, if I could make him think I was the ghost of some long dead slave, I might scare the shit out of him and make my way to safety. I also knew it was a good bet he had no idea he was trampling across an old slave plantation. Somehow, the desperation of the moment cleared my mind quickly enough that I even surprised myself.
"I work for Temple Industries," I said. "Temple owns this land, and we're just looking it over."
I hoped he would think I had a partner out there with me. It was all I had to go on. It wasn't the worst thing in the world.
"Temple hiring on niggers now?" he said. "Ain't that a goddamn thing."
I pulled out my camera and showed him.
"Mister Temple sent several of us out to take pictures."
I wasn't sure there even was a Mister Temple. I was hoping the stranger knew as little as I did. What I was really hoping was the stranger was smart enough to know he didn't want Temple Industries discovering one of its employees laying dead less than a quarter mile from his house.
He held the rifle out for me to see, in excha
nge for my showing him the Brownie.
"I heard some kind of commotion," he said. "I figured I might have me a hog for supper tomorrow night."
I nodded like it never occurred to me he might be looking to kill me.
"I could shoot and dress you," he said. "I don't reckon you'd taste too good."
He thought it was a fine joke. I wasn't convinced.
"My boss might hear the gunshot and come running," I said. "I wouldn't want either one of us getting on his bad side."
That almost seemed to win him over.
"Look, I ain't got nothing against your kind," he said. "Most of 'em come up this way, they've heard those old baby in the well stories. Come nosing around looking for a scare. Well, I can give 'em all of that they want."
I hadn't heard any baby in the well stories. I was as scared as I wanted to be already.
"I expect I got as much in common with you as that big boss man of yours. But if either one of you come around again, trying to buy my little piece of land, I'm liable to grab this here rifle and let it do the talking."
I nodded like I understood more than I did.
"They try to buy your land too?"
He spit on the ground and kicked at it.
"Four times. Each time, he offered me more than the last. But you know what? Sometimes, it ain't about the goddamn money."
I agreed. I honestly agreed with the man.
"This land been in my family going back almost two hundred years," he said.
I wanted to take his picture. There was no way I was ever going to ask him for that.
"You one of the Conrays?" I said.
He cocked his head in a way that made him look like one of his dogs.
"Bobby Conray the third," he said. "Third and the last."
After my encounter with Bobby Conray, I didn't stick around to look for J.T. and Lucy's house. I hightailed it back to the car and drove on down to The Pepper Pot. I was genuinely interested to find out if anyone there had heard from Art Patton, and I was genuinely in need of a beer to steady my nerves.
There was nobody playing that night, but someone had dropped a few nickels in the jukebox, so a Rattlesnake Cooper song was on. Jay Henry got his jukebox serviced from a guy out of Houston, so it was stocked exclusively with artists working on labels down there. That suited me fine. I wasn't a big fan of Memphis and Chicago blues. I stopped by the machine and punched up "Hello Central" by Lightnin' Hopkins and "Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thornton, one of my new favorites. I ordered a Dixie from Jay Henry and sat at the bar, which I had never done before.
"I've seen you around," he said.
I introduced myself and said I usually turned up for live music but I was in the area.
"Business at Kelty's?"
I guess almost all of their business came from Kelty's, a big lumber yard headed toward Lufkin. Lately, a few houses had spring up in the area, and folks had taken to calling the whole area, although it really wasn't much more than a wide spot in the road, Kelty's. Best I could tell, it was a little bit how Pattonia had once been.
"I was looking for information on the Conray and Delafield families who used to live out here."
Jay Henry nodded and said, "You ought to talk to Hollis Lampkin. His people go way back here."
A man down at the other end of the bar had been pretending not to eavesdrop up until that moment.
"My mother's side of the family knew the Conrays. Most of them have died or moved off long ago."
I had seen the man before. In fact, I was fairly sure he had been there the night Art Patton played. He was dressed in work clothes that looked like they'd never seen soap. Probably stopped off on his way home from Kelty's.
"You heard of a guy named Bobby Conray?"
Jay Henry laughed.
"Bobby Lee. Is he back?'
I decided to hold my cards close to my chest.
"So I heard."
Jay Henry poured himself a drink.
"Bobby Lee's spent the last few years vacationing down in Huntsville."
No more needed to be said. Huntsville was only known for one thing, and that was the state prison that sat right in the middle of it.
"What was he down there for?" I said. Which meant, what was he doing time for.
The man at the end of the bar moved two stools closer and signaled for another cup.
"He's the one that shot those boys in Nacalina several years ago. Never would have gone to the pen if he hadn't bragged to everyone between there and Nacogdoches about it. Some fancy pants D.A. in town decided he would make a name for himself and brought him in for trial."
Jay Henry started to pour a bottle of Pearl into the man's cup, then thought better of it and handed him the bottle. There were only a couple of other people in the place, and nothing seemed to be getting out of hand.
"They sent him down to Huntsville for ten years," Jay Henry said, "and he comes back in three. That comes out to one year per murder."
We all shook our heads and drank our beer, and I wondered if the boys had been colored boys, but I knew they had been. The premium on white skin would never be so cheap. Before I left, I asked Jay Henry if Art Patton might be playing again sometime, and Jay Henry just said "who?" so I left it at that.
On the way out of the building, a young guy came after me.
"Hey, mister."
He didn't look old enough to be hanging out in a joint like The Pepper Pot, but who was I to judge.
"I hear you say Art Patton?"
I said that he probably did.
"He's playing next Saturday night at the fish fry at the Church of God in Persimmon Grove."
My heart jumped nearly as much as it had when Bobby Conray the Third had come strolling into my view. Bobby Lee.
"Next Saturday night."
"That's right."
"He's singing at a church?" I said.
The boy took a slug from a bottle of Texas Tornado.
"Well, not in the church," he said. "The fish fry is on the outside."
I took out my notebook and jotted the information down. It was getting dark, so I had to write mostly by feel, but it had been a good day. A productive day. I had escaped being murdered by a descendant of the J.T. Conray family.
Hollis Lampkin lived in Marion's Ferry with his granddaughter and her family. He was eighty-four years old, and, as fortyish year old Hilda said, "he can remember what he ate for breakfast on Christmas morning of 1890. Just don't ask him what he ate for supper last night."
He was bed-ridden and not in good health, but he loved visitors, even if he didn't know them.
Hilda and her son Ted introduced me to him and left us to talk, once it was understood what I had come for.
"So you write for the newspaper," Hollis said. "They hire on colored people now?"
I told him that I wrote for the Doches Gazette, a small monthly paper for the colored community. I was hoping to write an article having to do with the Patton's Landing area, and had been told that he might remember a few of the families who once lived there.
"I remember just about all of them, I expect," he said. "At least the ones that were there when I was there. And I remember my mother talking about a lot of other ones."
I retrieved my notebook, stretched my fingers and prepared to take notes.
"What did your parents do?"
He thought for a long time, and I wondered if he had heard me, but I think he was preparing his answer before he spoke it.
"My father died when I was very young. He was a slave on the big cotton plantation here, back when all the steamboats were coming up and down the river. They set him free after the war, but he never left Pattonia. I hear 'em call it Patton's Landing nowadays, but back then, it was almost always called Pattonia. I even remember momma talking about the Patton family."
I was writing as quickly as I could, quickly moving to a shorthand that I hoped I would remember later.
"This was the family that the town was named for?"
Hollis nodded.
"It was a town, once upon a time. We had all kinds of people living here. Stores and even an eating place for a while."
"You remember the seed store that George Delafield used to own?"
He kicked at the sheets on his bed, and I thought that he was going to get up. Hilda scurried in and adjusted things so that his feet were out from under the sheets— "he hates for his feet to get hot," she said— and then disappeared into the other end of the house.
I was about to repeat my question.
"Is the seed store not there anymore?" he said.
I told him that the building was still there, but it had been closed for more than twenty years and had fallen into disrepair.
"Now that building originally belonged to George Delafield's granddaddy," he said. "Was the undertaker place for a long time. There've been more dead bodies in that place than there are in Mount Violet."
"So George took it over after his father retired?"
Hollis deliberated.
"There was a long spell when it was the undertaker and a seed store. I guess either wouldn't enough people die to stay in business, or maybe the son just liked planting seeds more than he liked planting them dead people."
I liked the way Hollis Lampkin talked. I hoped I could get some of his spark into my writing.
"So you would say you know the Delafields better than you know the Conray family then?" I said.
"I know the Conrays more from hearing my momma talk about them," he said. "They was mostly moved on by the time I was around. Moved down to Beaumont or somewhere I think. She said they got into boating and such. I don't rightly know what they did once they left Pattonia."
I was fascinated. I felt like I was reading a really good book, and I couldn't wait to flip the page and see what happened next.
More to the point, I knew that the book was largely in my hands. What I asked next made all the difference.
"What do you remember your mother saying about the Conrays?"
Again, he waited a long time before speaking.