by Tim Bryant
"Here's what I can recollect. The old man's name was John, but they called him J.T. I even remember why. He had been called John or Big John, and then his wife— whose name, I think, was Lucy or Lucille— had a little boy. I believe they had two boys, but anyhow, this first boy they named Little John. John Junior. What have you. They used to do that a lot.
Everybody in Pattonia knew Little John. The son of the big man. Then, when the little guy was just about schooling age, a terrible sickness came through. Took a handful of people here, a handful there. Some just kids, some fully grown. And that little boy was one of the first to go. They buried him up at Mount Violet. One of the very first headstones put up.
So after that, John didn't want to be called John no more, on account of it reminding him of that little boy. And that's how he came to be J.T."
I took my time, writing it all down, making sure to get it all right. I figured I was giving Hollis more time to think, and that didn't seem to be a bad thing at all.
"What about the slaves?" I said. "Do you remember your mother saying much about all that?"
"That my daddy, who was named Hooker Bill, was a slave there. I think they had a sloosh of them. Well, I say that. They had twelve, maybe fifteen, which was a whole bunch for around here. Of course, that includes little kids too, and them little kids weren't always as productive as they might want them to be."
I decided to cut to the chase.
"Did you ever hear of a slave there named Art? Later, he used the name Art Conray, and then later Art Patton."
Hollis pushed himself up in the bed.
"I knew of an Art Conray, yes sir. If he's the one I'm thinking about, I don't know about him being no slave. He worked construction. I think he worked for somebody over close to Lufkin for a while."
Independent confirmation of Art Conray in the Pattonia area.
"Ain't he the one that killed that little baby?"
That startled me.
"Oh no, I don't think so."
"I guess not," he said.
I almost lost my train of thought.
"Around what time would this have been? The time when you knew the construction worker."
It looked like he was counting to himself.
"I would have to say sometime around 1900, best I can come up with."
"And how old would he have been at that time?"
He didn't hesitate.
"Oh, he was an older man by then. I don't think he was doing much work at that point. Now that I think about it, he for sure was old enough to have been on the Conray farm."
He paused.
"He wasn't old as I am now, I'm telling you. But he was maybe close to sixty."
That seemed to me to be pretty close to the age of the Art Conray I had met. I was seriously beginning to wonder if I had met a ghost. I tried to collect my thoughts and find a way to go forward from there.
"Do you remember if Art Conray played a musical instruments? Was he a musician?"
He kicked his right foot like he was trying to stir up some kind of thought on the subject. Then nothing.
"I have no knowledge of that," he said. "Seems like he might have been the one who lived on that boat. Is he the name of the fellow who lived on that riverboat?"
"I'm not sure," I said.
"If he did, I'm pretty sure he's the one who killed that little baby."
On the way out of the house, I asked Hilda if she knew anything about a man killing a baby in Patton's Landing. She said it sounded familiar, but she wasn't sure. Maybe she was thinking about something that had taken place somewhere else.
Any chance she knew how her great-grandfather— Hollis' father— had died? She and Ted were walking me out to my car, and I knew they had other things that needed doing, but I asked anyway.
"He was killed in Nacogdoches," she said.
"The word would be lynched," the boy said.
"Lynched," she said.
Hollis' dad had been working for a fairly well-to-do family in town, and one morning, the mother and a daughter had both been discovered with their throats slashed.
"The man came into the kitchen of his house, up on the big hill by the railroad tracks, and found his wife. She was laying across the kitchen table, all the blood drained from her body on the floor. He ran through the house, thinking the killer might still be there. He found his daughter upstairs in bed with a kitchen knife still in her. She was still alive.
"Who did this? the father said.
"She wasn't able to communicate a name but she said, gardener. Gardener.
"Well, James Lampkin had been working for the family for almost a year. He worked in the yard. He worked in the garden. Worked in the fields. Did everything from planting roses in the front yard to planting corn in the back to fencing in all the property from east to west.
Having nothing else to go on except his dying daughter's last word, the father led the sheriff and a posse out to the fields, where James Lampkin was busy tilling the soil, getting ready to plant some peas, corn. Food for the family and maybe just a little leftover for James to take home to his family for his troubles. His troubles was just beginning though.
"Lampkin, the father said, where was you at this morning? Lampkin looked up at the group coming down on him and got scared.
"I ain't been nowhere but right here, sir, he said.
"The sheriff handcuffed him and led him away from the premises. That group wanted to hang him right then and there. Picked out a tree and everything. The sheriff, though, he said, this man's coming with me. We're going to do this in town, out in the open where everybody can see. So they took him into town, gave him a thirty minute trial right there on the courthouse steps, pronounced him guilty of the murders of both of those two women, and hanged him from an oak tree in the middle of town.
"To hear my grandfather tell it, half the town was there to see it."
I had heard stories of people being lynched in the town for years. Art Patton's certainly hadn't been the first one. But even Art had never told a story quite like that. I almost felt sick to my stomach.
"They ever find out what really happened?" I asked.
Ted answered.
"Way the story goes, later, they discovered that an acquaintance of the family— a white man named Bob Gardner— killed them. Turned out there was a bunch of money and jewelry that went missing. James Lampkin never had a stick of it. None of our family ever saw it, that's for sure. They conveniently overlooked that part."
"Until Gardner was caught robbing somebody else in town," Hilda said. "When he finally got caught and went to trial a couple years later, all kinds of truth come pouring out. Money from half a dozen rich families in town. Jewelry enough to make Cleopatra blush. And guess who a great big bunch of it got traced back to."
Wow, I thought. Gardner. How had I never heard this story?
"I was telling your father about a guy named Art Patton, used to live around here a long time ago," I said. "He told a story that was pretty close to that."
Hilda seemed neither surprised nor impressed.
"Well, I'm sure it happened more than we want to know."
I agreed, but said that if Mister Patton had been talking about her great-grandfather, then it just went to prove that it was a small world.
"Goes to show that Patton's Landing is small, anyway," Ted said.
He had the last word on the subject, but, as I left their place, it was Art Patton's words that were left ringing in my ears.
Hanged man didn't have nothing to complain about. Nothing to complain about indeed.
The Seed Store was right where it had always been, halfway between the turn off onto Patton's Landing Road and the entrance to Marion's Ferry, standing like a forgotten ghost from a different time, a different world. Its sign was almost unreadable— you could make out the name Delafield, if you already knew what it was— and about half of the windows had broken out. I was surprised to see that the other half hadn't been.
The front door was locke
d tight, and the wood around the door frame was still surprisingly good. I knew I could break out a few panes and pull myself through one of the windows, but I wanted to check out the rear entrance first. Walking around the back was like walking into a museum. Rusted out engines parts that looked too peculiar to have ever fit into automobiles. Wooden wagon wheels and iron tractor wheels. Plows and harnesses. Stacks of wooden boxes.
A large back room had been added onto the store at a later date, and, ironically, it was the more recent part that was starting to go bad. The double door was pulling from its hinges and beginning to fall in on itself. I could give it a push and gain entrance. I was only concerned that the entire back wall might go with it. The door was chained shut, so I scrounged up a crow bar and busted the chain. Broken free, the wall shuddered and sighed. I carefully pushed on the door and walked in.
The building had never seen electricity, so there were no light switches. There was enough light to see the kerosene lamps that lined the wall, and there was still enough day streaming through the windows that I wasn't worried about finding kerosene. I walked through the back room, which still smelled like coal. There were more of the wooden boxes, and I looked through several of them, thinking I might find some of the coal left behind. They all appeared to be empty except for rat droppings here and there.
I could see even better in the front part of the store, due to there being a row of large windows along the top on each side. It appeared that birds had nested along the ledges. Probably pigeons. Shards of glass littered the floor on each side where the glass had fallen in to give the birds— and who knew what else— access. The big stove stood squarely in the center, having waited a couple of generations for a light. It was warm in the building, but I wondered if it would work after all these years. There were two rocking chairs in front of it, and I stopped to imagine Art and his friend George sitting there, discussing the news of the day. One of the chairs seemed to be rocking back and forth on its own. I got a shiver all the way up to my neck.
The old cash register was still sitting on the front counter, the counter still stocked with tobacco and smoking supplies. The shelves, although covered in several layers of dust that were gold in the sunlight, looked like they were ready and waiting for customers. Some of the products had strange names. Coffee, foods, soaps, starches, household supplies. I couldn't be sure if some were meant for animal or human use.
Back in the back of the main room, I found the office, which consisted of a desk and chair, an Underwood typewriter, a stack of yellowing papers, and a row of boxes against the wall which seemed to have served as a filing system. I looked closer and found a record of customers and a sales ledger. Carrie Delafield's name appeared and reappeared, along with others from the Pattonia area. The Alexanders, the Turners, the Barlows. One man listed simply as High Step. And there, with four, five, six different entries, the name Art Patton.
I knew some of these were white customers, but most were likely colored. Not counting Art, there was no way to know one from another. No "w" or "c" written into the margins. But, from the looks of things, George Delafield had extended credit to one and all, when it was needed. Most, I could see, had paid back in full.
As is my usual practice, I moved past all of the other stacks of records and went all the way to the back. The ledger there was falling apart, its binding kept together only by years of spider webs. I took one of the other books and knocked it clean, or at least clean enough to pick it up. It fell apart in my hands, leaving only the papers inside.
The records from the years when the store had served as a mortuary.
I placed the papers inside of a folder and tucked it under my arm.
The undertaker's records were a goldmine of information. They spanned the years from just after the Civil War until the turn of the century, and between them and the tombstones in Mount Violet, I was able to account for a good percentage of the people who had died in the Patton's Landing area.
Mount Violet, like all cemeteries at that time, was carefully segregated between the colored section and the white section. A notion that struck me as odd. It seemed that once we were in our graves, all things were pretty much equal. One set of bones no different from the other. Because Pattonia, during its heyday, operated largely on the backs of its colored population, that portion of the cemetery was much larger than the white portion. It lay at the east end of the grounds, two short rows of stones where the rest covered at least half an acre.
Several members of the Patton family were buried in the white end, as was Lovey Delafield, who arrived far ahead of her own mother. Many of the oldest headstones were unreadable, to stand there and gaze upon them, but Mrs. Collette in the office had suggested that I bring paper and a pencil and etch the stones.
"That way, you'll have something to bring back and look at," she said.
I was glad I did. One of the stones that was in the worst shape came alive beneath the pencil lead. A pair of hands held in prayer over the words "Gone Home October 10, 1872." No birth date listed. Beneath that, the name Jodora Conray. I almost cried.
I searched in vain for another member of her family. No Victor. No Wash. No Art. There were Conrays, white Conrays and colored Conrays, but no J.T. or Lucy or even Jed. The ones that were there all seemed to belong together, more mothers than fathers, children who had died either in childhood or soon after birth.
For the most part, the undertaker records lined up with the headstones, but there were a few names listed in the old book that couldn't be accounted for in Mount Violet. No doubt, people who came from other places and wished to be returned there. One such case was the guy who went by High Step. Dead on Christmas Day of 1912 and embalmed on the next. Reasons for death were mostly normal and mundane, except for the several notations of people dying of Influence. I momentarily wondered what kind of influence that might be before it dawned on me. Influenza. Normal and mundane.
Sarah Ellen and Kate Alexander were a mother and daughter, buried in the same casket. Others died of diphtheria. Smallpox. Falls from horses and tree branches. It seems like, for such a small place, there sure was a lot of dying.
One thing I didn't see was a little boy dead at the hands of somebody else, Art Patton or otherwise. I still had more missing pieces than found ones. Furthermore, some of the missing pieces weren't missing pieces. They weren't even pieces to begin with. At this point, I would have to wait and see if Art Patton himself could provide a few more clues as to which were which or how they might or might not fit together.
"There were three rooms in my house, one after the other after the other. What they used to call a shotgun house. When you walked through the front door, you were in the sitting room. What my momma called the living room, although I did a good bit less living in that particular room than either of the others. There was a chair and a couch, and I remember nothing about where they came from. The house originally belonged to my mother Jodora, so whatever story there was there belonged to her, and she took it to the grave.
"My father's name was Victor, although it wasn't a name that fit him too well. There were no photographs of him in the house. This is mostly because there was only a couple of photographs ever made of my father, and in each, he's just a figure in the background, trying to get out of the frame or not even knowing he was in it. Which is fitting because that pretty much describes him in our life. If there ever had been a decent photograph of him, I doubt momma would've had it in the house.
"There are two photographs in the sitting room. One was of Jodora, my momma. In it, she's holding a small boy on her lap while a somewhat bigger boy stands over her. I was told as a child that the smaller boy was me. For many years, I had the mistaken belief that the person looming over the two of us was my father. In fact, it turned out that he was my older brother Washington. He was eight years older than me. Everybody called him Wash.
"The photograph was taken on a steamboat docked at Patton's Landing, just up the road there, a skip and a jump this side of the
old general store. Best I can tell, it was sometime in the 1850s. Cotton season. Boats were coming to town once a week back then, sometimes an extra one on the weekends. I have no memory at all of the photo session, but I do remember hearing those big boats blow their horns when they pulled into the landing. You could hear them from one end of Pattonia to the other, and I imagine you could hear 'em all the way down here in Persimmon Grove.
"All the white folks for miles around— there wasn't a whole lot of white folks to tell the truth— but they would throw down whatever they were doing and run to meet the boat. The colored men would load up the boats with cotton, timber, bricks. The white men would take the money for the last haul that had been sold down river, usually in Sabine Pass, sometimes Jasper.
"The women would be spending that very same money on clothing and material. Coffee. Salt and sugar. Whatever they had. It was just such a day that Lucy Conray stumbled into a photographer on a boat called the Kate who was making photographs of people as he went along. He struck up a conversation with Mrs. Lucy and asked if he could take a photograph of some of her workers.
"The niggers? she said. Why would you ever want to do such a thing?
"He told her that he had come from many miles away and had never seen such people. It was arranged that, the next time the Kate pulled into Patton Landing, Mrs. Lucy would be there with a representation of the farm workers. Momma Jodora, me and Wash were photographed because we were the least likely to give either the man or Mrs. Lucy trouble.
"The following year or so, Wash was sold off to a man passing through the area. Sold off because J.T. Conray thought he was trouble, and he was starting to get big. That meant big trouble, and Conray didn't want none of it.
"Now, the other photograph in the living room was President Abraham Lincoln, and it looked like a painting to me, but momma always said it was a real photograph. That Abraham Lincoln picture had its own story to tell. A story my momma passed on to me.
"Everybody learned, in the years following the big war, that President Lincoln had set all the colored people in America free. Many stories were told about him, including one that he had come down South just before the war and had seen how we were all being treated, beaten and chained up like animals and with not much more clothing either.