“Tell you what, Ace. I didn’t just ride a train 600 miles to watch a movie.” A hotel bar in the middle of a swamp sounded pretty good to me.
Turned out, Gina liked West Side Story a whole lot better than I did. My only interest lay in having met a couple of the actors. Those introductions had been made by Leland Parris III, a successful Broadway actor in his own right. I survived the sappy flick thanks to my trusty flask.
(Wednesday, June 21, 1961.)
When the taxi dropped us in front of the College Administration Building Wednesday morning, even I was gulping for air. On the lowland plains, the humidity builds overnight until it’s close to a fog. The afternoon rains return most of it to the swamps only to start the process again. I carried the DeCamp artifact in a canvas gym bag. Without much thought, I had slipped in the other traveling bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Inside Sampson Hall, it was easy to follow the signs to the Library Wing. Once there, a young gal at the main desk took my question and pointed to a woman wearing a green flowered sundress and sandals. Both hands planted, she leaned over a table talking to two students. She noticed our entrance and walked in our direction smiling.
She had wide-set hazel eyes, a snow-white smile and a crown of flowing auburn hair. The loose fitting attire accented her hourglass figure as she moved. Her sweet southern voice on the telephone hadn’t prepared me for a Sophia Loren look-alike. However Gina was interpreting what she saw, she automatically put her arm around mine.
I stuck out my hand to meet the woman’s and said, “We’re looking for Miss Brayboy.”
“I’m Doris Brayboy. You must be Mr. Stone.”
“Yes, call me Woody.”
She turned her mile-wide smile towards Gina, “Is this Mrs. Stone?”
Gina flushed a bit but held her ground, “I’m Gina Kowalski, Mr. Stone’s Executive Secretary.” Neither extended a greeting hand.
I said, “Miss Brayboy, is there a place we can talk for a little while?”
“Call me Doris. You’re in the swamps now.” Her eyes sparkled - and that smile! “Come on back to my office. Would you like some coffee?”
“No thanks. We just came from breakfast at the Overton.”
“The Overton used to be a whorehouse, you know.” Neither Gina nor I came up with a reply. “Oh, it’s a fine place now,” Doris said. “That was back when lumber was king around here.”
She stood aside and allowed us to enter her large, airy office first. Books, artwork and objects of unmistakable Indian origin filled the walls.
I pointed to a school kid’s finger painting experiment, “I like that colorful painting.”
She turned and seemed to stare at it in true appreciation for a second. “That’s actually a signed print of a Matisse called, ‘The Goldfish’. He painted it about 1910.”
“I like it,” I reaffirmed. “As I mentioned on the phone the other day, my clients, for their own reasons, are interested in the life of a Dr. Wesley DeCamp when he lived here a half century ago. Have you ever heard of Dr. DeCamp?”
She withdrew her smile. “I’ve spent my whole life studying the culture and history of the Lumbee people. I’m very aware of Dr. Wesley DeCamp; his parents are buried in the Oxendine Cemetery.”
I threw a quick glance at Gina, but she was unfazed. “We’re investigating the connection between Dr. DeCamp and the death of an Indian sometime around the turn of the century. The doctor had moved his family from New York City to Lumberton, in about 1899.”
“Are you talking about the hanging of a Lumbee boy in 1907? They never found his body, you know.”
“We know very little about it, but that sounds like it might be the incident.”
“Y’all come on over and sit down.” Gina and I took the two side chairs, strange mixtures of leather upholstery and woven cane. Miss Brayboy sat behind her desk and continued, “I remember reading a newspaper article from the Robesonian about all that. If I recollect, the Lumbee boy had recently graduated the Croatan Normal School; that’s what Pembroke State College was called in 1907. Apparently, one night, in a roadhouse, some white boys dropped hints a Lumbee had been hanged because they caught him with a white girl.”
“What was the boy’s name?” I was taking out my notebook.
“Oh, gosh. It’s been years since I read that article. We can, undoubtedly, locate it again. Seems like his name was Rayford. Yes, I’m pretty sure because I have a brother named Rayford.”
“How was Dr. DeCamp involved?”
“I’m getting to that.” Her right hand moved a crystal bowl full of paperclips in a small circle on her desktop, but she kept her pretty hazel eyes leveled on mine. “That roadhouse revelation was a spark in the tinderbox. And it did spread like wildfire because it coincided with the disappearance of a young Lumbee man from the area.”
She pushed the glass bowl to the side and clasped both hands on her desk like she needed to get hold of herself, like the telling was painful. “The boy had been raised by his grandmother west of the Raft Swamp. She sent word to the feed store where the boy worked, asked if they’d seen him. He’d taken her buggy on a Saturday and hadn’t returned in several days - something the boy would never do.”
“The details get pretty murky after that. The horse brought the buggy home, but they never found the boy’s body. When I was working on my thesis at the WC in Greensboro, I interviewed a Lumbee man named Carson Revels. Mr. Revels had been a young boy when all that business happened. He said the law got involved. But they couldn’t even locate the ones who’d bragged about the hanging, much less the dead boy’s body.”
Miss Brayboy pushed herself up with her hands and walked over to the window and stood with her back to Gina and me. “Mr. Revels told me that the sheriff questioned Dr. DeCamp based on the rumor that his daughter had been seen with the Lumbee boy. The doctor denied such a preposterous thing and just about run the sheriff off his property. Some folks on both sides of the swamp thought Doc DeCamp, who was a war hero, had taken care of that preposterous thing his own self. A Lumbee boy with a promising future was gone, no witnesses, no body to be found. The boy’s grandmother moved north to live with her daughter not long after that. The two sides of the swamp retreated to their own misery and speculation.”
“You mean they didn’t believe the boy had been killed?” I was starting to get a headache.
“Oh, they believed it all right.” She turned from the window and folded her arms under her large breasts. “Everybody believed it, but the whites didn’t much care. The Lumbees, who weren’t completely cowed by their circumstances in life, harbored paralyzing distrust. That, right there, is the story of Robeson County for the last hundred years, and more.”
She returned to gazing out the window. When she faced us again, her face and demeanor were softer. She pulled a third straight back chair closer and sat down near Gina and me. Her big gray-green eyes were moist. “I have an idea. Carson Revels still lives out off North Chicken Road, south of the Back Swamp. I’ll carry you over to talk to him if you like. I stop by there every once in a while, but I haven’t been for some time. Would you like to explore some living history?”
“Doris, that would be way too much to ask of you.”
“This is the Library. Information is our business. Seriously, it’s been too long since I’ve stopped by to visit Carson.”
“I appreciate it. Is there anything I can take to Mr. Revels to break the ice?”
Instantly, her thousand-watt smile cured all evil in the world. “Funny you ask that. Mr. Revels has been known to take a sip once in a while.”
That made me smile and look down at my canvas bag. I wondered if this woman included x-ray vision on her list of obvious and abundant talents. What I said was, “I’m liking him already.”
Doris looked at Gina, “There is one thing to consider. Don’t take offense, Miss Gina, but Carson certainly doesn’t get many visitors. My bringing even one stranger might be stretching the limits of his hospitality.”
Gina’s eyes went dark blue, and I stepped in, “That’s fine. Gina, if Doris will show you how, I wanted you to research the local newspaper archives for the period we’re talking about.”
“Doris doesn’t have to show me how, just where,” Gina said in her New York business monotone. If she’d had gum in her mouth, she’d have been popping it. Doris smiled without showing teeth and nodded.
When Doris led Gina back through the Library, I found the front steps to have a smoke and wait. ‘What is it with those two? Like oil and water’.
Doris walked up behind me and said, “That’s me, first row in the corner.” I almost dropped my bagful of religious icon and bribery liquor.
We walked through the pines to her blue and white 1955 Chevy two-door sedan. Without the yearly assault of the northern winters, the thing looked new. As we were getting in her car, she told me she’d known of Carson Revels her whole life.
“But, I had never spoken to him until I enrolled in the Master’s Program at the University of North Carolina Women’s College in Greensboro. Carson turned out to be the keeper of the Well of Lumbee Knowledge. But he didn’t invite many to drink from it, not even a poor Lum girl trying to better herself. That is, until the day I showed up at his place with a quart of moonshine.”
She saw my double-take, “That’s what I said, moonshine. What’s a girl gonna do with you stubborn men?” And she flashed me the biggest smile yet and laughed. I told her I had something even better and patted my canvas bag of tricks laying on the seat between us.
She skirted the campus and turned left on the main drag. I instinctively waited at the right engine RPM for her to shift. But the Chevy’s automatic transmission just steadily and quietly changed its mind as our speed increased. I stole a glance to see if Doris was using her x-ray abilities to read my foolish thoughts.
CHAPTER TWENTY
We drove past the whorehouse and through downtown Pembroke, a blip on the map. Five miles south on the straight, flat road that led to Lumberton, twelve miles away, Doris turned right on North Chicken Road. We rode through a patchwork of endless agricultural fields and woods so thick they looked solid. The fields of wheat, tobacco and corn shot away from the highway for a mile and slammed into the black wall of the swamp on the horizon.
I hadn’t seen expanses so flat and wide since I’d left West Tennessee in 1953. It gave me a sense of vertigo just like I used to get walking down Manhattan streets and looking up. I spotted a field full of green cabbages and made a comment to Doris about the variety of crops.
She nodded, “Most of the soil in Robeson County is loam or sandy loam, and we get fifty inches of rain a year on top of the river and swamp systems. You could almost drop a seed and grow a crop by accident.”
The two lane asphalt road ran between deep, wide ditches. Each dirt side road and individual sandy driveway required a small bridge to connect. A four-foot culvert pipe ran through each bridge.
“Why’s all the vegetation dead in those ditches,” I asked?
“Those are flood abatement ditches; they have to be maintained and kept clear. The County sprays them with a mixture of pesticide and herbicide as the most economical way of killing the skeeters and the muscadine vines at the same time. Problem is, the use of synthetic organochlorides has decimated the Peregrine falcon population. It’s not doing any favors for the local folks who eat the rabbits and turtles out of those ditches, either.”
I learned early on not to ask a question if you can’t handle the answer. So I just kept my mouth shut for a while.
Out in the open country with full sun, the air was a little drier and easier to breathe. Air moving through the open windows helped. On the moving air floated the same scent of honeysuckles I’d first noticed in Doris’s office. Was it her or the flower-laden vines growing by the fields? It didn’t matter as I stole a look at her, both hands on the wheel, chin slightly lifted. The dame was just as beautiful in profile.
The dense woods tried to crawl out on the highway as we neared a river. The cement bridge had no sides or guardrails. When I asked if that wasn’t dangerous, she said, “Yes, but the County got tired of replacing the bridge after every flood. The low side allows the water to wash right over the bridge - at least, in theory. We’ve lost a couple of people off that very bridge. And bridges like that exist all over Robeson, the biggest county in North Carolina.”
Doris slowed the car and turned to cross one of the small connector bridges. She nosed the Chevy along a pine needle dirt lane that snaked off and disappeared into the forest.
“Carson Revels lives by himself up here on the right. There are things Carson has told me and other things I know without knowing why I know. Regardless, if he takes a liking to you, he can tell you what you need to know; but he’ll decide what you need to know. I’m not being dramatic. You may not be getting out of this car on his property. Let me go up and talk to him first.”
We rode on without talking. The Jays squawked in the pines and the Cardinals called to each other with what had always sounded to me like, ‘Oh dear, Oh dear!’ when I was growing up in East Memphis. There was no sign of a driveway, but she turned into an opening between the pine trees. She brought the car to a stop in a sandy clearing behind a prewar pickup truck.
A humble tin roofed clapboard house sat to our left front. It was the same one I’d seen a thousand times up and down the Mississippi when I worked on a paddleboat as a teenager. Tin sheets, held up by barked cedar poles, covered a two-step front porch. A redbone hound lay in the pine needles and dirt on the shady side of the porch, but showed no interest in the automobile.
A thin old man with olive skin on high cheekbones, dark eyebrows and a full head of white hair rocked slowly on the porch. One spidery hand held a straight length of wood as he whittled with the other. Doris said, “You’ll have to see the walking sticks he makes from honey locust just using that old treebrand.”
“Using that old what?”
“Treebrand, you know, a jackknife.”
When the car stopped, the old man got to his feet and stood in faded overalls and long-sleeved work shirt. He folded his work knife and stared at us with coal black eyes. Doris approached the house and started talking, but I could barely hear the conversation. The hound dog lifted his head then flopped it back on his paws.
Doris spoke halfway up the path, “Hello, Mr. Revels. It’s Doris Brayboy”
“Thad you, Doris?”
“Yes, sir, it is. How are you doing?”
“I’m fine in the world today now I seed you, cuz. I hope m’clare.”
Doris reached the top of the steps and gave the old man a hug. “Mr. Revels, I brought along a friend who’d like to meet you.”
“Don’d need no new friends.”
“Carson, he’s come a long way to ask about Ol Doc DeCamp. Not sure, but I think the family sent him. He brought you a present!”
“Yeah? Wha he brung?”
Doris motioned for me to join them on the porch. “Mr. Revels, this is Mr. Stone.” When we shook hands, the grip of his thin fingers belied his years.
I said, “Call me Woody, Mr. Revels.”
He narrowed his dark wide-set eyes, “Woody…”
“Show Mr. Revels what you brought for him, Woody.” I unzipped the canvas and produced the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
His eyes widened, “Oooooo-wee, brown liquor. Say, tha’s all right.” He looked at Doris, “Cooter, step in the house and gets a couple them jelly jars off’n the table. Got some Co-cola in the Kelvinator if you wants one.”
As she went through the door, she looked back at me, smiled and shrugged as if to say, ‘We’re here now. He’s in charge’.
“Woody, y’all sit cheer on the pizer with me.” He sat in the rocking chair and I pulled up two mismatched straight-backs. Doris was back with two pint Mason jars and a bottle of Coca-Cola. I thought I’d take a chance. I broke the seal on the Jack, gave the cap a big spin with my thumb and caught it in my right hand when it flew up in the air. I�
��d seen somebody do that on the TV.
Revels sat frozen for a second, then started clapping and flashing a toothless grin from side to side, “You bes stop that. I’m gone bust a gut, I hope m’ die, if I ain’t.”
I poured an inch of Jack in his extended pint jar. He didn’t move a muscle, so I filled it halfway up. I poured myself a couple of ounces and took the straight back beside Doris.
Revels finished half his liquor in one gulp, “Sho is hottin up. You two jus out cruisin? How’s e’body on the swamp, Coot?”
“Everybody’s fine, Carson. They always ask about you. Carson, when Woody found out I was coming by to visit today, he wanted to meet you and ask some questions about Doctor Wesley DeCamp. Do you feel up to talking about those days?”
“Girl, you talkin like those days is different from this here day and time.” He threw back the rest of his pint, reached for the bottle and refilled his glass. He set the bottle on the porch boards on the opposite side of his chair. I figured I’d better sip my drink. “Woody, whatchu a-wantin to know?”
“I’d like to know about the time Dr. Decamp moved his family here from New York and the incident where a Lumbee boy was hanged, but they never found his body.” I had no idea if the simple-talking old man could understand space and time much less the flow of complicated issues. I found out he could, and very well.
“Boy, you jus go right at the story that gots folks on both sides the river feelin jubous yet.”
I shot a look at Doris and she said, “Jubous - strange, maybe eerie.”
Carson leaned his white curly mop of hair back against the tall rocking chair. He held his Mason jar protectively in his lap with both hands, “Lawdy, the story starts mos a’ fo hunnert years ago. Tha’s when swamp peoples was called Tuscarora. Took in a bunch a’ starvin English folk at a place called Ro’noke Island. Saved they lives and lost ever’thin fer they troubles. But, y’all prob’ly ain’t got that kinda time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The sweat trickled down my back, “Carson, I’m burning up. I’m gonna take off my coat. I’m a Private Investigator licensed by the State of New York, so don’t be nervous about my .45 automatic.”
The Case Of The Lumbee Millions (Woody Stone, Private Investigator, Series) Page 12