Read Online The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sally Jenkins
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Jackie,Albert did not. What explained the exception? Albert’s wife, Mason Rainey, may have influenced her husband in his views on slavery. She was a woman of obscure background, said to be an orphan whose family had been neighbors of the Knights in North Carolina, taken in by them after her own people died of “flux.” Mason supposedly went with the Knights when they migrated west and married Albert, ten years her elder, when she came of age in 1820. While there is no direct evidence of Mason’s beliefs, it’s worth noting that not one of her dozen offspring ever owned slaves, a striking departure from the rest of the Knight clan.
Martha Wheeler, the Knight family slave who as a child did chores in Jackie Knight’s yard and lit his pipe, recalled that Mason was compassionate, “quite a doctor,” who tended to the sick in “all the surrounding country.” Mason was also literate; she taught her children to read and write, and she and Albert donated land to establish the first school in the area. All of her children received some education.
The Knight family schism was reflective of larger rifts taking place all across Jones County, and Mississippi as a whole, during the secession crisis. The most common division was between rich and poor: it was a state of stark economic differences. On the eve of the Civil War, Jones County was an island of poverty in a sea of cotton- and slave-based wealth. Economically, the Piney Woods was as stagnant as its swamp water: it had the poorest soil and poorest people in the state.
Residents and outsiders alike referred to it as “de po’ folks’ lan.” A vast, dark, meandering cypress marsh ran through the region, known as the Dismal Swamp. The ground was sandy and the pine barrens were almost impossible to clear, which made it better suited for grazing than cultivating cotton. Planters sneeringly referred to it as “cow country” and joked that the land was “too poor to raise a fuss on.”
But one of the many ballads sung by the local poor whites reflected, if not their ear for poetry, then their sense of regional pride and independence:
I’m de po’ folks’ lan’ with my miles of sand,
and my cottonwoods moan and groan,
An’ I’m gonna stay free from hills to the sea and
my forests are all my own.
Locals also called the area “no man’s land,” because so many settlers picked up stakes and moved when the better-soiled Choctaw lands were opened for settlement in the 1830s. Jones County was just too hard to clear, with its swamps, thickets, and mighty pines, to lure many large planters or slaveholders.
In 1860, the entire output of cotton in Jones County was just 633 bales. There were only 407 slaves, and those were concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few, like Jackie Knight: just seventeen families owned half of them. The rare Jones County farmer who
did
have slaves tended to have just four or fewer. Most families owned none at all.
But if Jones County was poor, it had a primordial magnificence that the inhabitants cherished. The rolling and wavelike forests were full of ancient, colossal pines that shot sixty feet in the air, their trunks so broad it took six men to encircle one. Streams glinted under canopies of oaks, so clear that riders who crossed them could see perch playing around their stirrups. Luxuriant grasses grew three feet high, and pastures were studded with wildflowers, amid which ranged herds of red deer and flocks of turkey and partridge. It was a place of fearful solitude at night, when the tall armless pines looked “gaunt and spectral and fall sadly on the soul,” according to one traveler. Nothing moved other “than the flapping of an owl, and fantastic shadows, like trooping apparitions, chase each other into settled gloom.”
The country Newton grew up in was still frontier, so wild that wolves scratched on the doors of homesteads at night. The woods were dense and full of panthers and bears, and the farms were few, separated by
Martha Wheeler, the Knight family slave who as a child did chores in Jackie Knight’s yard and lit his pipe, recalled that Mason was compassionate, “quite a doctor,” who tended to the sick in “all the surrounding country.” Mason was also literate; she taught her children to read and write, and she and Albert donated land to establish the first school in the area. All of her children received some education.
The Knight family schism was reflective of larger rifts taking place all across Jones County, and Mississippi as a whole, during the secession crisis. The most common division was between rich and poor: it was a state of stark economic differences. On the eve of the Civil War, Jones County was an island of poverty in a sea of cotton- and slave-based wealth. Economically, the Piney Woods was as stagnant as its swamp water: it had the poorest soil and poorest people in the state.
Residents and outsiders alike referred to it as “de po’ folks’ lan.” A vast, dark, meandering cypress marsh ran through the region, known as the Dismal Swamp. The ground was sandy and the pine barrens were almost impossible to clear, which made it better suited for grazing than cultivating cotton. Planters sneeringly referred to it as “cow country” and joked that the land was “too poor to raise a fuss on.”
But one of the many ballads sung by the local poor whites reflected, if not their ear for poetry, then their sense of regional pride and independence:
I’m de po’ folks’ lan’ with my miles of sand,
and my cottonwoods moan and groan,
An’ I’m gonna stay free from hills to the sea and
my forests are all my own.
Locals also called the area “no man’s land,” because so many settlers picked up stakes and moved when the better-soiled Choctaw lands were opened for settlement in the 1830s. Jones County was just too hard to clear, with its swamps, thickets, and mighty pines, to lure many large planters or slaveholders.
In 1860, the entire output of cotton in Jones County was just 633 bales. There were only 407 slaves, and those were concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few, like Jackie Knight: just seventeen families owned half of them. The rare Jones County farmer who
did
have slaves tended to have just four or fewer. Most families owned none at all.
But if Jones County was poor, it had a primordial magnificence that the inhabitants cherished. The rolling and wavelike forests were full of ancient, colossal pines that shot sixty feet in the air, their trunks so broad it took six men to encircle one. Streams glinted under canopies of oaks, so clear that riders who crossed them could see perch playing around their stirrups. Luxuriant grasses grew three feet high, and pastures were studded with wildflowers, amid which ranged herds of red deer and flocks of turkey and partridge. It was a place of fearful solitude at night, when the tall armless pines looked “gaunt and spectral and fall sadly on the soul,” according to one traveler. Nothing moved other “than the flapping of an owl, and fantastic shadows, like trooping apparitions, chase each other into settled gloom.”
The country Newton grew up in was still frontier, so wild that wolves scratched on the doors of homesteads at night. The woods were dense and full of panthers and bears, and the farms were few, separated by
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