TERROR IN TENNESSEE
Looking for My Ancestor’s War Battles and Finding a Modern Riot
After exploring the site of my great-grandfather’s brutal battle in Franklin, Tennessee, we would soon learn about our nation’s first major racial disturbance after World War II, along with meeting a spirited defender of the Old South. By the way, George and I would also learn about the World’s Mule Capital and the filming location for Hannah Montana.
Our planned route south, out of Tennessee, already traced my great-grandfather’s Civil War marching orders. To set foot on another of Austin Patton’s battle sites, we crossed the Duck River, site of war skirmishes tand into the small city of Columbia. From my homework, I knew that Columbia was famous as the World’s Mule Capital and host of Mule Days. Besides being the filming location for Hannah Montana, Columbia headquartered the Sons of the Confederacy, and was the hometown of President James K. Polk, who led the country into the Mexican War to expand slavery’s reach. Columbia was also the site of the first major disturbance of the modern civil rights movement, the “race riot” of 1946.
George and I went to the visitor center to learn of any commemorative sites for both the battles of the Civil War and civil rights. We found the place unoccupied except for an older woman reading, or maybe sleeping, when George and I walked in. For a moment, I feared she had passed out, face down in an open book, and was about to check on her when her head popped up. Appraising the two tall men who’d disrupted her rest, she immediately became animated. Spry and wiry, apparently a volunteer manning the center for the afternoon, Deane Hendricks engaged us with fervor. When I timidly mentioned seeking Civil War sites and my great-grandfather’s possible battle here, Deane startled me by praising Klan founder and Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest, and handed me a pamphlet about him, “Arch-Angel of Confederacy.” Deane asked what role my great-grandfather served in the Confederate Army.
Oh no. There was nothing to do but reveal that Austin was a Yankee, fighting for the Ohio Infantry.
Deane looked at me evenly and absorbed the news quietly, but not for long. She suggested we sit down, so I took a place at a small table while George kept his distance on the far edge of an adjacent bench. Deane sat across from me, folding her hands, and launched into a free-ranging tutorial about Civil War history. She went into moving detail about postwar starvation across Tennessee, along with many other personal hardships borne by ordinary Southerners. And did I realize George Washington was really a rebel? Confederates were merely continuing his work against another faraway, tyrannical power…The North!
A torrent of corrective information followed at random, including how the “redneck” was a result of deprivation, too. Returning Confederate soldiers didn’t have detachable collars to cover their necks, so they got sunburnt when working the farm. “Blacks and Yankee soldiers would laugh at them, call them red necks.” By the way, Deane went on, “Your General Sherman was a war criminal, period. Even though black people saw him as a God, he hated them. He let his men rape not just white women but black women, too. So many black people drowned.” Deane glanced over to George. “Sherman neglected them, wouldn’t even feed them.”
Daylight was burning, and I realized I had to squeeze in a question about modern Columbia. We needed information about the 1946 racial disturbance, so we could get oriented to the location, and seek local sources of memory and commemoration. But Deane ignored my question as a white couple entered. She sprang up and began to gush over Mule Day and the other wonders of Columbia, dismissing George and me without warning.
We decided to visit the county library, right around the corner. The reading room was busy but hushed, so when I asked a reference librarian if there were some commemorative marker or historical display where I could find out more about the town’s 1946 racial disturbance, I felt self-conscious. I lowered my voice but it carried; heads turned. My northern accent must have been obvious. Chairs swiveled. Books and newspapers were set aside. A librarian, Adam Southern, though, responded immediately and offered details. Adam was actually working on an oral history capturing the 1946 riot’s surviving voices.
One of his colleagues stepped forward and gently chided him. “Working on it, Adam? When are you going to take it out of the drawer and finish it?” Two other staff members gathered around like a settling flock, engaged but quiet, watchful (George later said, “more wary than watchful”). Adam went on, undeterred by the attention. Like any good historian he stuck to the facts.
There was no commemoration, he told me, and nothing marked. His colleague nodded, stating that most people in town either knew little about the riot or wanted to forget about it. In 1946, though, the violence brought national media attention to Columbia, largely because it was among the first racial disturbances after World War II and its protagonist was an African-American Navy veteran who’d just served in the Pacific. The vet grew concerned when a white clerk in a radio shop became aggressive with his mother. The small incident exploded: the vet and clerk got into an altercation, the shop window was smashed, the clerk crashed through it, and the vet was charged with felony intent to kill the shopkeeper—who was quite alive. A white mob gathered at the county courthouse.
It got worse and worse. Black veterans and citizens also gathered, just a block downhill from the courthouse around an African-American commercial district, the Mink Slide. Some were armed, and when four police officers entered the Mink Slide, gunfire wounded all four. As white citizens encircled the district, state police arrived and went on a rampage. The officers rioted, shooting and stealing at random, conducting warrantless home searches to confiscate private weapons, and arresting over a hundred black citizens, all deprived of any legal recourse. Police killed two African-Americans held in custody. The overt violence sparked a six-month grand jury case over law enforcement’s unlawfulness.
Thurgood Marshall, then a lawyer with the NAACP, came to the prisoners’ defense. Eventually, white juries dropped all charges against the white officers. Only one of the hundred blacks was ever convicted.
In the aftermath of the legal case, more state police villainy involved Thurgood Marshall in an incident confounding to those of us who grew up learning of him only as the hero of Brown vs. the Board of Education and as our first black Supreme Court Justice. In the fall of 1946, when Marshall left Columbia after the last trial, state patrolmen trailed his car. The officers stopped him on fake driving violations, essentially chasing Marshall and his associates through the woods and eventually taking him—Thurgood Marshall!—into custody for driving while drunk. The charge was so obviously bogus that a country judge dismissed it.
To this scene, out of a Jim Crow nightmare, Adam, along with his colleague Elizabeth, added a final chilling detail I had not read in any summaries of the riots and the legal cases. With Marshall alone in their patrol car, the officers intended to isolate Marshall at a river sandbar. “This was the historical ‘legal’ lynching spot,” Adam added. Luckily, after the fake drunk charge was dropped, Marshall’s allies escorted the legal team back to the highway.
Clearly, the 1946 Columbia riots marked a made-for-Hollywood instance of state terror in the U.S.A. Its perfect casting included a war veteran demanding respect and a valiant lawyer on the verge of becoming an American icon. The story was one of ultimate vindication for human dignity.
We followed Adam’s directions a few blocks west to scout our own impressions of the Mink Slide today. George and I weren’t surprised that Columbia did nothing to identify the site or remember it publicly. The watchful/wary reception my question inspired at the library still embarrassed me, making me feel every inch the intruding Yankee blundering, uninvited, through Dixie. Still, the short stretch between the library and Mink Slide was its own monument, a sad one erected not by hands but by hands off, decades of neglect. Blocks of soaped-over shops, weedy lots, abandoned gas stations and warehouses, shut-down businesses in an old brick storefronts led past a faded sign, “Dump’s Café,” and to the corner of West 8th and Main. Here was
the site of the 1946 riot, the once-segregated but thriving black business district. Now segregated from commerce and life itself, three impressive old two-story brick facades faced Main with sagging, rusting arcades and ply-boarded windows. A vacant lot faced an abandoned warehouse and an empty parking lot. Mink Slide looked like it had been abandoned for all the sixty-five years since the police rampaged there.
George and I strolled one block north, up a sloping, more promising block that connected the forlorn corner to the classic, light marble courthouse atop the hill. From this angle, downtown Columbia was a beauty, a collection of elegant brick commercial buildings ringing the courthouse’s tall, pillared white clock tower overlooking mostly abandoned businesses.
This pretty City on a Hill looked like a dead zone.
We tried out a theory: maybe the riot was so traumatic to Columbia it never recovered? It remained physically divided between white and black. East of the courthouse a shabby warehouse district occupied a holler-like bottomland. Across that holler and lining a hilltop opposite, a low-density mix of isolated smaller houses scattered on rural-like lanes, a few black folks walking here and there, a few places beautifully maintained and renovated, but most forlorn, and a few collapsing. The west side, on an opposing hill, was identical except it had white faces, more money for renovations, and an air of satisfied prosperity.
Had something altered, shifted, in the town’s orientation? Why was the county seat of a proudly historic region in the very middle of Middle Tennessee all so lifeless? George speculated it was truly that lawless riot of law enforcement, that travesty of justice in the 1940s, become an original sin that had cursed the town ever since.
Just down the road, we’d soon find an even more cursed Tennessee town, its sin so original that George didn’t want me to set foot in the place.
My Blood Claim on Southern Real Estate
Finding my great-grandfather’s battle ground in Franklin, Tennessee
Even if Franklin, Tennessee had been a toxic hellhole, I would’ve visited the town, site of one of the Civil War’s most sadistic and deadly battles. But just south of Nashville, Franklin was one of the richest communities in the entire country and fastidiously preserved, its village squares and quaint shops giving off an aroma of self-satisfied affluence.
I had to pay homage to my great-grandfather by walking in his footsteps. Years before, a historian at the National Soldier’s Home and Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio informed me that my great-grandfather had fought for the Ohio Infantry in Franklin. Austin Hill Patton was a teenage arrival from Ireland who fought for the Union. Since Austin enlisted so young, and since his son did not father my father until late in life, and since my father had me later in life, too, I ended up weirdly close in generational time to this Civil War ghost. I knew nothing more about him than what I learned in Dayton —that Austin entered what was then the Old Soldiers Home still in his forties, dying from a long list of physical ailments. The Dayton historian had told me it was no wonder he was in such terrible shape; my great-grandfather had fought in the “worst of the worst.”
Franklin, Tennessee. Three patchwork Civil War sites were stitched into the town’s development. Pizza joints, boutiques and golf courses covered the graves of generals and cannon fodder with equal disregard. George and I visited Carter House, a central point in the battle that once overwhelmed the entire town. I had a sentimental idea that I would stand in my unknown great-grandfather’s place, draw him closer and somehow dust off a century and a half of oblivion. I had a proprietary feel for this small farm, this set-aside of open land within the town, my own blood claim on Southern real estate. What I ended up learning was bloody, all right, and that I was tied to a much wider swathe of the South.
The battle of Franklin lasted only four or five hours on November 30, 1864. It was nearly suicidal and/or homicidal on both sides, pent-up vengeance seizing the forces for past humiliations and stand-offs. As the short November afternoon melted into darkness, the curtain was raised for “the last great drama of the war.” In a family’s cotton fields and private gardens, the armies unleashed lunatic violence and hatred. Many scholars describe the battle at Franklin as a psychodrama rather than a strategic maneuver. Some speculate it accomplished nothing and would have resulted in the same outcome—the next battle in Nashville—no matter what happened here at Franklin.
The excruciating Civil War ordeal of the Carter family was detailed with speed, passion, and poetry by our guide Robert Donald Cross, associate historian for the Battle of Franklin Trust. “Don’t call me Johnny Reb, I won’t call you Yank,” Rob said, then led us through the home and the family’s story with vivid detail, in the elevated diction of the era. We ended up in the basement, just as the family did as they waited out the siege, bullets flying ceaselessly above them. Scores of bullet holes still riddling the outbuildings and walls gave silent testimony to what must have been relentless pandemonium overhead.
Rob stressed the battle’s terrible losses. Over two thousand men were killed within hours, more killed in less time than on any other day in the entire war. Corpses were left standing, propped by other corpses. The Carters’ fields of wheat, corn and cotton, then worked by their twenty-eight slaves, were now cemetery-like green turf. Franklin was built over countless unmarked graves.
As we wandered the site, George said, “Rob’s so intense, but keeping a lid on himself, like a pressure cooker. History is like a creation he wants us to understand. He’s expressing his art, trying to convey the best interpretation, to take us there.” George stared at a greensward that sloped toward a highway. “I just wonder, how is all this important to me?” Walking on, he wistfully answered his own question: “I guess, because I’m an American. It’s part of our kinship, and so, it must be part of me.”
We came to a slave cabin, cater-corner from the Carter House. Unlike a brick, gabled pump house nearby, the slave residence was a rough-hewn, one-room wooden shack with a dirty mattress thrown on the floor. “Where were the slaves,” George asked, “while the Carter family gathered in the basement?”
Back at the museum, Rob was working historical magic. With no more than my great-grandfather’s name and town, Springfield, Ohio, he had uncovered in-depth information on Austin Hill Patton’s Civil War engagements throughout the South. The vague scraps I’d learned in Dayton became a feast of specific data. Rob had memorized footnote citations and sub-numbers and knew arcane guideways to identify ordinary soldiers. Austin Hill Patton, 19, enlisted on January 27,1864, and mustered into Company I, 101st Ohio, 1st Brigade, 1st Division, 4th Army Corps. At the Franklin battle, he was probably sent to reinforce the center of main area near Carter house. My sentimental goal more than attained, I got chills thinking of that Irish kid enduring that carnage. My own great-grandfather shot or dodged some of those bullets still lodged in the walls.
But Rob told me so much more. It turned out that Austin took part in the Atlanta campaign. He served in several battles heading south into Atlanta—Rocky Face, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Jonesboro; battle grounds I had already seen with no idea of Austin’s presence in them. After that, presumably while Sherman went on scorching earth through Georgia, Austin was assigned to the Western campaigns, taking him north again, into the heart of Middle Tennessee: Columbia, Spring Hill, Franklin, and finally Nashville.
Weird how blood bonds animate the imagination’s capacity for connection.
Our conversation with Rob turned to his thoughts on certain Southern attitudes. A lifelong Tennessean, Rob felt “Southern xenophobia regarding the Civil War was sickening and idiotic.” He rebelled against the very term “Union” (favoring “Federal”) and the assumption that any Northerner is “just a Yankee.” He studied military history and found his passion for recovering soldiers’ stories after his father told him of his own great-great grandfather’s history in the Franklin battle.
See what I mean about blood bonds?
After closing time, Rob’s conversation got more personal. Inspired to join the service at age twenty-one, after the 9/11/01 attacks, he hoped “to fight on behalf of a “specific victim, to carry their picture with me into battle.” So Rob was devastated, during training, to be dismissed for heart murmur. He struggled, agonized by a sidelined feeling. At rock-bottom emotionally, he sought his pastor’s counsel. “My pastor told me flat out that I was an idiot. It was obvious, given my education in history: my calling was to educate others on war.”
That’s exactly what Rob devoted his career to, right at home in Franklin. Along with many public presentations and outreach for the Battle of Franklin Trust, Rob also counseled Vietnam veterans, drawing out their funniest stories, then eliciting the worst. “They hunger for their stories to be told truthfully.” Because the vets tell themselves tales of self-delusion in order to cope with atrocity, Rob explained, they struggle to be “truthful even to themselves.”
Another associate joined us and our talk turned to current social topics.. The two young historians thought that our times were “the worst, the most divisive, ever since the Civil War.” As at so many other cultural-historical stopovers on this journey, the staff at Carter House seemed astute and super-informed. The whole place gave the vibe of reverence for the past’s horrible burden and respect for those who sought to learn more, commemoration at its best. This was honoring the past and our ancestors with digging for depth. This was accepting the outcome of the search, no matter how savage or contradictory to some shallow patriotic or nostalgic narrative of our national story—that self-serving slant on history which George and I had come to call “The Pageant.” This wasn’t pageantry at Carter House; it was public truth-telling. Maybe this was the real patriotism.
Taking leave of Rob, full of gratitude, feeling I’d finally discovered my great-grandfather, I also felt the sting of history’s slap here in Middle Tennessee. Starting with my great-grandfather’s role as a youthful infantryman here, and after Rob’s intense interpretation, I’d felt blindsided by raw injustice and wanton violence, old blood gushing under my feet. I felt revulsion at what ought to have been unnecessary struggles for basic equality. The past was a wretched place. Would it always be?
Pleasure Ground on a Killing Field
Our Velveeta War Summit in Chattanooga, Tennessee
After our dead-end search for traces of George’s great-grandmother in South Carolina, we set off across the Appalachians in search of my great-grandfather’s Civil War battle site in Franklin, Tennessee. We took a few days to get there, first detouring into Chickamauga National Military Park. The Civil War battlefield had accidently saved a chunk of natural beauty in Chattanooga’s staggeringly ugly suburbs, a greensward built on war corpses. We learned that Civil War veterans had come together here in 1889, giving birth to the very idea of preserving the major battlefields: There will be no place here for…the show of wealth; no place for lovers to bide tryst; no place for pleasure-seekers or loungers.
In fact many visitors used the battlefield for lounging and pleasure seeking —bikers, joggers, and picnickers. I don’t know about trysting, but who knew what was shaking in those blushing thickets?
The battlefield parkland was stately, faithful to its “hallowed ground” sentiment and full of white marble monuments to military units from many states. Weirdly, combat started by accident and ended with a random, surprising breech of Union lines, the Confederates’ last victory on the South’s road to defeat. Often drunk, commanders on both sides could not communicate strategies, leaving troops in uproarious confusion. The Civil War’s second-bloodiest battle after Gettysburg ended with Chickamauga Creek running red.
Sunny and absorbing as this pleasure ground/killing field excursion was, our Chickamauga stopover also felt existential and stomach-churning, revelatory of things we didn’t really want revealed. George wondered about the “utility” of visiting battlefields at all, and I felt a chill, realizing he had named my own doubts about these touristic outings. Utility. The word mocked our very presence here, the very possibility of authenticity in travel and travel writing.
We soldiered on, even so, through the park’s heaps of historical fact. In the museum, we learned of the Union’s overall acceptance of Southern slavery. The North’s real fight and passion was over its extension into the Western territories, not the inhuman institution itself. Even Lincoln’s emancipation move may have been merely strategic. Not exactly our high school lessons of unmitigated Northern virtue.
Earlier, at a Waffle House breakfast, George and I had tried to define our ever-shifting Civil War attitudes over omelets gooey with processed cheese—a Velveeta War Summit. In the down-home chain diner’s cheery, multiracial atmosphere, we discussed our ways of relating to the Civil War, individually as Northern African-American or Average White Guy, or together as Westerners, or as Yankees, in the eyes of locals; and as ordinary modern Americans appalled by secession and slavery. Now at a popular pull-off-spot in the battlefield park, George and I roved different paths. He got itchy as the lone black guy while exploring a watchtower, feeling singled out or unwelcome, sensing the uneasiness of other visitors with his presence. When we rendezvoused at the car, I felt his estrangement. He wondered aloud if he was just being peevish, the unappeasable Race Man.
It stabbed me, how George had to suffer slights, then wonder if he really did. The battlefield was definitely White-landia, not only in the complexions of the visitors, but in the marginal mention of black roles and black stakes in this great battle. Here, of all places, the contest over who really possesses this history, who really belongs, went on and on. “The uneasiness is on both our parts,” George said. “Like neither me nor those white folks can know what the other is thinking. It’s like an awkward dance. The little courtesies just don’t flow. It seems to happen more down South, especially in places where ‘history’ happened. I felt it at Fort Sumter. I felt it in Charleston. Like I’m not supposed to breathe the rarified atmosphere.”
“Maybe we should stick to the Waffle House,” I tried to joke, thinking of the way adoring white waitresses fussed over him. The way a trio of girls at a fast food joint had gasped in joy, mistaking George for President Obama. Then he got to Chickamauga, and damn! That white stare that asks, what the fuck are you doing here?
At our last battlefield stop, a hilly overlook, vintage muscle cars lined the lane. Each one featured pairs of young women with fluorescent hair. We were told it was a photo shoot for a Chattanooga salon, Zombie Candi. The stylists posed, all
laughter and playful hauteur, while alone on the hood of one of the cars was the single black girl. George glanced at her, smiling sardonically. “I know just how she feels.”
* * * *
After Chickamauga’s battlefields, in old Rossville, we sought Cherokee chief John Ross’s house, a now-dilapidated wood structure surrounded by smelly ponds and helter-skelter commercial buildings.
I wondered what John Ross, the founder of Chattanooga, would think of the suburban town named in his honor. Rossville’s ugliness, notable even by metro Chattanooga standards, sprawled with no value but expediency. Here was a town which looked as if nothing was ever planned or improved over a couple hundred years. The site of one of America’s most tragic ethnic cleansings, Rossville today was nearly all-white, a centerless heap of strip businesses from the twentieth century’s cheap-gas car craze.
How beautiful the forests and hills must have been—like those shrouding the nearby Chickamauga battlefield—when Chief Ross lived here. Leaving aside Ross’s conflicting reputations as either the Moses of the Cherokee or an exploitative fraud, a blunt plaque underscored Andrew Jackson’s hostility to the Cherokee plight. After Ross failed in complicated legal challenges to stop the Indian Removal Act, in 1838 the Cherokee were ejected from Georgia and Tennessee on that deadly and torturous forced march to present-day Oklahoma , the Trail of Tears. Reduced to leading the removal himself, Ross lost his wife, who died en route.
A chain-link fence barred us from the historic home. It was a sad but apt commemoration: visitors fenced-out of the story, clinging instead to the metal bars and wondering which side encircled the real prison.
GHOSTS IN AN UNDEAD HISTORY
Starting the Search for Our Lost Ancestors in Greenville, South Carolina
As George and I sped toward Greenville, the horizon looked hazy, even haunted.
But in the South, it seemed too tempting to apply “haunted” to nearly everything in its ghostly, undead history. Sometimes the physical beauty of Southern landscapes tantalized me so that I couldn’t resist what waited to ambush us from those thickets and rocky outcrops.
Without knowing it yet, I was already traveling in the path of my great-grandfather’s ghost, northward to where he’d fought in Tennessee. As a teenage Irish immigrant, he’d joined Ohio Infantry in the horrific Civil War battles of Franklin and Nashville. I imagined that bloody terrain, beyond the horizon, daring me to follow his footsteps.
But first, we had another errand here in South Carolina, tracing the steps of another ancestor lost to recorded history, George’s great-grandmother. We couldn’t prepare ourselves for what was next, what we’d find and what had vanished.
* * * *
The Greenville Cultural Exchange Center was a homey museum of the city’s African-American history, where founder and curator Ruth Ann Butler devoted her afternoon to George’s search for his great-grandmother. Though George had followed every lead we obtained at the South Carolina State Archives in Columbia, the results were pathways to dead ends. He still had only those rumors of her pioneering preaching. We did not have so much as a name, only George’s sister’s belief that their great-grandmother’s name started with an “L.” We had L.’s husband’s name, and her daughter’s—George’s grandmother’s—record of birth in Greenville, dated 1905. We knew that L. died young, because within a few years, her daughter was an orphan.
I felt as if we were on the edge of some crucial discovery. Ruth Ann continued with her roll call of Carolinian names if she were resurrecting a lost soul each time she found someone. “I have never not found a person,” she assured George.
As Ruth Ann and George continued checking, exhausting computerized lists, I became distracted but enthralled. The Cultural Exchange Center seemed exactly the right place to be, occupying a vintage house on a tranquil tree-lined street at the edge of Sterling, Greenville’s historically African-American neighborhood. Ruth Ann Butler had created the museum in 1987, inspired to preserve the city’s black history.
When George took a moment to enter notes on his tablet, he mentioned our book project to Ruth Ann and left me a moment to chat with her. It was a distinct possibility that George’s great-grandmother had attended an early, vanished version of the neighborhood’s first black high school. A later, larger incarnation of Sterling High School was legendary; Rev. Jesse Jackson was an alumnus. Ruth Ann, a one-time history teacher who’d written a history of the school, had herself attended Sterling High alongside Rev. Jackson. Ruth Ann told me that when school integration was on the horizon, Sterling High burned in 1967. Officially the cause was faulty wiring, but many considered it to have been racially motivated arson. At this point, Georgepulled me aside. “I think we’ve got all the information we’re going to get here,” he said.
Over that evening’s dinner at a Mexican joint, George got on my case about why I hadn’t jumped in sooner to interview Ruth Ann Butler about her own identity as a Southerner. “I gave you an opening, and you ignored it. You need to talk to more African Americans,” he said, as if I didn’t talk to one big skinny African American every day of this journey, the one across from me, climbing again atop his high race horse. He had a point, though; most of our conversations in Georgia and South Carolina had been with whites. But his reprimand sideswiped me because I had deliberately kept out of the discussion at the Cultural Exchange, thinking our mission there was to focus on the search for his great-grandmother and not my inquisitions of Southerners.
George scoffed. “You have to reach out more. You can’t dismiss the importance of black people.”
“Have a heart,” I told him, steaming behind my glass of Dos Equis. His stern, Mr. African-American-Know-It-All demeanor heightened my insecurities about our whole Southern identity project. I felt like the Clueless White Westerner again, tongue-tied, slow-witted and feckless. Whether planned or random, our encounters with Southern folks were unpredictable. Later I reflected that we were just irritable, waking to an uncomfortable truth. Though Ruth Ann Butler had never not found anyone, maybe George’s great-grandmother would be her first hopelessly lost soul. The center’s database only chased us into more false leads and dead ends. And it made me wonder what had compelled us to chase her ghost on our journey in the first place. What were we really looking for? Why had I become so invested in searching for a young woman whose footprints had long vanished? The Lady Reverend Starts-with-“L” was completely unconnected to me, and a stranger to her grand-grandson George as well.
What was I really doing down here in Dixie, anyway? Who the hell did I think I was, interpreting the entire freaking Southern U.S.A. in tinker-toy rental cars and budget motels? Ours, the Quality Inn, was hosting Gun, Knife & Militaria Show attendees from all over the region. That night, somebody punched through a wall a few doors down. In the morning, the manager repaired a kicked-in door next to ours. In the disrupted breakfast room, the trays of powdered eggs and instant grits were empty, every scrap, as if invading Gun and Knife Militarians had devoured all of Greenville at dawn.
* * * *
Next morning, in the Carolina Room of the Greenville County Public Library, no matter how much we might be shooting guns and knives in the dark, our search continued. When George asked about local orphanages, the librarian produced zip-locked packets of articles and clippings, a treasure trove of news about Upstate South Carolina orphan care from late 1800s through the 1950s. The daunting pile was instantly simplified when we realized that —of course —all orphanages had been segregated. Possibilities narrowed to the Colored Orphanage in Pickens, twenty miles northwest of Greenville. Only one tiny clipping, lonely in its zip-lock, referenced the Colored Orphanage in passing. Leafing through the white files for any accidental scrap of further reference to the black ones, I found a typical quote from one white orphans’ home, which stressed in cheerful prose the children’s great fortune to be housed with such caring folk: “Children from any section of our country are welcome provided they are fatherless, of tender years, and in need of aid.”
And provided they were white.
Encouraged even by the microscopic clipping about the Colored Orphanage, we left Greenville through a tangle of exurban sprawl to Pickens. I was psyched by the first humps of the Appalachian foothills, cloaked in color. Maple leaves sighed down, orange and scarlet.
Pickens was a small, quiet county seat, dating back to the 1820s, with handsome, historic brick storefronts lining its main street. Housed in the former jail, the county museum had an obliging curator who verified that a colored orphanage once existed here. But he did not have any specific knowledge of, or location for, the long-vanished institution.
So that’s how it was going to be. George could contact further leads from home in Colorado, but our face-to-face prospects here had gone cold. Aiming for our next destinations and appointments over the Blue Ridge into Tennessee, we took a detour up to Mount Sassafras, the very top of South Carolina.
On our Sassafras perch we peered southeast, so high and so distant from Greenville’s sprawl we saw no signs of human settlement. Maybe this was the way the Cherokee saw it, an endless forest, the far blue mountains merging into a flawless sky.
“Another absence instead of a presence,” George proclaimed, cryptic.
But I got it. Maybe. Black Americans’ search for their past was a reach into an absence–lost records, vanished orphanages and burned schools. The cruel paradox made me admire Ruth Ann Butler’s efforts even more, her forthright energy and joy a kind of poetry connecting the unconnected, calling home the names of the nameless.
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