Becoming Americans (75 page)

      Junior wasn't so fast to confess his sins as he once had been. He had lived in near-suffocation for too long under the close eyes of his in-laws and the church to submit himself to that procedure again. He noticed that the people who were first to expose their own sins were the older people, and they were quickest in pointing-out the flaws in his own generation. But Junior agreed with the old folks that the children would grow up to be different and be better than all of them.

      As important as the uprooting of sin was, more heat was raised by the incursion of Particular Baptists into the county. The Philadelphia Association had sent two preachers of that persuasion, Vanhorn and Miller, to spread the word in Edgecombe. Some local folks had become converted to that belief, and these preachers had asked permission to speak in the churches. There was outrage the first time that proposal was mentioned to Reverend Parker and his congregation. A firm "no" was the answer agreed upon by vote, after very little discussion.

      As the competition for souls in Edgecombe County intensified, another wedge was driven into the community with the arrival of Stephen Williams, Senior.

      With the death of James Williams, his son John had been granted future rights to his Uncle Stephen's two hundred acres in Deep Creek, as set out in his Grandfather Joseph's will. John was eager for immediate cash and, in an agreement that had disappointed his brothers, John and his uncle combined their legal rights and sold the land. Stephen brought his twenty pounds of Virginia money to Edgecombe County, hoping to buy land on the Sapony, near his son.

      The old couple arrived to stay with Junior and his family while Stephen looked for land. Within days, it was obvious that there were problems. Junior's daughter, Mary, was afraid of her new grandmother and begged to stay with Grandma Manning. Eliza, the baby, seemed frightened too, and screamed whenever held by Nancy, who'd become an awkward crone. Nancy Williams stared at the girls, sometimes, and thought of her own girls, lost so long ago. Her tears only frightened the children more. How precious they were to her, she told Junior, but there was little that he could do. There was immediate hostility, with Junior caught in the middle.

      Mathias and Elizabeth Manning thought of the Williams grandchildren as their own. The moral teaching of the children had been left in their hands, so far, and the presence of Particular Baptists in the household of their vulnerable offspring was disturbing.

      Few of the old friends of the elder Stephen Williams came to call. Most land was unavailable for them to purchase, but Junior finally convinced his friend, John Hatcher, to part with a portion of land he had downstream.

      The old man was happy. Even though he'd paid twenty pounds for only one hundred and sixty acres, Stephen was satisfied. There was already a small cabin, the land was on both sides of the creek, and a good portion of it was low, swampy, pocosin. Most of the rest of it was pine trees. Stephen felt comfortable on such land. He'd always been able to eat and make a living trapping and trading. At his age, he had no taste for felling and planting. God's bounty was always available for the taking.

      Sometimes, still, Junior poled his corn down to the river and to Duncan Lamon's mill. The creek passed by his father's cabin, and going that way was an opportunity to visit. Often, there were several horses tied-up at the cabin and Junior poled on by. His father's visitors were Particulars and Junior wanted to avoid their evangelical ways. It was difficult enough to listen to the sermonizing of his mother and father alone.

      Usually, he loaded the cart and hitched his horse to it, knowing full well that he'd leave the cart at Lamon's and let the horse carry him home, asleep, giving him an excuse to return for the cart, and another trip to the Tavern.

      Lamon's was a busy place. There was need for other mills and other ferries, people said, but by the end of 1758 no one had built one, and it was unlikely that another mill or ferry would be as exciting as Duncan's. At his mill, there were be loud arguments about religion; inside the tavern, talk was more often about politics.

      The county was in near-rebellion. It had been divided again, the northern part being renamed Halifax County and taking with it the borough and market center of Halifax Town. That left no seat of government for Edgecombe; its courts still met at Halifax. Plans called for a court seating in Redmon's Old Field, near Howell's landing, but there was no courthouse, no jail. What little order there had been seemed to be falling apart, and Junior was glad his friend, Robert Tucker was now a constable, affording some protection to friends, if needed.

      The French were on the run, travelers reported in the winter of 1758. All of New France would soon be taken and nearly the whole of America become English. The Indians were yet to be convinced of that, but they would be!

      "North Carolina troops should take care of its own and slaughter all the Indians! They proved their worth in battles up north."

      "Governor Dobbs should bring back Major Waddell and set him on the Cherokees and Catawabas."

      "Let the Germans and the Scots who live out there take care of their own Indians," Pridgen said.

      The old man's white beard was stained tobacco-brown from his mouth down below his chin. He'd fallen from religion after his wife and children died, and he sometimes tried to pick fights. His neighbors generally humored him and tried to ignore his contentious attitude.

      "I'm not so worried about the Indians as I am about taxes," Hugh Stancil said. "After paying for this damn war, I can't buy powder for my own gun, much less one that might be run off with by a Frenchman or an Indian!"

      The drinkers grunted in agreement, but wished someone had said it other than the cheapest man they knew.

      A well-dressed gentleman at a table stood up and raised his glass.

      "Well said, Sir. Well said. I am William Williams, and as your representative in the Assembly I have often tried to state the matter in such understandable terms. I toast your wisdom."

      Cheers went up for the gentleman, and his self-introduction opened the floor for anyone's complaints.

      "It's not just the King and Granville," Stancil said above the crowd. "It's Moir and his English Church. Taking the side of Corbin against the people!"

      Another cheer went up for Stancil. Moir, the churchman, was too involved with politics and money. And, he was on the wrong side.

      Pridgen didn't want to hear religious arguments, calling both sides "fools." Folks said his mind stayed in fantasy.

      "I heard a man come through here say that Doctor Franklin's got a plan to bring all the colonies together, to act as one."

      "It would take Doctor Franklin and a host of angels to get North Carolina to join such a union," the assemblyman said.

      Every man laughed, and they all gave William Williams three cheers.

      "You any kin to our Junior Williams, here?" somebody called out.

      "Indeed I am," the gentleman replied. "We are both Englishmen."

      Junior, red-faced, cheered with the others, and the man went on.

      "I want you to know that we in the Assembly understand and share your grievances and are working to express our pain and oppression to His Majesty. The King and Earl Granville will eventually see that we suffer unduly. The King does not oppress his subjects."

      Junior stumbled from the tavern to find his horse. The sound of argument continued in the tavern, as it always did.

      Torches lit the small group of men who were clustered at the mill, breathing steam as they fought about God. Junior had no wish to join into a discussion there. Fights among the Baptists had become as frequent as those mounted against Corbin. Most of the war in Edgecombe was not directed towards the French or the Indians. Reverend Parker had nailed shut the door to the church he'd built, on his own land, when the congregation had turned Particular. Junior's father had been treated like a leper when he arrived; now he was a patriarch among his increasing fellow-believers. Manning kept his eye on Junior as a potential traitor.

      Junior walked his horse onto the flatboat, and Duncan's equally thicknecked son pulled him across the river. There was no moon, and the sky had finally cleared of clouds after two dreary weeks of rain. The sky was always brightest in winter, it seemed to Junior, and he wondered if that were God making up for the cold.

      He rode past Pridgen's dark, cold house and spat across his left shoulder, thankful that he had a fire and a family waiting for him on the Sapony. He started to count the years since Mary had died but had to recount, remembering that it was January 1759, and not 1758. The calendar had been changed seven years earlier and he was still confused by the year beginning in January, not March. How they could change the calendar he didn't know.

      He pulled his horse up quickly. There was a star in the sky like he'd never seen. It had a tail, and was as big as his fist! Was the world about to end! His heart began to pound and he whipped his horse into a gallop, praying that the animal wouldn't stumble in the hidden ruts.

      He took the path to his father's house, it being closest. He pounded on the door and went inside. Stephen turned and looked at the intruder.

      Stephen knelt by the side of his wife, who was lying in their bed, silent and stiff. For an hour he'd been praying, making promises to God, pleading for his wife to look him in the eyes.

      The ague had come on Nancy in the afternoon, and Stephen had nursed her as he always had, or she him, when the attacks came. He'd made the brew, he'd covered her, and he'd bathed her. It was as he bathed her an hour earlier that she died. He'd touched her breast as he bathed her, and she'd shuddered under his hand as she had so many years before when he'd touched her. It had shaken him more than anything had in his life—next to finding God, he supposed. He wanted to weep about his own life, not knowing why. He wondered if most of his life with her had been some sort of lie. He realized how much she'd loved him and he cried for not loving her back as much.

      Had that been God's wish, that she turn all her passion to loving Him. Maybe some of that passion would have been for him if he'd accepted it.

      September 15, 1767 was a momentous day for the Williams family: two sons were born. The two mothers were brought together in Junior's enlarged house, and relatives of the extended families, with dozens of their friends, gathered in the yard while two pigs roasted on open fires, and several jugs of brandy were passed around outside of open sight. It was a legitimate opportunity for celebration, and everyone grasped it. Another generation to carry on the proud name, they all said. The menfolk tried to avoid serious talk.

      Eight years after Halley's Comet, the political discussion at Lamon's Tavern raged fiercer, although religious disputes around the mill, and around the county and the province, had calmed. Only Reverend Parker, Mathias Manning, and a few others remained aloof when the Particular and the General Baptists agreed to unite as Regular Baptists in the Kehukee Association in 1765. This union freed people to join together to question and rebuke their common oppressors.

      Whether the comet had foretold the problems or brought them on, nobody knew, but there'd never been anything like the affair that brought on the 1759 Enfield Riots in North Carolina; maybe not in America. Some men from Lamon's had taken part in it. Junior wished he had. He wished he could have.

      The same week that his mother died, men from Edgecombe had stolen Corbin from his home near Edenton and taken him to Enfield. They made him post a heavy bond to ensure his appearance at the next Spring's Superior Court, and to refund all unjust fees that had been taken. Corbin agreed to remove any objectionable deputy surveyors and to appoint men of generally-known good character. The people were allowed to examine his entry books, and—by committee—to adjust conflicting claims to same properties. Junior had thought it was a grand day for the Granville District and the Province.

      There'd been a few weeks of hope for change until the Attorney General, the Assembly, and the Governor turned on them in turns. Governor Dobbs ended the affair with arrests and the jailing of several men in Enfield. The people united and freed their friends, but the promised reforms were forgotten.

      The French-Indian war had finally ended in America, but the increased burden of taxes and the stalemate between Governor Dobbs and the north-south stalled Assembly, brought people to the feeling of "a pox on both their houses." Governor Dobbs retired in 1764—news joyfully received by Edgecombe residents—and the new Governor, William Tryon arrived in the fall.

      On the heels of Tryon, in the spring of 1765, word came of yet another tax, one ordered by Parliament, not by the King. It was for stamps on documents and newspapers, not of much consequence to the county, but of great concern to the merchants in the port towns. The outcries from the towns of Boston and Philadelphia were echoed in Wilmington. It was taken up by the farmers in Edgecombe who, no longer distracted by religious squabbles, directed their anger at Granville towards the government in London: the Americans weren't being treated the same as their English brothers.

      Samuel Williams was a proud new father, and it was obvious to him how proud his own father was to have a first grandchild. He was seeing the beginning of a dynasty, and Sam was glad to have pleased him. Sam's own grandfather, the ancient Stephen, had thoughts of his own, Sam knew, and wasn't thinking of him and his child. Still, Sam knew, and was grateful, that much of what he had and would have was from Grandfather Stephen. The old "Dismalite's" knowledge of the forest and of cooking tar had earned him a comfortable old age, with little effort.