The Invisible Line (28 page)

The poker players looked at the cards they had been dealt. They went around the table in a slow circuit, betting or folding, discarding and drawing, raising the bet, and finally calling. In a game where, according to one nineteenth-century cardsman, “it is a great object to mystify your adversaries,” the moment when the men revealed their hands was a reminder that nothing was ever as it seemed. The fellow talking chaff might have little more than a high card, while the quiet man held nothing but spades.
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To all appearances, everyday life in Johnson County, Kentucky, was no different from what it had been like a generation earlier. But something had shifted. The war had introduced many of Johnson County's veterans to the world outside, and it had also brought outsiders in. Northern speculators and investors began contemplating the ancient hardwood forests and seemingly inexhaustible deposits of coal in the Kentucky mountains. In 1864 a local businessman took a steamboat to Pittsburgh to tell investors in the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company about Johnson County springs that bubbled with petroleum. With interest rising in the potential uses of oil as medicine and fuel, speculators and wildcatters from the Pennsylvania oil fields started showing up in Paintsville, forming five stock companies in six months. Veterans tramping through the county on their way home from the war were amazed at the sight of oil derricks along Paint Creek. The way mountaineers thought about themselves, their land, and their place in the world was changing.
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With each poker hand, the responsibility of shuffling and dealing would rotate from player to player. It was a practice that began on Mississippi steamboats as a way to eliminate the dealer's advantage, to make it harder to mark cards and deal from the bottom of the deck. There was little such danger in the Jordan Gap, but the players followed the ritual. The dealer held a marker—a button or silver dollar or buckhorn knife, known as the “buck”—that denoted his position of authority. As soon as one hand was over, the buck would be passed to the next hand's dealer.
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When it was time to pass the buck to Jordan Spencer—when it was his turn to deal—Dr. Strong looked straight at him and said, “Buck, nigger!”
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John Preston was jolted. He had heard Tom Baldwin say that Spencer had once been a slave and had bought his freedom, but Preston had never heard anyone speak so bluntly to Spencer's face. Was Strong cracking a joke—say, punning on the word
buck
, a common slur for a black man? Or in a moment where whiskey was being drunk and money lost, did something more serious slip out of the doctor's mouth?
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Johnson County had been spared the wrenching transition from slavery to free labor because there were so few blacks to free. But more families had owned slaves in Kentucky than in any other border state. The state had remained in the Union, so it was not subject to the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after the South surrendered, there were more than 65,000 slaves in Kentucky, and the state legislature voted against ratifying the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which ultimately freed Kentucky's slaves and guaranteed them equality and voting rights. As people of color organized and declared themselves, as the Kentucky Colored People's Convention did in 1866, “part and parcel of the great American body politic,” Southern whites responded with violence but also with pointed assertions that blacks had no claim to equal rights because of an inferiority carried in the blood.
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Immediately after the war, Kentucky's legislature barred interracial marriage, limited the free movement of blacks, forbade their testimony against whites, punished blacks more harshly than whites for the same crimes, and segregated the schools by race. In 1867 the Kentucky Supreme Court declared that such measures were necessary to prevent circumstances that would be “deteriorating to the Caucasian blood.” All over the South the boundaries between black and white were shifting and hardening. Before the war slavery had established and supported white privilege. As long as law and violent custom preserved the boundary between master and chattel, privileged whites had had little real need to insist on racial purity; allowing ambiguous people to become white only strengthened the prevailing order. In slavery's absence, however, preserving white privilege seemed to require new, less flexible rules about race and constant, aggressive action to enforce them.
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Although Johnson County whites had no reason to organize lynch mobs, gangs of self-described “moderators” and “regulators” were beating, murdering, and otherwise terrorizing blacks across rural Kentucky. In nearby Tennessee the legislature took the logic of racial purity one step further, defining
Negro
to include all people “having any blood of the African race in their veins.” In Chattanooga, Richmond, and elsewhere, judges and juries were considering a new set of cases on whether the racially ambiguous clans known as Melungeons were black or white, and courts were delineating drop by drop the amount of blood that made a person white or black. Along Rockhouse Creek, census-takers redefined many of the Spencers' neighbors as mulattoes or Indians.
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Hiram Strong's words hovered over the poker table like a storm cloud. They challenged Spencer's status, and if they attained a wider currency, they could undermine his marriage and portend intrusive and damaging attention from the state. A hard man like Spencer could have responded with his fists, a broken bottle, or worse. He could have taken a buckhorn knife to the doctor's racial categories—and his throat. But a good poker player is unfazed by a bad hand, or even a string of them; he does not try to change his luck with desperate play. He works patiently and keeps a calm face even when he wins. Spencer let the cloud pass. If he did not take offense, the comment must have been a joke. He shuffled the cards and dealt out a new hand.
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LETCHER DAVIS DID NOT ARRIVE in Johnson County so much as stray there. He reeled through the hills, soaked with whiskey, angry and excitable like a flash flood. He had a runt's build, short and wiry, but he scared people. They were struck by his wildness—no easy feat in hills that were full of hot-tempered, hard-drinking men. At his cabin or off wandering, he was coiled for battle.
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Back home in Clay County, Letch Davis had spent much of the 1870s running a “blind tiger”—an illegal saloon—and making his pale face familiar in the criminal court. He collected tippling, assault, gambling, and weapons charges as if he were foraging for roots. At the end of the decade he killed a man in a fight and was charged with murder. Although the charges were eventually dismissed, he left Clay before his victim's family could exact revenge.
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If Johnson County had emerged from the war in relative peace, other mountain counties continued to bleed. The war had deprived sheriffs and judges of their monopoly on justice, and private killings spiraled among feuding families, business and political rivals, and criminal gangs. Bushwhackers continued to target their perceived enemies. Returning soldiers on each side were ambushed or assassinated or found themselves settling scores as they had on the battlefield. The decline of farming and the rush to clear-cut and mine the hills fueled the violence.
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From the 1860s into the next century, the hillsides cracked with gunplay, as everyday frontier violence crested into waves of revenge killings. There were more killings in Kentucky in 1878 than in all of New England. In Clay County, for instance, rival salt-making families and political opponents, the Whites and the Garrards, repeatedly turned to their shotguns and Winchesters, and by the 1890s they would be engaged in pitched battles that drew national attention. Just north of Clay, on the way to Johnson County, was “Bloody Breathitt,” where forces led by a former Union irregular named Captain Bill Strong fought a host of rival families, staged their own courts-martial and executions, waged a gun battle in a county courtroom in 1873, and occupied the courthouse in 1874. Twice in five years the governor had to send in troops to establish order, but the feuding continued for decades.
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At some point in the 1870s Davis gave Johnson County locals a glimpse of this darker world. The man he had killed in Clay County would not be his last victim. After settling near Lee City, thirty miles west of Johnson County, he participated in a point-blank shoot-out at a picnic in 1905 and in a separate incident turned his twelve-gauge shotgun on a man at such close range that the victim had to have his leg amputated. Davis's son Letcher Jr. was reputed to have cut a man's throat for looking at his wife. People fled their cabins at his approach.
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When Davis reached the hollows west of Paintsville, he was a hundred miles from home, but his wild blue eyes landed on a familiar face. He knew exactly who Jordan Spencer was. Although Davis had been born right when Jordan and Malinda Spencer were leaving Clay County, he grew up just over a hill from the Centers and Freeman families. Davis frequently socialized with them, for good or ill—George Freeman's sons were repeatedly called to testify at Davis's criminal trials. Maybe Davis had heard about Jordan and Malinda while growing up, figured out who they were after talking with them or their neighbors, or recognized Clarsy Centers at the Spencers' cabin. It was even possible that he was staying with the Spencers.
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Whatever the connection, Davis spent enough time at Rockhouse Creek to pick a fight with Jordan Spencer. When they “got into a difficulty,” Davis could have shot Spencer—he had done worse—but it made little sense to kill a man on his home ground. Far from Clay County, without friends to defend him, testify on his behalf, or vote on a jury to acquit him, Davis might have hanged for the crime, from a gallows or a tree. Instead, Davis started telling people along Rockhouse that their neighbor was a “negro.”
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For years, Spencer's neighbors had maintained a code of silence, accepting Jordan as white so long as no one ever really had to think about it. Spencer gave them no reason to, always asserting a strong place for himself in the community and creating the circular logic that made it unthinkable that a man with whom whites worked, prayed, drank, and gambled could be black. When Letcher Davis started talking out loud—shouting, even—it seemed that by spreading this forbidden knowledge, he would force a moment of reckoning along Rockhouse Creek.

Men like John Horn, whose farm adjoined Spencer's, heard Letcher Davis out. Horn had spent the Civil War in a blue uniform but was hardly radical. While many Republicans favored voting rights for blacks as well as the ability to make contracts and buy and sell property on an equal footing, almost no one, white or black, would admit to advocating what came to be known as “social equality,” which included the right to attend integrated schools or marry across the color line. Horn, who had known Spencer from his first days in Johnson County, was not looking to spend time with black people. “I never fooled around them but little,” he would say. “I always had something else to do.”
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Confronted by Davis, Horn could have rethought his relationship to the Spencers and stopped socializing with, working alongside, and relying on his neighbors. Or he could have decided that he had no problem living with people of color. Instead, Horn simply shook his head and dismissed Spencer's accuser as “a wild, drinking kind of a dissipated man.” Horn did not know Davis and had no reason to believe that Davis came from Clay County or even that Davis was indeed his name. Other neighbors followed suit in ignoring the talk about Spencer's blood. Jordan's ancestry stayed his own business, and the Spencers—like everyone else along Rockhouse Creek, whether or not their skin was pale—remained white.
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It was more than a convenient fiction. For a generation, the Spencers had lived in the same place. The hollows were filling up with Jordan Spencer's sons, daughters, and grandchildren. If they were suddenly relabeled black, their neighborhood would reveal itself as one that did not guard the line between black and white. And if it were admitted that one family had slipped through, many others had surely walked the same path. Few families would be immune to the kind of talk that Letcher Davis was spreading about Old Jordan. Even as outside demands for segregation and racial purity grew louder, it made little sense to redraw the definition of “white” to exclude dark people. Instead, communities buried the hazy, ambiguous, barely documented past and, in essence, allowed almost everyone who had been living as white to stay white. People could remain secure in their status, safe enough even to give reflexive support to the emerging hard-line politics of race.

With his neighbors standing by him, Spencer had no need to retaliate. And by letting the controversy pass, Spencer helped his community embrace the idea that nothing was amiss. Like a rattlesnake at first frost, Davis disappeared from Rockhouse Creek. The neighbors returned to the everyday struggles, mostly silent, that truly defined their lives.

 

 

A WEDDING IN THE MOUNTAINS in the 1870s began with a procession from the groom's family home to the bride's. Two by two, under a new day's sun, the groom's party walked or rode through the hills. They were simply dressed. “If there were any buckles, rings, buttons, or ruffles,” went one account, “they were relics of old times.” The path might be rugged, the journey slow, through thicket and mud, fording creeks, shrouded by forest, or up steep rises to ridgetops with views for miles. It was a ritual of resolve, a reminder of the struggles of marriage and the countless ways the hills had shaped and would continue to shape the bride's and groom's lives.
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