The Invisible Line (44 page)

While coal mining was still twenty years away, the counties surrounding Buchanan were being hammered and chiseled and dynamited to dust. It was common knowledge that Buchanan would be next—that the hills were hiding twelve billion tons of “high-grade, coking, bituminous coal in beds of minable thickness”—it was only a matter of time. When that time came, George Looney, Home Creek's resident businessman, would be ready to sell his mineral rights. While the train carried logs out of the county, the return trip brought crates of liquor and bags of mail from the outside. Ninety percent of the mail was addressed to the Ritter mill. Logging had attracted new people to Buchanan County, a slow but constant stream. While most were strong men headed to Hurley, at least one family moved into Home Creek.
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In 1898 Jordan Spencer Jr. arrived from Kentucky with his wife, Alafair, and their nine children, the youngest an infant and the oldest seventeen. Within two or three years they might as well have lived in Home Creek forever. They bought land and started farming it. Jordan's eldest son, George, soon married Arminda Justice, the daughter of an established local family—at twenty, almost beyond marriageable age. George and Arminda moved to land nearby that she owned, and within a decade they had five children. Just like that, the Spencers found themselves kin to almost everyone around them.
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For the better part of a decade, Jordan Spencer and his sons and daughters worked for George Looney, whether it was harvesting corn or clearing trees. The Spencers and the Looneys got along well. They often ate together and stayed over at each other's houses. In 1909, when George and Arminda Spencer's oldest son, Melvin, turned six, they sent him to the same school that George Looney's children were attending. The teacher was Looney's third cousin and related by marriage to the Spencers.
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If the Spencers found easy acceptance along Home Creek, it abruptly ended in late October 1910. As the hillsides slicked with fallen leaves, George Looney's older brother was shot dead. Henderson Looney had been boarding with George. He was divorced, in his forties, laboring for his keep. His killer was Andrew Jackson Spencer, the third of Jordan Spencer Jr.'s nine sons. Jack was nineteen, just married, farming a small plot of rented hillside in the hollow. No one knows why he shot Henderson Looney, who had been a neighbor since Jack was a little boy and had a daughter near his age. Spencer was charged by the sheriff and put on trial, but he was never convicted. The acquittal allowed him to resume something resembling a normal life on Home Creek in early 1911. He soon had enough money to buy land and years later was enough of a law-abiding citizen to help the sheriff raid and shut down local moonshine stills. But George Looney would not forget what had happened.
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After Henderson Looney's killer went free, it seemed preordained that George Looney would exact justice on his own. The occasional items about Buchanan County in big-city newspapers described a place without law—or more accurately, a place with its own code that existed alongside the law. While Hatfields and McCoys had periodically slaughtered each other in nearby Pike County, Kentucky, and Logan County, West Virginia, more than once the killers had fled to Buchanan, which was too rugged for the sheriff's posse. Buchanan County families did not have feuds. They had wars.
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“These mountaineers are men who hold life as light as a laugh,” pronounced one of the first anthropologists to study the Appalachians at the turn of the century, and in Buchanan people lost their lives for reasons big and small. Sometimes they died for money. In 1909 six members—three generations—of one family were shot, hacked, and burned to death for several hundred dollars' cash and a thousand more in gold and silver coin buried on their land. People died “in the madness of moonshine intoxication”—in fights over ten cents to buy whiskey, and fights after all of it was drunk. And people died for no reason at all, cut down at their ramshackle home places and on their way to church parties, along lonely mountain passes, and in the muddy streets of Grundy. No one was too law-abiding to partake of a little killing. When a local judge's son encountered a deputy U.S. marshal's son in 1901, they blasted each other with revolvers point-blank “as rapidly as they could draw the triggers.”
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George Looney's war on the Spencers began immediately after Jack Spencer went free. In newspaper stories, silent films, and anthropological studies, Southern mountaineers invariably reached for their rifles, but Looney did not fight with bullets. Words were his weapon. Everywhere he went, Looney would talk about the Spencers. “Nothing but God damned negroes,” he called them, “and I can prove they are God damned negroes.” At his mill and at the store, at home and when visiting, he spread the rumor to anyone who would listen. In the summer of 1911 his words drifted down the creeks and forks and branches wrinkling through Buchanan County.
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It was a strange accusation, considering that there were no blacks to hate in Buchanan County. It was almost entirely white, possibly the whitest place in the South. Out of twelve thousand county residents, the census counted four blacks in 1910, down from five a decade earlier. The rest of the South had spent the last twenty or thirty years building a social wall between blacks and whites. In Virginia and elsewhere, new statutes required the separation, and it would be stricter than ever before. Since the eighteenth century, Virginia had defined a black person as anyone with more than one-quarter “negro blood.” In 1910 the legislature tightened the definition to a one-sixteenth rule. Other states took the idea of racial purity to the limit, defining anyone with any African ancestry as black. While established by law, the new order assumed a concrete form every day on streetcars, in restaurants and hotels and shops, at job sites, and in random, momentary face-to-face encounters. Segregation was also being enacted and enforced with slaps, slurs, punches, and kicks, by rope and bullet and pine torch.
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Segregation and lynching and the idea that blacks were genetically inferior—a contagion that had to be quarantined—seemed to make the most sense where blacks and whites lived in great enough proximity that whites could imagine a world where blacks had an equal claim to power and privilege and justice for old wrongs. Most people in Buchanan County had never even seen a black person, and segregationists looked longingly to the hills as an Eden of white racial purity. Although outsiders were constantly describing the backwardness of the mountains, the drunkenness and violence and primitive Christianity and child brides, the “bare feet, ragged clothes, and crass ignorance,” the highlanders also symbolized something else: what one anthropologist called “the inextinguishable excellence of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Where everyone was white—where black people posed no threat to the social and political order—the question of whether or not the Spencers were “God damned negroes” seemed to have little consequence.
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However, the fact that Looney could think of his whisper campaign as vengeance for his dead brother suggested that Buchanan County was less isolated than most outsiders could imagine. Although hardly any blacks lived in the mountains—although the South's highland counties had fewer slaves before the war, were less likely to support secession, and were more likely to ally themselves with Northern Republicans after the war—upcountry whites had long resented the counting of blacks for apportioning seats in the state legislature, which tilted political power to the plantation regions. “This hill folk were ... opposed to slavery,” wrote Harvard geologist and Kentucky native Nathaniel Shaler, “and even more to negroes.” Fifty years after the war, industry and capital and the outside world were steadily creeping closer to the mountains, bringing with them the politics of segregation and a rigid vocabulary of difference.
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Just as their lives were changing, the people of the mountains associated blacks with an uncertain future. Although southwestern Virginia had a minuscule black population, more blacks were lynched there between 1880 and 1930 than in any other part of the state. Although isolated from the surrounding counties, Buchanan was not untouched by the killing. When two Buchanan County merchants were robbed and murdered in 1893 by a train depot in nearby Tazewell County, more than one hundred Buchanan men rode to the scene of the crime and lynched five blacks. As the mob rode home, they proudly proclaimed Buchanan “altogether a white county.”
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Looney did not want to kill the Spencers, but his accusation threatened to turn the Spencers back into outsiders. Looney also understood that community standing and security were not the only things that hinged on the issue of race. He had something bigger in mind, something that would require traveling beyond Home Creek. He enlisted the aid of a younger cousin in Grundy—an attorney at law named Glenn Ratliff—as well as a trustee of the Rock Lick School District. Together, at Looney's expense, they traveled eighty miles to the northwest, until they appeared one summer day at a Paintsville hotel. After asking the proprietor a few questions, they found themselves riding through the Jordan Gap, looking for people who knew the Spencers.
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Before the school on Home Creek opened for the fall term, Looney approached his third cousin the teacher and told him to tell the Spencers that he had called them “damned niggers.” Because there were Spencers enrolled there, Looney declared, he would have to take his children out of school. “They shan't go with negroes,” he said.
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While each Appalachian hollow appeared to be entirely self-contained, Looney understood that the people in Home Creek lived in direct daily contact with outside authority. For about forty years there had been public schools in Buchanan County. More than the railroad or the revenue inspectors who periodically raided local moonshiners, these schools connected the mountains with the world beyond. George Spencer signed his name with an
X
. His wife, Arminda, could not read or write either. But they were sending their oldest son to school. He would learn to read and write. This opportunity—this relationship with the state—was one of the few things the Spencers had. Looney intended to take it away. When Looney returned from Kentucky, he asked the Rock Lick school trustees to convene without telling Spencer. Looney produced sworn affidavits from the men he had interviewed in Kentucky and convinced the board to expel Melvin Spencer from the third grade.
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If George Looney had a modern outlook on the world, his neighbor George Spencer resembled a stock character in a silent melodrama about feuding mountain families. Spencer was thirty. He spent his days farming the hillsides and came home to a pregnant wife and a cabin full of children. He had a taste for whiskey and was not above going on “a drunk.” George Looney had essentially ambushed him with his affidavits and the school board decision. For most whites anywhere in the country in 1910, “God damned negroes” were fighting words. In the mountains one might have expected an illiterate farmer to kill over them.
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But once again the Spencer-Looney feud did not follow the standard script. Instead of loading his rifle, George Spencer mounted his horse and rode out of the hollow. He went to Grundy and discussed his situation with a man named William Daugherty. Daugherty was Spencer's age, and like Spencer, he had recently moved to Buchanan County from Kentucky. In his younger days Daugherty had taught school. But in Virginia the law was his business.
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Daugherty would eventually gain a reputation for his “legal prowess,” and in a few years he would help coordinate the World War I draft in Buchanan County. But when Spencer met with him, he had just escaped discipline from the Virginia Bar for practicing law without a license. Although Daugherty was barely established, he had formed a partnership with one of the most experienced and well-known lawyers in the region. Roland E. Chase had practiced for more than twenty years, and unlike most attorneys in the area, he had actually attended a law school. Long active in Republican politics, Chase was serving his second term as state senator for Buchanan and three other mountain counties. He lived forty miles away in Dickenson County, in a massive brick mansion that he had built next to the courthouse. He routinely traveled throughout Virginia in his capacity as grand master of the state's Odd Fellows.
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Spencer retained Daugherty and Chase. He was not going to kill George Looney. He would sue the man for slander.

Perhaps Spencer was following Looney's lead. Looney, after all, had hired a lawyer, taken evidence, and presented his case before the school board as if it had been a trial. The school board's decision resembled a legal verdict. Independent of Looney's actions, however, Spencer knew full well the power of the law.

Although Buchanan County appeared untouched by the modern world, attorneys had spent two decades burrowing into the jagged landscape. The county's hardwood forests and billions of tons of coal—the potential for millions of dollars from out-of-state investors—meant that land titles had to be clarified, competing claims resolved, and mineral rights bought and sold. Outsiders filed claims for hundreds of thousands of acres based on long-forgotten colonial land grants, leading to litigation that took upward of fifteen years to work through and subjected even the most obscure hollows to judicial scrutiny. Much of Chase and Daugherty's practice was devoted to title disputes. The litigation was all the more intense because the Grundy courthouse and all the county's property records had burned to cinders in 1885. Before there were loggers, there were lawyers. Before the railroads, before the mines—before modernity—there were lawyers.
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