Ida: A Sword Among Lions

Paula J. Giddings

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061972942
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Pulitzer Prize Board citation to Ida B. Wells, as an early pioneer of investigative journalism and civil rights icon

From a thinker who Maya Angelou has praised for shining "a brilliant light on the lives of women left in the shadow of history, " comes the definitive biography of Ida B. Wells—crusading journalist and pioneer in the fight for women's suffrage and against segregation and lynchings

Ida B. Wells was born into slavery and raised in the Victorian age yet emerged—through her fierce political battles and progressive thinking—as the first "modern" black women in the nation's history.

Wells began her activist career when she tried to segregate a first-class railway car in Memphis. After being thrown bodily off the car, she wrote about the incident for black Baptist newspapers, thus beginning her career as a journalist. But her most abiding fight would be the one against lynching, a crime in which she saw all the themes she held most dear coalesce: sexuality, race, and the law.

CHAPTER ONE

Holly Springs

I often compare [my mother’s] work in training her children to that of other women who had not her handicaps.

—Ida B. Wells

There was no need to kill here [Holly Springs], only to deprive…

—Hodding Carter

Ida Wells remembered being told as a child that her mother, Elizabeth, called Liza or Lizzie by friends, was born somewhere in Virginia, was one of ten children, and that her father was part Native American and her grandfather a “full-blooded” one. The only other detail she recalled about her mother’s early life was that Lizzie was taken from her family when quite young and, with two of her sisters, was sold by a slave trader into Mississippi, and sold a second time before she was purchased by Spires Boling, an architect and contractor in Holly Springs. One of her mother’s masters had “seared her flesh and her mind with torturous beatings,” and by contrast Boling, who never used corporal punishment against her, was the “kindest” master of all. But Ida did not remember the name of the Virginia family to whom Lizzie “belonged” or the county in which she was born.¹

However, circumstantial evidence suggests that Lizzie Wells was born to Annie Arrington and George Washington about 1844 on a plantation owned by William Arrington in Appomattox County, Virginia.² Lizzie must have been sold when she was seven or eight years old, the average age in most slaveholding states when a child’s market value was greater without her mother than with her. Compounding the crime, but softening the blow of separation, the sale also included two of her sisters—Martha, two years younger, and Isabelle or Belle, for whom Ida was named, two years older. The sale was probably handled by George D. Davis and his brother John, merchants reputed to offer the highest prices for slaves in the area, and who had had previous dealings with the extended Arrington family. The two men customarily traveled from estate to estate, picking one, two, or three slaves from each homestead until they gathered a hundred or more to sell on the market.³

The Davis brothers purchased most of their slaves during the summer and fall, when they could get them at lower prices and “trim, shave, wash,” and “fatten” them until they looked “sleek” and could be sold at a profit. The Arringtons were closest to the Lynchburg slave mart, about twenty miles away, which was then beginning to rival Richmond and Petersburg in its volume of sales. At the height of the buying season, children who had been bought from their owners—like Lizzie, Martha, and Belle—could be seen traveling two by two, their wrists bound by a rope, their pace hastened by an enforcer’s whip.⁴

When such children reached Lynchburg, they were taken to a brick building on First and Lynch Street, where slaves were secured before they were sold. The prepubescence of young girls saved them from being intimately scrutinized by potential buyers who routinely examined buttocks and considered breasts. The health of children, by contrast, was determined by making them run in circles, or jump up and down, or skip along in measured distances.⁵

By October of 1858, Lizzie, about thirteen or fourteen, was among the nine slaves owned by Spires Boling; her sisters, Belle and Martha, were settled nearby, in Marshall and DeSoto counties, respectively.⁶

NOW A BOLING, Lizzie’s primary responsibility was cooking for the middle-aged contractor; his pregnant wife, Nancy; and the household, which consisted of an older female relative and seven children between the ages of one and eighteen.⁷ Lizzie’s development into an excellent cook and the nonviolent treatment at the hands of her owner were not atypical of the fourteen hundred slaves in Holly Springs. Although there were laws that prohibited blacks from assembling, and one published account by a minister noted the death of several women slaves by whipping, the political economy of the town demanded labor that required more skill than brawn; and it encouraged paternalism rather than violence.⁸

The white population of Holly Springs had begun to settle in earnest there in 1837, the year Holly Springs was incorporated and the original Chickasaw Indian inhabitants had been removed to the Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). Under the mounting pressure of President Andrew Jackson’s land-hungry administration, the Chickasaws signed the Treaty of Pontotoc in 1832, which extinguished their title to all of the lands east of the Mississippi, comprising the entire northern portion of the state. Of the twelve Mississippi counties jigsawed out of the territory, Marshall County, in the northwestern part of the state and named after the recently deceased Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, was the largest and the richest. In a mere twenty years, it would yield more cotton per square acre than any similar subdivision in the world. Holly Springs—named after a large, thirty-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep spring in a hollow that watered a thick grove of holly trees—became Marshall’s county seat and administrative center. Soon afterward, the town was embroiled in feverish land speculation and sales and also became the site of northern Mississippi’s first bank.⁹

As such, Holly Springs attracted “Episcopalians, Virginians and Whigs”—deserting the thinning soil and accumulating debts of the older cotton states—who brought their “ruffled shirts,” “libraries,” and “slaves” with them, as one historian noted.¹⁰ The bustling county seat also attracted bankers, retail merchants, land speculators, those in the building trades, and a bevy of lawyers as the town, already cleared of growth by the Chickasaws to facilitate its use as a hunting ground, grew at a dizzying pace. By 1845, the nearly thirty-five hundred residents of Holly Springs had established St. Thomas Hall, a boy’s educational academy, and the six-year-old Holly Springs Collegiate Institute for young women was prepared to award Mistress of Polite Literature degrees and include subjects such as algebra, physics, and natural philosophy. “Our object is to impart a sound, substantial, liberal education,” announced its president, Thomas Johnson, “not masculine, but approximating as near to it as the peculiarities of the female intellect will permit.” Less than a decade after its incorporation, Holly Springs also boasted a land office, six churches, offices for nine doctors, three coach shops, four tailors, as well as several newspaper offices, printing shops, confectionaries, hatteries, and silversmiths. Its early reputation as a retreat with healing spring waters that attracted resort seekers made doggeries, horse-race tracks, bathhouses, theaters, hotels, and gambling houses viable enterprises. By the time Lizzie Boling had arrived, Holly Springs’s eight produce houses carried an array of fresh farm products; its town stalls contained turkeys, geese, and quail; and a variety of food shops sold specialities, all of which helped her to make cooking into an art.¹¹

IT WAS DURING Holly Springs’s exponential growth in the 1840s that the North Carolina–born Spires Boling finally settled there after living for periods in Ohio—where he married his Virginia-born wife, Nancy—and later Arkansas, where two of his children, John and Harriet, were born. In 1850, he was thirty-nine years old and listed in the census as a carpenter who possessed one male slave and no property. But he soon found Holly Springs to be an opportune place for an ambitious house builder. Its forests of hickory, oak, magnolia, and pine provided fine timber; the red clay soil was suitable for brick-making; and the town possessed one of the three foundries in Mississippi that could produce grillwork and other decorative metal fittings found infrequently in other parts of the state. The longing for residences with the neoclassical Greek flourishes that were long out of fashion in Europe also helped assure a plentiful and skilled slave labor force in adjacent Tippah County where a significant proportion of its six thousand blacks were hired out by their masters to contractors and trained in the building trade arts of brick-making, dressing wooden planks by hand, and creating doors, window sashes, and blinds.¹²

Boling, who appeared to be a self-taught designer of houses that reflected the Athenian ideal, became known for a number of signature architectural elements: staircases with longer treads; intricate newel posts with their decorated step ends; cast-iron detailing; large porticos and massive columns and pediments designed to accentuate their monumentality. The contractor’s wealth began to rise in the 1850s, and by 1860 he was designated a master builder, had purchased a clock and pleasure carriage—two items that connoted a particular status in the period—possessed nine slaves, and had bought his first parcels of land, which included a spring that provided fresh water and on which he would build his own story-and-a-half house.¹³

Boling’s increase in wealth and status coincided with his building, simultaneously, three of Holly Springs’s largest and most elaborate homes. Among them was the Walter House, Boling’s most lucrative contract to date. Harvey W. Walter was an avid prohibitionist and ebullient lawyer who was the counsel for the town’s most important economic achievement in the period: the building of a section of the Mississippi Central Railroad, incorporated in 1852, that extended from Holly Springs to Memphis and New Orleans and that was laid down by slaves loaned out for the task by their owners. In addition to Boling’s standard, Greek-style blueprints, Walter wanted two large octagonal turrets on each side of the house to be used as extra bedrooms for the family’s ten children. Perhaps in anticipation of the coming war, Walter also requested hollowed tunnels within the columns through which a ladder could be extended from the gabled roof to an underground tunnel. The contracts to build the houses explained the need for Boling to increase his number of slaves from three to nine between 1857 and 1860; among them were Lizzie and a young man by the name of James Wells from Tippah County.¹⁴

James Wells, called “Jim” by family and friends, was nineteen years old in 1860 and had been apprenticed to Boling by his white father and owner, Morgan Wells, a well-to-do farmer in the part of Tippah known as Hickory Flats. While Jim was perfecting his carpentry skills, he may have been traveling back and forth from Tippah to Holly Springs for several years before meeting, and eventually marrying, Lizzie—with the nuptial occasion being marked, perhaps, by the appearance of a slave cabin on the Boling property in 1860. There are no photographs of her but it is known that she was darker than Jim, and she may have possessed the same high cheekbones and knowing, intense eyes that the pictures of her sister Martha reveal.¹⁵ Whatever Jim’s particular features, he probably exuded a kind of confidence that foreshadowed his later acts of political independence.

Jim was the only son of Morgan Wells, who had never laid a hand on him, and he had become, Ida remembered, the “comfort and companion” of the white man’s old age. Jim’s mother was a slave named Peggy who had lived on the Morgan Wells estate since the 1840s. The later-revealed jealousy of Morgan’s wife, Margaret or Polly, indicates that the black woman may have also had a favored place in the household, which included in 1850, James’s half-siblings: Alfred, aged six; Henry, four; and Margaret, two—all of whom had a black father.¹⁶

FOR THE BOLING and Wells families, life and labor proceeded unremarkably through the fall of 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected to the White House, and January 1861, when a Holly Springs lawyer, Alexander Clayton, coauthored Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession, severing the state from federal jurisdiction. But the threat of war began to darken the landscape in March of 1861 when fifteen hundred volunteer troops from Marshall County headed for Pensacola under the orders of the Mississippian Jefferson Davis, soon to become the president of the Confederate provisional government, who had resigned from his U.S. Senate seat the month before. By April 1862, Holly Springs’s McIlwen Foundry, used to melt metal for Boling’s decorative fittings, was sold to the Confederacy and refitted to produce guns. The foundry produced the first cannon in the South, and according to one account, the occasion was consecrated by white townswomen, who, with their children, formed a circle around the foundry’s fiery pit of molten metal and one by one, with the “solemnity of a priestess,” dipped a ladle into the lavalike mixture and into the newly fitted mold.¹⁷

For Jim and Lizzie it was a time of heightened concern about their immediate and extended families. That same April, Lizzie was showing her pregnancy of six months, and news came that Jim’s father, Morgan, had died at the age of sixty. Whatever grief Jim might have felt was no doubt mitigated by his also learning that the day following his death, Morgan’s wife had had his mother, Peggy Wells, “stripped then whipped.”¹⁸

Concern about Jim’s family heightened in May when news came of the bitter showdown at nearby Corinth, one of the Civil War’s bitterest battles, which claimed nearly five thousand rebel lives, twice the number of Union soldiers who died there. The bloody struggle was soon followed by the fall of Memphis, just forty miles northwest of Holly Springs. By the time Lizzie gave birth to Ida Bell on July 16, 1862, the couple must have wondered what kind of world their first child would be born into. That same month the first Union attack on Vicksburg failed, followed by the Confederate victories of General Robert E. Lee in Virginia and Maryland. It must have been chilling to watch the white Holly Springs residents celebrate the good news with dancing and celebrations with what one observer called “patriotic dissipation.”¹⁹

By November, however, the tables had turned again, leading to the heart-stopping entry of Union general Ulysses S. Grant into Holly Springs, nearly doubling the population of five thousand with his cavalry and the sutlers who served them. Drawn by the Mississippi Central Railroad and the Greek-styled accommodations that were the source of the townspeople’s pride, Grant made Holly Springs his personal headquarters from which he planned to supervise a new assault on Vicksburg in a combined land-and-river operation. The general brought his son Jesse and his wife, Julia, with him, and according to one account, Julia, who grew up on a southern-style plantation near St. Louis, also brought her personal slave to accompany them. The Grants chose for their private residence the spacious Walter House, built by Boling and his slaves, with its turrets and strategic tunnels.

On December 20, the most spectacular battle that took place in Holly Springs was led by the Confederate general Earl Van Dorn, who had led his troops to the earlier defeat in Corinth. Under the cover of night, Van Dorn’s troops destroyed the Mississippi Railroad poised to aid Grant’s transportation to Vicksburg, detonated the piles of ammunition stored by the Union troops, and pierced the predawn darkness by setting the cotton bales and sutlers’ supplies afire. In the ensuing chaos, it was reported that “diminutive” Southern belles turned into boisterous night-gowned cheerleaders as they came out of their houses to shout encouragement to the raiders. In the end, both the east and west sides of the central square and three blocks of buildings and the railroad station were destroyed.²⁰

Soon after the December raid, Belle Strickland, the nine-year-old niece of Boling’s neighbor J. W. C. Watson—a lawyer and state senator during the period of Mississippi’s secession—recorded in her diary that she woke to martial music and saw three regiments of blacks passing by. By then, Ida was five months old and Lizzie was pregnant with her second daughter, Eugenia.²¹

The Unionists soon returned “defeated, hungry, and threatening with a torch,” noted one observer. In a test of the strategy that would subsequently be used by Union general William T. Sherman in his infamous “March to the Sea,” infantry columns subsisted off the food of Holly Springs residents and fanned out to strip a 370-mile swath of the northern Mississippi countryside of its corn, wheat, and livestock before burning plantations to the ground. “The Yankees stole the corn and wheat and drove off the horses and mules and killed the hogs and sheep and took all th...