The Ballad of Little River

A Tale of Race and Restless Youth in the Rural Sou

Paul Hemphill

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780684856827
• eBook ISBN: 9781439138267
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

Except for a massacre of five hundred settlers by renegade Creek Indians in the early 1800s, not much bad had happened during two centuries in Little River, Alabama, an obscure Lost Colony in the swampy woodlands of To Kill a Mockingbird country. "We're stuck down here being poor together" is how one native described the hamlet of about two hundred people, half black and half white. But in 1997, racial violence hit Little River like a thunderclap. A young black man was killed while trying to break into a white family's trailer at night, a beloved white store owner was nearly bludgeoned to death by a black ex-convict, and finally a marauding band of white kids torched a black church and vandalized another during a drunken wilding soon after a Ku Klux Klan rally. The Ballad of Little River is a narrative of that fateful year, an anatomy of one of the many church arsons across the South in the late 1990s. It is also much more -- a biography of a place that seemed, on the cusp of the millennium, stuck in another time. When veteran journalist Paul Hemphill, the son of an Alabama truck driver who has written extensively on the blue-collar South, moved into Little River, he discovered the flip side of what the natives like to call "God's country": a dot on the map far from the mainstream of American life, a forlorn cluster of poverty and ignorance and dead-end jobs in the dark, snake-infested forests, a world that time forgot.Living alongside the citizens of Little River, Hemphill discovered a stew of characters right out of fiction -- "Peanut" Ferguson, "Doll" Boone, "Hoss" Mack, Joe Dees, Murray January, a Klansman named "Brother Phil, " and his stripper wife known as "Wild Child" -- swirling into a maelstrom of insufferable heat, malicious gossip, ancient grudges, and unresolved racial animosities. His story of how their lives intertwined serves, as well, as a chilling cautionary tale about the price that must be paid for living in virtual isolation during a time of unprecedented growth in America. God's country is in deep trouble.

PART ONE
The Heart of a Distant Forest

ONE
Lost Colony

FROM SHORE TO SHORE, the shortest length between national boundaries in the continental United States is the north-south route, a fairly straightshot of about nine hundred miles on Interstate 65, connecting the icy Great Lakes and the tropical Gulf of Mexico. There aremore scenic drives in the country. By the time travelers have reached Montgomery, Alabama’s capital city, they have seen aboutall of the rolling farmland a body can bear on one trip: Indiana’s endless cornfields, Kentucky’s white-fenced bluegrass country,Middle Tennessee’s knobby little hills. The monotony breaks, though, and fairly abruptly, once the road has passed tired oldBirmingham’s battened steel mills to finally reach Montgomery, the “Cradle of the Confederacy.” There are woodlands and pasturesand farms there as well, but the change is more in attitude, for Montgomery is the jumping-off point for the vast forested no-man’s-land of south Alabama. This is the Black Belt, sonamed for its rich black loam and the people who once slaved in the cotton fields, a broad band stretching from the coastalplains of the Carolinas to the piney woods of the Big Thicket in east Texas, and the motorists who might forsake the interstatefor the sleepy back roads soon find themselves in the very bowels of the Deep SOUTH. HEART OF DIXIE, proclaim the state’s vehicle license tags, and indeed it is.

This is the land of Bear Bryant and George Wallace, of tar paper shacks in the shadows of white-columned neo-plantations,of roadside fightin’ -and-dancin’ clubs and whoop-and-holler Pentecostal churches and trim little high school football stadiums, of magnolia and dogwood and mimosa and honeysuckle, of pine forestsand farm ponds and pastures, of 4-H and VFW and Rotary clubs, of junkyards and sawmills and decaying barns swallowed up by kudzu. On the square at Enterprise: a statueplayfully “honoring” the boll weevil, whose devastations early in the twentieth century forced the South to abandon cottonin favor of other crops. At Georgiana, south of Montgomery on the lonesome road to Mobile: one of the many childhood homesof Hank Williams, a wild urchin who sprang from the sawmills and logging camps to become the quintessential country singerand songwriter. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” was his most plaintive tune, released soon after his death in the fifties,from whiskey and pills, at the age of twenty-nine, and the song’s morbid sentiments perfectly suit the isolated nature ofthis part of the American outback, where all news is local. There might be an old geezer left in Pine Apple who remembersthe terse mention in the Personals column of the weekly newspaper announcing a favorite sons triumphant return, bearing medals,from the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles: “Percy Beard has returned home from California, where he participated in a footrace.”

Most tourists not bound for the port city of Mobile, or on beyond to New Orleans, exit south on Alabama Highway 59 and makea bee-line for the oceanside resort of Gulf Shores, the westernmost point of what Alabamians insist on calling the RedneckRiviera: a marvelous strand of sugar-white beaches, among the most beautiful in the world, sort of a good old boy s sandboxof cut-rate motels and bars and seafood diners, with miniature-golf courses and makeshift amusement parks for the kids. TheRedneck Riviera lies eastward for more than a hundred miles along the coast of the Florida Panhandle—“L.A.,” they call it,for Lower Alabama—and although the 1990s saw the coming of expensive condos and gated vacation communities (on the Alabamaportion of the Riviera, a stretch of less than thirty miles, about eighty high-rise condominiums require more elevators thandoes all of Birmingham, the states largest city), it remains a workingman s playground; a place where three generations of Bubbas have gone for their initiations into manhood: to get drunk, sunburned, laid, and thrown in jail.

“My sheriff is Jimmy Johnson, built like a football player, wears a cowboy hat and boots, fancies himself as John Wayne.”David Whetstone, Baldwin County’s longtime district attorney, was holding forth one day at his office on the square in BayMinette, the tidy little county seat, gussied up with park benches and oleanders and whitewashed storefronts. “He and hiswife went off to France for a vacation one year and everybody was dying to know what he thought about the Riviera on the Mediterranean.‘Well,’ he said, ‘the nekkid ladies was all right, but the beaches ain’t near as good as the real Riviera.’”

Whetstone—fifty-five, balding, pugnacious—marvels at the diversity of the southern portion of Baldwin, the largest countyin area east of the Mississippi River, bigger than the state of Rhode Island and nearly the size of Delaware. “Because ofthe port at Mobile, we’ve got all of these ethnic towns. Daphne is full of Italians, Malbis is Greek, Elberta German, SilverhillScandinavian, and a lot of ’em speak the languages from the old countries and have festivals every year. It seems like there’sa new culture every ten miles. Northern Baldwin, now, that’s another matter. There’s these two towns on either side of thesame exit off the interstate, Rabun and Perdido, settled by mountain folks, and they carry on feuds like the Hatfields andthe McCoys. We’ve prosecuted ten homicides up there in the past twenty-five years. The patriarch of one clan always showsup in court wearing a black felt hillbilly hat, and one side always leaves a silver-handled knife as a calling card even ifit was a shooting. Northern Baldwin keeps me in business.”

By all means. Were the traveler to turn north instead of south off of I-65, he would be entering another world. Once pastStockton, a neat little village quickly gentrifying these days into an upscale Republican enclave for comfortable whites whocommute to their jobs in downtown Mobile, a half-hour drive on the freeway, Highway 59 begins its run into the heart of adistant forest. Along the forty miles of road between Stockton and Uriah (pronounced YOU-rye), the first town of any size in southern Monroe County, there are no speed-limit signs and only a single blinking caution light to slow the traffic. Of Baldwin County’s total population of aboutone hundred thousand in the late nineties, fewer than three thousand people were living in the piney expanses of the upperone-fourth. Between Stockton and the bridge over the Little River, marking the Monroe County line, there are but four hamletsdenoted by green highway markers—Latham, Tensaw, Blacksher, Little River—with most of the people living on bulldozed or asphalteddead-end roads far from Highway 59, known locally as “the road,” in house trailers or plain brick homes or tin-roofed shacksor prefabricated Craftsman and Jim Walter homes that have survived since the forties and fifties. The racial makeup in thatpart of the county is roughly fifty-fifty, black and white, with a lot of high cheekbones indicating Creek and Choctaw Indianblood on both sides, and the demographic profile is one of a society barely hanging on. A startling percentage of the peopleare old, sick, disabled, or simply idle (the unemployment rate is 20 percent, four times higher than the rest of the county,and the per capita income is less than $11,000 a year before taxes); and the younger ones who have chosen to stay—but notto risk their lives and health, as did their fathers and grandfathers, by logging in the forests that dominate the landscape—mustdrive for nearly an hour each way to reach menial jobs in textile mills, warehouses, factories, or shopping malls.

MOST OF THE history of northern Baldwin County is measured by small mileposts noted only by the locals: first school, first church, firstdoctor, first steamboat, first paved road; the coming of electricity, county water, plumbing, telephones; sawmills, cottongins, slaves, Ku Klux Klan, boll weevil; radio, newspapers, television. The land belonged to the Creeks and Choctaws untilthe late 1700s, following the Revolutionary War, when white settlers began drifting in from Virginia and the Carolinas onthe westward movement to stake out homesteads in what was then known as the Mississippi Territory. It was wild, forbiddingswamp country—teeming with poisonous snakes, alligators, bears, deer, wild boars, mosquitoes, scorpions, chiggers, beavers, raccoons, ’possums, rabbits, squirrels—and black slaves, human cargo from the Gold Coast of Africa, were boughtat auction on the docks at Mobile in the late eighteenth century to help with the carving out of a civilization in the wilderness.

The British naturalist William Bartram first drew attention to the land when he sent home specimens of exotic subtropicalflora he had found around the time of the Revolution, and Aaron Burr was finally tracked down in those parts and arrestedfor treason in 1807 after his duel with Alexander Hamilton. But the only newsworthy event in the entire early history of northernBaldwin County was the Creek massacre at Fort Mims in 1813. Trouble had been brewing for years between the resident NativeAmericans and the settlers, prompting a prosperous farmer named Samuel Mims to build a stockade surrounding his land nearwhat is now Tensaw as a line of defense against an unyielding branch of the generally benign Creeks, the “Red Sticks,” whowere rumored to be stockpiling weapons and laying plans to rout these interlopers. The Red Sticks were led by a thirty-three-year-oldmixed-blood named William Weatherford but known as Red Eagle, a product of his Scottish fathers marriage to a Creek princessnamed Sehoy. On the last weekend of August in 1813, feeling an attack was imminent, Mims summoned to his “fort” about 550settlers, slaves, “half-breeds,” and militia from a nearby military post. Some of the soldiers were still drunk from an all-nightparty when Red Eagle and about a thousand of his Red Sticks rushed the fort at noon that Monday. When the sun fell, the fortnow a pile of smouldering ashes, some five hundred had died and no more than fifty had escaped from what is still recordedas the bloodiest such massacre in the history of the United States. It brought immediate outrage across the nation and ledto the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s “Trail of Tears,” the deportation of all Native Americans to Indian Territory in whatis now Oklahoma. One hundred and eighty-four years would pass before the outside world would hear again of northern BaldwinCounty, Alabama.

As soon as the land was cleared of Indians, the settlers dug in and began to whack out a crude society in the woods. Alabamagained statehood in 1819, not long after the Fort Mims Massacre, and life there was much the same as in the other frontier statesjoining the Union as it expanded beyond the Mississippi River. Huge tracts of virgin hardwood were cleared, the timber usedfor log cabins and outbuildings, the land plowed and planted in corn and cotton. It was backbreaking work, requiring largefamilies (the more strapping sons, the better), but with the abundance of game and the rich soil, nobody starved who was willingto work. They were self-sufficient out of necessity, and proud of it, and except for the staples they had to barter for, allthey needed could be taken from the land: food, housing, furniture, the clothes on their backs.

In steady increments, decade by decade, a semblance of order and civilization was wrought. Horse paths were widened to becometurnpikes for stagecoaches; canoes and rafts and then rough keelboats and finally steamers turned the Alabama and Tombigbeeand Little Rivers into highways for moving cotton and timber down to the docks at Mobile; taverns and inns and boat landingsappeared; and schools and churches and barns and trading posts. Here and there one might see a gaudy mansion on the hill,built by men who had cleared massive fields for cotton and bought slaves at the auction in Mobile. One of those planters wasDavid Tate, Red Eagle’s stepbrother, whose “last will and inventory” upon his death in 1829 listed 150 slaves whose valuesranged from twenty-five cents to $600. But most of the people were simple dirt farmers trying to survive the natural scourgesaround them—violent weather, diseases, wild animals, sheer loneliness—as best they could. They hunted and fished and plowedfor sustenance, made their own whiskey for comfort, settled disputes with guns and knives and fists in the absence of organizedlaw, found solace in a God who accepted no excuses, got so accustomed to being alone that the only people they trusted werekinfolks. Except for the handful of cotton planters, moguls with a vested interest in retaining slavery, the Civil War meantlittle to the simple men in the woods; Admiral David Farragut might have been steaming into Mobile Bay in August of 1864 inthe largest naval engagement of the war (“Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!”), but northern Baldwin County’s only involvement was the non-skirmish involving James Witherington s grandfather, Ausphera Bryant Myles, that sameyear on some meandering little stream known as Shomo Creek.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION meant that slavery was abolished as a formal way of life, but most of the African-Americans whose ancestors had been boughtat the slave auction in Mobile chose either to hire out as sharecroppers to their former masters or to accept the governments offer of forty acres and a mule and to homestead nearby in the woods and swamps on inferior land not already claimed bythe pioneer white settlers; to build a society of their own that would be separate but by no means equal; and to become adark, brooding presence that soon would attract the attention of the new Ku Klux Klan, the white South s response to Reconstruction.Whippings and house-burnings and lynchings by night-riding packs of hooded Klansmen were not uncommon sights in a harsh landwhere brute strength and intimidation and the power in numbers took precedence over fairness and intellect and formal rulesof law. Then, as now, life in that part of the country boiled down to survival of the fittest, and everybody tried to takeit in stride. Upon the news that the Gulf Florida & Alabama railroad was laying lines through there, it was said that GF&A stood for “Gophers, Frogs & Alligators.”

When the boll weevil infested the cotton fields all over the South, in the early 1900s, practically finishing off what wasleft of the antebellum plantation society, the people in upper Baldwin County had to look no farther than the surroundingwoodlands to find an alternative means of making a living. Huge forests of virgin hardwood were everywhere, and so that waswhere the men would go, both black and white, to spend all their waking hours in the deep woods and marshes, fighting offmosquitoes and alligators and timber rattlers as they drew turpentine from the pines and brought down the towering oaks andcypress that would be floated down the series of waterways to brokers in Mobile Bay, who would buy these “forest products”to make everything from houses to telephone poles to newsprint. For the next half-century, through the First World War and the Great Depression and the Second World War, right up untilthe development of the Redneck Riviera as a tourist destination in the late sixties, the rich forests of northern Baldwinaccounted for the bulk of the entire county’s income, and thus its tax base. Many men of both races would go off to servein the Second World War, where they would develop skills in carpentry and welding and construction, but most of them wouldreturn home to take jobs with the big timber companies that had begun buying up great chunks of woodlands, doing the samebackbreaking work as before, but this time with a salary and benefits. For the women, in this booming postwar world, therewere dull jobs in windowless mills or as clerks and waitresses in the towns of Monroeville and Atmore and Bay Minette.

Forget amenities. Lacking any sort of political clout due to its sparse population, the northern end of Baldwin County wasthe last to get such necessities as paved roads, electricity, telephones, even county water. Most of that came in the earlyforties—especially the paving of Highway 59, needed as a pipeline to haul turpentine and lumber to Mobile in the war effort—butthen all of that stopped, once the war had ended, and the communities of Tensaw and Blacksher and Little River were abandonedduring a period of unprecedented growth through the rest of the nation. The interstate connecting Montgomery and Mobile waslaid out some thirty miles away. Oil was discovered near Atmore and Monroeville—oil in the cotton fields!—but not in BaldwinCounty. That neck of the woods had received none of the basic services that most American taxpayers had come to expect duringthis, the American Century: schools, libraries, town halls, playgrounds, small factories, white-collar jobs of any kind. Theyoung left as soon as they could get a driver s license and wheels, leaving behind their parents and grandparents to scrapealong on whatever savings they might have or on government checks of all sorts. About the only outsiders who knew much aboutthat part of Baldwin County were the lawmen who responded to outbreaks of random violence, the loggers who came to haul thelumber away, the paramedics who carried off the sick and the dead, and the sportsmen who came in from the towns and cities to hunt or fishor simply escape civilization by holing up in their getaway cabins or trailers on streams and ponds in the deep woods, wherebullfrogs and cicadas and foraging wild animals ruled the night.

ONCE HIGHWAY 59 has cleared the blinking caution light at Tensaw, the turnoff for the sad remains of the pinepole fort where the CreekMassacre occurred nearly two centuries ago, it begins an undulating roll northward toward the bridge over the Little Riverthat marks the Baldwin and Monroe County line thirteen miles away. There is little to distract the motorist except road signsriddled by gunshot and fervent evangelical warnings hand-lettered on scraps of tin or lumber nailed to pine trees (HE THAT BELIEVETH NOT IS CONDEMNED ALREADY and REPENT OR BURN IN HELL), but it is, nonetheless, a perilous road as it twists and rises into woods thick with orderly rows of pine planted for harvest.Deer are everywhere, likely to bolt across the road at any moment; and vultures, picking over flattened armadillos and rabbitsand squirrels and other hapless roadkill; and, out of nowhere, somebody riding a horse along the shoulder of the road. Mosttreacherous of all, though, are the ferocious logging trucks, Peterbilts and Freightliners and Macks, big mothers, belching smoke and changing gears, careening wildly, their ragged loads swaying behind, stirring the dust and flutteringthe leaves as they hurtle on a pell-mell rush to the nearest lumberyard.

Finally, three miles south of the river bridge, the last stop in Baldwin County, there is the community of Little River. Asthey say of the thousands of little black-dot hamlets spread across the vast American outback, nobody goes there without apurpose; and on the cusp of a new century, in the summer of 1997, Little River had taken on the feel and look of a Lost Colony.The nearest Baldwin County schools were thirty-seven miles away, by yellow school bus, in Bay Minette (although high schoolershad the option of attending J. U. Blacksher High in Uriah, seventeen miles up Highway 59 in Monroe County); the nearest doctors and dentists and full-service grocery stores nearly an hour’s drive; the one remaining moviehouse twenty-two miles off in Atmore; the only public diners between Stockton and Uriah a pair of catfish-and-hamburger eateriesopen mainly on weekends, when the hunters and fishermen came around. The only jobs in the immediate area involved loggingor clerking at the convenience and package liquor stores out on the road. The only time the residents of the community evercame together as a body, it seemed, was in the early afternoon of the first and third days of each month, when the governmentchecks arrived, bringing swarms of old or disabled people to the gravel parking lot of the post office, a whitewashed fifteen-by-thirty-footcinder-block affair squatting beside the road under a scraggly grove of trees. It sat next to the only place that could becalled a community center in all of Little River, except perhaps for the boat launch at Dixie Landing on the Alabama River:Ferguson’s Grocery, a combination country store and gas station where one might cash a check or buy limited groceries or makea call from a pay phone or simply catch up on the gossip.

Little River was on the earliest maps of the area, due to its post office and its proximity to the boat landing, but its stutteringgrowth has been haphazard at best. Now there are only two paved roads spinning off of Highway 59—the four-mile Dixie LandingRoad, leading to the boat launch, and a stretch named Gantt Road that turns to dirt and winds into the woods after about amile or so—and all of the other thoroughfares, if they can be called such, are widened old logging trails or newly bulldozedroads named after current or past families of some note: Couglan, Phillips, Boone, Cumbie, Earle, Gantt, Haywood, Benjamin.The lines separating the communities of Ten-saw, Blacksher, Little River, and Chrysler are blurred, but the population ofwhat is known as Little River is generally agreed to be about two hundred, spread over an area of some fifty square milesof swamps and bogs and hummocks and tangled woods and wandering streams.

The populace is a Faulknerian huddle of fairly exotic pro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• PROLOGUE A Spin in the Country
• PART ONE The Heart of a Distant Forest
• ONE Lost Colony
• TWO Peanut
• THREE The Preacher
• FOUR A Hard Life
• FIVE Trouble
• PART TWO A World on Fire
• SIX Disturbing the Peace
• SEVEN Wild in the Woods
• EIGHT Five Kids
• NINE Cleanup
• TEN Country Goes to Town
• ELEVEN Lives Suspended
• PART THREE Long Hot Summer
• TWELVE Dog Days
• THIRTEEN Boones Everywhere
• FOURTEEN Brother Thomas
• FIFTEEN Mom
• SIXTEEN Shootout at Butterfork Hill
• SEVENTEEN It Takes a Village
• EIGHTEEN Murray January
• NINETEEN Deliverance
• EPILOGUEN o Church Today