9. ‘Our Black Friends’

I must turn again to the subject of race. These people, my direct forebears, lived their lives in the Deep South. They witnessed emancipation, Reconstruction’s attempt to produce racial equity, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the dismantling of Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow. These were important events in American history, events that still shape our own times, and the Davises were in the front row if not, far as I can tell, on the front lines.

Under Reconstruction, federal authorities asserted control over Arkansas and other former Confederate states. Former Confederate leaders were restricted from public office. Aid, opportunities and rights were granted to emancipated slaves, called freedmen, as a new African-American society took shape. The counter-reaction was swift and violent. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized black communities, Republicans and Union sympathizers. Its first grand wizard was ex-Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who led Confederate troops to battle down the road in front of Sarah Storey’s house. The Klan was suppressed in the early 1870s (thanks to President Grant), though white supremacist vigilantism never fully went away, and blacks were elected to office across the South, mostly as Republicans. But northern politicians grew tired of managing unruly southerners, and Reconstruction was killed by politics in the disputed election of 1876. White Democrats regained control of state legislatures and enacted what came to called “Jim Crow” laws reversing the gains blacks had made since emancipation. 

We can only guess how these events played out on Davis Row, but we know something of what was going on in the neighborhood. The Klan was active in Drew County up to 1875, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas reports. Following violence and voter intimidation during the 1868 election – at least 200 Klan murders, by one account – Gov. Powell Clayton, a former Union general elected by Republicans, declared martial law in Drew and 13 other counties and negotiated changes. “Four prominent Drew County citizens met with Governor Clayton and offered to form a bipartisan “home guard” to keep peace in the county,” the encyclopedia says. “Clayton agreed. Members of the militia and the home guard formed a military commission that tried, convicted, and executed one local Klansman for murdering a deputy sheriff and a black man. Clayton revoked martial law in southeastern Arkansas in February 1869.”

The history section on the Monticello’s official homepage puts a positive spin on the city’s Reconstruction strife: “Officials and citizens reached an agreement that whites would continue serving as county officials and African Americans would be elected representatives. Two prominent black citizens, Curl Trotter and Lynn L. Brooks, are given credit for helping ease the tension by using their influence with members of their race.”

In fact, I can find just one black elected to the state legislature from Drew County: Edward Allen Fulton, who had been enslaved in Missouri and was an abolitionist newspaper publisher in Chicago, was a Republican elected to the state House of Representatives in 1871. He was the first, and last. The Legislature created a literacy test for voting in 1891 and a poll tax in 1893. In just two years, the black vote dropped from 71 percent to 38 percent. No African-American legislators served in the Arkansas General Assembly from 1893 to 1973.

Hattie Bell Davis Jackson gives a more personal view of race relations in the Jim Crow South in a chapter in the brown loose-leaf notebook titled “Our Black Friends.” For context, this is an elderly white woman, who spent her life in Arkansas and Mississippi, remembering her childhood in the 1890s. She probably wrote (or dictated) this chapter in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when the Civil Rights Movement was rattling the South. You may hear defensiveness, pride and racism in these words. I can’t vouch for Hattie Bell’s accuracy or her attitudes; I didn’t know her. Hers is a view through a particular window, smudged by time and limited in scope, that may tell us something useful about where we’ve come from.

 “Friendships and good business relations always existed between the Davises and negroes,” she writes. In the wake of emancipation, and in the absence of post-war land reform, slavery was replaced by share-cropping. “Uncle John Traylor and Aunt Nora were tenants on Calvin Grier Davis’ farm,” Hattie Bell writes, recalling that her father paid his tenants once a year, after the cotton was picked, in silver and gold coins, filling Uncle John’s hat. Uncle Spencer Bearman owned land adjoining the Davises. When Calvin Grier bought a slice of land from him, he learned that Aunt Millie, mother of his grown children, wasn’t legally Spencer’s wife. Grier, a justice of the peace, married them on the spot so they could sign their land away. Were these fair deals and “good business relations”? You’d have to ask the Traylors. But there was nothing fair about the sharecropping system.

As for the Bearmans, “Many years afterward, little Davis children, with their chums visited Aunt Millie, sitting on the veranda of her log house, her bonnet folded crosswise on her head. She would fill their flour sacks with apples, and give them a drink from the well in her long handled gourd. Such friends,” Hattie Bell writes. “The word segregation was unknown then.

“Aunt Liza was a friend to those little Davises, too.” She had no teeth and wooly hair white as cotton. “She claimed to be over 100, but she did not know it in years. Her answer always was, ‘I was a grown nigger when the stars fell.’ (Halley’s Comet, about 1836 or 1837).” Aunt Liza was strict. “She would brook no sass nor irreverence as she saw it. She had more children and grandchildren than she could name, and she helped give them fantastic names. She had a grandson named “Him ‘feet ‘mart ‘dood Putty chil’ Gwo-man Gwo-chil’. They called him ‘Dude.’ Aunt Liza’s daughter was named “Limestone Shoulderfield Alabama Beauty-Spot Imtemtation Touch-me-not Elizabetha Queen. They (we all) called her ‘Nigger’ and she liked it.”

There’s that word again. It’s not one I’d use outside of quotation marks, but I wouldn’t feel right pretending it wasn’t in common use 100 years ago.

Hattie Bell’s childhood sounds like a scene from a Disney movie about the Old South. “When the farmhands came in in the evening we waylayed Uncle Joe. ‘Tell us a tale about Mr. Turtle, Mr. Raccoon, or the terrapin.’ All the time children were climbing on Uncle Joe’s knees. Our prime favorite we always saved for last was ‘Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.’ ‘And what next, Uncle Joe?’ He always ended with, ‘I lef’ bout that time.’” I remember my Aunt Mame telling me the same story, generations later.

Hattie Bell remembers “Aunt Lou,” born two years before emancipation, who often stopped by after breakfast, hoping there was still coffee in the pot. She remembers Queen, who was her “first friend” when she married and moved to Mississippi. Queen did laundry and other chores for Hattie, more for barter than cash, especially during the Depression. Hattie made clothes for Queen. Hattie made a frilly pink dress for Lougenia, Queen’s daughter, but Lougenia took sick and died before she could wear it. Queen came to Hattie for a white dress to bury her in, declaring she wouldn’t let Lougenia “rise in pink.”

Hattie Bell and her husband, Bob, had a hired hand whose name was Arthur Lee but everyone called him Foot. Bob said Foot was “the best hand, most profitable hand he ever had, in spite of his ways. Foot did not know how old he was, couldn’t read or write.” Bob paid Foot in cash each Saturday noon and Foot headed to town. “The Saturday night things were not good for Foot,” Hattie writes. “I told Bob if he would not advance him that money there could be no shooting craps and tea, and then the trip to jail to pay him out the next day. Foot would come home that day and sober. Bob said ‘now, now. You must leave that to me. His little Saturday night spree is his outlet. Foot will be fine come Monday morning.”

“The love of whites and blacks is based on an honest mutual understanding,” She writes. I don’t know about that. I wish I had the memoirs of Foot and Queen for comparison.

But I’m struck again by the intimacy that existed between black and whites back then, especially between children and their caregivers. “In those days most little white children in our circle of acquaintance had a ‘black mammy,’” Mame Davis (Mabel Boyd Davis Jr., born in 1915) writes in her memoir. “My mammy was Aunt Liney, and I loved her dearly.” After Queen died, Hattie Bell’s children loved Lula May and Lizzie, and she continued to make dresses for the children of her servants. She lists family members and the women who helped raise them. The children, she says, “were devoted to their family, but they always preferred black arms around them.”

“A special bond of love exists that no amount of racial disturbance can effect,” Hattie Bell writes. That special bond was real, no doubt, just as a farmer can feel a special bond with his cow, a child with her dog. They may even call it love, but that’s not the same as a bond between equals.