XXXIV

A deep examination of the records might reveal that Branse Havelock may indeed have been a prince of the Greek blood, and not just of the planter elite of Athens. He understood the Havelocks first arrived in Limestone County by way of South Carolina. His great grandfather, James Havelock, fought against his own kin at Kings Mountain, then he killed Redcoats at Cowpens. This was during America's first civil war, which was the Revolution. James Havelock settled over the Appalachians after the war where he was given a bounty of land next to Cane Creek near Petersburg, Tennessee. That is how the Havelocks first arrived in the Nickajack, before Branse's own grandfather resettled in Limestone County.

Numerous Havelocks remained in South Carolina where they had settled up the backcountry as far back as the Great Buck War against the Yamassee Confederation. This was years before the Revolution. South Carolina was still a young colony. Charleston itself was threatened with being overrun by Indians. The frontier was ravaged by the Confederation. Plantations were burned, settlers and slaves were murdered. It took a tough and ruthless sort of settler to push out from the city burning Indian villages, slaughtering all males and enslaving the rest. When they had wiped out the natives, they would hunt out the skin of deer from the countryside and move on, for this war was about the almight "Buck," from which we derive the slang. These were the Havelocks, whose kin pushed the frontiers of white South Carolina deep into the interior in a war of annihilation.

The mysterious origins of the Havelocks, however, reaches even further into the mists of time. The name first appears as the Englishization of Paleologos, affixed to a petition for settlement submitted from Barbados to the Lords Proprietor of the Province of Carolina. The colony of Carolina itself was granted by King Charles Stuart I to the Lords Proprietor, which was a roll call of Royalist supporters of the King against Parliament. Most of the settlers were induced to resettle from the English island colony of Barbados by way of tax exemptions and generous land grants.

Anthony Havelock was born Anthony Paleologos, the illegitimate son of Ferdinand Paleologos, a Royalist cavalier who fled to Barbados to avoid Parliament's executioner. His mother was rumored to be a Portuguese mulatto and a slave of the Paleologos estate. Ferdinand himself was known as the "Greek Prince of Cornwall," for the Paleologos had been the last imperial dynasty of the Eastern Romans, known as the Byzantines. Ferdinand's ancestors had come to England by way of Italy where the imperial kin and kith had resettled after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Perhaps no place in the history of slavery did that vile institution manifest greater evils than in Barbados of the mid 17th century. The first plantations were worked by white indentured servants, mostly Irish whose debt contracts were transferrable and effectively made them white slaves. The European was wholly unconditioned to the pestilential tropics of its environs. Both the plantation proprietors and their white slaves died in droves from diseases as they hew indigo and tobacco from the rich volcanic loam. If these indentured servants survived their five year contract, they were given a 'freedom due' worth ten pounds in goods and some land.

As unpropitious as these prospects may seem, many took it. The need for labor soared, so the growing Barbadian elite contracted privateers to prowl the Atlantic looking to impress whites to work on the plantations. They included Ferdinand Paleologos's son and Anthony's half-brother Thomas, who raided the Caribbean aboard the privateer Charles II. In the years before the 1650's, two-thirds of all whites from the British Isles travelling to the Americas were settling into Barbados, voluntarily or involuntarily. The island quickly overcrowded in conditions that seemed like they couldn't get worse. But they did, and for a whole new class of arrival.

Sugar cane was introduced to Barbados in 1640 by a band of Sephardic Jews from Dutch Brazil and it completely swept the island over. It ushered in an agricultural and labor revolution, and not for the better. Because of the intensive labor required to cultivate and refine sugar, the Barbadians began to import slaves by the tens of thousands. African slaves were hardier than white indentured servants. They could survive the tropical climate better. They were also less inclined towards the inconvenient individuality by being completely uninformed about the culture and society into which they were thrust.

Barbados had grown into one of the most densely populated places in the Western Hemisphere. Thousands were still dying in droves, even the hardy African slaves, but the Dutch slave ships still anchored off shore to deliver more human cargo. They arrived in the most wretched conditions and were sold by the hundreds at the dockside slave markets. The densely cultivated island was intersected by straight roads where tudor-style plantation homes were hedged like the English countryside. Each held dark secrets like mass graves and slaves being whipped to death, hung, or even boiled alive for their intransigence. Meanwhile, the white Barbadian elite held social court among themselves. A portrait of Ferdinand Paleologos himself shows him dressed in a ruffed damask doublet and silk trunkhoses wearing a black velvet capotain, still very Elizabethan in habit.

Anthony Paleologos himself grew into a small landholder of 100 acres and twenty slaves until he was bought out by a Consortium of English investors. That is when he decided to emigrate to the Province of the Carolinas, which was being solicited by the Lords Proprietor. And as he prepared to sail aboard the galleon bound for the settlement of Charleston, he parted from his father for the last time. He had neverminded his mulatto heritage. The cruelty of Barbadian Master had known no color, but his father impressed upon him to keep it a secret unto the grave, then pressed into his hand a ring.

Inset into the bezel of the ring was a red jade. Inscribed upon it were the Greek letters Alpha and Kappa. Anthony was confused and asked his father about it. It stood for Adelphon Kuklos. It was an ancient crusading order of the Eastern Roman Empire, sworn in kanly, or Turkish for blood revenge, against the black Mamluks of Egypt. Its sinister imprecations reach back into the clouded annals of time. White Christians against Black Moslems. Anthony did not know what to think about all this. He did not know any Moslems but for the few that crewed his half-brother's ship. But he certainly knew a lot of blacks. And so he kept this ring and brought it with him to the Province of the Carolinas where its secrets were related down the Havelock line, and it infused them with a cursed fury, first against the Yamasee, and then again against the race upon which their family was cursed to loathe.