XXXIX

Drake Shoney treated all his friends with airish disdain, even ones he was indebted to. So it was that one of his creditors was Linus Poteat, to whom he owed a gambling debt on account of a busted flush. These two kept low when the Yankees occupied Athens, for they had both been sponsors to the would-be ironclad, The Gar. They frequented Kingpin Cotter's turf where they played cards and gazed askance at Blanche Cotter's cleavage. This distraction had cost Drake Shoney a good sum, to which he pledged a note of $500 to Linus Poteat.

Goddamit why you gotta bother me about that money again, Linus? I said I'm good for it. I just gotta rake in this corn. Interest? Did you read the note? It says interest free. You signed it. I read it to you, you indolent cretin. Learn to read.

Linus looked sad, except he wasn't sober, and was somnambulate. He put the promissory note he couldn't read back into his pocket.

And so the Yankee occupation lifted in late '62, and Drake sold his late corn on a contract of $1,500 in Confederate bonds to General Bragg's agents in order to feed the Army of Tennessee, which was soon to occupy the Nickajack around Shelbyville. No sooner had he received this perceived windfall when he was also handed his conscription notice. He accepted it with confusion, his mouth open. Drafted? Me? But, but...

He went home and after a spell of drinking began to scheme a way out. He had not the specie to buy a substitute. He had $1,500 in Confederate bonds, which was merely an annuity. He couldn't afford to sell a slave. Elzey, his creole overseer, wouldn't have it. He'd never hear the end of it from her. She was already upset he had sold the early corn.

And so at another bender at Kingpin Cotter's flatboat, Drake Shoney threw his arms around his friend Linus Poteat, who was catfishing next to a demijohn.

Linus, before you get drafted, what do you say I pay you $1,000 to go as a substitute for me? That's a lot of money! The going rate for a substitute is half that. I'm telling you, this is the way to go. If you're going to have to fight, you might as well get paid a bounty for it. Am I right? Look here. Drake held out a slip of paper. He didn't even have the bonds in hand, just a scrip signed by General Bragg's agent transferring ownership of the bonds. For something worthless to begin with, this looked altogether suspect. But it would relieve $500 in gambling debt and buy Drake out of the war.

Linus Poteat, who was a doleful drunkard and a dullard, was convinced at length to take the deal. And before Linus could sober up, Drake rode into town in his chaise with his arm around his friend, sharing a flask and waving cigars singing Buffalo Gals. They rode straight to the Limestone County Board of Enrollment where, up until Linus Poteat affixed his signature of an "X” on his army papers, Drake never removed his arm from around Linus. This done, Drake signed over the scrip to Linus Poteat, who was now richer than he ever had been in his life. Or so he thought.

Its an annuity, Linus! They pay you every month, so you don't spend it all at once, you fool! Lord knows you'd lose it all at the table anyway!

In fact, it paid nothing. At length, General Bragg had been turned out of the Nickajack by the brilliant machinations of General Rosencrans and was falling back into Georgia. The Yankees reoccupied the Nickajack. In theory the payments and interest for Linus Poteat's bonds were accruing on a ledger book in Richmond, Virginia, but that was about the extent of it. Meanwhile, his soldiering potential was judged so abysmal that he was sent with an allotment of dunces to the Trans-Mississippi, which was to say Louisiana. His skills as a boiler mechanic, however, were at least passable, and he was thus assigned to the CSS Queen of the West, which had just been captured from the Yankees on the Red River. It was the third year of the war.

XXVI

Much has been said of the first white settlers of the Nickajack such as John Hunt and John Ditto and the Criners of Hurricane Valley, who arrived in present day Madison County in the dawning years of the 19th century. They were squatters all on Cherokee lands that they anticipated would be opened up to settlement. And so they were by the Treaties of Tellico, except those Cherokee lands which overlapped Chickasaw claims along the Elk River in Limestone County. That is where, in the years before John Hunt settled on the Big Spring, that a desperate band of derelicts hove their makeshift flatboats alongside Buck Island, at the great bend of the Elk in northwest Limestone County .

 
They were eight families led by William Penn Redus, who was a lapsed Quaker, and whose relations survive widely in Limestone County still today, both black and white. Among them also was Abner Stockwell Shoney and a woman whose name is lost to history but apparently he hadn't married anyway. They formed a cult-like compact and fashioned flatboats to carry them down the Tennessee River from Knoxville past Ross's Landing and through the Tennessee Gorge. They drifted down into the Cherokee lands known as the Nickajack and, finding the mouth of a rich tributary, steered themselves up that course into the uplands of the Highland Rim.

 
They arrived at an island and tied their flatboats into a floating village. In those days great elk still roamed the Nickajack, and Abner Shoney had slain one with his long rifle as it forded the river across the island, which was thereafter named Buck Island on the river thereafter named the Elk. They made contact with their Chickasaw neighbors, who were irate that an elk had been taken on the island, which was sacred burial ground. They cursed Abner Shoney and all his progeny and would thereafter raid the squatter settlement at Buck Island during the night, rustling livestock and leaving bad omens such as skinned rabbits. The squatters survived mainly by fishing and growing crops in the Indian fashion with stalks of corn intertwined with beans and crowded with peas and squash.

 
Bitter complaints by the Chickasaw to their agent about these squatters brought federal intervention in the form of a company of soldiers from the 7th Infantry Regiment, who marched overland from the Hiwasee to construct Fort Hampton on the Elk River. They commenced to remove the Buck Island squatters from their settlement further east into undisputed Madison County in a relocation settlement called Barkville for the bark which were clasped to its shanty structures. And so they were uprooted, and they did not return until the Chickasaw did relinquish their lands sometime thereafter. Abner Shoney, however, refused to give up his claim crying that "there is just one redskin for every 10,000 acres." To avoid removal, he went native into the wilds of the upcountry, which was not even part of the United States at the time. His lady companion unsurprisingly falls off the record. He survived by shooting for birds and pelts and elk. He kept the great rack of the elk he first brought down on Buck Island and mounted it over the mantle of the dogtrot house he built near today's Leggtown.

 
As the Natchez Trace was surveyed up the northwest corner of Alabama, the Chickasaw finally decided to sell their land before it was taken from them. Limestone County was now opened up along all points west and south of the Tennessee River. When William Penn Redus and the other squatters returned to Buck Island, they found Abner Shoney had taken a Chickasaw squaw as his next companion and had survived on pemican and dried fish and bird flesh during two hard winters.

 
Abner Shoney used his old Chickasaw relations to open a trade in liquor and dry goods from a post on Buck Island, for the Chickasaw did not vacate the lands they relinquished, but had only settled on farms like white settlers had. The Chickasaw, however, did not give up their temperamental ways. When the unscrupulous Abner Shoney was caught cutting his liquor and overcharging his customers, a pair of Chickasaw braves accosted him at his post. A scuffle erupted, and Abner was pinned to the ground and scalped by the braves, who then robbed him and stole his rifle. Abner survived the scalping and carried the disfigurement the rest of the days. And so Abner Shoney eventually built up his farm starting with 20 acres at Leggtown and purchased his first slave from Nashville. There he gave birth to a one Cawthorp Shoney, a man of considerably less intrepidity as his forebear, and whose mother remained unknown or unknowable.

XVIII

For someone who had been such a vocal proponent of secession, Drake Shoney went to extraordinary lengths to avoid actually fighting for it. When the first conscription act was passed, he placed an entreaty in the paper to hire a substitute. He could scarcely afford one. Thankfully, Linus Poteat was broke after the debacle of the Gar and Drake hired him at a discount in forbearance of his gambling debts. Later, when the hiring of substitutes was abolished, the Confederate government left an exemption from conscription for any white male who owned twenty or more slaves. So Drake went even further into debt and purchased two slaves bringing his total to twenty.

Esmerelda had her hands full as the overseer of Gloaming Birch. Drake seemed to have very little interest in the running of his plantation. He left almost all day-to-day management to her. She did well enough. She learned her trade at Davis Bend under the legendary Ben Montgomery, the slave who managed the Hurricane plantation and its five-thousand acres. Each year she sold the cotton harvest, she brought in tidy profits for her master. So she was frustrated that Gloaming Birch still did not prosper, but it was only a point of personal pride. Drake was actually a generous if flippant master. He was munificent everywhere with his finances. Whatever she needed to improve the living conditions of the estate's slaves, he showed a dismissive largesse. It was not out of benignity, for Esmerelda had long come to the realization that Drake Shoney was just an a**hole.

Fine! Fine! Elzey. You're just about getting on my goddam nerves now. Go and get you and your darky friends instruments then. I don't give a damn. Besides, I'm tired of hearing y'all beating those gourds and s**t in my backyard. You sound like a bunch of mooks out there. And when you get back from town bring me some tobacco. Oh, and if they got some orange juice I need some for my cocktails. And you can use the change to buy you and your darky pals some gum. Just get yer s**t done before you go. Now go on. Get out of here. And don't let me forget to sign your negro papers before you go! 

So she bought instruments and the slaves of Gloaming Birch learned to pick tunes and sing ditties and put their slave spirituals on the strings. With so many slaves working so few acres they had plenty of time on their hands. On cool autumn evenings, they'd play music around the fire like Jimmy Get Your Hoe Cake Done and Rose of Alabama.  Drake was often surrounded by a milieu of bogtrotters, mudsills and low downers he held in his social thrall. They'd sit on Drake's porch and listen to the music and get roaring drunk into the night playing cards and talking about hunting.

Meanwhile Gloaming Birch was in dire financial straits. Drake searched the papers for a Southern victory that would remove the yolk of his Northern creditors. When the Yankees occupied Athens in the Spring of '62, he never went into town.  He grew reclusive and spent more time hunting and fishing and neglecting the estate.  When the Greeks started selling cotton up North during the occupation, he told Esmerelda to change the crop over to corn. He understood he could make more in Confederate dollars selling corn, but did not understand that inflation rendered higher revenues in that currency meaningless.  

None of this concerned Esmerelda. With the war she knew slavery was on its way out.  She could have fled Drake long ago, but she stayed with him.  Besides, the corn he now grew made it even easier to smuggle fugitive slaves through his fields.  She had been running them under Drake's nose for years.  

VIII

Esmerelda Laquina Barrilleaux was sold upriver in the Memphis slave market to a one Drake Shoney of Limestone County, Ala. for $1,200 and a chestnut gelding to boot. The advertising bill said she was a marabou, which sounded creole and exotic, but only meant she had some white blood in her. That was nothing unusual even in those days. What interested Drake, however, was her experience in the creole-style of labor management. He interviewed her and purchased her and, curiously, rode with her in the same train carriage back to Limestone County.

 
Drake Shoney planted 150 acres at Gloaming Birch with eighteen slaves. He wasn't a Greek. His family was of the smaller yeomanry of the north County and the bottomlands. They had come from a Whig tradition and were strident against secession, all except Drake. He had hoped to ghost his Northern creditors by voting for it. He was mortgaged to the hilt. In a fit of resignation, he had to admit he had no idea what he was doing. He was just a sportsman, a playboy. The plantation he inherited from his mother was more than he could handle. He had learned he could save money by buying a creole overseer rather than hiring a white one, hence the black woman who sat uncomfortably beside him. It began to draw the ire of other white passengers.

 
A sheepish conductor approached. Sir, you can't have your negro in this carriage. Oh, he replied? But she's got a lot of white in her! Don't you Elzey (Elzey?). Here I got her receipt. Can’t you see she’s high yeller? Drake showed the conducter, pointing to where it was scrawled she was a “marabou.” See, he snapped smugly? She's creole, as if to impress. At any rate, the conductor let them be so as not to be rude to the gentleman. Drake Shoney never minded the glare of vitriol from the others. He went on reading his papers, tipping a flask dramatically and often until he had passed out. Elzey, uncertain of her future, rubbed the stones which lined her grigri bag and prayed to Blanc Dani.

V

The Darlings of Strangetown all loved “Royal Bill” Marmaduke, Sheriff of Limestone County. The man was a living legend, and a deep thorn in the side of the Greeks. He was a Republican. Among their councils on the Hill they sneered him as a scallawag, traitor to his class, traitor to his race. But he was a war hero. He swore his oath to the Confederacy in Huntsville, Alabama and mustered into the 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. He fought under Fighting Joe Wheeler at Shiloh with the 19th Alabama, and rode as a guerilla fighter with his friend Frank Gurley, who became Sheriff of Madison County. When John Bell Hood invaded Tennessee in the winter of ’64, he came down out of Hurricane Valley to fight with the 19th Alabama one last time. When he mustered back in, there wasn’t anybody left he knew. And when he fought at Franklin, he lost all the new friends he’d made too. He was a changed man after all that. But that’s a whole another story.

 
He ran on the Republican ticket, which was roundly viewed with cynicism by his fellow Greeks and suspicion by Strangetown. Maw Possum brought in the colored vote and helped elect Limestone County’s first Republican. Royal Bill ran down the Klan’s operations out of Dogwood Flats while getting his take out of Strangetown’s tables. The Klan was bad enough. There were a lot of people coming home from the war with everything gone, and then being told it’s the negro’s fault, it’s the Yankees’ fault. They’re told that they might have lost everything, but at least they are still white and they should be grateful. And people actually believed that stuff and joined the Klan because they just ate it up. The Klan’s problem was that most of them were stupid, but they provided a pool of useful idiots for the real enemy of Strangetown.

Adelphon Kuklos was a secret society of absolute white terrorists. They were a committed few willing to do violence on their fellow man for a white world. No one knew who its members were. Rumors and gossip abound about the AK. They controlled the Klan from the shadows, and possibly the Greeks themselves. All anyone really knew is that Royal Bill Marmaduke shot one of them dead saving the life of Drake Shoney down in Belle Mina. The Adelphon Kuklos had strung Shoney up by the noose when Royal Bill pulled out his Navy Colt and shot down a figure in a scarlet robe as the others fled. No one recognized the man who Royal Bill shot, and the investigation into this curious episode is a story for another time.
After that, Royal Bill grew beloved in Strangetown. He had taken on the terrorists himself. His popularity snowballed from there. He ran parades and rodeos and raced wagons around the track. The crowds in Strangetown cheered Royal Bill who rode along like a king on his wagon. He became a powerful political force that was resented by the Greeks, admired by The Major, and profitable to Maw Possum.

I

I'm reminded of some old stories in chatting with my friend Charles Williams, whose daddy was longtime mayor of Athens and an old fox of politicking.

 
If you grew up in Limestone County like I did, then you might have heard the story of the old rebel ironclad called The Gar that protected these parts of the Tennessee River from Grant's army. She was sheltered from the Yankee gunboats by the Muscle Shoals and she was to prowl as she pleased up and down the river these parts. She was financed by Drake Shoney, a sesech cotton planter from Athens and the county's deadliest duck hunter, who said to hell with the Union and bought a steam scow from the pilot Linus Poteat, who said to hell with the Union too.

 
Rumors of the ironclad's construction spread and were greatly exaggerated by the Yankee press. It was said Grant couldn't cross the River here because as long as The Gar was afloat, it could chop his ferryboats to matchsticks with its guns. So he had to swing his army west and cross the Tennessee above the Shoals at a place now called Shiloh, where The Gar could not molest his crossing.

Folks from all over county came down in their buggies to Buelah Bay where she was cheerfully christened beside the tall grasses. For long days work was done by volunteers while the ladies picnicked. She wasn't but thirty foot long. They lashed her with sheets of tin, and all bits of ploughshares and gin work, cast iron cookery and lumber ties. When the folks of Limestone County had finished with her, The Gar looked like some shaggy metallic duck blind, or perhaps a floating doodlebug.

 
At any rate, she carried a single gun cast crooked from the bell of Buelah Land Apostolic Church, which was donated by the fire eating preacher Hieronymus Rhett, who believe in predestiny and thought all his congregation was going to hell anyhow. He had done the math on 144,000 and shuttered his church doors to fight Yankees. The Gar's single boiler doubled as a still with which Linus Poteat, who was a notorious lush, mixed powerful and melodious elixirs. Such were the proclivities of vice that were natural to both Shoney and Poteat that they took The Gar out one night to fish off Lucy's Branch, shooting birds and taking to their cups. What was supposed to be one night out catfishing turned into a three day drunken bender during which the great Battle of Shiloh was fought up the way while The Gar mysteriously burned down to the waterline in the Elk River.

 
Drake Shoney and Linus Poteat swam to shore exclaiming it was a boiler explosion that had sunk The Gar. They blamed it on a Yankee gun battery that had set up on the opposite bank, and with which they tussled with their single crooked gun. Most folks in town, though, knew about those two boys when the moon goes full and whiskey gets poured. And so goes the story of the Tennessee River's only ironclad gunboat, built in Limestone County, Ala.