LIV.

The carpenter Jonas Jackson, called Big Jim Crow, was contracted by the preacher known as Swampy Joe to build a new church in Strangetown.  It would be the second such freedman's church in the district, the first being Jessup Floyd's African Methodist Church.  It was to be known as the Chapel of Freedom, and the cost was put up by a parishioner's trust funded by Maw Possum and The Major.  Swampy Joe, whose Christian name was Joseph Greene, was a highly unusual preacher.  

Before Emancipation, he was a slave preacher on Drummond Downs, which was on the Mooresville Road. He had surreptitiously run an invisible church from inside a crumbling gambrel-roofed barn on the outskirts of the plantation. It was partially caved in and grown over with brush and ivy, the rafters sagging with wisteria. And in this crumbling structure he ministered his fellow brothers and sisters into the presence of the Holy Spirit. His church was vaguely of the Baptist tradition. The power of his theology was Freedom, and his brothers and sisters were the Israelites. This was a common theme among most slave churches. What made Joseph Greene's church so unusual was its Hoodoo ritualism.  

At his invisible church, Joseph Greene would throw himself into trances and speak in tongues. He'd call up Ring Shouts and dance bare-chested around the fire, babbling glossolalia and blowing goofer dust from his palm into the faces of his supplicants. He'd charm snakes with fevered hymns and snap chains with his teeth. It was a dazzling spectacle of the Holy Spirit!  It was also provocative to the slaveowning society and placed his life at great risk, but risk it he did as he travelled by night to preach and shout and dance at the various plantations. He'd baptize in the marshes of Limestone Creek where he earned the name Swampy Joe. Now that the war was over, the Chapel of Freedom would become a beacon for all the freed slaves whose Salvation was groomed in the shadow of Swampy Joe. 

Evander Pruitt accompanied Big Jim Crowe to work on the church.  It was his penance for his sins - his recent ones, anyway.  Unlike the traditional gable and steeple of Jessup Floyd's AMC, which was on Strange Street itself, Swampy Joe's church was being built with a thatched hip roof. Keen on the power of symbolism, Swampy Joe had a well dug into the groundwater, and instead of a bucket he hung a bell.  He would ring it on Sundays and his congregants would stand in line as he cast water on them drawn from the well using a gnarled stump of ash wood for an aspergillum. His eyes would lift into his head, and he would cast some benediction, then quote Leviticus or some such, and then open the double doors which revealed a room of split-log pews and a great chest-like structure which doubled as some form of altar.  A grotesque Catholic-like crucifix was hung by hemp at the back end.  

Swampy Joe's performance had tempered somewhat since Emancipation. He slackened somewhat from his Hoodoo roots.  His renowned ministry in the in the County was suddenly challenged by the appearance of another renowned minister. This was Jessup Floyd, who had come by way of a prominent family of New England freemen. He was an educated and well-spoken brother. He had organized congregations of the African Methodist Church among the Low Country Gullah of the Carolina Sea Islands. Now that the war had ended, Jessup Floyd had come to the Nickajack to bring his orthodox brand of social and spiritual enlightenment to the emancipated slaves, who were left bereft with sudden freedom and little more. 

Jessup Floyd always wore a black waistcoat to service with a clerical collar, and his salty beard and gray hair gave him an avuncular air.  In spite of this observant outfit, he had the personal touch. He recounted the possibilities of free labor in devotion to Christ.  He shared the Israelites rejoice of Freedom, and the earnest labor and study of these people to follow in the pathway of the Lord. He dazzled his congregations with photographs of himself in Faneuil Hall in Boston, and shaking hands with Frederick Douglas, and of his free children who were never sold off, and of him standing next to white men, all of them smiling. To freedman this was all quite foreign, but it proved that some form of harmony existed elsewhere when their current post-war world was fraught with violence and tumult. And so Jessup Floyd's flock increased to Swampy Joe's consternation.

But if Jessup Floyd's favorite Gospel was Mark, then Swampy Joe's was John. Whereas Jessup Floyd could recite the Aquinus and Augustine when the assault of logic required it, Swampy Joe could recite Acts and Revelations when the Holy Spirit compelled it. He did it in the fever of what he called the "Gittup." And whereas Jessup Floyd's orthodox Sunday service over the newly emancipated freemen was noted with satisfaction by the Greeks, Swampy Joe's preaching was regarded as bombastic and heathen by the same.

And so the Chapel of Freedom rose from the funky bottoms of Strangetown by the earnest labors of Big Jim Crow and his crew. For his penance, Brother Pruitt helped build the church. He saw no error in the charge. Penance was penance, and Evander Pruitt always paid for his sins - recent ones anyway. Before service, Swampy Joe would slather his hair in pomade and douse his head with water.  In the heat of summer, he would steam and bead water.  His preaching was fevered and fervent. He scooted and shouted and sweated and seethed. What he seethed at was what Lyman Resnick, editor of the Limestone Democrat, was calling the "New Condition." It was not pejorative, but an apt label for the post-war limbo of black-white labor relations. But for Swampy Joe, he proclaimed the New Condition was the freedman's chance to forge a new identity.  The New Condition was a black Israel freed.  And that black Israel meant a new brotherhood nation of freedom, free labor, free choice, free worship, and free expression. When Swampy Joe trifled with sermons preaching land reform and support for the Fifteenth Amendment, his church on Drummond Downs was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan. On the front page of the Limestone Democrat, the arch-conservative Lyman Resnick could scarcely conceal his satisfaction.  

And so Swampy Joe paid homage to Maw Possum, who proffered him a Quark and a Promissory Note for the construction of a new church, smack dab in the middle of Strangetown. And he rode the cars to Huntsville to draw upon her check from the parishioner's trust at the State Bank on Jefferson Street, and returned to Strangetown to place this cash in the hands of Big Jim Crow, who immediately began construction of the Chapel of Freedom. And so it rose on Strange Street, across from Jessup Floyd's AMC. And the music of both churches would rise on Sunday's into the milieu of sound of Strangetown's busy streets. And so it was that the aroma of sound from both temples would compete but was deemed pleasing all the same to the Lord. 

XXI

Guster Ledbetter trusted only two white people in his life, and one of them was dead. The rest of them he could take or leave. He thought about this as he thumbed through his copy of the Holy Bible and found the verse in 1 Corinthians.

For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.

He had a lot of trouble with that one.

Early in the war his slave quarters had been aswirl with rumors that the Yankees had just marched into Limestone County and occupied Athens. Does that mean we're free? Apparently not since the Yankees didn't seem eager to free anybody. They ended up pillaging the town instead. The rumor now was that they were raping slaves. What kind of liberator was this? Then the Emancipation Proclamation came and went and still there wasn't any freedom. Can we leave now? Is someone supposed to come and get us? Tired of waiting, he fled Cowford Plantation with the aide of Maw Possum. Her underground railroad ran up the creeks and bottomlands into Limestone County's interior towards freedom - Strangetown contraband camp.

Strangetown was then a filthy bottomland crowded with tents. Brothers and sisters were sleeping out in the open. Everyone was sick and coughing and wearing masks fashioned from kerchiefs. Typhoid and dysentery were rife. It was nothing short of an open air refugee camp. The Yankees were completely apathetic. Worse yet, they kept everyone under guard in Strangetown so as not to antagonize the very white people on the Hill who kept them as slaves. What the hell? Guster's mistrust of white people deepened.

They weren't completely helpless. There were teachers and missionaries. They seemed sincere, especially Mary Fletcher Wells, who was white and taught him to read and found him 'oh! so bright!' There was also Brother Jessup Floyd, a black preacher from Boston who preached to the freedman in the Sea Islands. He warmed to Brother Floyd and his Christian ministry, but he kept back a devilish secret. With Mrs. Wells, however, he was hesitant. The only white woman he interacted with was Mrs. Zeigler, who was a complete b***h to her slaves. But Mrs. Wells was persistent, and she loved everything she could do for him, and he sensed it.
Things took a bad turn when he was approached by his old master, Mr. Zeigler , who held a rag dramatically to his face as he walked Strangetown contraband camp looking for his fugitive slaves. He had the Yankees apprehend Guster. His arrest was greatly protested by Mrs. Wells, who sought the assistance of other sympathetic whites around her. Only one white man stepped forward in his defense. His name was Abraham Stone.

The rub was that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in regions in the South in open rebellion against the Union. Since Limestone County was occupied by the Union and rather pacified after a good pillaging, Guster's master argued his property was not beholden to Mr. Lincoln's proclamation. Rather than being consigned to his master, Guster was jailed instead until the case could be decided. He was extraordinarily bitter about this.

Abraham Stone had come to Limestone County from Maryland as a carpetbagger and established a practice on Market Street where he turned a tidy profit from representing drunk Yankee soldiers in civil court. He used to pass the slave markets of the Baltimore every day on the way to his clerkship. They disgusted him. So he gave pro bono legal work to the freedman. When Guster was apprehended and threatened to be dragged back into human bondage, Abraham acted on his moral instincts. He immediately walked to Limestone County courthouse and obtained a stay. The judge agreed.

Abraham Stone felt he had met God's calling in securing the freedom of this one man, Guster Ledbetter. In a sensational case followed by the Yankee press, Mr. Stone was jostled between the civil and military courts until he made the long trek to Washington D.C. by the cars. He waited in a long line of petitioners for six hours at the White House before he was ushered into the presence of Mr. Lincoln. After stating Guster Ledbetter's case, Mr. Lincoln related the parable of the Frog Who Wished for a King and drafted an order declaring the Limestone County subject to the Emancipation Proclamation. When Abraham Stone returned to Limestone County, he was met with cheers in Strangetown. The Darlings of Strangetown were now free!

Guster Ledbetter was released into freedom and he returned to Strangetown to resume his studies with Mrs. Wells. He had placed his trust in Abraham Stone, and in doing so had helped secure the permanent freedom of all the contraband slaves collected around Town Creek. And now that they were free, they had to find out how to move on with life in this world without chains. That was a long road ahead, and one that would last for a hundred years.

Abraham Stone did not live long after. He was shot dead in his home in front of his wife on East Street by a single man in a scarlet robe and hood, who was Adelphon Kuklos. Guster Ledbetter wept at his funeral, like he had wept for his brothers and sisters who had died in the fields. And he recalled the passage from 1 Corinthians, and may have glimpsed some of that One Spirit. And then it would pass, and he would remember that name - Adelphon Kuklos. And then he never wept again.

There was only one white person he had left to trust, and Mary Wells Parker went on to found the Trinity School for freedman with funds she had procured from The Major. She collected her 'oh, so bright!' students from among the freed negroes of Strangetown and taught them to read and to write and to stand proud on their accomplishments. And though Guster Ledbetter had joined the army and had come back and gone out into the County from the racist tumult of Reconstruction Athens, he found it just as bad out there. The Klan was beginning to surge, guided by the invisible hand of Adelphon Kuklos. So he took up his musket that the Yankees let him keep, and practiced with his Colt Walker until he was ready to face them all.