XXVIII

In the years of Reconstruction, the fate of the Nickajack rested more than on just a rabble of freedman and poor white trash in Strangetown. Great forces were gathering to fill the commercial and political vacuum of a devastated South, specifically Republican forces. The Democrats were on the defensive. Thus as of yet they had no allies among the old War Democrats. But things were more complex in the Nickajack.

The Yankees occupied much of the old cotton growing region for most of the war. While the Democrats of South Alabama had been effectively disenfranchised by "Iron Clad" oaths, most Democrats of the Nickajack could still take this oath swearing they had not born arms against the Union, hiring substitutes not withstanding. Indeed, the planter-class of Democrats known as the "Greeks" survived the political revolution brought on by outright conquest. They avoided subjugation by having collaborated with the Yankee power. Even in the midst of a great conflict that emancipated millions from human bondage, they continued to sell slave-picked cotton North even after the Emancipation Proclamation... at least until Abraham Stone won Guster Ledbetter's case for freedom.

The other political class that survived the war were the old "Whig" Democrats. The Whig Party was a defunct national party that believed in a strong federal government emphasizing legislative power. The party platform was popular with burghers and yeoman yearning to bring their goods to a growing American market. They believed in internal improvements and high tariffs to support domestic industry. They had sent four Presidents to the White House before the slavery question destroyed the party. The Whigs had split, with the Northern Whigs finding embrace with the new Republican Party, and the Southern Whigs representing a class of 'moderates' in the Democratic Party. So strong were these old Whig sentiments among both parties that the 1860 Presidential election was split four ways, ushering the most unlikely political creature imaginable into the White House, Mr. Abraham Lincoln. Most Southern Whigs opposed secession, but enlisted in droves after Fort Sumter. When all those enthusiastic patriots had been killed, conscription started rounding up the rest.

However they may have survived, the class of Whig Democrats had been devastated by the war. Most of them could not afford substitutes, so they ended up fighting... and dying. Their properties were confiscated for taxes in arrears when they never came home. Their families were left destitute. What few slaves they may have had walked off to work on (marginally) better plantation contracts brokered by corrupt Union officers out to the Greeks. There was enormous resentment amongst the Whigs against the Greeks despite being of the same political party. So great was this scorn that many of these Southern Whigs had turned to the Republican Party after the war - "Scalawags."

Huntsville, Alabama was full of Republican Scalawags. They had even put one of their own into office, William Hugh "Skedaddle" Smith. Like most Huntsvillians these days, he wasn't even a native. He was a lawyer from Randolph County where he had studied law beneath a tree under the tutelage of Robert Stell Heflin. patriarch of a great Alabama political dynasty that has lasted more than 150 years. They remained close political allies, having stumped the South for Stephen Douglas for the 1860 election that swept Mr. Lincoln into office. They were passionate opponents of secession.

The Governor was scorned as "Skedaddle" by the Democrats. He had been one of their own. He may have been a Whig, but he was a slaveholder. That's what this war was all about, wasn't it? Though he voted against secession he ran anyway for the new Confederate Congress. Harangued out of the campaign by the fire-eating Montgomery press, he fled into Yankee lines. He skedaddled, and took roost in Huntsville, Ala., which was a hotbed of Union sentiment. There were Greeks in Huntsville too, like the Steeles and the Pope-Walkers, who had close kinship with the Limestone County Greeks.

Bill Smith cast his lot with the Yankees early as a very different collaborator from the Greeks. He spent the war raising up the pro-Union 1st Alabama Cavalry (US) in Madison County. The 1st Ala. (US) clashed with Frank Gurley and Bill Marmaduke in the mountains of Madison and Jackson Counties. So renowned had this unit become that General Sherman personally requested it to escort his horde of Yankees in its March to the Sea. Not willing to be left out of a good junket, he rode with Sherman's headquarters as it burned and looted its way from Atlanta to Savannah. It earned him the permanent enmity of the Greeks.

After the war and for his loyalty, he had found himself neatly tucked in at the Southern terminus of a Republican patronage system that radiated from the District of Columbia like a rotten fistula. The Greeks were aghast that Skedaddle Smith had eminently powerful political allies like "Pig Iron" Kelley and "Spoons" Butler. These were men roundly hated throughout the South as abolitionists. They were Radical Republicans who had nothing short of an agenda of radical social engineering of the defeated South, and they played Skeddadle Smith like a pawn in their plans. They were also all crooked as a barrell of fish hooks.

Skedaddle Smith was swept into power on passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. To ensure his election and inauguration, General Grant had sent the army in. When he settled into the Governor's mansion, he repaid his Radical Republican masters in kind by authorizing the sale of railroad bonds backed by the state coffers to rebuild the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. The bonds were solicited to investors by the Lehman Brothers of Montgomery for which Skedaddle Smith took a tidy cut. The proceeds of these bonds were used to pay overbid contracts on repairs to the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. The contractors, which included the Huntsville Railroad Corporation, were controlled by a Consortium of Radical Republican opportunists that included Pig Iron Kelley and Spoons Butler.

So spectacular did this scheme work that Skedaddle Smith thought to do it again! Without legislative authorization, he authorized the issuance of millions more in state-backed bonds to help build the railroad from Chattanooga to newly founded Birmingham. The railroad in question was the Alabama & Chattanooga, which was being laid down the Wills Valley between Sand and Lookout Mountains. Coincidentally, both the Governor and Pig Iron Kelley sat on the Board of Directors. Even Spoons Butler was a major stakeholder. And so the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad reached Birmingham first, beating Jimmy "The Colonel" Sloss's railroad from Decatur.

The Republicans were raking in the cash. Special couriers - good Party men - shuttled between Montgomery and Washington with bags of specie in what Spoons Butler called his Underground Railroad. But once the railroad was constructed, problems grew quickly about how to actually run it. Gangs of Irish thugs called the Molly Maguires mysteriously began to attack the newly opened railroad up and down the Wills Valley. Profits faltered, then collapsed altogether. When the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad defaulted on its interest payments, the states finances couldn't be more red. Now the Democrats had Governor Smith right where they wanted him... pinned as a Yankee collaborator and sheisty as politician could get.

But nothing was quite so shocking to the Consortium's commercial interests in Alabama as the story broken by the New York Sun on the Credit Mobilier scandal. Here was something that could destroy the Republican Party. It was corruption on a vast scale. It spanned the breadth of the continent... literally, for it involved overbid contracts and management abuse on the transcontinental railroad. Pig Iron Kelley was hauled before Congress. Here was a passionate abolitionist, a founder of the Republican Party, and now standing accused of unscrupulous corruption. As the investigation progressed, it was decided that some loose ends needed tying up.

The prototype for Credit Mobilier was the Huntsville Railroad Corporation and its obscenely expensive contract to rebuild the Tennessee River bridge from Limestone County to Decatur. It had been financed by the first round of state-backed railroad bonds authorized by Governor Smith. Somewhere in the records of this company, which had no office or employees, were names of the one-hundred shareholders of the Huntsville Railroad Corporation, now being solicited by the Lehman Brothers as an initial public offering with the ticker HRC.

And so it was passed down from the Consortium its desire to see this party shut down. It didn't care how. The Consortium was already at work cleaning up the loose ends on Credit Mobilier. They needed someone in the Nickajack to clean up the loose ends in Huntsville. So they called upon one of their own, William "Parson" Brownlow. Parson, who was by then Tennessee's Senator, had a man on the scene.

And so a telegraph went out down the wires from Nashville to the Western Union in Athens where this man sat stood waiting with a bowler in his hand. His query to Nashville was coded so as not to alarm the telegraph operator. How do you like your soup? With tongue or tail? The telegraph paused, as though in thought. Then the telegraph sounder began to tap and rattle. The telegrapher passed the message to the Melungeon. He took out his reading glasses and read what it said.

Tongue.
 

XXV

The Melungeon and Crab Orchard Boys were playing a screwy game in Limestone County where they settled into business. Something about Strangetown had frightened the Melungeon and his efforts to cut in on its juice had came to nothing. So he settled in on hunting down bounties for Klan fugitives from Pulaski, Tennessee, where the Klan had been founded. Parson Brownlow, Tennessee's tetchy Republican governor, wanted them chased into Alabama where they had taken refuge with the Limestone County Chapter of the Exalted Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The highest bounty went to a one Luther Lang for $120, dead or alive.

 
The Klan at that time was associated with a derelict cotton warehouse in the place known as Dogwood Flats near Piney Creek. Inside they ran gambling tables and wagered on the cocks. It was popular among bereft and disillusioned veterans who had bought into what Barry Hogan called The Big Lie, which was that they while they had lost the war and everything they knew had been cast adrift, at least they were still white. They wouldn't be caught dead in the unnatural pleasures of Strangetown where there was miscegenation of the races.

 
As it were, three of the fugitives from the Tennessee had hunkered down at Dogwood Flats after seeing their bills posted at the Athens Depot. Luther Lang could be among them. So the Melungeon and the Crab Orchard Boys took up positions in the burnt corn around the warehouse and fired a parleying shot. When the Klan refused to give them up, a firefight erupted. A-head and Ling Ling moved in under the cover of the smoke which hung in the hot, stagnant air. When they had reached the door, A-head kicked it in and shot down two Klansman, blowing them into the bails. A third was dispatched by a tomahawk thrown by Ling Ling, which had wedged itself into the man's skull. Picking up his tomahawk and the fallen man's Remington, he put two slugs into the chest of a fourth.

 
Dogwood Flats emptied out. Klansmen scattered in all directions into the brush. The Melungeon walked into Dogwood Flats and looked decidedly pleased. There were four dead Klansmen, two of whom were posted bounties. But if $80's worth of bounty money was all they'd get paid, they had won much more than that. Dogwood Flats now belonged to the Crab Orchard Boys.

XXIII

The Melungeon walked into Madame de Smets trailed by a Chinese boy and another boy whose head was shaped like an "A." The former had been a coolie goon on the transcontinental, but he was cast bereft along the fringes of the railroad frontier after the Panic of '73. His name was Ling Ling, or anyway they called him that. The other boy was called A-head on account of his single bar of eyebrow and even mop of greasy hair. He cast slow, stony glances around the room. They both brandished knives, but A-head kept an Ithaca riding shotgun under his oilcloth duster, and Ling Ling slung a tomahawk visibly from under his shoulder. The Melungeon didn't need anything more to get his point across.

Madame Julia de Smet closed in to greet the newcomers. They were welcomed by a room of sofas and a lecherous exchange of sexual economy. The smell of opium was thick and a pipa twanged languidly from an unseen room.

Well, don't y'all look like a dishy bunch!

The Melungeon smiled half-heartedly, but not enough to hide his his rotten teeth. Madame de Smet smiled without mirth and curtsied. I'm looking for Maw Possum, he said, removing his bowler hat and casting his eyes sideways this way and that to size up the room.

I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place, you thorny brown stud. Her accent hung thick like the humid air. She studied down his body and looked over to her girls to find the right match, and then returned her smile to The Melungeon. It invited him to unspoken pleasures. But that's not what interested him. He wanted to speak with Maw Possum. I heard she could be seen here, he said.

Madame de Smet shrugged. She can't be seen, she said. No one sees her. The Melungeon was confused. But you can see her mwenzi, Mr. Lincoln, she said.

What the f**k is that, The Melungeon thought? What the hell is she talking about?

A negro who had been sitting in an arm chair reading the Limestone Democrat suddenly put down his paper and stood up. He continued to rise until he stood near seven feet tall. He wore red paisley pants and bleached white cotton shirt. He was clean shaven and bald as kettle. Papa Laduc, he introduced himself. What bidness you got with Maw, he asked?

The Melungeon was impressed. Even the A-head had to turn his head up. Ling Ling itched his fingers on the tomahawk under his left shoulder.

Your the muscle I see. I've come to see who everyone calls the Queen of Strangetown, he announced to the milling forms on the sofas. He was ignored, which irritated him.

You're the Melungeon, said Papa Laduc. Maw Possum says no good will come of you being here in Strangetown. Bad omens come with you.

What the s**t is this, The Melungeon thought as he turned his head to Ling Ling, who pulled his axe and swung at Papa Laduc. The whole room had seized. Papa Laduc threw out his long arm and snagged Ling Ling's arm before he could even swing the tomahawk, then threw the Chinaman into table, which shattered under him.

As A-head drew his coach gun, The Melungeon threw out his arm to restrain him.

Get the f**k up, he barked at Ling Ling, who fumed and steamed with embarrassment. Papa Laduc sneered down at The Melungeon, who seems none among the intimidated.

So what's this mwenzi, he asked?

I'm Maw Possum's agent you might say.

Then we've much to discuss my tall friend, as the Melungeon accepted a seat offered by Madame de Smet. Forgive my Chinaman, he said. He comes from a rough stock.

XXII

The man they called The Melungeon was a short, wiry ruffian. His skin was a leathery brown, and his long walrus mustache curled around his sunken dimples. He was one of William G. Brownlow's men, the Radical Republican governor of Tennessee. They nicknamed the governor "The Parson." Born Simon Mise, he fought as a staunch Unionist in the guerilla war that swept East Tennessee during the rebellion. He and his band ranged up and down the Cumberland Plateau from the Nickajack to the Cumberland Gap burning bridges and ambushing Confederate patrols. Towards the end of the war Bill Brownlow, probably the most hated man in the Confederacy besides Mr. Lincoln, was swept into the governorship of Tennessee. Ex-Confederates were barred from voting, so only Tennessee Unionists were polled. He replaced his political rival, the military governor and Unionist Democrat Andrew Johnson, who in three months would became President upon Mr. Lincoln's assassination.

When The Parson moved into the governor's mansion in Nashville, disenfranchised whites who fought for the Confederacy were appalled. They were unable to vote without taking the "Ironclad Oat,h" avowing they had never voluntarily aided the rebellion. They were horror stricken when The Parson began to agitate for the black suffrage, saying a "loyal negro was more deserving that a disloyal white man." That's when the Ku Klux Klan was born and exploded across war-torn Tennessee with the celebrity of that devil Nathan Bedford Forrest in its ranks. Bill Brownlow had another insurgency on his hands, albeit one against his own power. For this irascible Radical Republican governor, vengeance against disloyal didn't end at Appomattox. He welcomed the insurgency to destroy his political foes in the Democratic party, whether they had been Unionist or not.

So The Melungeon earned his reputation of busting heads at the Tennessee ballot boxes for the Republican Party, and crashing Klan rallies with a pistol whip and shillelagh. He was part of the Brownlow patronage system that dominated post-war Tennessee. But a love of Union didn't prevent this Republican from lining his own pockets in the pursuit of vendetta. The L&N Railroad, while under Yankee occupation for much of the war, was under the influence of a cabal of old Whigs investors. They all had pre-war connections between both North and South dating back to the Fillmore administration, James Withers Sloss being notable among them.

The Parson's rub was that the thousands of negroes he held in thrall with the voting franchise could not find enough opportunity in war-ravaged Tennessee. They crowded into freedman camps where they worked pitiable wages on annual plantation contracts negotiated by corrupt Republican authorities. But down south in Limestone County they'd heard up the grapevine that a place called Strangetown was bursting at the seams with work and opportunity. So they started packing up and train hopping their way south towards the Nickajack where they found work on Jimmy Sloss's railroad to Birmingham. Bill Brownlow was bleeding the black vote his party's power depended on as it migrated South to help close the last frontier of Alabama. And the Melungeon followed in their wake, chasing freedman who fled their plantation contracts in Tennessee. It landed he and his gang, the Crab Orchard Boys, in Limestone County where one of America's forgotten post-war frontiers was throbbing with opportunity, and riches. It was an irresistible temptation to the Melungeon.

XIX

James Withers Sloss of Birmingham fame was known as the "The Colonel" on account of his service with the Confederate Corps of Engineers during the war. This complicated social occasions that involved The Major, so he called him Bonwit. James Sloss was a native of Limestone County who had proven to possess all the industry of his class. Having started his bookkeeping business in Mooresville, he expanded into planting on several non-contiguous plots he steadily acquired throughout Limestone County. To farm these scattered fields, he employed various bogtrotters and other poor whites to till and harvest, though he continued to employ household slaves at his home. He was a burgher and yeoman, a Whig to the bone who had voted against secession. He was also of a class more rarified and aristocratic than even the wealthiest Greeks. He was the new breed of a bright and promising age of gilded capital.

 
Following the war The Colonel became president of the Decatur & Nashville Railroad and negotiated its merger with the larger Louisville & Nashville. This created a transportation monopoly spanning from the Ohio River to the Nickajack. It terminated near the Tennessee River in Limestone County where it junctioned with the east-west Memphis & Charleston. The L&N grew into a vital conduit of capital and goods flowing both ways to rebuild a war-torn Dixie. It thrived under long periods of Yankee occupation during the war, and grew further still under the The Colonel's vision which unfolded with the settlement of Birmingham.

 
The ridge and valley system of today's Birmingham was nearly inaccessible from the Nickajack and was sparsely settled before the war. When surveyors found deposits of iron, coal and limestone in close proximity in Jones Valley, the settlement of Birmingham was founded by investors including The Colonel. They intended to exploit these resources to build blast furnaces and coal mines under the aegis of rising post-war tariffs. Tariffs were vilified by the Greeks who believed they reduced cotton exports by strengthening the dollar. This was of no concern to James Withers Sloss, who was never a Greek and who no longer even lived in Limestone County. He had liquidated his local holdings to invest wholly in the Birmingham deal, bedding with Northern industrial and banking partners. He had gone 'national.' Limestone County's politics were mainly a provincial concern to him now.

 
But he could not wholly disregard the political ferment of his home county. The L&N Railroad was now laying tracks across the Warrior Mountains towards Birmingham, requiring enormous amounts of material and labor, much of which needed staging in Limestone County. Theft and graft was rampant along the L&N corridor. So The Colonel returned to the county of his birth to meet with The Major, Bonwit Vrooman. They met in the conference room of Sloss's agent in Athens, an obdurate and carpetbagging attorney named Rufus Lipman who never ceased glaring at The Major. The niceties were rushed. Sloss was a busy man. They had known each other through business circles.

I don't need to tell you that your little cabal here is f****d, Bonwit. The Major was taken aback. The Colonel spoke in a bizarrely neutral accent for his origins. It was the accent of money. The Colonel continued. You know what's going on in Washington? Congress is going to defund the Freedman's Bureau. The Democrats and moderate Republicans don't want negroes on the government teat, so they are shutting down your party. What will you do then? Look, I know you've got a lot invested here. I've come to offer you a deal. I need labor for the railroad. That's easy. You find me labor and I'll lease them. We are subsidized cost plus, so I can give you 20% margin. That's a generous offer. But it needs to come with extras.

Bonwit shifted uncomfortably. His hands were sweating underneath the table. Extras?

 
Look, The Colonel explained. I need protection for my investments all up and down these tracks. You know people here. I'm an outsider here now. I never had anything in common with these people, referring to the Greeks. I'm hiring colored labor from you. I need them protected. The political situation here is dicey, Bonwit. You're eaten up with the Klan, and they are growing more violent as we approach the mid-term elections. I can't be seen as getting my hands dirty here, but you? You are one dirty bastard, Bonwit. I know you can find the people to put a lid on the Klan.

 
Bonwit was stunned. He had never thought of himself as a "dirty bastard." The Colonel was assuming Bonwit had dealt in violence. How else could he have prospered in this tumultuous political environment of Reconstruction Alabama? But it was all just good old government fraud. Before he could raise a finger in objection, The Colonel continued.

You don't have to pay them. Just invoice them directly to me. Call them railway detectives. I dont give a damn. All you need to do is keep the Klan off my work crews and protect our capital here. We've got a lot invested in this railroad. I don't need a bunch of white cracker peckerwoods gumming up the works just because they won't work for less than a negro.

 
And with that said, Bonwit's mind raced. This was indeed getting his hands dirty, but he was sharing the risk with one of the most renowned industrialists of the New South. And furthermore, The Colonel was right. The Freedman's Bureau was on the chopping block in Washington. Nevermind the social progress made in Strangetown, he was facing destitution. Bonwit blurted out - 30%.

The Colonel thought a minute and then nodded. 30%. This is important to me, and your reputation for the work you've done here serves to your credit. The Colonel turned and presented his hand towards his attorney.

This is my attorney Rufus Lipman. He's Jewish. Lipman nodded. He'll be my agent here in Limestone County. He's just here to watch over my interests. He'll draft the first contracts, but this is where we shake hands.

 
And so they did, but James Withers Sloss held his grip. Leaning forward he spoke very seriously.

I have one problem now that does not involve the Klan that I'd also like for you to take care of. He and his gang have been filching my depots all up and down this railway, and my people tell me he is moving his operation to Athens. His name is The Melungeon.

XI

Braxton Butler III walked down the left bank boardwalk that runs along the funky bottoms of Strangetown, past the Broken Spoke and Madame De Smet's. He hung a right past a stand where a German brass band was playing the polka, ducking into the alley beside the theater. There, behind a shack where freedmen were frying chicken, he found the man known as Spiderman. The origins of this name are clouded in myth, but he peddled a tincture known as Black Cow. Spiderman was black and scarecrow-ish. He walked with a tumbling motion and he was apt to twitch his arms in random spasms.

Black Cow was the street name of an abortifacient that had been prescribed by the witch Maw Possum since before the war. It was sought by slaves who did not wish for children born into bondage, or who were raped and impregnated by their white masters. It was not the only abortifacient she prescribed, for she would also prescribe potions of tansy or herb-of-grace depending on the customer's constitution. What Spiderman had discovered, however, is that in sufficient (but not too much!) doses Black Cow would induce a euphoric state, which he described as the 'wiggles.'

 
According to an 1881 article in the Scientific American it consisted of a tincture of ergot, soda phosphate and water sweetened with molasses. It was not particularly addictive, though its unusual sensations were increasingly sought in the underbelly of Reconstruction society. Ergot, a fungal poison of rye, was the active ingredient. In excess quantities it triggered seizures and vomiting or, worse, vascular trauma and dry gangrene. Cases of St. Anthony's Fire, as the disease ergotism was called then, were on the rise in Limestone County, which perplexed Royal Bill, the sheriff.

 
When Spiderman saw Braxton he smiled. He was missing so many teeth you could see his tongue. They exchanged a curiously bumping but friendly handshake and Braxton passed a roll of Yankee greenbacks for which he received a small fruit box. It contained a dozen apothecary bottles of Black Cow. Braxton at once wrapped the parcel in gunny cloth. Once this furtive exchange was complete they sat down together on the grass and grooved to the music that filled Strangetown. They ate fried chicken and smoked a marihuana cigar that Spiderman rolled up from a string bag he kept in his pocket. The conversation was convivial, but it was most unusual for the reason that Braxton was the scion of a Greek.

 
Braxton Butler III had returned home from the University of Alabama when the Yankee army had burned down the campus. He spent several years loafing around Limestone County, frequenting the races and saloons of Strangetown to the odium of his family. Now that the war was over, he was planning to return to Tuscaloosa to study law. And so from his dormitory in Woods Hall he sold all twelve bottles within a week to his fraternity brothers in Alpha Gamma. When he returned to Athens for fall break they had made over $200. They kicked back a fifth to Maw Possum for her tax, then they discussed ways they could grow their little operation.

 
As fortune would have it, Congress passed the Comstock Laws banning the interstate commerce of pornography, contraceptives and abortifacients. The price of Black Cow rocketed in price from $15 to $25 per bottle. Braxton, whose youthful entrepreneurial spirit was piqued, bought ergot-tainted rye from Kentucky for pennies on the bushel. They partnered with a notoriously dangerous black marketeer from Nashville called the Melungeon, whose network spanned the length of the L&N Railroad. Within a few weeks they were bottling Black Cow in the grave keeper’s shack behind Dement Cemetery. By the end of the year they were grossing $1,700.

 
There is an old adage that if two partners go into business and they make $10, they split their earnings gratefully down the middle. But if two partners make $1,000, then each partner becomes a sunnuvabitch to the other not worth their keep. And so it was with the Melungeon, who increasingly saw his network as the linchpin to the whole operation. His gang were a rough-hewn folk from the East Tennessee mountains known as the Crab Orchard Boys. They were killers all, veterans of the violent Unionist insurgency whipped up by William Brownlow, who was now a Tennessee Senator and a political ally of the Melungeon. With the L&N Railroad now being extended towards the Coosa Valley and the settlement of Birmingham, the Melungeon began to his set his sights south. Strangetown, with its anomalous prosperity in a region destitute from war, seemed like the perfect place to move shop.