Forbidden Fruit (15 page)

Piney Woods didn’t die, though. In 1937, Laurence Jones founded a school band he called
the International Sweethearts of Rhythm to raise funds and create good public relations
for the school. His adopted daughter, Helen, became a trombonist with the band at
the age of eleven. The Sweethearts were the school’s primary musical messengers and
fund-raisers during the 1938–1939 school year, appearing at dances, resorts and conventions.
In 1940, band members, including Helen, ran off to Washington, D.C., in a school bus,
lured by a promoter’s promise that they could see the world and make a good living.
In 1944,
Downbeat
magazine named the group America’s top girl orchestra. They were also the first integrated
girl orchestra, but the white girls in the band wore dark makeup in the South, passing
for black to avoid getting jailed for race mixing. This, after all, was an era when
it was illegal for blacks and whites even to play checkers or dominoes together in
Birmingham, Alabama, and when black and white members of fraternal orders in North
Carolina and Virginia couldn’t call each other brother.

But the Piney Woods saga didn’t end with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm,
either. Helen Jones, the adopted child of Laurence and Grace Jones, later married
William Alfred Woods, the first African-American to earn an accounting degree from
Creighton University in Nebraska. In 1947, the Woodses had their first child, Cathy.
Cathy Woods, now better known as Cathy L. Hughes, became founder and owner of Radio
One, the first radio chain to target the African-American market. Cathy Hughes, great-great-granddaughter
of Charlotta and Harry Pyles, is now a board member of the Piney Woods School.

The family’s most lasting legacy is the Piney Woods boarding school, a place founded
by Laurence Jones, nurtured by Grace Jones, inspired by Prior Foster and aided by
Mary Ellen Pyles, who moved to Piney Woods in her later years to help out at the school.

Started with three students, the Piney Woods School now has two hundred and sixty
students from twenty-nine different states and four or five foreign countries, including
Mexico and Ethiopia.

Started with a pine log and then a shed, it now has three girls’ dormitories and two
dorms for boys, five man-made lakes and two thousand acres, five hundred of those
acres an educational farm with pink and black pigs, donkeys, sheep, cows and the rest
timberland roamed by skunk, armadillos and deer.

Started by a man with only a few dollars to his name, Piney Woods now has housing
for visitors, a post office and a $6.5 million annual budget.

Once a place where students could pay their tuition with eggs, hogs, butter or molasses,
it has become a school where the majority of students receive some kind of scholarship,
all work ten hours a week and more than 90 percent of those who stick it out go on
to college. All students receive four years of English and literature, social studies,
math and science with emphasis on writing and thinking. They attend two-hour classes,
pray every morning, attend church services on Sunday, study for at least two hours
every evening and wear uniforms. Some show up at the black boarding school with uncontrollable
tempers and other problems, but they return home ready to make up their beds and clean
up their rooms without being told. Students’ grades are checked weekly, and anyone
with any grade below a C is barred from participating in any extracurricular activities.

This was supposed to be a story about a wagonload of people who ran away from Kentucky
together, some white, some black, but all chased by wolves. Yet it is also a story
about a man and a woman, both grandchildren of Underground Railroad conductors, who
ran from ignorance and made the pine trees of Mississippi sway with purpose and song.

H
e carried his wife to freedom on his scarred and beaten back—that’s really all you
need to know about John Little. Among slaves, backs were storybooks, telling a person’s
whole saga, recording where he had been and suggesting where he might go. The back
of a Mississippi slave named Gordon shows up in nearly every book about slavery: his
knotted and furrowed back looks like a geography lesson, a cluster of islands here,
a mountain range of pain there. Yet between them, a North Carolina–born slave named
John Little and his Virginia-born wife, Eliza, might have had as many scars as Gordon,
but they also had something else: an incredible memory of an incredible day.

John Little became a runaway after his master refused to give him a Sunday pass to
visit his ailing mother. He went to see his mother anyway and returned to take his
punishment, five hundred stinging, cutting lashes across his back. After that, a slave
breaker beat him steadily for three months, trying to snap his spirit, twist his will,
but nothing worked. When he was sent to Norfolk to be shipped to New Orleans, Little
ran back to North Carolina to his mother. Taken to Tennessee, he married a woman with
soft hands, a woman who couldn’t stand too much sun, a woman as gentle as he was strong.
But he was jailed again and about to be resold; that’s when he broke out of jail.
When his wife told him the overseer planned to whack him three hundred times with
a wooden paddle, he prepared to run away again, waiting in the woods until his ailing
wife healed.

Once the Littles began walking, they journeyed nine miles before an exhausted Eliza
Little collapsed on the floor of a barn. John Little kept trying to rouse her, but
couldn’t. Benjamin Drew, a nineteenth-century researcher, describes what John Little
did next:

Over the years, Eliza, who married John at sixteen, had been battered almost as much
as her husband. She had three scars on her hands and arm and one on her forehead,
inflicted by a mistress who had thrown pieces of a china plate at her, even though
Eliza wasn’t the person who’d broken the plate. She had been beaten with a piece of
wood, leaving her with a scar over her right eye. Maybe that was a part of what made
her so special to her husband. Like the people who stare in amazement at famous pictures
of the slave Gordon’s back, John could look at his wife and taste her tears.

“I bled like a butcher,” Eliza told Drew.

During Eliza and John Little’s journey to freedom, Eliza’s shoes gave out, and she
wore out her husband’s old shoes, too. Barefoot, they stumbled on. When they crossed
the Ohio Bottoms leading to the river, John Little once again proved that he was more
than a man with a strong back. He told Benjamin Drew:

After stopping off in Windsor, the Littles finally journeyed into the Canadian wilderness.
They had nothing but two axes, one suit of clothes, an iron pot, a Dutch oven, a few
plates and forks, some pork and flour. Around 1842, they marched into the snowy wilderness
known as the Queen’s Bush, a vast tract of land in the Huron area. Settlers moved
there on their own, one family at a time. There were no roads, no markets, no mills
to grind flour. The Littles built a home amid wolves and bears and raised wheat and
potatoes. Eliza Little chopped wood right beside John, the man who had carried her
on his back and paddled her across a river, impelled by love.

A
ngeline Palmer’s story has the bittersweet beat of those cotton field songs and street
corner shouts that became the blues. She grew up amid snow-crusted hills and whispering
streams, not fields watered by sweat and bleeding feet. She came from Massachusetts,
where black people eventually considered themselves free, not Mississippi, where they
always knew for sure they weren’t. Yet even at the age of eleven, Angeline Palmer
knew all about sorrow struggling to turn itself into joy. The three young men who
loved her saw to that.

She was a black girl living near Amherst, Massachusetts, among the lower foothills
of the Green Mountains. She was a motherless child, and a fatherless one, too: that
started her blues. Her mother, Sylvia, had died about 1831 from smallpox, one of several
deadly diseases, including cholera, yellow fever, scarlet fever, typhus and typhoid,
that regularly roared through nineteenth-century towns. In 1830, Angeline’s father,
Solomon, was one of eight black men with families in Amherst; however, by 1834, he
had become an official “transient,” a temporary resident, a man expected to drift
off in the first cold wind. His name soon disappeared from Amherst’s public records,
but it’s possible he was asked to leave because he might need public assistance. Such
things had happened before. An elected official had escorted a white woman named Meg
to the town line and urged her to go. Others had been booted out of town, too. The
bottom line was this: Angeline Palmer was on her own. So that she could earn her keep,
town officials had made her an indentured servant for Mason and Susan Shaw of Belchertown,
Massachusetts, ten miles southeast of Amherst. After the Shaws moved to Georgia and
later to New Jersey, Angeline lived with the couple’s son-in-law and daughter. However,
in the spring of 1840, the Shaws decided to deepen eleven-year-old Angeline’s sorrows.
They plotted to take the child down to Georgia, let a slave trader sell her into slavery
and pocket their profits. Whenever she returned to Massachusetts, Mrs. Shaw would
tell people the girl had run away.

By the time Amherst was settled in 1728, slavery already existed in Massachusetts.
It was small-scale slavery, a few people here and a few there, usually working beside
their owners. When the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution established the principle that
all men were free and equal, it seemed to end slavery. However, it took several legal
cases to dismantle and bury all the bones of the institution, including a lawsuit
by an uneducated black woman named Elizabeth Freeman, who left her owner’s house after
his wife struck her with a heated kitchen shovel. Attorney Theodore Sedgwick Sr. took
her fight for freedom to court and made it a test of the legality of slavery under
Massachusetts’s new constitution. The jury agreed that slavery was illegal and forced
Freeman’s former owner to pay her thirty shillings. Though this ruling did not emancipate
all enslaved blacks in Massachusetts, the verdict—coupled with other legal victories
for blacks—eventually flushed slavery out of the state’s legal system. It remained
in the hearts of people like the Shaws, though.

Their plan to sell Angeline Palmer into slavery leaked out in May 1840. Susan Shaw,
who had returned to Massachusetts for a visit, read aloud a letter from her husband
detailing their plot. One of her servants overheard it and passed on the information.
She put it on the drum, moved it on the grapevine. Word reached Angeline’s half-brother,
Lewis B. Frazier, a twenty-year-old unmarried laborer who visited the girl when he
could. He couldn’t support Angeline, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love her. Frazier
shared the grim news with two black male friends, Henry Jackson, a twenty-three-year-old
single stable hand, and William Jennings, a twenty-seven-year-old unmarried laborer.
They brought what they’d heard to the Amherst Board of Selectmen, but nobody took
the story seriously. The Shaws were respected people and had taken another black servant
to the South and returned with her. Why should anyone believe they planned to turn
a free black eleven-year-old orphan into a slave?

Actually, people often tricked, dragged or kidnapped free blacks, especially children,
into slavery. In December 1851, two slave catchers came up to the back door of a rural
farmhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania. When sixteen-year-old Rachel Parker answered
the door, one of the men grabbed her by the arm and pulled the free black Philadelphia-born
girl outside. Both she and her previously kidnapped sister, Elizabeth, wound up in
Baltimore and, in Elizabeth’s case, in New Orleans before they were eventually freed
and brought home. Meanwhile, Rachel Parker’s employer, Joseph Miller, who had charged
one of the girl’s abductors with kidnapping, disappeared from the platform of a train.
His body was later found hanging from a tree about nine miles from Baltimore.

But Lewis Frazier and his two friends were determined no one would kidnap, jail, rough
up or drag Angeline into slavery. Instead of waiting to rescue the child from slavery,
they would rescue her before she became enslaved. There are no well-documented stories
about Underground Railroad activity in Amherst, no tales of people hiding slaves among
sacks of potatoes or lumps of coal or arising in the middle of the night to transport
a load of fugitives to the next stop on the road to freedom. However, Lewis Frazier
and his friends were about to become Angeline Palmer’s rescue team, forming their
own Underground Railroad on the spot. On May 25, 1840, two days before her planned
journey to the South, Angeline took a stagecoach to Amherst to visit her grandmother,
Margaret Sash Pharoah, whom she called Aunt Peggy. No doubt she also sought out her
brother to tell him about her travel plans and learned that he planned to snatch her
off the stage when she returned home to the Shaws in Belchertown. And no doubt she
shared her brother’s plan with her grandmother. That was a mistake. Angeline’s grandmother
didn’t like the smell of the plan and quickly took it to her employer, Hezekiah Strong.
Strong hurried to Deputy Sheriff Henry Frink’s livery stable in Amherst and hired
him to take Angeline and the Shaws’ other female servant back home from her grandmother’s
place by a different route, taking the long way to Belchertown. As a result of this
switch in plans on May 26, Angeline was not inside the coach when Frazier and his
friend William Jennings waved for it to stop.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Frink’s black employee, Henry Jackson, had overheard enough to
alarm him. Jackson, who was part of Frazier’s rescue team, left his job, found Frazier
and Jennings and took charge of the rescue. With a horse and buggy borrowed from a
white butcher, the trio galloped to Belchertown by a roundabout route and stopped
at the Shaw place. Now it was time for those blues guitars to wail. Now it was time
for loud, foot-stomping music and shouts. Mrs. Shaw and several women were inside
the Shaw home. Frazier raced up to his sister’s room, alarming the women. One threw
the bolt on the outside of Angeline’s room, trapping Frazier and Angeline inside.
Jackson and Jennings then ran into the house and rushed to the third floor, plowing
through Mrs. Shaw and her friends. The two men unbolted the door and led out Frazier
and Angeline. As the men left the house, they shoved aside Mrs. Shaw, who fell on
a landing. Her three rescuers then rode off with the girl, heading back to Amherst.
On the way, they passed Sheriff Frink, who ordered them to stop. It was panic time
again. What did the sheriff know and how had he learned it so soon? However, Sheriff
Frink knew nothing. He merely lectured the young men on the dangers of speeding and
let them ride on.

The young men left Angeline at the home of Sarah and Spencer Church, a white couple
in North Amherst. Although the Churches had eight children of their own, they agreed
to care for Angeline. However, Angeline’s rescuers knew that the Church home was not
a safe long-term hideout—the girl needed a more distant refuge. On the advice of a
black woman named Huldah Green Kiles, who also lived in North Amherst, the three men
quickly moved Angeline to the remote town of Colrain on the Vermont state line. The
Scotch-Irish had settled this area, many coming from the Province of Ulster and the
towns of Londonderry and Colrain. They had been clear-headed, frugal people: they
introduced flax spinning to New England and saved their shoes by sometimes walking
barefoot to church, not donning shoes and stockings until they were nearly there.
In Colrain, Angeline stayed with Huldah Kiles’s brother, Charles Green, and began
to breathe freely at last. While Jackson and Kiles took Angeline to Colrain, Angeline’s
brother, Lewis Frazier, had remained in Amherst to confuse the authorities. After
that, Jackson and Jennings briefly left the area.

On May 27 in Amherst, Mrs. Shaw filed formal complaints against Frazier, Jackson,
Jennings and Deputy Sheriff Frink, whom she believed was somehow involved in Angeline’s
disappearance. All four men were charged with abduction and unlawfully imprisoning
Angeline Palmer and assault upon Mrs. Shaw during the kidnapping. Frazier posted bond,
Frink agreed to appear in court when called and Jackson and Jennings soon surrendered.
When their jury trial finally began in March 1841, tall, straight, spare Edward Dickinson,
a man cool enough to handle any emergency and the father of future poet Emily Dickinson,
defended the four men. The three black defendants were found guilty of all charges,
but the judge offered to free them if they would reveal Angeline’s location. They
refused. Each served three months in the Hampshire County Jail, in neighboring Northampton,
the county seat. However, the jailer allowed them to leave during the day and return
at nightfall. Many visitors showed up at the jail with clothes and food. When the
three young men returned to Amherst, they walked like heroes: people, black and white,
congratulated them for rescuing Angeline.

Ten years after proving how much he loved his half-sister, Lewis B. Frazier died of
what was called a “hip complaint”; he was buried at West Cemetery in Amherst. Soon
the Civil War rode into town and created more black heroes. Between 1863 and 1865,
twenty-two black men from Amherst served in the war, including two of Angeline Palmer’s
rescuers. In 1863, William Jennings, then fifty, and his son, William H.H. Jennings,
both enlisted in the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment to fight
for the Union army. The elder Jennings was disabled in an accident while in the 54th
Regiment, but at age fifty-one he enlisted in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry and served
in Virginia. Henry Jackson, mastermind of the Palmer rescue, became another kind of
hero. He was a stable hand when he helped rescue Angeline, but in later years he became
a respected teamster, hauling goods to Springfield and Millers Falls and often serving
as a bank courier, carrying large sums. He even introduced the town to a new industry:
he brought loads of palm leaves to Amherst and distributed them to families who turned
them into hats and other goods. Jackson owned parcels of land, too, and shares of
First National Bank of Amherst. After the death of his first wife, Celia, from consumption,
he married Olive Prutt, widow of Angeline Palmer’s brother, Lewis Frazier.

Angeline Palmer continued to live in Colrain, a part of hilly, water-rich Franklin
County, a place where, in the presidential election of 1860, the majority of residents
voted for Abraham Lincoln. On May 13, 1851, she married Sanford C. Jackson, a man
who, perhaps, loved too much—or at least too often. After Angeline’s unrecorded death,
sometime between 1851 and 1859, Sanford Jackson married Emily Jane Mason, twenty-seven,
in 1859, in South Wilbraham, and a year later, he married Nancy A. Newport, fifteen,
in Worcester. Fortunately for him, the two wives didn’t know about each other. In
1863, Jackson, thirty-two, enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment
just as his friend William Jennings had done. He was wounded in action at Fort Wagner
at Charleston, South Carolina, where the 54th led the attack. The regiment of mostly
free Northern blacks lost 259 of 650 officers and men, but, in death, it achieved
an enduring victory. The doomed, desperate assault on Fort Wagner became powerful
proof that blacks could fight as bravely, as resolutely, as any other soldiers under
attack. On September 14, 1863, Private Sanford Jackson died of gunshot wounds at the
Union Army General Hospital at Beaufort, South Carolina. After the war, both of his
wives applied for his pension, triggering an investigation. There is no record of
what action, if any, the government took. Nor is there any record of which of his
three wives Sanford Jackson loved the most or whether any of them ever gave him a
taste of Angeline’s blues.