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6 Negotiating Boundaries of Race and Gender in Jim Crow Mississippi: The Women of the Knight Family
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chapter six Negotiating Boundaries of Race and Gender in Jim Crow Mississippi The Women of the Knight Family The Knight family of the Jones County region of Mississippi has long confounded notions about race in the United States. Descended from white Southerners, former slaves, and Native Americans, it did not fit into the discrete categories of racial identity demanded by Jim Crow laws in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Furthermore, many of the family members refused to abide by the South’s “one drop” rule, which demanded that white persons with any degree of African ancestry identify themselves as black. The lives of the multiracial Knight women reveal various strategies by which conventions of gender, class, and marriage might be manipulated to escape the worst effects of racial discrimination. The daughters of former slave George Ann Knight— Anna, born in 1874, Grace, born in 1891, and Lessie, born in 1894— learned early in life that a poor “mulatta” living in the Piney Woods of Mississippi could hope for little better than the economic support of a white man in exchange for sexual favors. Neither the mother nor the grandmother of the sisters ever married, but both gave birth to 118 Legacies numerous children fathered by white men. To the dominant white society, such women were little more than prostitutes whose behavior reinforced a common stereotype that women of color lacked morals.1 Yet, through travel, education, or unconventional personal choices, Anna, Grace, and Lessie escaped the fate of their female forebears. The oldest sister, Anna, joined the legion of educated middle-class “black” women who, between 1890 and 1930, worked tirelessly to uplift African Americans by opening the doors to education and health care.2 Before she could join the ranks of elite African American women, however, she first had to lift herself. Her struggle to escape her mother’s fate began early in life. Described as having “blue, blue eyes,” Anna had every reason to anticipate the sexual advances of white men as she approached her teen years. Sexual activity would likely result in pregnancy, at which point all avenues to social respectability would close. Had Anna followed the paths of her mother and grandmother, she too would have been disdained by whites for bringing unwanted “white Negroes” into their world. As late as 1963, her grandmother Rachel was described as a “concubine” by many local whites.3 Anna might have married a man of color and raised a family, but, instead, she never married at all. While still a teenager, she embraced Seventh-Day Adventism much as a drowning person would grasp a life jacket. She believed with all her heart that God had lifted her from a life of poverty and degradation. No amount of physical risk or intellectual challenge deterred her from following a religious path that simultaneously relaxed the grips of gender conventions and racism. Anna’s religious conversion and successful career as a teacher and missionary especially impacted the lives of her sisters. Yet, despite the influence of their older sister, Grace and Lessie followed different paths in life. Like Anna, Grace was identified as a black woman, remained single, and became a schoolteacher. Unlike Anna, however, she lived her entire life within the community of her birth. Sister Lessie, on the other hand, followed yet another path by leaving Mississippi and living as a white woman. In taking the paths they did, all three sisters avoided much of the social harassment that plagued their kin, particularly those who refused to be defined as “Negroes” and who engaged in illegal marriages or illicit relationships across the color line. During the 1948 miscegenation trial of their cousin Davis, for example, the private affairs of the Knight sisters’ longdead grandmother, mother, and several of their aunts were paraded before the public.4 [54.226.222.183] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:15 GMT) The Women of the Knight Family 119 On 14 November 1949, Davis Knight’s trial again made national headlines when the Mississippi State Supreme Court overturned his conviction. In reporting the historic decision, newspapers provided not only the facts of the case but also rehashed Mississippi’s most famous legend, that of the Free State of Jones. Davis, readers learned, was the great-grandson of Newt Knight, a white man and the infamous “captain” of a band of deserters in the Jones County region who had held the Confederacy at bay during the final two years of the Civil...