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EPILOGUE: Fathers and Sons
- The University of North Carolina Press
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epilogue Fathers and Sons When the war erupted in April 1861, Newt Knight was a law-abiding white Southerner who, like most Jones County, Mississippi, farmers, owned land but no slaves. Because he turned against the Confederacy, crossed the color line, and became the leader of the Knight Company, he became a living legend. At the same time, he was ostracized by many of his closest associates and relatives and, long after his death, vilified by his grandniece, Ethel Knight, author of The Echo of the Black Horn (1951).1 Until that moment, Newt Knight had symbolized plain folk democracy , inspiring a novel and movie, Tap Roots, which celebrated Southern Unionism. Scholarly studies of the Southern plain folk were also popular during this post-Depression decade. Riding the crest of this wave, in 1946 Newt’s son Thomas Jefferson Knight published his version of the Free State of Jones, one that emphasized Newt’s Unionist principles and community loyalty. To maintain his father’s honor in a segregated white society, Tom ignored Newt’s interracial family. But in 1951 Newt’s image was forever altered. Tom, who died in 1956 at the age of ninety-five, lived just long enough to witness his cousin Ethel’s replacement of his heroic portrait of his father’s Civil War exploits with that of a lawless, murderous traitor who she claimed betrayed his race by taking a black woman as his lover.2 Epilogue 138 A less notorious but equally important member of the Knight Company was also the subject of a son’s twentieth-century biography. Newt’s 1st sergeant, Jasper Collins, had no interracial relationships to complicate his Unionist reputation and, thanks to descendants such as his son Loren, is remembered today as a respected community patriarch. During his old age, Jasper’s participation in a guerrilla deserter band during the Civil War was usually politely ignored, and his Unionism was obliquely referenced as political “independence.” It was not that Jasper was ashamed of his past. As certain of the righteousness of his Civil War stance on the day that he died as he was in 1862, Jasper spoke about his guerrilla days without apology. In 1895, as a result of his candor, he was viciously attacked in print by his Democratic rival, J. F. (Frank) Parker, a New South editor, when he and son Loren published Ellisville ’s only Populist newspaper, the Ellisville Patriot. To discredit the People’s Party, Parker heaped scorn on the old Unionist for having fought against Lowry’s forces, the “true gallants” of “mighty, majestic manhood,” thirtyone years earlier.3 Notwithstanding Parker’s attack, Jasper’s Civil War exploits were usually overshadowed by writers’ fascination with its captain, Newt Knight. Over and over, folklorists and journalists debated the legend of secessionwithin -secession and whether Newt was a Unionist or an ordinary bandit. Around 1942, retired lawyer Loren Collins defended his father’s Civil War adventures in an essay entitled “The Free State of Jones, or, Two Ways to Tell a Story.” Tales about the Free State had grown mighty tall over the years, and Loren was determined to correct the historical record once and for all. He denounced “wild” accounts of the Knight Company that ranged from insistence that its men had drawn up documents of secession from the Confederacy to claims that the deserters’ Leaf River swamp headquarters was the site of a new generation of deserters during World War I.4 In certain ways, Loren was far better equipped to defend the Knight Company than was Tom Knight. Many more of his kinfolk had been directly involved, and he had enjoyed a closer relationship with his father than Tom had had with the notorious Newt Knight. Born in 1860, Tom had parted company as a young man with his father over race, unwilling to sacrifice respectability by living in a mixed-race community during an age of white supremacy. At the same time, Tom remained close to his mother, Serena, who left the household of her husband late in their marriage. Given the turmoil that Newt’s extramarital relationships likely caused for Serena, [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:13 GMT) Epilogue 139 Tom’s sympathy for his mother may have further fueled his resentment of his father’s interracial affairs. Loren Collins had endured no such conflict within his family. His childhood memories were dominated by images of family and friends gathered around the fireplace as they rehashed...