Forsaking All Others: A True Story of Interracial Sex and Revenge in the 1880s South

1. Mississippi on His Mind: Isaac Bankston’s Formative Years

1 Mississippi on his Mind: isaac Bankston’s Formative Years For most of the residents of Arkansas City, Arkansas, the morning of May 6, 1884, was like so many others. High humidity greeted the sunrise, signaling the steadily increasing temperatures of the season. A light breeze blew through the soft leaves of tall maples. The melodious morning songs of small birds mixed with the crows of roosters announcing daybreak. Even in the early hours, many townspeople were already on the move. Workers at Crawford and Bullock Grocers swept dirt from the wooden walkway into the dusty streets. On a soon-to-depart steamboat docked on the nearby Mississippi River, a loud bell excitedly rang while chanting roustabouts loaded the boat with flour, sugar, cotton, corn, and other supplies. It was the chorus of a new dawn in Arkansas City, but Isaac Bankston could hear none of it. His troubled mind was doubtless filled with reflections on his present predicament and the course his life had taken. The once proud and popular sheriff of Desha County, Isaac now sat alone in a jail cell that he had once overseen. Gone was the prestige of a job that had made him one of the big men in the county. Gone was his reputation for honesty, sobriety, and respectability. And gone was the freedom that had allowed him to have two families— Mississippi on His Mind 2 one legitimate, the other illegitimate; one white, the other black.1 Although Isaac Bankston was born in Chicot County, Arkansas, in 1833, his earliest memories were probably of life on the family farm in Bolivar County, Mississippi. Isaac’s father, Ignatius, and his mother, Rosa, had moved him, along with a family of five others, into that area sometime in 1838.2 The county had only recently been organized, and streams of families, mostly from other parts of the South, poured into it to take advantage of the rich alluvial soils. The Bankstons probably crossed the Mississippi River at Napoleon, Arkansas, arriving in the town of Prentiss before moving to county lands farther east. Once settled, the Bankstons, like their neighbors, labored to clear the land in preparation for growing the principal staple of the region: cotton.3 Surviving and prospering in the Mississippi Delta during antebellum times was no mean feat. The Bankstons encountered a demanding frontier. Seasonal rains often caused the Mississippi to overflow its banks, flooding lands that were already low and swampy in many places. The stifling heat and humidity contributed to the spread of cholera and dysentery, while mosquitoes left malaria and yellow fever in their wake. Some areas abounded with trees and thick brush that were extremely difficult to clear. The Delta even had its fair share of dangerous wild panthers and bears.4 Despite the perils, most white families moved to the Mississippi Delta because they saw promise in the land’s fertility. Many settlers had left farms with depleted soils, and in their eyes the Delta’s lands offered a chance to maintain or enhance their economic standing.5 This, in all prob- Mississippi on His Mind 3 ability, was what motivated the Bankstons to migrate to Bolivar County. New political opportunities were likely another compelling factor.6 The Mississippi legislature had organized Bolivar County in 1836. Thus, when the Bankstons arrived two years later, the county government was still in a fledging state. This afforded Ignatious Bankston an opportunity to build a political career. Coming of age in the era of Jacksonian Democracy, common white men like Ignatius Bankston felt they had every right to a political voice. And just one year after Ignatius’s relocation to Mississippi, Bolivar County residents elected him to the Third Board of Police, a fiveman governing body that oversaw county business. In 1842 Ignatius ran successfully for county assessor—an office in which he never served because of his failure to make bond. (Municipalities and counties often required winning candidates to put money into the local coffers as insurance against corruption; if the candidate personally lacked the required sum, he could still secure backing from wealthy local citizens.) Despite the initial setback to his political ambitions, however, Bankston reemerged in local politics in 1854, when he won the position of county treasurer, a post he probably kept until the Civil War.7 The Bankstons also moved to Bolivar County because Lafayette Bankston, Ignatius’s brother, had settled there in...