Chapter Six


Memphis, Tennessee, 1874–1878

I am a jazz musician. When I think of Memphis, I think of Beale Street, the blues, and W. C. Handy. As I continued to trace my great-grandfather's story, I realized that while he was alive, Memphis was famous not for its music but for its boomtown status as the fastest growing city in the South.

On February 1, 1873, John B. Wilkins opened an account at the Memphis branch of the Freedman's Bank, located in the heart of the black district on Beale Street. In a clear, bold hand, he gives his address as “Carolina Street” and his occupation as “school teacher.”1

I imagine Memphis would have impressed my great-grandfather as he strolled along its crowded streets. Home to the nation's largest inland cotton market, the city had a population of over forty thousand, nearly double that of Atlanta or Nashville. Memphis was now the leading producer of cottonseed oil in the nation. Its cotton presses operated twenty-four hours a day, and smoke from its many factories darkened the sky.² On the city's crowded streets, scores of wagons laden with merchandise competed for space with horse-drawn carriages, while the sidewalks swarmed with pedestrians.

Along the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, new factories and cotton mills seemed to spring up overnight. The din from all the construction must have been deafening. In the first six years following the Civil War, one Memphis firm put up more than 130 new homes, churches, stores, and public buildings around the city. In 1870 plantations in the Mississippi Delta sent more than three hundred thousand bales of cotton upriver to the city's bustling docks, where four railroads and eleven steamship companies waited to carry its cotton products to markets around the world.³

African Americans looking for work poured into Memphis and found employment as clerks, mill hands, craftsmen, teamsters, and laborers. Beale Street, on the southern edge of the downtown business district, soon became a focus point for black entrepreneurs. Between 1866 and 1874, twenty black-owned businesses flourished there.4 For many of the city's new African Americans residents, once they had found a job and a place to live, becoming literate was the next priority. In the city's booming economy, an educated freedman had a host of new opportunities available to him while an illiterate black man could only hope for work as a laborer.

Some Memphis residents, however, did not believe blacks should have access to educational facilities. In 1866 Memphis's whites had rioted and burned the black business district to the ground, killing forty-six people. When the federal government convened a tribunal to investigate the killings, the panel found that “the most intense and unjustifiable prejudice on the part of the people of Memphis seems to have been arrayed against teachers of colored schools.”⁵

I am a teacher myself. When I read about the determination and courage with which African American teachers in those days pursued their vocation, I am humbled. What it must have taken for my great-grandfather to get up every day and teach, in the face of the threat of imminent violence and possible death, I can't even begin to imagine.

For those with the fortitude to undertake the challenge, however, there was no shortage of work. Black folks coming out of slavery were hungry for knowledge. Many of these people had spent their entire lives stooped over in fields, digging and chopping. Now they were free, they saw no reason why their children should suffer the same fate. While community leaders begged the authorities to open more schools, whole families squeezed into the city's already overcrowded classrooms.⁶

No matter what his educational background might have been, J. B. Wilkins would have had no trouble finding employment as a schoolteacher in Memphis. Academic credentials, although helpful in securing a teaching position, were not always required. The need was pressing, and black teachers were in short supply. According to historian James Garner, prospective teachers were “asked a few oral questions by the superintendent in his private office, and the certificate was granted as a matter of course.”⁷

Working conditions would not have been easy for my great-grandfather as a newly minted schoolteacher. White landowners frequently refused to rent or sell space to African Americans, which forced black schools to meet in private homes and church basements. Even when classroom space was available, the new schools often lacked desks, seats, blackboards, and books. In some classrooms three students might be asked to share a single book, while in others the King James Bible was the only textbook available. Schoolhouses were poorly heated, and many students came to class hungry and in rags.⁸

In their overcrowded classrooms, black teachers often struggled to maintain order. Corporal punishment was the norm. Discipline strategies that would be legally actionable nowadays were considered proper during John Bird's time. Students who neglected their schoolwork, who were tardy, or who talked in class could expect to receive a beating.9

Despite the difficulties inherent in his work, my great-grandfather remained in Memphis at least through the spring of 1878, when his name appears in the city directory as “John B. Wilkins (colored), teacher, r 57 Eliott.”¹⁰ In the summer of 1874, he returned to the Freedman's Bank to make another deposit, this time as the secretary of his Masonic lodge, King Solomon Lodge Number Two.¹¹

Founded in 1784 by Prince Hall, a charismatic former slave from Barbados, the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons is the oldest black fraternal organization in America. An ambitious Mason in my great-grandfather's day could easily parlay his lodge membership into a network of valuable contacts around the country.¹² John Bird Wilkins seems to have done just that, making connections with Masons from as far away as Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Farmington, Missouri.

As the summer of 1874 began, the future was looking bright. The city of Memphis was enjoying a period of unparalleled prosperity. My great-grandfather had a job, a social network, and two bank accounts. Despite all appearances, however, hard times lay in wait.

Along with thousands of other African Americans, my great-grandfather had deposited his life savings into the Freedman's Bank. Established by an act of Congress in 1865, the bank had been designed to help former slaves acquire the financial skills needed to function in a capitalist economy. If a freedman made a daily deposit of ten cents, he would receive a 6 percent interest on his investment; after ten years his dime-a-day deposit would have grown to $439.31. The nation's African Americans responded enthusiastically to the program, and by the time that J. B. Wilkins opened his first bank account, blacks had deposited over $60,000 into the bank's Memphis branch.¹³

At first, the Freedman's Bank invested its funds in government-backed securities, but in 1870 Congress allowed the bank's directors to speculate in the open market. The bank's financial position began to worsen, and a sudden downturn in the stock market forced bank closings across the country. In a last-ditch effort to shore up its plummeting credibility, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass was enlisted to serve as the bank's president.¹⁴

But it was too late. In June 1874 the economy of the entire country spiraled into a depression. The Freedman's Bank, already standing on shaky financial ground, collapsed. And my great-grandfather, like thousands of other African American investors, lost everything.

Boom times were over for Memphis. In August 1878 a major yellow fever epidemic swept through the city killing thousands, white and black alike. “Yellow Jack,” as the disease was called, spread rapidly when infected blood was passed through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Once infected, victims suffered horribly, convulsing in gruesome spasms while they vomited up a thick bile blackened with their own dried blood. There was no cure for the disease; within three days, unless he or she was extremely lucky, the patient would be dead.

By the middle of September, the death rate in Memphis had reached two hundred people a day. Those who could leave the city did so, fleeing in panic-stricken droves. All commercial activity ground to a halt, the factories and cotton mills shut their doors, even the municipal government closed down. By the time the epidemic had run its course in mid-October, the city was nearly deserted.15

At some point between 1878 and 1879, my great-grandfather also left town, perhaps to court an Oxford girl named Susie Frierson, whom he married in April 1879.¹⁶ After her marriage to my great-grandfather, Susie Frierson disappears from the record books. After many hours searching records on an ancestry Web site, my researcher Mariah Cooper was unable to find any further trace of her.¹⁷

In the summer of 1879, on the other hand, a woman named Winnie Jamison in nearby Itawamba County gave birth to John Bird's son, naming the boy Leroy, perhaps after John Bird's younger brother.¹⁸ Even as a young man, it seems, John Bird displayed a taste for bigamy. Did Susie find out about John Bird's other woman and leave him? As usual, a close investigation of my great-grandfather's life seems to generate more questions than answers.

According to the Record of Educable Children for Lafayette County, Mississippi, an eleven-year-old boy named John Wilkins and his eight-year-old sister, Mary, attended school in the Town of Oxford during 1885. Their father's name is not given, but their guardian is listed as William Frierson, a blacksmith and prominent citizen in Oxford's black community. Was William Frierson related to Susie? It seems likely. Are these my great-grandfather's children? It certainly seems possible, but I could find no further mention of them, in Oxford or elsewhere, after 1885.

By the summer of 1880, my great-grandfather is listed in the census as widower, once again living with his older brother, William. Although he may have been teaching school at this time, his occupation, at least according to the 1880 census, is that of a laborer.¹⁹ The fate of Leroy's mother Winnie Jamison is also a mystery. Although Itawamba County documents show that my great-grandfather married her in 1881, I could find no further record of her after that date. Black women during this period frequently died young, their lives cut short by malnutrition, disease, or childbirth.²⁰

Reading over the information I had compiled about my great-grandfather's life, I was struck by how much violence he must have witnessed. How had this affected his character? Therapists today consider a child to have been traumatized if he experiences even one violent incident during his formative years. My great-grandfather's life to this point would have been one long trauma. Abandoned and sold as a child, enslaved as an adolescent, and twice widowed as a young man, he lived during one of the most chaotic and violent epochs in American history. In 1880, life for a black man in Mississippi was often short and brutal. The more I thought about it, the more impressed I was that John Bird Wilkins had been able to survive at all.