Chapter 2

Republican Heyday

IN THE EARLY 1870S, CARTER & CO. WAS DOING A FINE BUSINESS, catering to the modest householders and prosperous money-makers of Central Texas. The store, well situated on the main plaza of Waco, was owned by Edward H. Carter and his partner Champe C. McCulloch, and they advertised “cheaper Goods than anybody”—boots, locks, hinges, cutlery, glassware, gunpowder, plows, spades, hoes, chains. On most any day but the Sabbath, Carter & Co. could expect a noisy crowd picking over wares and haggling over prices, cowboys mingling with housewives and plantation managers. Meanwhile, in a storeroom above the din, an enduring love affair was beginning.¹

The identity of the father of Lucia Carter’s baby is a mystery; he might have been David Davis or Oliver Benton or Albert Parsons. The fact that she named the little boy Champ suggests at least the possibility that she wanted to acknowledge the man who allowed her to rendezvous with Parsons in Carter’s storeroom—Champe McCulloch, Parsons’s next-door neighbor and fellow Freemason. In any case, the spurned Oliver Benton (who later said he had contemplated killing Parsons) on at least one occasion burst in on Lucia and Albert at their trysting place. Benton said he “scourged” Lucia all the way back to his cabin, implying he had cracked a bullwhip on her, but perhaps those claims revealed merely the bravado of a humiliated man.²

In the summer of 1870, Lucia’s mother, Charlotte Carter, was living in Waco’s River Street black neighborhood. Charlotte, now thirty-six, reported to a census taker that her household included one daughter, Lucia (nineteen years old), and two sons, Tanner (fourteen) and Webster (eight). Another apartment in the modest frame building housed Jane Tallavan and her children and Lucia with one-year-old Champ. The census recorded Lucia as a literate mulatto. In Jane and Lucia’s unit were also living a freedwoman named Lizzie Murphy, a twenty-two-year-old native of Alabama; Lizzie’s two sons, ages five and seven months; and a freedman, James Johnson, a twenty-five-year-old from Mississippi.³

Perhaps the suffocating heat of a July midday had clouded the census-taker’s judgment; or perhaps, as a nonnative English speaker (he was a German immigrant), he misunderstood Charlotte’s description of the family’s living arrangements. Although overlapping census districts at times resulted in “duplicates”—a person counted more than once—it was unusual for a census-taker to list the same person twice as a member of two separate households in the same building. That Charlotte reported Lucia as living with her, but the daughter was actually living in a different apartment, with her infant son as well as a man and a woman and two other children, suggests several possibilities—an estrangement between mother and daughter; a desire on the part of the younger woman to establish a household apart from her mother; or a liaison with James Johnson, a lover.

If Champ’s father is unknown, so, too, are the circumstances of his birth. Lucia had become pregnant when she was about the same age at which her mother, Jane Tallavan, and Lizzie Murphy had all had their first babies. During Lucia’s labor, was she comforted by the presence of the three women, and were others present? Did she have an easy time of it, or hours filled with pain? Did someone pay for the services of a midwife? Or did she bear the child alone, away from her mother and from the man who considered her his wife, but was by now perhaps consumed with suspicion and jealousy? In the summer of 1870, Lucia was living apart from Benton, and she had given the baby the last name Carter, which had been her own last name since her mother had married Charlie Carter. Charlotte and Charlie were also presumably living apart from each other, as he was not listed as a part of her household, though he was still working at the brickyard east of the Brazos River. (He would remarry in 1888.)

In 1870, Albert Parsons was boarding in the northwest part of town, in a well-to-do area on high ground away from the river, with the family of a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend David C. Kinnard. For all his speechifying, Parsons must have struck Kinnard as a respectable young man; the pastor of the newly formed Cumberland Church would have demanded no less of a boarder (or perhaps he was doing Parsons’s well-to-do sister Mary a favor). Next to the Kinnard residence was the impressive dwelling of the Missouri-born merchant Champe C. McCulloch, living with his wife, Emma, and their nine-month-old son, also named Champe. By this time, Parsons was working as an assistant collector for the Internal Revenue Service, a patronage job that rewarded his service to the Republican Party. He would seem to be tempting fate, now that he was not only associated with the despised party of Lincoln, but also collecting taxes in a town that had shown overwhelming support for the Confederacy. Yet Waco did possess a small but vocal knot of northern supporters and sympathizers—former Confederates, such as Parsons, who had deserted the Democrats; Freedmen’s Bureau agents and Davis, the Yankee schoolmaster; a couple of hundred black voters as well as bold activists such as Shep Mullins; a few foreign-born and northern migrants who had held their counsel during the war; and, in a soon-to-be-dismantled US Army garrison, forty-nine white soldiers hailing from Western Europe and the southern and northern states who had all been deployed to Waco to keep a fragile peace. Although these groups, according to a Union officer, were initially targets of the “most intense hatred,” by 1870 some of them had made accommodations with former Confederates—Davis, for example, had ingratiated himself with local Democrats, and the federal troops were hosting grand balls for their white neighbors at the Masonic Hall on the plaza.⁴

The relationship between Albert Parsons and Lucia Carter soon became an open secret among white and black Wacoites, though little is known about the precise nature of that relationship. For Parsons, the year 1870 had begun auspiciously. Black voters, enfranchised since 1867, were working with German immigrants and other Republicans to challenge the white-supremacist power of the Democrats. After years of delay, the state legislature had finally ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, granting the former slaves citizenship rights, and enfranchising black men, respectively. A new state district judge in town, Republican John W. Oliver, was promising a no-holds-barred assault on bands of white criminals and vigilantes. The inauguration of the Radical Republican governor Edmund J. Davis in April had breathed new life into the party and given Parsons a new mission as a political organizer. In Waco, black men were getting jobs as police officers, sitting on petit and grand juries, and receiving appointments as county commissioners. Widely seen as a rising star in the Republican Party, Parsons was skillful at straddling its conservative and radical wings. Yet demographic patterns signaled dangers ahead: the county’s explosive population growth meant that soon, in sheer numbers at least, white Southerners would easily overwhelm the small, badly divided Republican Party.⁵

Both William and Albert Parsons gained prominence in the 12th legislative session, a session that saw Republicans using every means at their disposal to bolster the tenuous power they possessed. Soon after he took office, Governor Davis created several new law-enforcement agencies—the Frontier Forces, the State Guard, the Reserve Militia, the State Police, and the Minute Men. Democrats saw all these armed groups as a threatening escalation in state power. In January 1870, Davis appointed Judge Oliver to the 33rd Judicial District in Central Texas, which included Limestone, Falls, and McLennan Counties. Davis exhorted his followers to bring in more white voters. Meanwhile, Albert Parsons began to canvass on behalf of the Union League and the Radical Republican Association, groups of like-minded blacks and those few whites who believed the party’s priorities should focus on equal rights for all.⁶

In the late summer and early fall of 1870, Parsons conducted a concerted campaign to reach out and flatter prominent party leaders in an effort to counter the infighting that was pitting Waco Republicans against each other. He reported that too many men were embracing Democratic prejudices while calling themselves Republicans. In August, he warned the governor that “enemies” skulking about “under the cloak of Republicanism” were seeking to undermine “the united desires of all genuine Republicans.” In Waco, these false friends were trying to oust the current mayor, B. F. Harris, for malfeasance in office. Parsons also began a correspondence with James P. Newcomb, editor of the Republican San Antonio Express and a powerful arbiter in Texas politics. Parsons feared that his “being an Ex Rebel Republican” had compromised his own ability to rectify what he called the “evils” that plagued Waco; he cited the local postmaster, who, though “he vociferously asserts his Republicanism,” together with other political appointees constituted “an actual encumbrance and dead weight to us.” Parsons saved his choicest words for David Davis, the schoolmaster turned district clerk. According to Parsons, to his “chagrin and mortification” Davis was shamelessly larding his office with Democrats. Parsons added, “There is a Republican harvest here but faithful laborers are few.”⁷

Parsons set about organizing petitions to Republican officials, declaring in one that “we suffered and born [sic] much from our enemies and unless we get relieve [sic] immediately much more injury will be done.” The signatories represented a cross-section of the Waco Republican Party—a merchant born in Poland; a number of freedmen, including Shep Mullins; and southern-born white men, including a saloonkeeper from South Carolina, a stable owner from North Carolina, and Mayor Harris, from Georgia. Parsons’s aggressive efforts to curry favor with blacks won him his own Waco “faction,” prompting his nemesis John T. Flint to alert the governor that “the Parsons faction here is irresponsible, and if they go into power will offend the sense of justice of all decent men whether Republican or not.” In the coming months, Parsons would go out of his way to ingratiate himself with Newcomb, reporting at one point that he had defended the editor against the unkind words of a local Republican official who had called the editor “too vain, conceited, and selfish.”⁸

Throughout this period, Parsons seemed to relish battles against both diehard rebel Democrats and the men whom he considered disloyal to his own brand of Republican Party politics. In fact, though, developments in 1871 gave him hope that he would have a chance not only to ascend the party ranks but also to make a substantial living in the course of doing so. He went back to soliciting subscriptions—now for Houston’s Union/Tri-Weekly Union. In January, he was appointed to the administrative position of first assistant secretary of the Senate for the regular session, which ran from January 10 to May 31. This job he had secured with the help of his brother—now Senator Parsons—as well as through his own successful efforts to gain the favor of party higher-ups. As first assistant secretary he updated the official daily journal of the Senate, recording events, proceedings, and votes. Each morning he distributed two newspapers to lawmakers—one in English, the Austin Daily State Journal, and the other in German, the Austin Vorwarts (Forward). A quick study, he probably used the Vorwarts to practice his German, since an understanding of the language was essential to communicating with a vital Republican constituency.⁹

The 12th legislative session represented the high-water mark of Reconstruction-era Texas Republicanism. Lawmakers funded the state’s first public school system, which had been created on paper the previous session but deprived of an appropriation, and chartered black mutual aid societies and social groups. Governor Davis deplored the prevalence of firearms in the state and urged state lawmakers to impose restrictions on gun ownership, a plea that came to fruition in 1871 with a ban on the carrying of pistols outside the home (travelers and those whites living in areas vulnerable to Indian raids were exempt). Yet riven by intraparty factionalism as well as party divisions, most legislators had no appetite for controversy. A proposal to send funds to the people of Chicago in the wake of the catastrophic fire in that city in October 1871 went down to defeat with the argument that Texas citizens should not be taxed “for the purpose of making gifts to individuals.”¹⁰

Nevertheless, Republicans wasted little time enacting measures favorable to business interests. Legislators bolstered commercial development and regional trade by chartering railroads, bridges, toll roads, ferries, canals, dams, waterworks, and fire companies as well as private manufacturing interests. They legislated in favor of stock raisers and bankers; the recording of births and marriages; and foreign immigration into the state (to address a chronic agricultural labor shortage). William Parsons represented the interests of the “Houston Mechanical Verein” (Union) to shore up his bona fides with a German group back home. He served as chair of Internal Improvements, the political epicenter of the session.¹¹

For his support for measures such as “an Act to encourage the speedy construction of a railway through the State of Texas to the Pacific Ocean,” William would solidify his reputation as a railroad man. Not all lawmakers were on board: some saw state subsidies to private and public interests, whether railroads or schools, as a form of “black mail” extracted from the people. In the lower house, freedmen expressed their own priorities by pressing for the redistribution of land to the former slaves and measures to protect black suffrage.¹²

As legislative clerk, Albert Parsons made the enviable sum of seven or eight dollars a day (urban workingmen were lucky to earn one dollar a day, while agricultural workers were paid largely in promises). And there is evidence that either he was the beneficiary of his older brother’s largesse or that on his own he eagerly sought perquisites from the state legislature to partake of the boom in internal improvements. With partners, he received charters to create a Waco Gas Light Company that would provide gas to streetlights and buildings in the town; to erect toll bridges in Navarro County; and to create a corporation, the Texas Manufacturing Company. Though nothing ever came of these charters, they represented the Republicans’—and presumably Parsons’s—conviction that the state could and should provide citizens with opportunities to make money in the private sector.¹³

In the summer of 1871, when his Senate job ended, Parsons went to work for the new Office of Public Instruction (OPI), which had been created to establish a system of free but segregated schools throughout the state. Living in the elegant Raymond House hotel in Austin, he was earning the munificent sum of $125 a month. For a three-month stint at the OPI he made a total of $375, an amount that would one day help finance his move out of Texas. At the end of August he got caught up in an alleged corruption scandal at the OPI; his remarkably generous salary (among other suspicious goings-on) had become grist for the mill of Democrats who considered public education largely a waste of the taxpayers’ money. In September, in the run-up to elections that fall, Parsons once again took to the road, addressing large crowds and prompting his detractors to describe him as one of “a set of men notoriously void of character and sent forth to disgust the Republican masses by their idiotic harangues.”¹⁴

In September, Governor Davis recognized Parsons for his party loyalty and raw courage by appointing him a lieutenant colonel in the reviled state militia and sending him to impose order in Bell, Coryell, and Lampasas Counties, where white attacks on blacks were rampant. Forty miles south of Waco in Belton, a freedman, the Methodist minister Romeo Hill, who was also a schoolteacher, observed that for blacks, “the times in Belton is very bad.” Hill begged the local bureau agent to reassign him to a school in another district “because these poor white people is so mean we cannot get [a]long here.” Hill was no coward—he had registered to vote in 1867—but he feared he would be murdered in his bed. “I don’t want to die before my time come,” he wrote. Hill, a thirty-eight-year-old native of North Carolina, expressed alarm not only at hostile whites, but also at the freedpeople, who, he wrote, armed with “their gun and knife and pistole,” believed that freedom gave them the license to make trouble and do as they pleased. “I cannot teach school hear [sic] in Belton and do it in piece [sic] and I want [to] go [a]way from here,” he wrote, adding, “Dear Sir there is no Law here to protect the school.”¹⁵

Governor Davis had sent Albert Parsons to confront the anarchy in Belton—to put in place a new Republican-friendly mayor and city council and install Republican supporters in the local police force. The outcome of Parsons’s expedition is unknown, but he later claimed that he was “not an ‘ornamental’ Colonel,” for he had accepted “a most warlike and dangerous undertaking”; in the process, he said, “I became somewhat famous as a champion of political liberty. Beloved by the blacks, I was hated and scorned by the whites”—and this scorn, coupled with the threat of lynching, he embraced.¹⁶

Meanwhile, Democrats continued to make steady gains at the polls throughout the state. The large numbers of southern white in-migrants added new members to the Democratic Party daily, and furthermore, victory in any particular election usually depended more on who controlled the ballot box than on who won the most votes. The Republicans remained so hopelessly divided that even when their supporters were in a majority they lost elections to the unified Democrats, who, by the end of 1872, had reclaimed the state legislature. Forced now to rely on federal rather than state-level patronage, Albert Parsons was working once again as assistant assessor for the IRS in Austin.¹⁷

FROM AUSTIN, PARSONS COULD GET TO WACO EITHER BY MAKING the one-hundred-mile trip on horseback in three days or by taking an all-day train, but he knew he risked his life if he returned to the town for any length of time. Political tensions were running high in Waco, owing at least in part to the assertive actions of Judge Oliver. Since his appointment in January 1870, Oliver had used all the powers invested in him—calling out the militia, using black police as ballot-box watchers, declaring martial law, rounding up offenders—in an effort to stem the aggression of whites throughout the 33rd Judicial District. In May 1872, the intrepid—or incredibly foolish—judge had held the entire McLennan County Commissioners’ Court in contempt on an indictment for embezzlement and jailed all its members. The local bar association was moved to try to have him declared insane. On May 7, the Waco Advance published a broadside titled “Stop the Madman!” Oliver resigned in January 1873 before a grand jury could indict him for corruption.¹⁸

Albert Parsons understood that the judge’s departure signaled not only a marked decline in influence among Republicans in Central Texas but also less-than-favorable prospects for his own political future and his personal life. Nevertheless, the young man was in love, and he took a bold step: he married Lucia Carter on September 28, 1872. He was twenty-seven, she twenty-one. The marriage license was issued in McLennan County, though it is possible that the wedding took place in Cherokee County, to the east of McLennan. (William Parsons would later say that the couple married in Austin, but no evidence exists for that claim.) Albert gave the officiant his correct name, but it was the first and certainly not the last time that his bride would give a public official a different name—she is listed as Ella Hall (in the coming years she would at times give “Ella,” at other times “Eldine,” as her middle name, and use “Hall” as her maiden name). The couple took advantage of propitious legal developments; they married shortly after a state Supreme Court decision, Honey v. Clark, affirmed the Republican interpretation that a section of the new constitution meant that black and white people could marry, briefly opening the way for legal interracial nuptials. Democrats had argued that the section granted former slaves only the right to marry each other. The judge who married the two—no doubt a Republican—neglected to list his own name, though it is possible that it was Waco mayor B. F. Harris, who was a friend of Albert’s and was officiating around this time. Weeks later, Democrats would outlaw such weddings.¹⁹

In fact, by early 1873, the Democrats, now in control of the state legislature, aimed to roll back a whole host of Republican policies and quash the unholy Republican alliance among the freedmen, German Americans, and southern-born white traitors to the neo-Confederate cause. With no more than 5,000 active members, the state Republican Party itself was wracked by internal divisions as well as by voter resentment over the police forces, tax increases, and the growing state debt. Richard Coke, a Waco native and unrepentant rebel, won the governorship in 1873 by a 2-to-1 margin in an election rife with fraud on both sides. One of his priorities was to do away with the various layers of law enforcement created by his predecessor. A Dallas paper bade farewell to the State Police, calling the force “as infernal an engine of oppression as ever crushed any people beneath God’s sunlight.” The Freedmen’s Bureau had ceased to exist, and the last federal troops were withdrawn from the state in 1870. Closer to home, Parsons had lost critical allies—Shep Mullins had died in 1871, and Judge Oliver had retired two years later. Albert’s brother William had moved to New York City in 1871 to represent the new Texas Bureau of Immigration (an agency established by the Republican legislature) and serve as a commissioner for the upcoming US centennial celebration.²⁰

Whatever hope Albert Parsons might have had for a new day in Waco must have been fleeting. Though they were legally married, he and Lucia could not count on living together openly and in peace. All of Waco knew his wife to be a former slave, and his prospects for lucrative state and federal patronage jobs were rapidly slipping away in the wake of the Democratic onslaught of 1872 and 1873. He had served as a secretary of the state legislature, promoted public-private partnerships to further economic development, charged into the town of Belton with his band of lawmen, and canvassed the state for Republican voters—all thrilling ventures that befitted his temperament and ambition. Yet a future in Waco or anywhere else in Texas promised only peril.

Meanwhile, Lucia faced constraints of her own. In Waco she would have to remain in the shadows and sew and cook for whites. She had glimpsed a life beyond menial labor in her interactions with her schoolteacher, her employers, and Albert himself. And her light skin opened possibilities elsewhere that her dark-skinned mother could have never imagined. Although Oliver Benton had the means to indulge her, he could not offer her an entrée into a wider world that was overwhelmingly white. More to the point, perhaps, the attraction between Albert and Lucia was palpable. She was probably not the first, and she definitely would not be the last, woman to be captivated by Albert’s public speaking—his eloquence, exuberance, and composure in the face of hecklers and even armed men. For his part, Albert saw his wife as smart and headstrong, a contrast to the illiterate, desperately poor black fieldhands he had met stumping across the countryside. So, he might have asked, if Lucia was not downtrodden, was she truly “black”? Facing the choice of a life apart, a life together as perpetual outsiders in Central Texas, or a life together among people who did not know them, they chose the last course—to put hundreds of miles between themselves and the town of Waco.

IN 1873, ALBERT PARSONS ACCEPTED A JOB AS AN EDITOR AND reporter for a new publication in Austin, the Texas Farmer and Stock Raiser. On September 10, 1873, he met with other newspapermen in the northern part of the state, in Sherman, and together they formed the seventy-member State Editorial Association. Simultaneously, the group received an invitation from the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad to accept an all-expenses-paid excursion to visit Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, Indianapolis, and other cities along the railroad’s routes. By entertaining the Texas editors, the railroad men aimed to promote commercial trade throughout the greater Midwest. It would be Parsons’s first trip outside the South, and his first visit to the city where he would become infamous.²¹

Around September 12, the group set out, a “precious cargo of Texas brains and influence,” according to the Dallas Weekly Herald. After stops in Memphis, Chattanooga, and Lookout Mountain, they arrived in St. Louis on the eighteenth, where they were feted in “grand style,” enjoying a boat ride on the Mississippi, a trip to the city’s fairgrounds, and an evening at the theater. They proceeded to Cincinnati and then on to Chicago on the twenty-seventh, where they set about “enjoying its magnificent sites and partaking of its hospitalities.” Their visit to Chicago, a city one hundred times larger than Waco, coincided with the opening of the Inter-State Industrial Exposition. Attracting 20,000 visitors to its formal opening on the twenty-fifth, the fair showcased the city’s triumphant rise from the ashes of the disastrous fire two years before.²²

The exposition was housed in an immense, domed building eight hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide, “the largest and best structure on the continent,” according to the Chicago Tribune. The paper listed for the edification of its readers the impressive statistics—the number of bricks, linear feet of oak piling, and tons of nuts, bolts, and plates that went into the hall. Here, then, was progress in its most solid, material form. Virtually every local manufacturer, wholesaler, and major retailer exhibited wares; on display were overalls, carriages and cradles, shutters and plows, floral arrangements, and sewing machines. Ordinary folk could admire housewares, wigs, and clothing, while building contractors marveled over new drilling, quarrying, and crushing machinery. Entrepreneurs found labor-saving innovations in mining, agriculture, dairying, and textile production—new machines powered by steam and water.²³

The truly awe-inspiring nature of the exposition—the size and grandeur of the building that housed it, the seemingly infinite number of products on display—could not completely overshadow the dramatic events that had transpired the week before. On September 23, a banking crisis had rocked New York City when the investment house Jay Cooke collapsed. While the Chicago Exposition highlighted the splendid interconnectedness of the postbellum national economy, the crisis revealed the darker side of the same trend. A decline in demand from eastern railroads reverberated in Chicago, where orders for ties and other timber products fell dramatically. By September 26, the largest Chicago banks had suspended operations because they feared a run on deposits. The city’s boosters sought to minimize the damage; they could hardly have known that the country had started on a steep, downward trajectory into a five-year depression. Back in McLennan County, the price of cotton plummeted.²⁴

In December, soon after Albert returned from his trip, came the day of reckoning for the newlyweds, the day they realized they had no future anywhere in Texas. Governor Davis and almost all other Republicans, including those in Waco, suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Democrats. Within a few weeks the couple decided to move to Chicago.²⁵

Albert Parsons went north that winter fully formed, as it were. He possessed the useful skills of typesetting, editing, and writing, and he had thrived off rough politicking and courting controversy with his audacious advocacy for the dispossessed. Self-promotion was his strong suit, and his oratorical gifts gave him an overweening self-confidence that could serve him well or disastrously, depending upon the circumstances. In Texas he had familiarized himself with a political economy that enriched an arrogant few at the expense of the disenfranchised, landless many—a political economy from which, truth be told, he aspired to profit via public office. Chicago beckoned as a new field of labor for him, but it was a field whose outlines he recognized and understood.

En route to Chicago, Lucia relinquished her first name and assumed a new one—Lucy. She seemed to want to erase her past altogether, for she left behind her close kin, Oliver Benton, and the Waco townspeople who knew her to be a former slave. There is no record of how or when, but by this time baby Champ had died; whether this left her grief-stricken or relieved (or both) is unknown. Life in Waco had taught her that a woman’s sexual attractiveness could play a critical part in shaping her life’s chances. At some point she had also developed a toughness of character that would allow her not only to serve as her own best advocate but also to survive devastating personal crises. She would remain guarded, and circumspect about her true self and her background, especially compared to her garrulous, outgoing husband. In the grand American tradition of self-reinvention, for a while, at least, she became a person without a past.

Lucy’s Waco years gave her reason to appreciate the value of a name change. Her mother had shed Taliaferro in favor of the name of her new husband, Charlie Carter, who himself had discarded his slave name. Oliver Gathings considered himself a free, or at least freer, man after he assumed the name Oliver Benton. Jane Tallavan chose a variation on her owner’s name—“Taliaferro” was pronounced “Tolliver.” In the immediate postwar period, identities remained fluid, especially in a town full of recent arrivals such as Waco, and new names could signal a person’s whole new way of being in the world. For his part, Albert Parsons had chosen to shed his identity as a Confederate veteran and become a Republican. Both he and Lucy were learning that a carefully crafted persona, “authentic” or not, could prove useful when either one of them wanted to be heard over the commotion of a hostile world.

Throughout her long life, Lucy would make the most of the fact that no one could tell for certain by looking at her who her parents were or what she had endured in Virginia, or on the coffle en route to Texas, or in wartime McLennan County, or in Waco during the turbulent years of Reconstruction. Albert and Lucy Parsons would never return to Texas, and they never looked back—except when those who wished them harm forced them to do so.