Free The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins Page A

thick reed brakes that lined the creeks and branches; if they trembled, it meant bear. He played thread the needle, which meant shooting a rifle ball through a small hole in a board at a hundred paces. And he learned to repack a muzzle-loaded, twin-hammered shotgun faster than any boy around.
    On Sundays, he attended church, sitting on a rough-hewn benchwith trestle legs. The Knights and the other families either walked, so as to rest the horses that had plowed all week, or hitched the steers to wagons and put chairs in the back.
    Farming and faith united the poor whites of Jones County. House raisings and corn shuckings were, like baptisms, communal rituals. When a family moved into the area, or a newly married couple purchased their first small plot, neighbors gathered round to help them build the frame, floor, and roof of their new home. Corn shuckings were celebrations of the harvest, of man and God working together to create the kernels that sustained life. The shuckers sang as they worked, in a call-and-response melody:
    Pull off the shucks boys, pull off the shucks.
Round up the corn boys, round up the corn.
    Shuckings, land clearings, and house raisings were social occasions that drew families from miles around. Newton’s family thought nothing of traveling ten or fifteen miles to a log rolling. “They would go out in the woods, cut their logs, and haul them up,” Newton’s son Tom recalled. “Then they would split those logs, and ask in a few hands and put the logs up. Then my father would hew them down on the inside, and when it was finished call it a fine house.”
    Women cooked the dinner and sat together and picked cotton off the seed or spun and quilted. A dozen women at their wheels made an ambient buzzing noise, and Mason and the other women could weave as much as five or six yards each of homespun in a day.
    With the shucking done, and the moon rising over the piles of naked ears, they sat down to feast on fresh pork and sweet potato pie. In their minds, they were the chosen people of God, morally superior to slave owners, who did no work and depended on others for their livelihood. They were God’s special children.
    The Knights were Baptists of a plain sort. Later in his life, Newton was a devoted Primitive Baptist, and he may have grown up one. It was an aptly named denomination, suggesting the nature of thefaith. While baptisms in Natchez took place in marble fonts surrounded by Italian stained glass, Primitive Baptists received the sacrament outdoors, under God’s canopy. After confessing their faith, the candidates for baptism waded into the muddy, snake-infested swamps, with the preacher leading the way, his Bible raised high over his head. It was full immersion. The congregation stood at water’s edge, singing, “High in the Father’s house above our mansion is prepared, there is the home, the rest I love, with Christ forever shared.”
    These Baptists of the Piney Woods practiced foot washing, lay preaching, and egalitarian worship in unadorned buildings. The central tenet of their faith was that all humans were equal in God’s eyes and infused with God’s spirit. “God is no respecter of persons” was one of their favorite passages from the Bible. Another was: “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.”
    Until about 1820, all Mississippi Baptists had acted on these egalitarian doctrines; blacks and whites worshipped together and prayed together. Lay preachers spoke informally, as the word of God came to them. But when cotton became king, and money talked louder than God, silver-tongued ministers yoked the word of God to the command of the slave owner. Increasingly, slaveholders and Southern evangelical ministers became one and the same: the voices of God’s authority.
    Primitive Baptists resisted such sophistry. For them, “the tongue of the learned” was a forked tongue, as one preacher said. In