Free The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins Page B

the 1840s, they formed a separate church in order to worship autonomously and in traditional ways, renouncing privilege and the pastimes of the rich. Indeed, they viewed the planter class as lazy and effeminate: the gentry had soft “fair hands covered with gloves,” whereas their own hands were hard and rough, “exposed by reason of hard labor.” They embraced the purity of simple living.
    Initially, Albert and Mason Knight attended the Leaf River Baptist Church, which sat at the junction of Jones and Smith counties,and which Jackie and Keziah Knight had helped found. But in the 1830s, its influential gentrified pastor, Norvell Robertson, began to lead the congregation away from primitive practices such as foot washing and toward more mainstream worship. Robertson was a Virginia-born planter who owned seven slaves, and he was also the sort who paid as much attention to others’ behavior as his own. He attempted to impose his morality on a flock full of unruly and unrepentant backwoodsmen, censuring various members for offenses such as drinking, dancing, fiddling, and fornicating. This did not sit well with the Knight men, who were enthusiastic drinkers and brawlers. Neighbor Ben Graves recalled, “The early Knights were considered tuff people.” In 1838, Albert Knight was excluded from the church for “repeated intoxication.” A problem with whiskey may have run in the family; Jackie’s youngest son, Daniel, would steadily drink up his inheritance. Still, it may have seemed the height of hypocrisy to Albert to be called sinner by a slave owner like Robertson. As the pastor became increasingly intrusive and the worship less primitive, most of the Knights stopped attending Leaf River, including Jackie. Albert and Mason instead began attending a church called Old Union.
    Newton didn’t drink, but other Knights and their neighbors enjoyed drinking as a pastime, a solace, and relief from backbreaking work. There was a choice of saloons in the towns of Williamsburg or Mount Carmel over in Covington County, if they wanted to go that far, where the various shades of liquor were served with evocative names like John Silver, Old Morgan, or Ben Gun. But they didn’t need to travel to drink: just about every household in the area had a ten-gallon keg of whiskey in the house, bought during their annual trips to Mobile to sell goods.
    Once or twice a year Newton and the other men of the family drove their surplus crops to Mobile by ox wagon for exchange or sale. The trip was 125 miles and took ten days, following a trail that meandered parallel to the Leaf River. Teams of oxen yoked in fours and sixes lumbered in front of springboard wagons hauling upwardof five thousand pounds of melons, bushels of corn, and bales of cotton, along a road so barely traceable that it “looked more like Indian path.” Often they halted, water-bound by rising streams. They made the journey with other families, sharing campsites and relying on one another for mutual protection.
    The trip was a high adventure for a young man, a moving caravan and menagerie. Newton and the other boys herded the livestock, using cowhide whips to force seventy or one hundred hogs into a begrudging trot. Flocks of turkeys and chickens fluttered and skittered down the road before them and roosted in the trees at night.
    Mobile, the South’s second largest seaport to New Orleans, was a stunning, multihued international business capital, a crescent of packed quays and warehouses set against the shimmering azure of the Gulf. It roared with commerce, roustabouts bustling along wharves, merchants dodging in and out of cotton presses and slave houses, and dusky outlanders dickering in what must have sounded to Newton’s ear like strange pidgin languages. Away from the water, on the quieter residential lanes, gracious silence reined over mansions entwined by honeysuckle and roses and cloistered by large oaks. British journalist William Howard Russell in 1861 described the