Ethel Knight

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Ethel Knight,published Echo of the Black Horn in 1953, a novel reeking with Lost Cause overtones, just in time for Massive Resistance to the Civil Rights movement.

Ethel Knight, raised to revere the American Revolution and slavery, as well as the supremacy of the white race, could not abide such a history for her ancestors. She assured her readers that although many early white migrants to Jones County were "without lands or money," or "simply adventurers and vagabonds," the founding families, including the Knights, were part of "the old aristocracy, bringing in slaves and finery from an older civilization." Historical records, however, do not bear out such aristocratic claims. As Street recognized, the ancestors of Jones County families were mostly plain folk who migrated to Mississippi Territory in search of elusive prosperity. In 1951, however, Street's images of racially mixed ancestors disturbed Ethel Knight more than his class-conscious characters and drove her to write Echo of the Black Horn. Street's creation of the Tap Roots character Kyd Fermat Dabney, a Cajun orphan adopted by Hoab and Shellie Dabney who secretly possessed "Moorish blood," seemed particularly to disturb Ethel. Although Kyd was not by birth a Dabney, Street's description of her as an orphan suggested that she might be modeled after Mason Rainey Knight, Newt Knight's mother and Ethel's direct ancestor.[6]

The mysterious tales about Mason Knight, who was reputed to have been the "ward" of Jackie Knight before she married his son Albert, were tailor-made for Street's novel of adventure and scandal, and he may indeed have built on legends about her to create Kyd. In 1935 Tom Knight described his grandmother as an orphan whose surname was actually Griffin, not Rainey. He further explained that she was raised by Jackie and Keziah Knight alongside their own children. Around the same time, Martha Wheeler, a former Knight family slave, told Works Projects Administration (WPA) writer Addie West that "she had always been told" that Mason Rainey had "attached herself" to the Knights in Asheville, North Carolina, after her own people died of the flux. Strikingly similar to Wheeler's story was Street's description of how a yellow-fever epidemic killed the parents of Kyd Fermat, causing her to turn to the Dabneys for sustenance.[7]

Kyd Dabney's resemblance to Mason Rainey disturbed some Knights because of her mixed-blood ancestry. "Those black eyes of Kyd's," mused Kyd's adoptive father, Sam Dabney, "ay they glow like bits of polished ebony in a tiny spoon of milk. And those full lips. And her happy nature. She's too unrestrained to be all white." Ethel Knight thus widened the distance between Street's fictional Kyd and her great-great-grandmother by expanding on Tom Knight's and Martha Wheeler's tales. She insisted that Mason Rainey's true name was Rebecca Griffith and that she and her brother were orphaned by their wealthy parents' death from the "bloody flux" during their move west. Shortly thereafter, she claimed, a group of Masons rescued the orphaned children and found a new home for the girl among the Knights. Ethel claimed that the Masons showed up on the Knights' doorstep on a rainy night--hence, the Knights renamed her Mason Rainey.[8]

To further counter any suggestion that Mason, like Kyd Dabney, might have had "black blood," Ethel described her as a "strange and beautiful" "Spanish-type lady." Since it was important to Ethel in 1951 that Mason's body contain not a drop of African blood, she explained her apparent lack of ivory skin and aquiline features by endowing her with an exotic (but European) ancestry. Because of Tap Roots and Davis Knight's trial, the racial identity of all Jones County Knights was openly in question at that time, and Ethel placed the blame for that squarely on the shoulders of James Street and Newt Knight.[9]

Although Ethel Knight's racial attitudes conformed to those exhibited by many white Southerners of her generation, these sentiments had evolved over a period of three centuries. By the 1840s, claims of Indian, Iberian, or Mediterranean ancestry defended one's whiteness against race-based laws and social harassment. But before the nineteenth century--and especially before slavery became firmly entrenched in the Carolina and Georgia backcountries--racial identity was more fluid, even negotiable in some cases. Nothing better exemplified its uncertain meaning in the era of the American Revolution than the prominent role played by Gideon Gibson, a light-skinned slaveholder of partially African ancestry, in South Carolina's Regulator Movement. As enforcement of race laws hardened, mixed people, including many of Gideon Gibson's descendants, migrated west in search of whiteness as well as fresh lands.[10]

During North America's colonial period, the yeoman ancestors of Jones County settlers lived in a patriarchal world bounded by lines of gender, class, and increasingly, race. The decision by colonial planters--the overwhelming majority of whom were white men--to abandon bound labor in favor of chattel slavery hastened their disproportionate control over land and wealth. In this world of expanding agricultural commerce and slavery, ordinary men understood that attaining economic success and individual honor depended on their ability to gain and cultivate land through the violent dispossession of Indians and ownership of African slaves.[11]

The rise of white men in the expansive colonial economy in turn gave rise to a racialized class structure. Even though slaveowners comprised only a minority of North Carolina's white population, their replacement of white servants with black slaves nonetheless sent the message to ordinary white men and women that servitude was uncomfortably close to slavery. As whiteness became the essential basis for freedom, white women became the crucial vessels of racial purity; black men, its despoilers. The policing of white women's and black men's sexual behavior revealed most strikingly the need for discrete categories of race in a society undergirded by the labor of enslaved Africans. Black women were designated as bearers of racially "polluted" offspring--whether fathered by black or white men--while notions of racial and sexual purity converged in the "chaste" white woman. Legally and socially, white women who crossed the color line entered a racialized realm of whoredom. As whites increasingly associated unbridled carnality, lust, and "nasty" sexual impulses with Africans, the term "wench" became almost synonymous with a female slave. At the same time, blame for the mixing of the races was placed squarely on the shoulders of white women, the designated repositories of chastity and racial purity, for their lewd "polluting" of white bloodlines.[12]

Male honor also became wedded to whiteness in this structure. A white man's success as patriarch depended not only on his owning land and mastering a household but on conquering "savage" Indians or owning "barbarian" Africans. Nevertheless, the bifurcation of racial identity into discrete categories of black and white was a long and ultimately illusory process. People of mixed racial ancestry were legally restrained and socially ostracized, but they could not be erased. Whether labeled Mulattoes, Mustees, Melungeons, Creoles, Cajuns, or the like, the mixing of peoples in early America was a visible fact.[13]