Chapter One
Cooleemee
Plantation
The mansion at Cooleemee was a commanding presence. Lordly andgleaming, it stood atop a knoll not far from the Yadkin River inNorth Carolina, at the end of a gravel road that snaked through a pineforest. I emerged from the woods to see the house set on a pedestal ofterraced gardens, painted a brilliant white, and guarded by a pair ofmagnificent trees, a flamboyant live oak and a stately Southern magnolia. Iapproached it from below, like a supplicant.
Tall and heavyset, with a great wave of white hair breaking across hishead, Judge Peter Wilson Hairston made an imposing figure as he stoodin the doorway of Cooleemee Plantation--the very image of the OldSouth aristocrat. He wore a bathrobe and slippers--he had been, he explained,polishing the silver--but that did not in the least diminish thegravity of his presence. From the doorway boomed a powerful, resonantvoice--truly the voice of a judge. The voice was a great gift, an instrumentworthy of an actor, the perfect instrument, as I would find, for tellingthe old stories of the plantation across a candlelit dining table, with tumblersof bourbon within easy reach. He could adjust its tone and volumefrom gentle to fierce. It could whisper conspiratorially and roar with pleasure.It was also a voice that had sent men to jail. Now it firmly laid downthe law, right in the doorway.
"First things first. My name is spelled Hairston, but it ispronounced Harston. If you can manage that"--now the smileemerged--"we'll get along just fine."
With this ground rule set down, Judge Hairston led me from the blazingsunshine of a June morning into the cool, echoing dimness of themansion.
It was a rare privilege to enter this house. Cooleemee is a time capsule,a relic of the dead and untouchable past that has managed to come intoour own time because of its isolation and because of the tenacity of itsoccupants. Many of the furnishings are those that the judge's grandfatherput in place before the Civil War. Time has moved so slowly at this housethat when you step across the threshold, you can be forgiven if you don'tknow what century you are in.
The graciousness, the beauty of the house, were breathtaking. Thestairhall was a large octagon, three stories high. On one side of the halldouble doors were flung open onto a view of lush greenery--tall rows ofEnglish boxwood, pungently fragrant in the June heat. A magnificentstaircase curved along the walls, swirling up to a tower that poked intothe sunlight fifty feet above. In the silence a tall-case clock gravely tickedthe time. Along the walls hung family portraits, including one thatseemed to be of the judge as a much younger man, with jet-black hairand beetling brows. In the dimness it was hard to see at first glance thatthe clothes were a century off--it was actually a portrait of his grandfather,the Peter Wilson Hairston who built the house. I would later findthat there was an uncanny resemblance in the male Hairston line goingback five generations.
On the wall at the foot of the stairs was a portrait of a boy about eightyears old wearing a pale blue suit. This was Sammy, the son of the builder.The artist had posed him outdoors with a favorite toy, a large woodenhoop. Tossed to the ground was a blue hat with a black plume, the jauntyadornment worn in battle by the boy's uncle, General Jeb Stuart, theConfederacy's legendary cavalry commander.
Six doorways opened onto the hall, creating the impression of a stageset for a country-house comedy with drunken, amorous cavaliers rushingabout in pursuit of ladies in crinoline. The doors led to a dining room,drawing room, master bedroom, and library, the judge's book-linedsanctum.
In the master bedroom stood a gigantic four-poster bed (to move itrequires six men) that the judge's grandfather had ordered from NewYork. There were porcelain and mirrors from France, paintings from Germany,a set of silver from England, and furniture made in North Carolinaby a free black cabinetmaker who once ran the largest furniture-makingoperation in the state, with many wealthy planters among his clients.And there were even older North Carolina pieces, a tall chest and tablefrom a plantation owned by the judge's great-great-great-grandfather. Thetable had been made from a cherry tree cut down in 1791. The judge hasthe receipt from the woodsman who cut the tree.
Cooleemee was one of many houses I was visiting in various parts ofthe country to write a book about old family homes and the people wholive in them. As I interviewed the occupants of these venerable places, Iheard history not as a historian would write it but as a novelist wouldimagine it. I became privy to the secret sorrows of these old families, andI learned also about the strange and cruel maneuvers of money. At onetime most of these families had been rich. Money moved like the tide--washingin inexorably, lifting everything in a slow and giddy ascent, thenjust as inexorably receding, slipping from frantic fingers, leaving onlywreckage behind.
A special poignancy suffused the Southern houses. They were theremnants not only of the vanished past but of a vanished society, onethat had been destroyed by the Civil War, a war that had left behindwhat Faulkner called "the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled withgarrulous outraged baffled ghosts."
I visited some people who had inherited nothing but the beautifulshell of their forebears' prosperity. They inhabit huge and breezy houses,built as if for a race of giants, with massive furniture ornate with theoptimism of boom times, the drawers stuffed with debts. Ghosts pace thehalls at night. They live in twenty-four-hour mockery; yet they stay on,pouring their meager dollars into polish and plaster. The houses embodya precious inheritance--it is the past itself that belongs to these families;it is their legacy, their pride, the floor beneath their feet. It has been givento them because of who they are. And the ghosts that walk hold no terrorfor them, they are guardian spirits.
Amidst all the losses these families have endured, they have been ableto take comfort from their tangible links to the past. The strength of theirheritage has kept these families together. They know history because itwas their forebears who enacted it. They know the family tree going backto the far reaches of Ireland and Scotland and England, and they knowwhere all the third cousins are today. They have to know--one of thoseobscure cousins might turn up in probate court to challenge a will.
As I sat talking with the descendants of the old planters, I felt all themoral confusion of a spy. I was a Northerner adrift in the heart of the oldConfederacy, an honored visitor in stately homes whose legacy I founddeeply troubling. America's racial problems had begun here, in the veryhomes I was planning to write about. It was impossible for me to put thatfact out of my mind. Many people, black and white, believe that the keyto our racial troubles lies in the past. Some black leaders still talk of thereparations America never paid to the slaves and their descendants forthe centuries spent in slavery and the near-slavery of sharecropping.
I wanted to find an African-American family that was descended fromslaves on one of the plantations I was writing about. I wanted to heartheir testimony about what the experience and the memory of slavery onthat particular plantation had done to their family. Was there, in fact, acenturies-old burden still being carried today? Has the past left them witha hatred of white Americans that will never be expunged? Was thereanything in their past which they looked upon with pride? Is it possiblefor an African-American to feel any connection at all to the past, or isit too dreadful even to contemplate? I worried that even if I succeededin finding such a slave descendant, it might be impossibly embarrassingto ask the right questions.
In any case, I couldn't find them. At the Southern houses I visited,the descendants of the slaves had left long ago. Some might very wellhave been living down the road from the old plantation, but the whiteowners didn't know it. There was no reason for them to keep track of theblacks, and they certainly had no interest in doing so.
At one house the only surviving trace of the blacks had been deliberately,though not malevolently, obliterated. There was a burial groundof slaves and free blacks in a pasture by a creek. When the owners rentedout their property to another farmer, he told them that he needed thatpatch of ground too. So the burial markers, iron crosses handmade by theplantation's blacksmiths, were uprooted. Too beautiful to discard, theywere stored in the basement of the house--symbols of Christian suffering,iron promises of resurrection-along with a century and a half's worth ofodds and ends. The owners meant no disrespect, but certainly no overpoweringsense of regard for those particular dead or for their descendants,who might one day come looking for the resting place of their forebears,rose up in their hearts to restrain them. They were poor themselves, theyneeded to rent out the land, and there was no one around to plead thecase of the dead.
The judge ushered me into the library and began to talk about the historyof his family. And history poured from him in torrents, as he talked ofthe family's exploits in the Revolution and the Civil War. The judge'sgrandfather had fought by the side of Jeb Stuart, his cousin and brother-in-law.He served later with another cousin, General Jubal Early, whosemother was a Hairston. He lost friends and relatives in battle at Manassas,at Williamsburg, and Shiloh. Jeb Stuart himself fell in battle late in thewar, hit by a wild shot from the pistol of a federal trooper who had hastilytaken aim at Stuart's flamboyant plume.
The judge showed me his most precious heirloom, which went backto the family's origins in this country. It was a crude wooden trunk, hewnfrom a single log and fitted with hinges and a lock made of iron. Thetrunk was covered in deerskin, and the inside was lined with faded,worm-eaten newspapers. The first Hairston to come to America, known in thefamily as Peter the Immigrant, had brought it with him on the journeyfrom Scotland and Ireland. The trunk had contained women's clothing.The clothes were a link to the Scottish past, a link that held greatsignificance for one member of the family, the judge's great-great-grandmotherRuth. "The day before she died she sent the servants up tothe attic at Berry Hill [one of the Hairston plantations in Virginia], theold family place, and told them to bring the chest down and air theclothes inside, because that's what she was going to be buried in. And soshe was." She had wardrobes full of the finest clothing, purchased withthe wealth of her plantations, yet she wished to go to her grave in thesimple clothing of times past, when the Hairstons were warriors in thecause of liberty.
Peter the Immigrant had come to America a refugee from war. As ayoung man of about twenty, he had joined the 1715 Rising, a rebellionof the Scots against English rule. The result was a hideous slaughter ofthe Scottish patriots at the Battle of Preston. Peter fled to Ireland, wherehe married and had five children. About 1729 he brought his family toAmerica. They had landed in Pennsylvania, but after a few years, theyheaded south along the Great Wagon Road to Virginia, where they establishedthemselves as tobacco planters and acquired slaves.
As the judge continued his recitation of the family chronicle, it slowlydawned on me that the beautiful mansion in which I was sitting was amere outpost and represented but a small fragment of a vast plantationempire, built up over several generations. The Immigrant's children andgrandchildren created a network of plantations along the southern borderof Virginia, stretching in a broad swath through the counties of Halifax,Pittsylvania, Henry, Franklin, and Patrick. They expanded south intoNorth Carolina, acquiring land in the counties of Stokes, Rockingham,Forsyth, Davie, and Davidson. The Hairstons did not know it when theycame here, but by an extraordinary stroke of good fortune they had settledon the best tobacco-growing land in the world, a region of the Virginia-NorthCarolina Piedmont that would later be called the Bright Belt.
Their plantation empire grew so large that it almost defies description.In Virginia and North Carolina the Hairstons established ten major plantations,and each of these had numerous satellite plantations that mightbe worked by a dozen slaves or fewer. When Judge Hairston tried to drawup a comprehensive list of the family's pre-Civil War holdings, he cameup with the astounding total of forty-five plantations, large and small, infour states. The judge's great-grandfather Samuel Hairston had his headquartersat Oak Hill plantation outside of Danville. His brother Marshallowned Beaver Creek plantation near Martinsville. Another brother, Robert,lived with his wife, Ruth (who was also his first cousin), at Berry Hill,and in the 1830s he went down to Mississippi with yet another brother,Harden, to establish cotton plantations there with a small army of slaves.Other branches of the family were established on hilltops and along riverbanksin southern Virginia, and the judge reeled off the names of theplantations--Windsor, Chatmoss, Hordsville, Marrowbone, Royal Oak.
The Hairstons always seemed to have cash in hand when a parcel ofland became available. Dour and devoted to acquisition, they lived bythe old Scottish maxim "Money is flat and meant to be piled up." Indeeda Richmond newspaper in 1851 ran an article saying that the judge'sgreat-grandfather, Samuel Hairston of Oak Hill, was probably the richestman in Virginia, and perhaps in the United States, the possessor of landand slaves worth $5 million. He was reputedly the largest slaveholder inthe South.
It is impossible to say precisely how many slaves the entire familyowned. Judge Hairston consulted over one hundred plantation lists andinventories to compile a roster of the slaves his grandfather had owned.It ran to more than fourteen hundred names, but represented only a smallfragment of the family's total holdings. The land and slaveholding recordsthat do exist are misleading and tend to understate the size of theirpossessions, because it seems that some of the Hairstons were not exactlycandid with the tax collector. Still, the judge estimated that the combinedbranches of his family held ten thousand slaves.
To keep this huge legacy of land and slaves intact, the Hairstonsrevived one of the old customs of the European nobility--they marriedeach other. The brothers Samuel, Marshall, and Robert all married cousins,creating a family tree of insane complexity. Samuel and his wife,Agnes, built the mansion at Oak Hill. Their first son was Peter WilsonHairston, Judge Hairston's grandfather. He combined two branches of thefamily tree and became heir to the accumulated wealth of five generations.He was to be the culmination of all that had come before, the man theyall expected to carry the wealth of slavery through the rest of the century.Then came the Civil War.
Of the family's great wealth, Cooleemee is one of the few survivingrelics. The capital of the family empire, Oak Hill, stood empty for manyyears, and finally burned.
There are no mementos of the Civil War at Cooleemee, no swords ormuskets over the mantel, no tattered flags, no sentimental pictures ofRobert E. Lee. The memory of the war was vivid enough without suchrelics. Judge Hairston remembers the visits of an elderly woman, relatedto the Hairstons by marriage, who wore black mourning clothes in memoryof her brother, who had been killed leading a cavalry charge at Manassassixty years earlier. The judge's grandmother was, he said, "the mostunreconstructed Southerner that ever was." She never let go of her angerat the North. A young girl visiting Cooleemee on the Fourth of July wasimprudent enough to show up with a small American flag pinned to herdress. She was stopped at the door by Fanny--"Child, take off that Yankeerag before you put foot in this house." Judge Hairston's father wishedsimply to put an end to the era. "Dad objected so to the bitterness overthe Civil War that when I was growing up, you could not mention it inthis house."
In the last days of the war, a Yankee raiding party approachedCooleemee and may have entered the plantation but did no damage. No oneknows exactly why the house survived, but the judge believes that theplantation's manager may have offered the Yankees provisions inexchange for sparing the mansion. What is known is that a slave namedJohn Goolsby risked his life to save the family silver. Goolsby, the plantationcoachman, had served throughout the war with Peter Hairston asbody servant and horse handler. He loaded the family silver in a wagonand drove sixty miles to Stokes County, dodging Yankee raiders, andburied the silver in the vegetable garden at the Saura Town Plantation.Goolsby lived into his nineties, and Judge Hairston remembers seeinghim as a very old man at Saura Town. The silver Goolsby hid from theYankees, usually kept in a bank, is brought out for family functions atCooleemee. The judge was polishing it the morning I came to the house.
I had heard such stories of "the faithful slave" at other plantations.Supposedly such servants begged the Yankees to spare the master, sparethe house. They hid the furniture, the mirrors, the silver, and brought itall back when the Yankees had passed. It was hard to believe that peopleon the brink of freedom would cling to their masters and shun the liberators,but that is what the whites all maintained. Since the slaves andtheir descendants had gone, no one could say otherwise.
So I asked the question that had drawn only blank looks at otherSouthern houses: Did the judge have any idea what happened to theslaves and their descendants? Indeed, he did. Quite a few descendants ofCooleemee slaves were still living in the vicinity. Most of them werenamed Hairston, but they pronounced the name in their own way. "Thewhites follow the old Scottish pronunciation," he explained. "I believethat the blacks originally used our pronunciation, but when the Yankeeschoolmasters came down here after the war and got their hands on them,they made them say it as it is spelled."
It suddenly made sense that the judge had insisted, almost as a conditionof my entering the house, that I get the Scottish pronunciation ofthe name right. I thought that this may have been the white family's wayof distancing themselves from the blacks who had adopted the name buthad given up the odd way of saying it.
So there were dozens of slave descendants, perhaps more, still livinghere. What stories would they have to tell? Did they have a sense of theirfamily history as strong as the judge's?
I was about to ask for the telephone book so that I could get theaddresses of black Hairstons and write to them for appointments whenthe judge surprised me by saying, "I'll call my old friend Squire Hairstonand ask him to come over."
I found it hard to imagine that a prominent judge and landownercould be on such good terms with a black man that the latter, out of purefriendship, would drop whatever he was doing and rush over for a chatwith a total stranger. Perhaps Squire Hairston would feel that it was inhis interest to answer this sudden summons. I felt uneasy interviewingSquire on these terms--I felt that he was being called in to give a commandperformance, to regale a visitor with old plantation stories at thebehest of the master. Squire might tell me only what he thought JudgePeter would want me to hear. And it occurred to me that the judge'sreference to Squire as "my old friend" was window dressing, intended toshow an outsider that he could be a man of the people, of the black peopleto boot.
Before long, our conversation was interrupted by the sound of voicesin the stairhall. The judge's wife, Lucy, ushered Squire Hairston into thelibrary. The judge rose to welcome his guest, and the two men shookhands warmly.
This meeting was not what I had expected. Here were two men withthe closest possible ties to slavery, the grandsons of slave and slaveholder,greeting each other cordially in the library of the old master's mansion.How did this come to pass?
Of average height but solidly built, Squire was dressed in work clothes,neatly pressed green pants and shirt. Although he was seventy years old,he still worked a few hours a day as a custodian at the Davidson CountyCommunity College.
Squire settled into one of the library's worn leather chairs. The judgeexcused himself, leaving us to talk in private.
I started by asking about his family. Squire said his father was bornon Cooleemee Plantation in 1886. His father worked all his life as asharecropper here, and on the side he planted tobacco on two acres ofhis own land, which he had bought for $20 in the early 1900s. Squire'sgrandfather, named Franklin, had been born a slave in 1851. Squire hadbeen able to trace back to his great-grandmother Louisa, Franklin'smother, born in 1833. The judge had shown him the plantation ledgerthat recorded Louisa's birth. But beyond that he could not go. His deeperancestry might be somewhere in the older plantation ledgers, but no onehad been able to trace a family tree among the thousands of names.
Squire spoke slowly and chose his words carefully. He talked abouthis lineage but offered few details about anyone's life. He had heard thestory of Goolsby hiding the silver and had no reason to doubt it, but hehad no direct knowledge that it was true. As I listened to him, I wastrying to form a tactful series of questions. From the judge, history hadpoured out in a flood--like many white Southerners, the judge possesseda rich storehouse of plantation tales to draw upon. Asking the grandsonof a slave about whips, chains, and the humiliations of slavery was anothermatter. But this was my one chance and I took it. I asked Squire whathe knew about the old days on the plantation.
"An old lady used to sit down and talk to us a lot about what theywent through."
"What was her name?"
"Victoria."
"What were some of the stories that she told?"
"Well, she told how they went out in the fields ... worked hard andeverything ..." Squire looked away and, to my surprise, broke into a quietlaugh. "Well--she told a lot of stories." He fell into silence.
"Nothing you want to tell me?"
"Well, I've got a lot of memories."
He would say no more. I imagined that generations of memories wereflashing through his mind, memories that might not be the sort of quaintand poignant anecdotes that writers like to collect for books about oldhouses. Perhaps he did not realize that I was willing to listen to anythinghe cared to say, that I was not interested in stories that were merelycharming. Then it occurred to me that Squire had laughed at the ideathat I expected him to explain, in a few minutes, his family's experienceduring slavery time and afterward.
Squire Hairston's warm greeting to the judge--indeed, his mere presencein the old master's mansion--seemed to indicate that he had madehis peace with Judge Hairston over what had happened in the past, butobviously he was inclined to keep his family's past private. Just beforeSquire arrived, I had asked the judge about how his grandfather hadtreated the black Hairstons in slavery. He said I should ask Squire, thathe would not presume to speak for them. The tradition in the white familywas that they had treated their slaves well, but he acknowledged that theblacks might think differently. Only they could tell me.
I was reluctant to press the matter with Squire--perhaps he wouldnever talk about such things to a white person--but I made one moretry.
"I guess there are some stories that will never go outside the Hairstonfamily?"
"Never will ... never will, no."
That seemed to be the end of it. But as he stood up to signal an endto the interview, he said there would be a reunion of the black Hairstonsin a few months, and he invited me to attend. If I wanted to gather storiesof the old days at Cooleemee, he said, there would be people at thereunion with ties to the plantation. He would see if anyone would talkwith me.
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After Squire left, I went up to the tower. It had a panoramic view--onone side of the house were old barns and stables; on the other, open fieldsthat ran down to the Yadkin River a quarter of a mile away. At its peakjust before the Civil War, this plantation had six hundred slaves andforty-two hundred acres. Since then the land and the house had changedhardly at all--so I could actually touch the objects the slaveholder hadtouched and see the very things he had seen. And I wondered about themind and soul of such a man. How different was the mind that lookeddown from this great height through this window and saw a white boyrolling a hoop for fun and a black boy sweating in a cotton field? In 1860it seemed that the order of things would never change. The order of theworld was good and could not be otherwise because Peter Wilson Hairstonbelieved that God Himself had imposed the existing order on the world,and it was not for man to tamper with His design. "Thank Him whoplaced us here," wrote a Southern poet, "Beneath so kind a sky."
Before leaving I asked the judge, if he had been his grandfather, wouldhe have freed his slaves?
"He had so many, it would have been all but impossible to free them,even if he could have hired them right back. The law required that if youset people free, you had to send them out of the state. How would theyprovide for themselves? And he didn't own the slaves outright--his titlewas all mixed up with his grandmother and the rest of the family. Andof course, slavery was simply the accepted system back then."
I asked him the question that he had been asked many times before:Did he feel any guilt about his family's past as slaveholders?
"You can't repeal history!" he thundered.
And then, in a quieter voice, he said, "I can't go back and unwindit."
As the day of the Hairston reunion grew nearer, I realized how fortunateI was to be invited to it. If a friendly connection actually existed betweenthe white and the black families, it was certainly rare, and it would be aprivilege to document it. More valuable still was the chance to interviewsome of the last surviving people who had actually seen and spoken withslaves. But I also began to have some misgivings. Whatever the blackstold me would end up as a short postscript to the tale of a white slaveholdingfamily--a black stamp of approval, solicited by the white author,on the plantation days. And in my story, as in so many others, blackpeople would be remote figures viewed at a distance as the whites dominatedthe scene. But as far as I could tell, the history of a black familywas largely unrecoverable. The documentation simply did not exist. So Iput aside my misgivings and persuaded myself that I was doing some smallservice to the black family by setting down the memories that did stillecho from the past.
The Hairston family was meeting at a large hotel on the outskirts ofBaltimore. Off the lobby at a registration table, two women sat wearing"HAIRSTON CLAN" buttons. A few people milled around, but there wasno evidence of a bustling reunion. It seemed that I had come for nothing.
Squire emerged from an elevator. I had last seen him in his workclothes, but he was dressed now in a gray business suit. He hurried meinto the elevator, saying that some people were waiting for me upstairs.
Gathered in the living room of a suite were about fifteen men, all inbusiness suits, and two women in silk dresses. Unsmiling, they eyed mesilently as I came in. Most were middle-aged; a few appeared to be aboutseventy. Three were in their twenties. I had expected an interview; insteadit seemed I had been called before a tribunal.
Squire introduced me and said a few words about the family backgroundof the people in the room. Verdeen Hairston, a neighbor ofSquire's in Petersville, was the great-grandson of a Cooleemee slave. Hewas a farmer. A tall, powerful man, with a broad face set in a scowl, hedid not look happy to see an outsider coming into this family gathering.A speech impediment made his words come out in a strained, basso growl,tending to increase the fierceness of his expression. A woman in herforties with reddish hair and yellow skin, named Ever Lee Hairston, alsowore a serious expression and listened to the conversation with greatintensity, but she said nothing, and I noticed that she never looked atme. Squire said she had grown up at Cooleemee.
The president of the clan was Collie Hairston from Camden, NewJersey, where he once served as an assemblyman. Born at Cooleemee, hewas about the same age as the judge. His sister Marie was in the room aswell. Their parents had been Cooleemee's housekeepers, the last of theblack domestics to be part of the everyday life of Cooleemee. Collie'sgreat-grandfather had been John Goolsby, who was the patriarch of sixbranches of the Hairston family. Collie told me the story I had heardfrom the judge, about Goolsby hiding the white family's silver in the lastdays of the Civil War. This seemed to be the agreed-upon plantation-daysstory that both the whites and blacks told to outsiders. I thoughtthat the white family might have made up the story, but Collie said thathe had heard it from Goolsby's son.
"There were twelve children in my family, all born on that plantation,"Collie said. "My mother spent eighty-five years on the plantation.She was born in Stokes County, and when she was six, she moved intoCooleemee. My grandfather drove a mule team for the plantation; heused to take loads up to Virginia."
Collie's account of his family background was interrupted by the arrivalof a short, bald, elderly man who walked with a cane. The roomrose to greet him. This was Jester Hairston, the family celebrity. Nearingninety, he was a regular on the television comedy Amen, in which heplayed the character of Rolly. Everyone called him "Cousin Jester," buthe was introduced to me as "Dr. Hairston," in recognition of his fourhonorary doctorates in music. He was one of several Hairstons who werewell-known. The others were sports figures, but I found Jester especiallyintriguing because he had had a long career in theater, radio, in Hollywood,and as a performer of Negro spirituals. He had figured prominentlyin two films I remembered well from my childhood. He had appeared inJohn Wayne's 1960 movie The Alamo, playing the role of Jethro, thearchetypal "faithful slave," who remains by the side of his master, JimBowie, despite being granted his freedom and with it the chance to leavethe death trap at the Alamo. In one of the final scenes, as a horde ofMexican soldiers closes in on the injured Jim Bowie (played by RichardWidmark), Jethro hurls himself over his former master to take the deathblow meant for the white man. Five years earlier, Jester had conductedthe chorus for another movie that dealt with slavery--the Howard Hawks filmLand of the Pharaohs, an epic of ancient Egypt written partly byWilliam Faulkner, which portrayed a pharaoh's mania for wealth and thelabors of an enslaved people in bondage to the master's obsession.
I had not expected that Jester Hairston would turn up at the reunion,and I was pleased when he was guided to the chair closest to mine andthe conversation was turned over to him. He said he had been to Cooleemeeand knew the judge.
"About three years ago I did a concert near Cooleemee, and Peterwrote me and told me he wanted me to stay at his house that night. Hecame down and got me and brought me up to the plantation, and I spentthe night and slept in his bed. And I didn't know it until he told me,`Jester, I was born in this bed.' I didn't feel it was any great honor, but itshowed me we were friends."
I asked him how he felt about staying in that house, given its history.
"It's a part of my ancestry, and it's a part of me just as much as it's apart of Peter. My folks were there in a different capacity, but that was theway of life in those days. It's the way it came up. Why look at it withhate? If you hated everyone who had us in slavery ... that was the systemin those days. I don't know a better man than Peter."
Dr. Hairston was a raconteur of the same high order as the judge. Helaunched into a series of stories about meeting Hairstons, white and black,on his travels around the country over the last sixty years. As a youngman he had gone out to Hollywood in 1936 with an all-black choir fromHarlem to sing in the film Green Pastures, which led to an offer toperform on a radio comedy.
"After we finished the picture we got a radio program with Irving S.Cobb. Paducah Plantation was the name of Cobb's show. He'd say, `BrotherHairston and the Hall Johnson Choir will perform so and so.' I got a letterfrom a woman in Long Beach who was thrilled to hear the name Hairstonon the radio and wanted to know if she was related to me. I told her tomeet me after the show. I saw this tall redhead standing with her husband.I'm sure they thought I was the janitor come to turn up the seats, andshe just froze--I put my arms around her and said to her husband, `Canyou see the family resemblance?' And he said, `No, Jester, that will haveto grow on me.'"
The room erupted in laughter. They must have heard that story adozen times, but Jester's polished delivery never failed to get a laugh. Hewent on to more reminiscences, and I realized that I was truly in thehands of a brilliant performer. He had
