The sergeant, p.26
The Sergeant, page 26
Considering that Said was constantly on the road, delivering one lecture after another, it is understandable why it was taking so long to turn his rough draft into something worthy of publication. As the tour proceeded, the growing pressure to finish his memoir appears to have taken a toll on Said, prompting him to turn to alcohol. During an appearance in Bainbridge in June 1871, the local newspaper accused him of “drinking whiskey by the wholesale.” Two weeks later, he was drunk or hungover as he stumbled through a lecture in the town of Blakely.
Blakely was likely Said’s last stop in Georgia. After spending a year and a half on the road in Georgia and Florida, he was ready to go west to Alabama, despite repeated warnings from friends that “it was a very dangerous State and filled with Ku-Klux [and] that the freedmen there did not know what freedom was owing to the oppression of the whites under which they were situated… My life, they said, would be in great danger.”
Since the end of the war, the Klan and other terrorist groups had killed more than a hundred people in Alabama and beaten or threatened many more, with a special focus on “colored” schools. “Every week brings us tidings of some fresh work of midnight villainy,” a Black teacher wrote. In recent months, a “colored” school in Greensboro had been burned to the ground and teachers in rural Marengo and Etowah counties had been horsewhipped and told to leave. A year before, an Irish-born teacher at a school for Black railroad workers in Cross Plains had been lynched, along with four of his students. “God knows I feel myself entirely innocent of the charge,” he wrote his wife, just before he was hanged. “I have only sought to educate the negro.”
Nicholas Said was undoubtedly familiar with such stories, but refused to pay them much heed: “My own common sense dictated to me, of course, that it was not possible that such a state of affairs could exist in Alabama, besides that, there were good and bad in all countries.” Shortly after his appearance in Blakely, he headed thirteen miles down the road to the Chattahoochee River, where he took a ferry to Columbia, Alabama, on the river’s western shore.
25 “An End to My Peregrinations”
Columbia, Alabama, was a riverport with only around 700 residents, but whenever a steamboat pulled in, its twin wharves came alive with dockworkers hauling cargo into their holds: bushels of corn, barrels of syrup, and bales of cotton, wool, and hides. The river was the primary way of transporting goods not only for Columbia but for the farmlands that surrounded it, since the closest railroad stop was fifty miles away.
With his African tattoos, dapper clothes, and European mannerisms, Nicholas Said must have been a curiosity as he made his way past the wharves and into the town center: a handful of stores, churches, hotels, and eateries. In contrast to what he’d been told about Alabama, the townsfolk greeted him warmly. “I shall truly say that I have never had such a reception,” he later wrote. Within days of his arrival, he managed to draw a large audience to one of his lectures, while selling more subscriptions to his as-yet-unwritten autobiography.
“I am glad to say [he] gave entire satisfaction to his audience, which was composed of a goodly number of white and black people,” wrote Mitchell Smith, a former slaveholder and Confederate veteran who was now one of the town’s leading merchants. When Smith heard that Said’s next stop was the county seat in Abbeville, twenty-two miles to the north, he wrote a note of introduction to its state assemblyman, William C. Oates. “Nicholas Said… is, by far, the most intelligent, and the best educated man of the African race with whom I have ever conversed,” Smith wrote. “Any attention paid to Mr. Said will be thankfully received.”
From the stagecoach depot in Abbeville, Said likely had no problem finding Oates, who kept a law office just a short walk from the county courthouse and lived in a spacious two-story home not far away, which until recently he had been sharing with his Black lover, Sallie Vandalia, and their son Claude. Although their relationship had begun when Sallie was a slave—probably not his slave, but instead loaned by a neighbor to help tend to his war wounds—it lasted at least two years after she was freed, suggesting there was likely some actual romance involved. But Sallie left Oates after he impregnated the fifteen-year-old cousin of his sister’s husband, so by the time Said arrived he was living as a bachelor while contributing to the welfare of his two sons.
Despite his personal foibles, Oates was known as the One-Armed Hero of Henry County because of his actions during the Civil War. As colonel of the Fifteenth Alabama Infantry, he had led a charge at Gettysburg which, he insisted, could have changed the outcome of the war if he had been properly reinforced. At the battle of Fredericksburg, his right arm was amputated after being shattered by a Yankee bullet, a sacrifice that paved the way to a career in politics. The year before Said’s arrival, Oates won a seat in the state legislature, the first step in a career that would bring him seven terms as a US congressman and one as governor.
At six-foot-two, Oates was nearly seven inches taller than Nicholas Said, and even with his empty right sleeve he was an imposing figure. He was a firm believer that white people were, in general, superior to Black people, but as his relationship with Sallie Vandalia indicates, his views were somewhat complicated. “Some of these people are becoming very intelligent…,” he would later say in a debate with fellow politicians. “Let them occupy a subordinate position, but do not silence them. Let the better element of them, though of an inferior race, who have won the confidence of their neighbors, won respectability and acquired property—allow all of that class a fair showing and let them go to the polls and vote…. There are some white men who have no more right and no more business to vote than a negro and not as much as some of them.”
To most white Southerners, that was sheer heresy. Oates’s fellow legislators blasted him for touting such a “Bostonian doctrine.” But when Nicholas Said came to town, a multilingual world traveler with a praiseful introduction from a popular white businessman, Oates must have felt vindicated. Likely with Oates’s blessing, Said gave a lecture in Abbeville just a few days after his arrival: “one of the heaviest speeches… we have ever heard,” according to the Henry County Register. Soon Said was exploring the idea of opening a private school for Black students in town.
More than most counties in Alabama, Henry County had dragged its heels on Reconstruction’s push to launch public schools. For white families, there were private schools for those who could afford them. Nearly 700 white children attended local schools, but that left almost 3,000 working-class children who didn’t, contributing to an overall illiteracy rate among whites of 29 percent. For Black people, the situation was even worse. In 1870, only 97 of the 1,621 school-aged Black children managed to attend school, barely putting a dent in the overall illiteracy rate among Black people of 86 percent. And that is how most of the wealthy white landowners in the county preferred things, including Oates.
As far as Oates was concerned, if parents wanted to educate their children, they should pay for it. If they didn’t have the money—which was true of most Black people, who had been penniless slaves just five years before—they should keep working in the fields. Spending tax dollars on schooling didn’t make sense, since a well-educated worker was a dissatisfied worker. “It is not the duty, nor is it to the interest of the state, to educate its entire population beyond [primary school],” he wrote. “Universal experience teaches that if a boy, without regard to his color, be educated beyond this point, he declines to work another day in the sun.”
Since Said’s plan for a private school required no public funding, Oates had no reason to oppose it. But as Said soon discovered, few Black families in Abbeville had enough money to pay tuition. Only nine Black households had any real property, including seven farm families that needed their children to work in the fields. In August, Said somehow cobbled together enough students to start a school, but when the cotton harvest came in a couple of weeks later, many of them had to work, so he closed the school and hit the road again.
Over the next five months, Said made his way west across Alabama, giving speeches in Eufaula, Clayton, Troy, Montgomery, Selma, Greenville, Pine Apple, Monroeville, Claiborne, and Gainesville. But the news coverage of the tour turned increasingly negative, as journalists heard from their colleagues in Georgia that Said was a scam artist, cheating his audiences out of subscriptions for his nonexistent memoir. These rumors of fraud led the Troy Messenger to conclude that Said “speaks nearly every language—except that of truth.”
The critics were wrong. Said wasn’t lying about his autobiography. He was just in over his head. His rough draft, a well-worn handwritten sheaf of papers that he carried from town to town, was much smaller than a book publisher would expect, but he could not figure out how to make it longer. It was hard to describe details of travels that had begun two decades before, when he was a teenager more interested in buying candies and sorbets than taking notes about his surroundings. And there were many stories he could not tell, ranging from his love affairs with European women to his service in the Union Army, neither of which would go down well in the South.
After two years on the road, what he needed was a place to sit down, recuperate, and finish the memoirs. He got close to finding that in March 1872, when he arrived in St. Stephens, a sleepy town in western Alabama, hugging the banks of the Tombigbee River and surrounded by a forest of pine, oak, and hickory. “Here I felt an insurmountable desire to put an end to my peregrinations, that is, at least for a season, for I was perfectly exhausted, and as I had a notion to enlarge my biography, and as the manuscript had become worn out by constant handling, I had nothing better to do than to take a school somewhere in order to accomplish my desired end,” he wrote.
Said’s search for a teaching job led him to Dr. William Coleman, a member of the Washington County school board, whose duties included examining teachers to ensure that they were well qualified. Coleman lived in Pleasant Valley, six miles northwest of St. Stephens, where he owned 2,500 acres of woodland and a 350-acre plantation that was once worked by seventy slaves, many of whom still labored there. When Said showed up unannounced at his house, Coleman gave him a written test and was so pleased with the results that he invited him to have breakfast, an extraordinary sign of interracial respect. “This most kind and hospitable gentleman furthermore promised to protect me during my stay in his neighborhood; and I can truly say did more than he promised…,” Said later wrote. “Through his instrumentality, my name has become popular through Washington and [neighboring] Choctaw counties.”
In April 1872, Said opened a school in Pleasant Valley, initially consisting of twenty-five students, which swelled to thirty-seven by the end of December. The newly formed Alabama Department of Education paid him $25 per month, the same as it paid most white teachers but by no means a grand salary. Teaching salaries in Alabama were the lowest in the nation. Salaries for rural teachers in such states as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, and Nevada topped $80. Nationwide, unskilled laborers were paid more than Alabama teachers; carpenters, house painters, and machinists averaged around twice as much. Aware of how low the salary was, Coleman loaned five dollars to Said to help him get started. “The colored people in this section of the country should certainly be grateful to him for his unwearied zeal in causing a school to be established in their midst,” Said wrote.
Unfortunately, the Alabama Education Department was terribly mismanaged, and public schools were so looked down upon that the legislature continually raided their budget to cover other expenses. As a result, the state periodically ran out of money to pay teachers, sometimes making them wait several months to get paid. During the final quarter of 1872, Nicholas Said got just $82 of the $117 the state owed him. Luke Taylor, the only other Black teacher in the county, got nothing, forcing him to temporarily leave school and take up farming. Soon the state government decided it would close any school that wasn’t getting additional monetary support from the local community. Since the farmhands of Pleasant Valley didn’t have that kind of money, Nicholas Said took one more “peregrination,” moving twelve miles up the Tombigbee River to build a “select colored school” in one of Alabama’s most secluded resorts: Bladon Springs in Choctaw County.
Bladon Springs was a small village of 350 people, with around 1,560 others in the heavily forested township that surrounded it. Over the past thirty years, Bladon had drawn a steady flow of wealthy visitors who came to drink and bathe in its waters, rich in sulfur, carbonic acid, soda, and magnesium. Local doctors swore the waters could treat such ills as gout, rheumatism, syphilis, dyspepsia, and ailments of the liver, kidneys, and bowels. “We honestly believe no water equals Bladon as a curative agent,” read a pamphlet cowritten by one of the spa’s resident physicians, local justice of the peace James S. Evans Sr.
Half-hidden among thick stands of moss-draped pine, the village boasted one of the largest inns in Alabama: the Bladon Springs Hotel, a two-story building lined with colonnaded verandas on both floors, with rooms for two hundred guests and space for a hundred more in rows of quaint cottages that radiated out into the woods. Besides offering cold, thermal, vapor, steam, and mud baths, the hotel also featured a billiard room, bowling alley, croquet ground, ballroom, and bar. In the tiny village adjoining the spa were several dry goods stores, groceries, and saloons, and a string of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, as well as the homes of some well-to-do spa-goers who decided to stay near the baths year-round.
To keep things running smoothly, Bladon relied on a coterie of Black craftsmen, artisans, and support workers, most of whom were paid much better than the farmworkers in the surrounding countryside. Both of the town’s blacksmiths were Black, as were all of its laundry workers, three of its five mechanics, its only seamstress and only shoemaker, and the carriage driver who transported visitors back and forth from the dock on the Tombigbee River. As former slaves, most of those workers were illiterate, but they wanted their children to get an education, and they knew the state government was unlikely to help. Led by middle-aged mechanic Nelson Williams, they pooled their money to launch a private school, hiring Nicholas Said to teach twenty-five of their children. “To my great satisfaction my pupils learned very fast,” wrote Said, who opened the school on January 21, 1873. “This, however, is not owing to my skill in teaching, so much as to their capacity for imbibing or receiving instruction.”
Said enjoyed Bladon Springs, which reminded him of the spa towns he had visited in Europe with Prince Trubetzkoy. After years of continuous travel, he finally felt he could relax. “These waters are unquestionably the best I ever used in my life,” he later wrote. “It is not too much to say that the Bladen waters are certainly superior to any of the mineral springs of Europe.”
Said quickly won “the highest esteem of the white citizens,” according to James S. Evans Jr., the son of the justice of the peace. “He had a dash about him that was fascinating…. His facial features were classical; his lips came squarely together; his teeth were even and white as pearls…. He knew something of political economy, had studied the principles of law, possessed a smattering of knowledge of physic, and had read much on religious topics.”
In this bucolic setting, Said finally had time to finish his memoirs. He wrote more than a thousand words to bring the book up to date, with descriptions of his lecture tour and teaching experiences. To that he added a six-page-long advertisement for Bladon Springs, probably written in exchange for a discount for his visits there. (“I take pleasure in giving a description of this interesting place, hoping that suffering humanity may, through the medium of my autobiography, hear of its fame and be benefited thereby,” he wrote.) Then he further padded it by borrowing passages from other books, which today we would call “plagiarism.”
One of Said’s hurdles in completing the book had been the challenge of describing everything he had seen on his travels, but now he had a remedy. The spa’s library apparently had a copy of Lippincott’s Pronouncing Gazetteer, a 2,200-page tome offering pithy descriptions of cities and countries throughout the world. Said used the gazetteer as a way of providing heft to the manuscript, copying its descriptions of such cities as Izmir, Istanbul, Saint Petersburg, Vienna, and Munich word for word, and lifting a thirteen-page passage about Italy directly from an article in the British magazine Bentley’s Miscellany. In the end, such borrowings totaled 3,100 words of his manuscript, or more than a tenth of its total length.
To be fair, Said was a first-time writer who may not have been aware of the rules against plagiarism, which were much more lax in the 1800s than today. Such well-known writers as Samuel Coleridge and Charles Baudelaire engaged in varying amounts of plagiarism. Timothy Flint, author of a number of popular history books in the 1830s, openly described how he borrowed passages from other authors without bothering to “disfigure” his text by putting quotation marks around the material or adding footnotes to say where it came from. Said followed the same practice. By the time he was through, his memoir totaled more than 30,000 words, which—when printed double-spaced with extra-large type and wide margins—covered 224 pages, making it hefty enough for a publisher.
As Said was polishing his manuscript, Bladon Springs played host to one of the South’s leading clergymen: Rev. Andrew Jackson Witherspoon of New Orleans, who was scouting for a site to build a women’s school where his daughter Amarintha could teach. Witherspoon, a former Confederate chaplain, had a broad reputation for charitable works, such as helping destitute sailors at his soup kitchen and hostelry on the New Orleans waterfront. Now, thanks to his daughter, he was turning his focus on education, and was intrigued when Bladon Springs Hotel owner James Conner mentioned the local private school run by a native African. After Witherspoon delivered a guest sermon at a local church one Sunday, he was introduced to Said by the school’s chief backer, Nelson Williams. The next day, after an hour-long conversation, Said showed him a draft of his memoir—and Witherspoon offered to help get it published.
