The sergeant, p.28
The Sergeant, page 28
By 1880, there were forty-two “colored” schools in Haywood County, and over the next two years, that number would rise to sixty, although outside of Brownsville, most were poorly funded single-room establishments, with barely enough money to pay a teacher’s salary, let alone buy textbooks or decent furnishings. By this point in his career, Nicholas Said was used to such conditions. Judging from the census, he was running a school with thirty students, although education took a back seat to picking cotton. On the census, his pupils—some as young as ten—were all listed as “laborers” instead of “students,” and if his school was like the others in the area, on any given day a fifth of the students might be absent from class, working in the fields.
The main goal of the schools was to give sharecroppers at least enough ability to read and do simple math so they could calculate how much they should be paid and how much their supplies should cost, to avoid being cheated. “With education, when [a worker]… undertakes to build, he will first sit down and count the cost, to see if he is able to finish, or whether someone is going to palm off upon him a bogus deed or fraudulent agreement,” said a speaker at a National Conference of Colored Men in Nashville in 1879.
As modest as those goals were, they were enough to make whites in Haywood County nervous. In the words of the local newspaper, the Brownsville States-Graphic, whites feared that by educating Black youths, they were “sowing the seeds of a dangerous force that will one day arise and make demands with which we cannot comply.” As a result, even though the state required counties to fund education through a school tax, the wealthy landowners who dominated Haywood County kept their tax at the rock-bottom minimum of 10 cents per $100 worth of real estate, meaning only a fraction of children could get an education. County school superintendent W. R. Leigh complained that the “unwillingness on the part of the white people to pay taxes” was the biggest problem the schools faced. “Third-rate pay for first-class teachers is a great drawback,” he wrote.
Despite such limitations, Haywood County’s schools produced some true success stories. After finishing his local studies in 1882, farmhand Isham Anthony went on to gain a medical doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to Brownsville as the county’s first fully certified Black surgeon. Samuel McElwee, another sharecropper’s son, earned a law degree from Central Tennessee College and in 1882 was elected to represent Haywood County in the state assembly, where one of his first moves was to press for more funding for training teachers. “There are many worthy young men and women of African descent in our state who would make good and efficient teachers, if they had the aid which this bill will give them,” he said. Although the assembly was dominated by white Democrats, the bill passed, since McElwee was savvy enough to provide more funding for white teachers than for Black teachers.
It’s easy to imagine that Nicholas Said crossed paths with both Anthony and McElwee during his stay in Haywood, particularly as McElwee campaigned from door to door during his political race. But oddly, as they came into the spotlight, Said faded into the background. During his time in the county, there is no evidence that he gave any speeches, sold any autobiographies, or appeared in any newspapers. Instead, he concentrated on providing an education for his students, living up to one of the concluding passages of his autobiography:
“My honest and ardent desire is to render myself useful to my race wherever it may be, but I shall always prefer at all times to find myself in the midst of the most ignorant of my race, and endeavor to teach the rising generation the advantages of education. Self-denial is nowadays so rare, that it is thought only individuals of insane mind can speak of it. A person who tries to live only for others, and puts himself in the second place, is hooted at, and considered a fit inmate for the asylum. The man who artfully extorts the earning of his fellow-man, and who seems to have no feeling for his daily wants, is, by a strange perversion, deemed the wise. To me, it is impossible to conceive how a human being can be happy through any other channel, than to do as much good as possible to his fellow-man in this world.”
In a way, those words could serve as Said’s epitaph. In recent years, some biographical sketches have suggested that Said died in Haywood County in the summer of 1882, although that notion is wholly based on what appears to be an erroneous interpretation of military records in Boston. For several decades after the Civil War, the former officers of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts tried to track the whereabouts of the veterans who had once been under their command. Next to a printed roster of the men’s names, they added handwritten footnotes listing their last known address and the latest date they were contacted there. If someone was deceased, a cross was added to his name, and the word “died” was written in the footnote. Among those footnotes was a single line: “Nicholas Said, Brownsville, Tennessee, August 6, 1882.” There was no cross by his name and no suggestion that he had died, so the note likely refers to the last time that anyone from the regiment had contacted him. But more than a century later a researcher ran across that notation and interpreted it as referring to Said’s death, so now a number of reference materials say he died in 1882.
That having been said, there’s no concrete evidence that Said lived beyond 1882: no known census listings, tax records, voter registrations, school rosters, passenger lists, or other official documents. On the other hand, two widely circulated newspaper articles in the 1890s suggested he met a very different fate, living until at least 1897, when he was allegedly shoveling coal as a prisoner in the prison mines of Alabama. While there’s an overwhelming probability that those stories were hoaxes designed to smear his memory, they surely put a dent in his reputation and legacy, creating a very different kind of epitaph. And they came at a time when conditions for Black people throughout the South were taking a sharp turn for the worse.
28 Epilogue
By the time Nicholas Said disappeared from the public view, he had racked up an impressive string of accomplishments. After spending two years fighting in the Civil War, he helped hundreds of former slaves cast their first ballots; helped organize or maintain at least nine schools for freedmen; delivered speeches calling for better race relations in at least thirty cities in five Southern states; and published an autobiography aimed largely at helping Southern whites develop a better appreciation of Africans. For a decade, he was one of the most visible foot soldiers in the army of schoolteachers that swept through the South during Reconstruction, who collectively whittled down the enforced illiteracy of former slaves so that by 1880 nearly a quarter of them could read, including a third of those of school age. And all that happened despite sharp cutbacks in educational funding, a shortage of schoolhouses, and periodic waves of violence from nightriding terrorists.
For many of those teachers, probably including Said, the goal was that if Black people could demonstrate their abilities in the schoolhouse and workplace, Southern whites would accept that they deserved equal legal and political rights. “There is something in human nature which always makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no matter under what colour of skin merit is found,” wrote Booker T. Washington, the nation’s most prominent Black educator.
Unfortunately, that was mostly wishful thinking. Even as the forces of education were advancing throughout the South, political rights for Black people were being sharply curtailed. Once Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, ex-Confederate officials regained their former political clout, Southern Democrats mobilized to retake control of their states, and terrorist groups like the Red Shirts and the White League used threats, beatings, and assassinations to keep Black voters from going to the polls. At the same time, many white Republican leaders turned their backs on Black politicians and their concerns. One by one, the Black leaders who had gained political offices during Reconstruction were squeezed out, often with the acquiescence of Republican leaders trying to curry favor with Southern whites.
Nicholas Said’s friend Alonzo Ransier, for instance, lost his seat in Congress in 1876 after criticizing South Carolina’s notoriously corrupt Republican governor Franklin Moses, who promoted a puppet candidate to defeat him. Ransier soon found it hard to get a job in the state, going from tax collector to night watchman to street sweeper, which was his occupation when he died nearly penniless in August 1882. By that time, Said’s other acquaintances in Charleston, Jonathan Jasper Wright and Benjamin Boseman, had already lost their seats, and within the next decade all but a handful of Black officeholders would be gone. Samuel McElwee of Haywood County managed to win his seat in the Tennessee statehouse in 1882 but lost it six years later in a virtual coup, when white election officials refused to count the full Black vote and ousted all the Black officeholders in the county. To avoid the racial violence then swirling through the county, McElwee packed up his family and moved to Chicago. After Black legislators were forced out, whites in each of the Southern states called constitutional conventions, imposing Jim Crow apartheid and banning nearly all Blacks from voting.
In the end, educational efforts did little to improve the overall position of Blacks in the South. Even college-educated Blacks, including the graduates of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, faced discrimination once they left. In 1896, Washington invited Alabama governor William C. Oates—the Confederate veteran who had crossed paths with Nicholas Said when he first entered the state—to give the commencement address at Tuskegee. Washington was proud of his students, believing that “a movement of any kind which succeeds in uplifting the Negro will receive the hearty support of the best class of white people.” But when the first speaker at the commencement ceremony, a Black official in the US Customs Service, praised Tuskegee as a monument to the successes Blacks could achieve through education, Governor Oates got visibly upset, to the point where he was shaking in anger when he took the stage.
“I have written this address for you, but I will not deliver it,” he said, waving the notes for his speech at the audience. “I want to give you niggers a few words of plain talk and advice. No such address as you have just listened to is going to do you any good; it’s going to spoil you. You might just as well understand that this is a white man’s country as far as the South is concerned, and we are going to make you keep your place. Understand that. I have nothing more to say.”
In the end, it was a lesson Nicholas Said should have learned when protesting for equal pay in the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts. On the pay issue, the army did not change its ways merely because the soldiers demonstrated how worthy they were. The change came after great sacrifice and risky protests, skirting the edge of mutiny. The same would prove true for the civil rights movement, in both the North and the South. When the Fifty-Fifth’s survivors met in Boston for its fiftieth anniversary in 1913, the point was hammered home by civil rights attorney Albert Pillsbury. “You will get your rights when you take them…,” he said. “No friend of the negro advises them to look to the white men for their rights…. [No other minority would] stand for the iniquities that the negroes have put up with, but would work as one man, and if necessary pull down the government. When you have learned that lesson your cause is won, and not until then.”
Nicholas Said hoped that his own example of being an erudite linguist, writer, and speaker might help change the opinions of Southern whites. Instead, it caused one of the nation’s leading journalists to wage a one-man vendetta against him, in a series of attacks that cast aspersions on Black education as a whole.
The roots of the vendetta date back to Nicholas Said’s arrival in Bladon Springs, where he met local justice of the peace James S. Evans Sr. As a former Alabama legislator, Evans was one of the first voices to support secession. After giving his heart and soul to the Confederacy, he became heavily active in the White Man’s Party, as the Democrats liked to be known. That did not mean he displayed any personal animosity to Nicholas Said. In fact, he officiated at Said’s wedding to Mournin Jackson. On the other hand, his young son James Jr. apparently had a hard time reconciling the disdain he had been taught to feel for Blacks with the respect that was shown to this African interloper.
By 1892, James Evans Jr. had long ago left Alabama and embarked on a career that would see him writing for such newspapers as the New York Sun, Washington Times, San Francisco Examiner, and Chicago Herald-Tribune. In an age of swashbuckling journalists, he was as rough-and-tumble as they came. A prodigious drinker and occasional brawler (one alcohol-infused fight with a rival journalist involved fists, a knife, and a pistol, although friends pulled them apart before they did too much damage), he sometimes took breaks from his writing to go adventuring into the still-Wild West, galloping across the plains, lassoing cattle, and whooping it up with six-shooters.
Thanks to his breezy writing style, Evans built a broad following among readers, but he had a habit of playing fast-and-loose with the facts. The Dallas Morning News reported that “Evans succeeded splendidly in getting every material fact wrong” in one of his stories; in another, it found an average of one error per sentence. The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune said that “fiction masquerades as fact” in Evans’s stories, while the Memphis Commercial Appeal said that “when he says a thing is so, it is proof positive it is not so.” Some people Evans interviewed for his stories publicly complained that he made up their quotes. “I am very willing to be judged by what I have written or said,” said one official. “But… the language attributed to me is in the main a fiction of his own, and is inconsistent with my habits of speech or writing.”
At a modern mainstream newspaper, Evans would have been fired for such behavior, but this was the heyday of yellow journalism, when reporters seldom let facts get in the way of a good story. Ambrose Bierce, whose journalistic career overlapped with Evans, once jokingly defined the word “reporter” as “a person who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words,” while “quotation” was “the act of repeating erroneously the words of another.” Despite Evans’s troubled relationship with the truth, his writing was buoyant and stylish enough to eventually attract a nationwide following.
Those qualities are important to consider when it comes to Evans’s stories about Nicholas Said, but there’s one other thing to bear in mind: Evans was a solid racist. His newspaper contributions included diatribes against Black and Asian people, as well as a defense of “the right of the Anglo-Saxon to rule.” His racism was most vividly displayed in 1894, in an elevator in Washington, DC. At the time when elevators were staffed by operators who managed the switches, the drunken Evans complained to his elevator’s operator—a thirty-six-year-old Black man named Overton Woodfork—that he was moving far too slowly. When Woodfork told him he was doing the best he could, Evans called him some vile racial epithet. “Don’t talk that way,” Woodfork asked. After letting Evans out on his floor, Woodfork thought the incident was over. Instead, Evans returned with a knife and slashed him across the chest. One of Evans’s friends tried to protect Woodfork, but Evans slashed again, this time cutting his throat. Woodfork was taken to a hospital, where he recovered after a week of intensive care, and Evans was arrested, but he was released on $25 bail and apparently never did jail time for the attack, nor did it affect his journalism career.
Unlike his immediate disdain for Woodfork, Evans had a grudging respect for Nicholas Said. He was just nine years old when Said arrived in Bladon Springs and in his midteens when he left, but the memory stayed with him throughout his life. Said was probably the first well-educated Black person he had met, which made him an inexplicable anomaly. To Evans, Said’s mannerisms were “in contrast with the other [Black people], refreshingly graceful and pleasant. He was uniformly courteous and possessed none of the evil habits which at that time were characteristic of his skin.” Yet Evans likely always believed there was something wrong with Said’s upstanding image and that there must be some “evil habits” lurking below.
In November 1892, Evans was writing for the St. Louis Republic when he dropped by the ornate Laclede Hotel in downtown St. Louis, a favorite hangout of traveling businessmen, not far from the main railroad depot and riverboat landing. At that time, one of his habits was to sidle up to out-of-towners at hotel bars and ask if they had any newsworthy stories to tell. At the Laclede, he met Thomas Burke, a wholesale liquor distributor from Mobile, Alabama, who told him of a Black teacher in that state who had been sent to the state prison mines for forgery. “The brightest negro I ever knew is, or was recently, a convict working in the prison mines near Huntsville,” Burke allegedly told him. “His name is Nicholas Said, and he is one of the finest linguists in the United States.”
That, at least, is what Evans later wrote for the Republic, although the tone and syntax of the quotations seem like they came from Evans himself, and it’s likely that much of the rest of the story came from him as well. He and Burke presumably did discuss the forgery conviction of an Alabama schoolteacher—probably Jim Lide, a sharecropper’s son from just north of Choctaw County—but it was likely Evans who shifted the story to be about Said and it was almost certainly Evans who supplied most of the details, including a wholly fictional account of Said’s life story, fabricated entirely from his imagination.
Even though Evans knew Said had written an autobiography (“an entertaining book [that] had a large sale”), he apparently never read it. Bereft of any factual information about Said’s background, he let his imagination flow, writing that Said had been a young boy in South Africa—about four thousand miles away from Borno—when an Englishman bought him as a slave, freed him, and then turned him into “the best educated servant in the world” as they traveled through Europe and the Americas. After leaving the Englishman, Said allegedly worked as a teacher in Mobile (although there’s no evidence he even visited there) before being fired for drunkenness and moving to Bladon Springs. “He could speak 20 different languages [later versions of the story trimmed that number to 12 and then 10] and wrote the prettiest and smoothest hand I ever saw,” Evans wrote. “It was his familiarity with the pen that got him in trouble, for he forged a man’s signature to a money order and was sent to the penitentiary for it.”
