Newton Knight and What Eve Started

The new March 2016 Smithsonian magazine has a fascinating article about the man whose life is the basis of Matthew McConaughey’s forthcoming Civil War movie: Free State of Jones. The historical character around whom the movie plot revolves was named Newton Knight. That's his image from about the time the Civil War began.

Mr. Knight was a big man, standing 6'4" and was a staunch Baptist who didn't drink, but had a violent streak. He enlisted in the Confederate army and fought in a Mississippi Infantry regiment during the 1862 bloodbath at Corinth, Mississippi. After the lost battle at Corinth, Knight walked away-deserted from the army. He returned to Jones County, a rare place in central Mississippi where the white, male population had overwhelmingly voted against secession (24 for, 374 against). Needless to say, a pro-Union county in central Mississippi was an anomaly.

When Knight returned home from the army, he was mad because the Confederate army had taken his only horse and his home destroyed. He became a guerilla leader of pro-Union men who were hiding from the Confederate draft, or, like Knight himself, had deserted from the Confederate army. The movie is partly about the fighting between Knight’s men and the brigade of Confederate soldiers who were sent in 1864 to stamp out the nest of pro-Union renegades. Men died on both sides of the fighting, but Newton Knight survived.

All that’s fascinating to any Civil War nut, like me, but the family side of Knight’s history is even more intriguing. After the war, the Newton Knight maintained two families, one white and one black, each with a passel of children fathered by Knight, each with their own house on the Knight farm. Knight’s black common-law wife, Rachel, was a freed slave owned by Knight’s grandfather.

Eventually, Knight’s white wife left him, and he spent the rest of his long life with ex-slave Rachel, and their children. Knight’s son and daughter from his white wife married bi-racial children born to Rachel before she and Knight became a couple. During the decades after the war, both black and white residents of Jones County shunned Knight’s openly bi-racial family and lifestyle.

The Knight family bi-racial issue stretched into the 1940’s when one of Knight’s great-grandsons still living in Mississippi was arrested and convicted of miscegeny -- a black man marrying a white woman – still a crime in Mississippi in 1948.  There’s a lot more to Knight’s story and books have been written about his life. I urge you to find the new Smithsonian magazine and read the article.

That brings me to my McBee Civil War novel trilogy, where one of the main characters, Levi, a mulatto (half white) slave, gradually confronts his bi-racial identity, after he becomes the body-servant of the other main character, Captain John McBee. The war thrusts the two men into three years of living together in the harsh environment of a Confederate infantry regiment in Lee’s army. 

Hardship, deprivation, deaths and battle impact the master and servant one way, driving them together out of necessity, while the brutal social realities separating white masters and black slaves impact them in the opposite way, keeping each bound in his respective role.

If surviving the war and the question of Levi’s white father are not burdens enough for the enslaved young man, Levi eventually attracts the romantic attentions of an unusual young white woman.

Does that sound salacious enough for a steamy best-seller? I was talking myself into believing the budding bi-racial romance was too over-the-top for the 1860’s. After all, I grew up in the Deep South and can clearly remember the first time I saw a black-white couple in public. That was in 1971, a hundred years after Newton Knight’s open, common law marriage to a black ex-slave. Things tend to change slowly in the South.

I’ve made this point before: I am aghast at the widespread acceptance in the 1800’s of white men fathering children with enslaved black women, with no recognition of the children as anything but another slave. The 1860 US census had three choices of race: White, Negro, or Mulatto. There were so many children born of black mothers and white fathers, that those offspring had their own racial label. Babies who essentially had no fathers.

So, I was gratified that my recent reading about Newton Knight provides a historical example for the bi-racial romance thread in the McBee books. Such romances certainly weren’t the norm, but interracial marriages did truly happen, even in the South during the Civil War.

Good novels usually aren’t about the normal, everyday things of life, are they? Good fiction often explores the uncommon, addressing our natural curiosity and fascination with that which is normally forbidden to us.

Consider that Eve only ate the apple after she was sternly told not to do so. And look at the bestseller that Eve's act of defiance starts. But I promise that Levi’s forbidden romance won’t be smooth sailing. And where it will end, I don’t even know yet.