Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [42]
Ford’s funeral proved to be a dire affair. None of his friends, none of his colleagues, nobody from town showed up. Only his wife and children were in attendance at the gravesite. A group of slaves carried the coffin. Just as they were lowering it into the grave, a savage thunderstorm erupted all around them. The slaves, terrified, let go of the coffin and it fell perpendicularly into the hole, where it immediately sank into the mud and stuck. The gravedigger left it where it was and filled in the grave all around it. People said afterward that Ford was the only man on earth to go to hell headfirst.
6
Bloody Island
FOR NEARLY TWO DECADES, from the early 1830s until his death in 1851, William Johnson kept a diary. He was a barber in Natchez, and was in a position to hear all the local gossip, but the ordinary round of small-town infidelities and scandals left him cold. One subject did fascinate him: the casual violence on the streets.
Mr Bledsoe and Mr Hewitt had a small fist fight. After a blow or two, Mr Bledsoe went and got his pistols.
Today Mr James in a small dispute with Mr Stanford struck him with his fist twice. Stanford drew a dirk and Mr James ran into his store and got a hatchet.
Jim Welch and Oblenis had a fight in the sheriff’s office.
Johnson rarely bothered to record what the fights were about. There was no point: they could have been about anything. Any event at all, no matter how benignly it began, could end up in a riot.
I rode out today to see the balloon ascend, but the man did not attempt to put it up at all, and told them that they would put it up tomorrow. A mob was soon raised and they tore it all to pieces, destroying everything as they went.
It was as though they were all walking around in a perpetual state of rage. They’d lash out at each other about politics, or a gambling debt, or the outcome of a lawsuit; they’d explode over a mistimed joke or a long-simmering feud. They would often get into fights over other people’s fights—even the fights of people they’d never met. Johnson records one fight that broke out over the question of whether a celebrated duel in South Carolina had been a sham: “When Mr Charles Stewart stated that those gentlemen that fought actually fought with bullets, Mr Dahlgren said that they must have fought with paper bullets. Mr Stewart then said that if any man would say that they fought with paper bullets that he is a damned liar and a damned scoundrel and a damned coward.” The two men began pummeling each other, Stewart with a walking stick and Dahlgren with an umbrella. They then pulled out pistols and began shooting at each other. Dahlgren was wounded in the side and Stewart was hit in the jaw. When Stewart fell to the ground unconscious, one of his friends went after Dahlgren with a bowie knife, and by the time the bystanders finally managed to break it up, Dahlgren’s head had been slashed twice, the palm of his hand had been split open, and one of his fingers had been almost entirely severed. “It was,” Johnson concludes, “one of the gamest fights that we have ever had in our city.”
Johnson doesn’t ever appear to have taken part in the fights himself. He preferred to remain a spectator. In fact, his diary is the work of an exceptionally prudent man—as it piles up, day after cautious day, year after quiet year (the most frequent entry is a relieved note, “Nothing new”), it reveals itself to be the autobiography of someone who spent his whole life trying, and ultimately