In the Blood with the Jordans of North Alabama and the Silent Cavalry of the Civil War

   

Like a lot of the country I was not familiar with Sacred Harp singing till I saw the Oscar award winning movie Cold Mountain. Mark Morgan had read the book by Charles Frazier in which Lucas Black  of Moulton Alabama Starred. He had key scenes around the Battle of Petersburg in the Civil War  where the voices of the Ivey Family of Henegar come in strong on the soundtrack with the Idumea ( 47 on the bottom)  which boisterously raises the existential question "And Am I Born to die, to lay this body down."

     I was near perfect attendance at Pine Grove and the July 4 singing in Henegar for 15 years after. At one point as my Grandfather Jordan taught school at Pine Grove about a crow fly of a mile and a half from the house, I asked the legendary Bud Oliver if any of my grandfather or Mother's generation were singers. He said yes your Grandfather Jordan brother Roscoe, Uncle Rock , came to a lot of singings but like you, Fox, he couldn't sing worth a darn. We called him "Cake' cause he came for the food.

   My Mother's cousin Eulene Reed  of Lookout Mtn and the Sacred Harp community told me a fascinating tale about seven years ago about a near lynching and almost murder on  Lookout Mountain Mtn . You can see the place where it almost all went down from the porch of the House I lived in for thirty years on land that was in the family since the 1930s. My Grandfather was born in the vicinity in 1881 and his father John Sanders Jordan and brother and JS brother  Henry Rufus both fought for the Union during the Civil war.

   Eulene's great Grandfather didn't believe in Slavery. The Home Guard in South DeKalb County came to his house down around the curve if you take a right at the ST Reed Place top of Lookout Mtn looking for him. He got word and wandered out into a cornfield. The HG got his wife and took her to the barn and threw a rope over an eave and noosed her hangin. She told em they could hang her till she died but she wasn't gonna help em in the least.

     They did discover somehow he had ran into the cornfield and they shot it up pretty good but never saw him. I guess they ran out of ammo. Story was later he got to the brow and hollered to kin he made it alive.

   Eulene is one of his direct descendants.

    She said a retarded son was born soon after the incident. Her ggrandfather went to the neighbor in the confederate and told him if he didn't apologize for noosing up his wife and the resulting injury to his newborn he was gonna kill him if he didn't get on his knees and pray for  forgiveness.

    They both had a salvation moment in that ordeal and Eulene's Great Grandfather became a Baptist Preacher.

    This story told to Eulene by Barrett Ashley   is extra mustard for me at least  in  Augusts when I sing at Pine Grove, especially the verse of my friend  Sam Hodges Great great great Grandfather Fitzpatrick, a Rebel of Crawford County Georgia,  whose dying words from injuries in the Battle of Petersburg Va near the end of the war,  were from the  Sacred Harp hymn Jesus can make a dying bed, soft as downy pillows are.

      It wasnt until I was well into my fifties my Uncle James Jordan told me my grandfather ran as a Lincoln Republican for school superintendent of Dekalb County. He was soundly defeated cause 120 years ago that meant he had the interests of people of color in mind. Uncle James said Grandfather Jordan would pass folks on the streets of Collinsville and they would brush their lapels and say "You can smell it on him, can't you."

      That became a badge of honor for me as I always took it the family stood out in some way. And it is the same for the pulitzer prize winner Howell Raines whose family came from Winston County which seceded from the state of Alabama when Alabama seceded from the Union.

      Raines new book, Silent Cavalry,  endorsed by Paul Finebaum and the Guardian Paper of England--google their review--celebrates the 2069 soldiers on North Alabama who fought with the Union . Raines says they lit the first torches in the burning of Atlanta, something that coulda been prevented if Sherman's orders two weeks earlier at Snake Gap Creek north of Resaca Ga hadn't been lost in translation. Raines said the war coulda been ended there.

     Judge Frank Johnson is the great Republican of Winston County who came down with the decision Martin Luther King and John Lewis could march from Selma to Montgomery. About him the great Bill Moyers said had Lincoln  lived in Alabama in the 1960s he woulda been Frank Johnson and had Johnson lived during the civil War he woulda been Abraham Lincoln.

     Moyers wrote me a note in the late 80s that said people like you make a difference. It was in regard some investigations I was doing about the hardwiring of the fundamentalist leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention to the right wing of the GOP.

      So like Raines I have come to embrace the idea there is something in the genetic makeup, the archaeology, the alchemy  of some families and vicinities that make them exceptional and passes from generation to generation.

    But as the book, a must read for anybody who is serious about the Civil War and it's legacy; the book points out it is much more complicated than that.

    Raines shines with this quote I have embraced as definitive for much of the Jordan family 

       "such are the chips through which defining traits marinate across generations of families that don't quite buy into the commanding culture. It's a mysterious process, difficult to calibrate, and especially daunting when it comes to rescuing unheralded difference makers from the scrap bin of history."

   Ed Bridges, a graduate of Marshall Frady and my Furman University, was the state archivist for Thirty years in Montgomery. He wrote the Bicentennial history of the state and has thrity grand pages on the Civil War and Reconstruction in his book. He has a great summation of the claims of groups like the Sons and  Daughters of the Confederacy which were taught in the public schools of Alabama and across the nation up until just a few years ago. I think the following quote should be memorized by all honors students across the state. Bridges lists four errant claims taught by the sophomoric he says:  " Although specific historical examples could be produced to support each of these claims , taken as a whole they amounted to a rewriting of history that  distorted it fundamental ways. Ed Bridges page 159