Dark Fire

By Bernadette Rule

Dark Fire tells the true story of the Drews and Lawrences, two farming families that were horrifically massacred in the violent struggle for a tobacco growers union in 1920s Kentucky. Painstakingly researched and beautifully written, Dark Fire invites readers into the brief, incandescent lives of four adults and seven children whose murder has long been shrouded in mystery and collective silence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ironing Board Press
• Release date: Apr 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781777644017

Book preview

1825

Prologue

It’s 1962 and I’m in the seventh grade at St. Joseph’s School in Greenberry, Kentucky. A woman dressed in the medieval widow’s garb which is the Ursuline habit stands in front of a bulletin board that reads, in letters a foot high: IT IS A HOLY AND WHOLESOME THOUGHT TO PRAY FOR THE DEAD.

She is telling me and the fifty other children in the room that Kentucky is an Iroquoian word meaning dark and bloody battleground.

Sister Clarentia has an expressive face imprisoned in her stiff wimple, and her dark eyes and white teeth flash as she delivers this rather toxic phrase. My friends and I grimace at each other. Why couldn’t Kentucky mean something pretty like where the rippling waters flow? Why on earth did it have to be called Dark and Bloody Battleground?

I look through the second storey windows to the quiet streetscape—the housetops of blue or green tiles, birds singing from every wire and branch. It seems perfectly peaceful to me. Our town of 6,000 people is arranged around the red-brick courthouse a few blocks to the east of the school. Its spire pierces the sky at the center of a leafy court square. A neat block of stores faces the courthouse on all four sides, with tree-lined residential streets beyond. Nothing dark and bloody about it as far as I can see.

Because of this very Kentucky History class I know that Greenberry is the county seat and geographic heart of Wills County, the county itself a perfect rectangle in the southwestern corner of the state, eighteen miles across and thirty miles long. It produces ball clay, soybeans, corn, cattle and a little oil and gas. But mostly it produces dark fired tobacco.

Though my family lives in town, we have friends and relatives on farms scattered all around the county, so I’ve seen a good deal of this land that’s supposed to be so blood-soaked. I’ve skirted herds of chewing cows, climbed fences and jumped creeks, feasted on wild berries, sour grass and honeysuckle blossoms. I’ve slapped at mosquitoes under wide shade trees, and inhaled the rich aroma of freshly turned earth. These fields seem to me to stretch away forever in all directions, with only throngs of insects to groan over them.

Once some friends and I came across a slit pig in a creek-bed, grey and purple innards spilling out of it. That was bloody alright, but this phrase troubling me now hints more at treachery between humans, than between people and animals. Sister has told us how Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton drove out the Indians. So, did the Indians only name the land as they were leaving it? Or were the battles they named it for ancient wars between Indian tribes, fought before Boone and Kenton ever arrived? How far back does the darkness go?

The recess bell rings and, jarred back to the orderly classroom, I close my Kentucky History book and stow it in the cubbyhole under my seat. The others are way ahead of me, filing carefully past Sister and into the hall to surge, just under a run, towards the playground.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Sometimes Daddy takes us out to the cemetery to visit family graves. Today, instead of going to St. Joseph’s country graveyard where most of our people are buried, he’s taking me and three of my brothers and sisters to Maplewood, the big cemetery in town. His father, Hardin Rule, is buried there because Hardin and his folks were Methodists. In 1905 my grandparents’ Catholic/Protestant marriage was frowned upon, but my grandmother told me once that she married Hardin because, ‘He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen, and in all the years since I’ve never had cause to change that opinion.’

In a reflective mood, Daddy strides among the tombstones, telling stories about people we never knew. Patiently, he allows us to wander around, commenting on inscriptions and asking questions. Then, as if struck with sudden inspiration, he says, Y’all come over here. I want to show you something.

Daddy was often a distant figure to me, full of mystery and authority. He was usually evasive, tantalizingly beyond my reach. (Where you going, Daddy? Going to see a man about a dog. Can I go? No.) So to have him invite us into a secret is a moment of thrilling privilege. I scamper behind him as he threads the family plots of Maplewood, lambs and angels tumbling in my peripheral vision.

He stops in front of a plainish white stone, slightly larger than average, and when we all catch up he reads its inscription out loud:

In memory of the Lawrence and Drew families,

Eleven in number, who met a horrible death in the burning of the Lawrence home near Hickory, Kentucky on the night of June 25, 1921

One of the unsolved mysteries

After Daddy finishes reading it, the words of the epitaph seem to echo from stone to stone in the quiet cemetery. They are chilling, especially the phrases horrible death in the burning, and unsolved mysteries. I don’t understand, but I can tell that Daddy is poised to explain. He stands before the tombstone with his feet spaced far apart, gives a sigh, and begins.

This right here is what’s called a mass grave. There’s eleven people buried in it: two young couples with three little babies apiece, and a twelve-year-old boy named Delmer. They were my first cousins.

As the surprise of our close relationship to this gruesome business settles into us, we begin firing questions at him. Eventually he answers them all, saying once or twice, Now this is important. You remember what I’m telling you.

Why were they buried all together?

Cause, they were so burnt up there wasn’t enough left of em to fill but one casket.

How’d their house catch on fire?

Now then, Daddy says, pointing his long finger at my brother Michael. Now then. You’ve done hit on the main question. You see, they didn’t die in a house fire like it says here. These people were murdered, and the house set on fire to cover up the evidence.

Murdered… How?

Who did it?

Why would anybody wanna murder em? You mean the boy and the little babies too?

Whoa, wait a minute, he says, pleased at our interest, but wishing to take the story more slowly. All of you take a good long look at that tombstone and when you’ve got it fixed in your mind, follow me on back to the car. I’ll tell you the whole story—if, he says, wheeling around to look at us again, you promise me you won’t ever forget it. Cause this is one of the most important stories I’m ever liable to tell you.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Daddy told us only part of the story that day. He told us that the Lawrence’s log cabin, the one that got burned down, was the same house his father, Hardin, had been born and raised in. When Hardin’s father died his mother sold the farm to the Oakley family and moved into town. One of the Oakley daughters married a Lawrence and another one married a Drew. They were the two women who—along with their husbands and children, and twelve-year-old Delmer—were killed that night.

People said some of the other Oakleys were jealous that their sisters had gotten the home-place, and they—the jealous ones— joined in with a group of men called Night Riders to ambush the Drews and Lawrences while the two families were having a Saturday night singalong party. The Night Riders rode around and around the house, firing in through the windows and then set the place on fire.

Daddy, fourteen at the time, was awakened in the dead of night by a man riding into town like Paul Revere to announce the news to the relatives. After hearing about the fire Daddy’d gone out to the scene with his parents and aunts and uncles, and he’d seen the house burning with the bodies still scattered around inside.

My papa climbed a big tree beside the house and he come back down white as a sheet, shaking his head and saying, They’re all in there. He said most of em was laying in the floor, shot, but one of the young mothers was laying across a bed trying to shield her three babies, like this. Here Daddy reached out to embrace the air in an attitude of tender grief. But they were all of em already dead when we got there. And we couldn’t get to em to pull em out. Just had to stand there and watch em burn up. We like to’ve never got over that night—and Aunt Ruth, she never did.

The night Daddy told us the story, I lay awake in the room I shared with my sister and two brothers, afflicted with grotesque images. Sorrow, especially for the mother and her babies, swelled and ached inside my chest. The term Night Riders held me rigid with fear. Daddy’s assurances that there weren’t any Night Riders anymore had been only slightly helpful, for they had already become boogie men in my imagination, and I knew boogie men could get anybody.

* * * * * * * * * * *

It wasn’t until I grew up that I learned Night Riders were real, and that they did get people. Strangely enough, Night Riding began as part of a desperate and even noble move to secure a decent living for tobacco farmers.

By the end of the nineteenth century factory-rolled cigarettes were the new sensation, and had made Buck Duke his fortune down in North Carolina. His company, American Tobacco, had bought up virtually all of its worldwide competition, and had a stranglehold on the market. They became the only game in town for farmers looking to sell their crop.

In 1904 the American Tobacco Company was offering farmers three cents a bushel—four cents less than they had gotten a few years before, and even less than it cost to plant the crop. After several years of chronic poverty, Felix Ewing—The Moses of the Black Patch—began working to form a planters’ union. By pooling our crops and holding them off the market, he said, we can force the big companies to pay us more. But only if we all work together.

At first the method was successful. Duke was astonished that a bunch of farmers—independent cusses as they’d always been— could work together to influence the market. So he began offering ten cents a bushel to anyone who would break with the union and sell at the barn door instead of at the chute.

This was the devil’s own temptation to people who hadn’t been able to pay their bills or buy their children shoes for years. Some caved. That was when David Amoss entered the story and what became known as the Black Patch War began. In the field, dark fired tobacco is a much darker green than the more common, yellowish burley tobacco. Hence, the areas of western Kentucky and Tennessee that grow dark fired tobacco are called the Black Patch.

A doctor from Cobb, Kentucky, David Amoss was an avid supporter of the new union, and a romantic on the subject of the Civil War, which he always regretted narrowly missing by having been born in 1857. Amoss formed the Night Riders to be a militant branch of the union, which would bring pressure to bear on farmers who wavered, reminding them that all the little fish had to hold together against the big fish or they wouldn’t stand a chance.

He went to the Ku Klux Klan to investigate their methods, one being the use of stereotypical fears poor people, especially blacks, were believed to hold about things such as ghosts and midnight. Like the Klan, Night Riders began as a technically ‘non-violent’ vigilante movement on the part of lower class whites. And just as the Klan soon moved from emotional violence to physical violence, so did the Night Riders.

The attempt to form a union of tobacco planters began to look like the Civil War all over again—brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor. In fact, as the Civil War had ended only forty years before, the old allegiances to North and South still operated in such matters as, say, the choice of which neighborhood to live in. Western Kentucky was a checkerboard of Northern or Southern sympathizers, and each section bore its grudges dutifully.

Night Riders took their mission equally seriously. Using Klan tactics, they always rode out in a body, their coats inside-out to avoid easy recognition. Feed-sacks were employed to muffle horses’ hooves, and to shield the identity of horse and rider. They would approach their target at midnight, riding up to the porch of a remote farmhouse and calling the farmer’s name.

At first, they did little more than call people out to give them a serious warning that they’d better not be thinking of selling their crop just yet. Eventually, if these warnings weren’t heeded, they would make another visit. This time they would tie the farmer, and often his wife as well, to a tree and beat him with hickory sticks or buggy-whip him. The beatings were gradually supplemented with crop destruction and barn burnings.

Townsfolk were not spared either. After all, they ran the chute where the tobacco was sold, or the warehouses where it was stored. They preached sermons, gave or withheld credit at the stores, controlled the courts, the newspapers and the banks. They, therefore, also had to be made to understand what was at issue in this struggle, and to take the union’s side.

In 1907 Hopkinsville, Kentucky was besieged by a band of Night Riders so organized they might have been putting a docile baby to bed instead of taking over a whole town. Swiftly and silently the depot and telephone office were seized; the mayor was chased right down the coal chute of the Baptist Church; the newspaper— whose editor had written articles questioning the union’s aims and methods—was disabled in the smashing of its presses; and finally, the biggest tobacco warehouses were burnt to the ground while the police and fire brigades stood and watched, as they were told to. After this success, small towns all over western Kentucky and Tennessee were liable to be besieged by disgruntled Night Riders. (Greenberry’s turn would come in 1920, during the second phase of the Black Patch War.)

By 1911 when Roosevelt busted the tobacco trust and assured farmers a fairer market, the few court cases against Night Riders fizzled out and the movement went into remission. Until after the First World War, that is. The war had boosted tobacco prices considerably (Cigarettes for our boys in the trenches!), and farmers were feeling the happy effects when, in 1920, the market suddenly plunged again. Ever watchful, Felix Ewing and other old union leaders began calling meetings and a second round of Night Riding commenced, this time with many returned soldiers in its ranks, newly graduated from the ugly academy of war.

The Drews and Lawrences were victims of this round of Night Riding. When, as an adult, I returned to Daddy’s story and began to research it for myself, I discovered that his version, so graphic and frightening to me as a child, had been softened and amended. The truth was both more brutal, and more complex than I had imagined. I also discovered that the aftermath of World War One in Wills County, as in many other places, was a period of history marked by violent change and by so much grey it is almost impossible to define the good guys and the bad guys.

One thing is clear to me. The Drews and Lawrences paid some sort of community debt with their blood. After their murders, Night Riding tapered off dramatically, and had ceased altogether by about 1930, when the union that is still in place today was established. Perhaps the men involved were shocked sober by the evil of which they had found themselves capable. As far as I have been able to determine, the massacre of the Drews and Lawrences marked the bloodiest and last large scale action by Night Riders, though it should be noted that the terrorizing of black families by gangs using the Night Rider modus operandi continued for two or three decades. Such raids were usually confined to heckling from cars and firing bullets through the upper panes of windows. The families of men who had fought for the North during the Civil War were particularly targeted for these raids.

As with a surprising number of other crimes, no one was ever tried for the murders of the Drews and Lawrences. On the Monday following the massacre, the court was to have heard the case against a group of Night Riders indicted for burning the tobacco chute in Greenberry the year before. Instead, after a brief and cursory examination of six Drew and Lawrence neighbors, their case was sealed with a verdict of murder by persons unknown. The case against the men accused of burning the chute was continued indefinitely. The entire county, it seems, entered into an unspoken agreement not to push either matter any further. The community was silenced. In my eyes that fact—that the justice system failed the victims and their families utterly—relegates these deaths to the level of human sacrifice.

We are accustomed to thinking of human sacrifice as a primitive practice carried on in ancient jungles, not in twentieth century America. And yet Wills County, Kentucky is no more the devil’s exclusive address than is the Amazon jungle. What happened to the Drews and Lawrences could and does occur periodically in human societies all over the world. That it happened in the quiet place in which I was raised astounds me.

By the time I was grown, and had learned what transpired in my own county in the 1920s, scholars were saying that Kentucky means no such thing as Dark and Bloody Battleground in any Indian language. They now say we don’t know where the name comes from or what it means. But I now know that the old notion of how Kentucky got its name is appropriate to at least one field in my county. This is the story of that field. To remember the Drew and Lawrence families, and to try and understand how this particular community could have come to such a moment, is why I have written Dark Fire.

Chapter One

I come awake real slow the morning after the Night Riders burnt the chute. I lay there in my bed for what seemed like a long time, and couldn’t figure out for the life of me whether all that stuff that’d happened in the middle of the night was real, or something I had dreamed.

The sun was streamin in the front window, and as my mind caught up to me I realized it was jist ordinary sunlight. It didn’t shift around none. I could tell by the kind of silence in the house, that Mama and Papa had already left for the Woolen Mills. At that time Bernard, who was thirteen, worked Saturdays at Uncle Berry’s grocery store. His bed was empty. The only ones at home was me and Bridget Ruth. She was three years older’n me so that’d put her at about eleven years old then. It was March 26, 1920 when the Night Riders took over the town and burnt down the tobacco chute. And living on 13th Street right across from it, we seen it all. But I’m gettin ahead of my story.

So I was a-layin there in my bed, and looked over and seen that Bridget Ruth was still sleepin. She had thick shiny black hair and I can see it yet, spread out over her pillow. I got up real quiet-like and went over to the window. The shade was nearly all the way down, and the sunlight was jist apourin in around it. I didn’t raise it—shoot no—I didn’t want nobody to see me there. I was still scared from the night before so I jist peeped out at the edge.

But when I looked out that east window the sun was like a torch thrust right into my face. My eyes watered and I squinted up good, and by and by I seen that the view was completely altered. The chute was gone and there was men all around what was left of it.

You see our neighborhood was called Boxtown, on account of the little, wooden, boxy houses scattered around them big old tobacco warehouses. It was the part of Greenberry where the tobacco market was. And it was mixed, but mostly colored. We was one of the few white families livin there. We lived there because Granny Rule, Papa’s mama, lived next door. She’d moved into town after her husband died and she sold the farm and give up raisin tobacco. She chose to settle in Boxtown because it was the part of town where she felt most comfortable, havin brung her tobacco there to sell all them years.

The chute was where the farmers brought it to. It was a long wooden barn with a driveway right through the middle, and raised platforms on either side. The buyers from the big companies’d stand on them platforms and look down into the wagon beds with hands of tobacco piled up in em, and they’d place their bids. They come from all over the world, Holland, Spain—ever’where I reckon. I used to go over and hang around sometimes on a market day jist to listen to them accents all mixed in with the auctioneer’s chant. It was mesmerizin, now that’s the truth. Like music.

Then the auctioneer’d give a signal, and some guy’d pull on the rope and ring