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 Posted: Wed 06 Aug 2008 05:54 Post subject: Inherit the Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie's Will_ |
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| Quote: | From: H-Net Reviews <books>
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Editor's Subject: Hoffschwelle on Stowe, _Inherit the Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie's Will_
Author's Subject: Hoffschwelle on Stowe, _Inherit the Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie's Will_
Date Written: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:02:09 EST
Date Posted: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:02:09 EST
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SAWH@h-net.msu.edu (January, 2008)
Gene Stowe. _Inherit the Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie's Will_.
Illustrations by Carl A. Sergio. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2006. xii + 309 pp. Illustrations, map, appendices, notes,
index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57806-864-7; $20.00 (paper), ISBN
978-1-934110-60-7.
Reviewed for H-SAWH by Mary S. Hoffschwelle, Department of History, Middle
Tennessee State University
Keeping It in the Family
In 1921, an all-white jury upheld the will of Maggie Ross, the richest
woman in Union County, North Carolina, against a challenge from more
than one hundred of her relatives. The case attracted public attention
because Maggie Ross was a white woman who had bequeathed most of her
property to two African Americans, Bob Ross and Mittie Ross Houston.
Three years later, another all-white jury heard the case on appeal and
once again upheld the will. Gene Stowe's _Inherit the Land_ presents a
detailed account of these proceedings and the unusual family that
provoked them. Heralded as proof that justice and the rule of law could
prevail in the midst of segregation and lynching, the case on closer
examination reveals two complicated story lines. One is the story of a
wealthy but emotionally isolated white family whose members created
fictive kin relationships across the color line. The other is the saga
of a court case to determine whether a white woman who chose black
people as her heirs could have been legally competent.
A native of Monroe, North Carolina, where the trial took place, Gene
Stowe began writing about the case when he was a reporter for the
_Charlotte Observer_. Discovery of the trial transcript allowed him to
complete this book-length work, which depends on extensive quotations
from court testimony and contemporaneous media coverage. Stowe is
clearly fascinated by the story of how two generations of white and
black North Carolinians forged loving personal relationships, and
especially by the legal triumph of reason over prejudice.
As Stowe is careful to show, there was little in recent history to
suggest that white North Carolinians would champion the rights of
African American legatees over white challengers. The white and black
Ross families lived in and near the village of Marvin, a seemingly
placid and neighborly small town in southwestern North Carolina.
Underneath its calm surface, however, swirled the strong current of
white supremacy that had overtaken North Carolina's Fusion experiment
(1894-98) in interracial politics. Disfranchisement and mob violence
hemmed in black North Carolinians while from atop the New South's
hierarchy elite whites decried lynching but otherwise routinely spoke of
blacks in degrading or, at best, patronizing terms.
The story of the Ross families suggests that, in the rural and
small-town New South, family bonds were so essential that an alternative
had to be constructed when one's family of origin failed to thrive. In
1857, Susannah (Susan) Burleyson Ross, a white woman born to a landed
family, found herself and her children mired in poverty. They were
rescued when her father bequeathed them the use of his family homeplace
on condition that Susan's improvident spouse never set foot on the
property. Subsequently, a legal covenant between Susan's mother and her
eldest son ensured that she and her children would hold on to five
hundred acres of Burleyson property and a slave. In the decades after
the Civil War, Susan and her children expanded their property holdings;
several years after their mother's death, the siblings moved to the most
imposing house in Marvin. None of the children would marry or have their
own children to inherit the land. As court testimony would later prove,
precious few of their extended family of cousins, nieces, and nephews,
or even their neighbors, befriended them. Without a broader family
network and lacking education or strong religious sentiments, the Rosses
had few ties to the broader social fabric of white Monroe.
Instead they turned to a black family. Susan filed a successful petition
in 1874 to apprentice a black child, Robert B. Ross, whose mother had
formerly been enslaved to Susan's in-laws. Susan's adult children Dennis
(d. 1896), Sallie (d. 1909), and Maggie Ross (d. 1920) helped their
mother raise Bob as a member of their household. They seem to have
thought of him as a much younger brother, and as an adult Bob lived in
the old Burleyson home. Increasingly isolated and lonely after Dennis's
death, the sisters raised Mittie Bell, Bob's daughter, as their own
child. As doting mothers, Sallie and Maggie used their wealth to outfit
their daughter in fashionable clothes and sent her off to Livingstone
College to get the education they had never had. When their daughter
left school to give birth to a child out of wedlock and the baby died,
they shielded her from public shame. They rejoiced when she found a
suitable husband and gave the young couple a new home of their own.
Later Maggie Ross would describe Mittie's daughter Florence as "her
darling granddaughter" (p. 63). Not surprisingly, then, in 1907 the Ross
sisters wrote duplicate wills that rewarded some of the white
individuals who had shown them kindness but devised the bulk of their
considerable estate to ensure the financial security of their chosen
family.
That said, it is difficult to assess the family relationships at stake
here. According to Stowe, the white Rosses, especially Sallie and
Maggie, acted from "simple goodness" and "guileless generosity" (p. x).
Without denying the sincerity of their love for Bob Ross, Mittie Ross
Houston, or Mittie's children, the white Rosses' motives and actions are
problematic. The biracial family that the Rosses created invites
comparison with other interracial relationships in the
nineteenth-century South.[1] White matriarch Susan Ross took African
American Bob Ross from his mother when he was only two years old. In
that instance, the law allowed a wealthy white woman to apprentice a
black toddler to her own household over his mother's protests. Bob's
daughter and granddaughter would also be plucked from their birth
families, but with parental consent. Nevertheless, the rupture of one
family to create another raises questions about whether the white Rosses
shared the assumption common among white southerners that their needs
and desires superseded those of black families.
What the black Ross family felt or thought is even more difficult to
know or interpret. The little evidence Stowe had to work with is
indirect, drawn from white observers, the trial transcript, and Mittie's
descendents. As was often the case in the nineteenth-century South,
other whites in Monroe and the Rosses' white kin tolerated the biracial
family until the black kin stood to inherit hundreds of acres of land.
In court testimony, those who challenged Maggie Ross's will portrayed
Bob Ross as an overseer and handyman rather than a brother, and Mittie
Ross Houston as a spoiled, immoral, and manipulative young woman rather
than a daughter. Later generations of black Rosses remember her
differently, as a strong woman proud of her dual heritage.
Bob and Mittie Ross remain in the shadows because ultimately the legal
story trumped the family story. As Stowe notes, after all their long
years together, the Rosses' complicated relationships would be boiled
down to one question: was Maggie Ross competent to write a will?
Attorneys and witnesses challenging the will maligned the black Rosses
and described Maggie as weak and dim-witted. The mere fact that a white
woman would leave so much property to black people instead of her white
relatives, they argued, proved that she was incompetent. As one witness
said, "I do not want these negroes to have this property in our
community. If the Ross women had the sense that I have got they would
not make a will like that ... giving it to the negroes" (p. 113).
Attorneys and witnesses defending the will swore that the Ross sisters
had always said they intended to provide for Bob and Mittie and that,
whatever the propriety of her biracial family life, Maggie Ross had been
in full possession of her faculties. In other words, Maggie Ross chose
her heirs poorly but she knew what she was doing and acted of her own
free will.
The outcome of the trial was less a triumph of interracial love and good
will than of the power of the law to maintain order in a segregated
society. The witnesses, legal authorities, and jurors who sided with
Maggie Ross did not share her feelings for black people or believe in
racial equality. Rather, they recognized that upholding the right of
white citizens over their property protected the status quo.
This leaves Stowe in an uncomfortable position, having cheered the legal
system for its color-blind application of the law and claimed that the
white Rosses "knew better" than their racist contemporaries (p. ix). And
unfortunately, he offers no explanation of the broader significance of
this episode for our understanding of the region or the period. Since he
wrote the book for a general audience, Stowe quite properly avoids a
discussion of historiography, and he does a very good job of setting the
trial in the historical context of Jim Crow North Carolina. The long
quotations from the trial proceedings let us hear the voices of the
"propounders" and "caveators" but, without a strong analysis of Stowe's
own, they become repetitive and confusing. Readers may well feel that
they have discovered a great story, but that it still needs a
storyteller.
Note
[1]. The scholarship on biracial southern families focuses on those
created by interracial sex. The white and black Ross families joined
themselves through different means, but their experiences echo those
described in Victoria E. Bynum, _Unruly Women: The Politics of Social
and Sexual Control in the Old South_ (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1992); Kent Anderson Leslie, _Woman of Color, Daughter
of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849-1893_ (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1995); Martha Hodes, _White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex
in the Nineteenth-Century South_ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1997); Martha Hodes, ed., _Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries
in North American History_ (New York: New York University Press, 1999). |
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