Unable to find marriage partners in the community, they started marrying their white cousins instead, with Newt’s encouragement. The Knight Negroes, as these children were known, were shunned by whites and blacks alike. After he and Serena separated-they never divorced-Newt Knight caused a scandal that still reverberates by entering a common-law marriage with Rachel and proudly claiming their mixed-race children. Knight also fathered nine children with his white wife, Serena, and the two families lived in different houses on the same 160-acre farm. It’s not even past.”Īfter the Civil War, Knight took up with his grandfather’s former slave Rachel they had five children together. And not for the first time in Jones County, where arguments still rage about a man born 179 years ago, I recall Faulkner’s famous axiom about history: “The past is never dead. I stand there writing it down and thinking about William Faulkner, whose novels are strewn with characters who look white but are deemed black by Mississippi’s fanatical obsession with the one-drop rule. “Now I’m going to say something that might offend you,” he begins, and proceeds to do just that, by referring in racist terms to “Newt’s descendants” in nearby Soso, saying some of them are so light-skinned “you look at them and you just don’t know.” Then he plants his staff on the ground and turns to face me directly. Reaching higher ground, Gavin points across the swamp to various local landmarks. We make our way around the lakeshore, passing beaver-gnawed tree stumps and snaky-looking thickets. “The Confederates kept sending in troops to wipe out old Newt and his boys,” says Gavin, “but they’d just melt into the swamps.” Gavin points out a site that was a hide-out for Newt Knight. I don’t know how much of that is true, but one of these days I’ll come here with a metal detector and see what I can find.” He said they had a password, and if you got it wrong, they’d kill you. “He said they had a gate in the reeds that a man on horseback could ride through. “I can’t be certain, but a 90-year-old man named Odell Holyfield told me this was the place,” says Gavin. We reach a small promontory surrounded on three sides by a swampy, beaver-dammed lake, and concealed by 12-foot-high cattails and reeds. Sal was the name of Newt’s shotgun, and originally it was Sal’s Battery, but it got corrupted over the years.” Knight and his men, says Gavin, hooking away an enormous spider web with his staff and warning me to be careful of snakes, “had a number of different hide-outs.
#MOVIE ABOUT A HIDDEN MAP AND THEY GO DOWN TO FIND IT FREE#
This little-known, counterintuitive episode in American history has now been brought to the screen in Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross ( Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games) and starring a grimy, scruffed-up Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight. The county was known as the Free State of Jones, and some say it actually seceded from the Confederacy. In the spring of 1864, the Knight Company overthrew the Confederate authorities in Jones County and raised the United States flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville. He waged guerrilla war against the Confederacy and declared loyalty to the Union. With a company of like-minded white men in southeast Mississippi, he did what many Southerners now regard as unthinkable. I’m here in Jones County, Mississippi, to breathe in the historical vapors left by Newton Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War. One of them is titled Sal Batree, after the place he wants to show me. At first I mistook him for a preacher, but he’s a retired electronic engineer who writes self-published novels about the rapture and apocalypse.
A tall white man with a deep Southern drawl, Gavin has a stern presence, gracious manners and intense brooding eyes. Gavin leads me through the woods to one of the old swamp hide-outs. With two rat terriers trotting at his heels, and a long wooden staff in his hand, J.R.
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