They were Welsh mostly, but a few were Scots and Irish arrested on the streets of London and other British cities for the crimes of being poor, homeless beggars just as Greensboro attempts to run off and arrest the poor today. The Crown locked them away in prisons until the prisons were overflowing and the Monarchy feared the cost of feeding and housing so many prisoners would bankrupt the whole of England.
A scheme was hatched to ship these prisoners off the the new world to work as indentured servants (contractual slaves) to pay back the Crown for the expense of their keep. Contracts were written up and those who signed went aboard ships bound for the Americas. Any who refused to sign spent the rest of their lives in prison. In the new world their contracts were sold to slave owners who preferred white slaves over black slaves. In a few years they would earn their freedom.
Problem was, the slave owners who held their contracts were also the ones who did the math to figure out how much time was left on the indentured servants' contracts and apparently these slave owners weren't very good at math for many of these indentured servants spent far more than the 7 years that was considered the normal length of contract.
My Daddy's ancestors were among the Welsh who were indentured in Jamestown and Williamsburg, Virginia-- the original American slaves. Like slaves are apt to do, they didn't take kindly to living in bondage and when opportunity arose they skipped town with only what they could carry and made their way to a place that was beyond where the army of the King of England and his law enforcement officers dared go. Today we call that place Ashe County, North Carolina.
Daddy's ancestors began farming that land using sticks to scratch furrows in the ground and lived in what was little more than huts. Luckily for Daddy's ancestors, the Cherokee, Creek, and Shawnee tribes never lived in Ashe County and only used the area for hunting and fighting each other. A few years later, before Daniel Boone passed through the area, a few wagon loads of Dutch-German Quakers rolled south from Pennsylvania in violation of the King of England's orders that no one was to settle west of the Blue Ridge. Those were my Mother's people and they were really big on chocolate. They brought with them plows, oxen, cattle, horses, seeds, tools, hardware and housewares. A few Moravians settled in about 1771.
The Quakers were amazed at the lush green valleys of Ashe County. It was the perfect place to raise beef and dairy cattle, beans, cabbage, lettuce and much more. Problem was, Ashe County was pretty much a lost province because it was so hard to get to. Up until about 1920 there were no roads leading from North Carolina into Ashe County.
On trips to the mountians our mother would always point out the approximate location of the tunnels her Quaker ancestors and abolitionists like Jarvis Bacon would use to smuggle slaves to free states and territories via way of Mount Jefferson, known until the 1960s as Nigger Mountain. As the story goes, the route was eventually found out and 60 runaway slaves were trapped in a cave on the mountain until dynamited and sealed in the mountain forever. The problem with that story is that it was said to be a moonshiner's cave where illegal whiskey was brewed but in those days brewing whiskey was perfectly legal.
Ashe County and most of what is now called Tennessee succeeded in the 1780s. It wasn't about slavery as very few people had slaves in Ashe County. They were just tired of being told what to do by lawmakers in a place they couldn't get to. Later, when the Civil War started to brew, Ashe County leaned towards the Union. When the fighting actually started, sentiments changed and Ashe County leaned South.
If there were any Civil War battles in Ashe County I've never heard of them. Most of Ashe County's experiences and hatred of the Union came in the first years after the war when Union Officers and carpetbagers made their homes there and set up the sharecropping system that would last for almost another century there. My mother, a Hartsoe (also spelled Hartzoe, Hartzog, and Hartog) of Quaker descent, was born in a big 2 story log house that according to local legend was the home of a Union Army officer who pissed off the locals so badly after the war that when his garrison of troops was finally mustered out of the Army, the locals hanged him in a tree in his own front yard. Many years later my grandfather would buy the house and 200 or so acres of land for .50 cents per acre.
My family first started coming to Greensboro and the Piedmont in the 1880s. With each and every economic downturn a few more would come here. They worked in the early cotton mills and later they drove trucks.
Daddy's side of the family wasn't quite so well off. My great grandfather, John E Jones, was Superintendent of Ashe County Schools and a sharecropper, college educated and bound to the land by contract and a desire to educate children in a place where few teachers would go. His son, Wade was also a school teacher and a sharecropper bound to the land.
During the later years of the Great Depression my Uncle Elmo left home at 14. The family always joked that he ran away but there was some encouragement from his parents as his father, Wade, was sickly and with his older brothers gone, Elmo being the oldest male child would be expected to fulfill his father's sharecropping contracts. See, like the indentured slave owners from Jamestown and Williamsburg, Ashe County's land owners also seemed to have problems with math. No one knows exactly how he got there but eventually Elmo was found sleeping under a porch in Burlington, North Carolina.
Now as it turns out, the man who found my uncle Elmo was a certain Mr Cates of the Cates Pickle Company. Some folks say Mr Cates was about to just shoo him away but Mrs Cates came out and had other ideas. Being that Mr Cates was stuck with this 14 year old kid from the mountains he put him to work in his pickle factory. Now I'm not exactly sure about this next part but I've been told that Uncle Elmo worked his way up to become vice president of the company before he turned 20 years old.
At 20 years of age, Elmo enlisted in the US Army to fight in World War 2. At just about that same time my Daddy who was then 15 lied about his age and enlisted in the Army only to get tossed in jail by the High Sheriff of Ashe County for trying to run out on the family's share cropping contract. A contract that dated back to his grandfather if not before.
Luckily for Daddy he wasn't the only Ashe County teenager in jail for running out on their family contracts and when a full bird colonel at Fort Bragg, North Carolina learned of this he loaded up a bunch of MPs and explained to the sheriff that all charges would be dropped and his recruits would be allowed to serve in the United States Army. And being that the Army vastly out gunned the Ashe County Sheriff's Department who was the Sheriff to argue?
From what I've heard, this was common all over the country and many old veterans from rural areas credit the US Army with breaking up this more modern version of slavery.
Uncle Elmo would go on to jump as a paratrooper at Normandy on the night before D-day in 1944, a member of the Pathfinders, a predecessor to the Special Forces. No one had ever attempted a night jump before, not even in practice. Over 200 Pathfinders jumped that night, roughly 25 came home. Elmo was shot and left for dead that night when his parachute trapped him in a tall pine tree only to be found days later almost dead when Allied forces finally took Normandy. Uncle Elmo returned to Normandy years later to jump in anniversary celebrations after running successful Greensboro businesses employing sometimes as many as 100 workers for almost 50 years.
Daddy was also supposed to jump at Normandy but after 2 years in service his mother left Ashe County for the first time in her life and traveled to Greensboro where Daddy was stationed at ORD, presented his commander with his birth certificate and insisted on taking him back to the farm that the money he and his brothers had been sending home had just bought. And with the Sheriff no longer in the mood to enforce sharecropping contracts what else could a 17 year old do but go home with momma?
Of course, Daddy was dead set and determined not to stay on the farm so as soon as he could he reenlisted and found himself stationed in Japan during the US occupation there. Daddy said he was having a pretty good time in Japan and was thinking about becoming an Army lifer until that little dust up came along in Korea. Being he was so close and all they put him on a ship and had them do a Marine Corps style landing on the beach of South Korea-- something they had never trained for.
Daddy spent the entirety of the conflict in Korea, beginning to end. But by then he had had enough of army life. He met my mother in Ashe County while on leave but had to catch a train the next morning to return to base in California. Six weeks later, Daddy hitch-hiked 2500 miles of mostly dirt roads from California to North Carolina to meet my mother, marry her, spend one night together in the little hotel with the water wheel on US 52 in Fancy Gap, Virginia then catch a train back to California.
My brothers are too young to remember and I barely do, but years later my Uncle Elmo carried Daddy to a hospital to be treated for what was then commonly called, shell shock. Years later, when Daddy was teaching me how to drive a tractor-trailer he would tell me of being sent to deliver a message on foot 20 miles away only to return to find his entire unit dead. Or of the time when assigned to a MASH unit and driving an ambulance hauling a wounded marine down a Korean street, lights and siren blasting, only to see a boy push a smaller boy directly into his path. When he stopped to see about the child the locals attacked him forcing him to flee. He stood trial and was found innocent but even in his 70s he still saw that little boy's face in his dreams. There were other stories he said he couldn't bear to tell me but those were his reasons he forbid my brothers and I go go to Vietnam.
My Grandfather on my mother's side of the family had the unusual experience of being drafted into civilian service during World War 2. I guess he could have got out of it but that's the way the story was told to me. As a master carpenter the Army sent him to Pennsylvania to train people to do woodworking to build footlockers, ammo boxes, desks, chairs and whatever else the Army needed made of wood. They paid him well but when they learned he owned a sawmill and a couple hundred acres of hard wood timber back in North Carolina they wrote him up a big contract and put him on the next south bound train with a bonus in his pocket.
Momma and Daddy first came to Gibsonville where my Uncle Gilmer was living and working in a management position with Burlington Industries. As soon as they found a place of their own they started inviting relatives from both sides of the family to come stay with them rent free long enough to get a job and a place of their own. Sometimes it was a few days, sometimes a few months but until I was about 5 years old and the house was filled with younger brothers there was always a relative living with us. Even after that a few passed through. Uncles Elmo and Gilmer were doing the same as were all the relatives who passed through our homes. Momma had 4 brothers and 2 sisters who came here. Some of Daddy's older brothers were already here but the nieces, nephews and cousins and second cousins who passed our way are beyond counting. My mother earned her position as family matriarch not by pushing people around but by being Momma to hundreds.
We left Gibsonville in 1958 when I was 2 and moved into the East Greensboro home I live in today. It was outside the city limits then and some of our neighbors were cows as there was a dairy farm across the street. The streets were dirt and the street I live on had a stream that had to be forded as there was no bridge. In really wet weather, cars would remain stuck in the red clay for weeks before tow trucks could get close enough to get them out. But Greensboro was coming full speed ahead and not even red clay or the quick sand pit around the corner would stop them.
Funny thing about that quick sand pit: While it's been about 45 years since Greensboro paved Tillery Drive, the City still has to patch that same hole just about every 2 years.
I enjoyed school in the beginning but very soon found myself bored to tears. While I never went to kindergarten I was still reading before I started the first grade. By the sixth grade I was over it. I would read all my text books the first week of school and be bored the rest of the year. I read my mother's college text books. I aced all the tests but never did my homework. In 1968, my parents went in debt to buy my brothers and I the World Book Encyclopedia. I read all 20 volumes, was nicknamed, Encyclopedia Jones, by the kids at school and didn't do any of my school work. But I could still ace every test every time. Adults everywhere were amazed at the wealth of knowledge I held in my young brain. I knew everything there was to know. Or so I thought.
Aycock Jr High School was a nightmare. Black gangs from the projects beat and robbed us white boys and some of the black boys of our lunch money each and every day. And when we brought a bag lunch they took that too. I think I had lunch 3 times in 2 years. If we told on them we got beat up again-- worse than before. Because it was so violent someone came up with the bright idea that all the boys would be made to run laps for the entirety of gym and study hall in hopes of tiring us all out so that the fights wouldn't go on. Two hours of running a day for 12 and 13 year olds just made everyone madder. The muscles we put on just made the punches harder and the wounds worse.
Freedom of choice allowed my mother to send my brother and I to Mendenhall Jr High for my final year of jr high school. Mendenhall wasn't violent. One punch in the nose and those Irving Park punks went running but there was something there I could have never prepared for and never saw coming. There existed at Mendenhall a level of snobbery and racism I had never before seen. None of those kids had ever been robbed by a black gang and yet they hated the handful of black students whose parents had sent them there for the very same reason my parents sent me there-- to get us out of the violence. And the snobbery, my family couldn't afford Neddleton Tassel Loafers (The Greensboro Shoe) or Converse. My mother made many of my clothes by hand and even the girls at Mendenhall would sit quietly behind me in class and cut my shirts with scissors then poke fun at me in the hall. In case you're wondering, some of my classmates there are among Greensboro's "movers and shakers" today. In shop class the boys cut the wood for my project up into little pieces and put it back into my box. Neither I nor my parents could afford to replace so I had to take an incomplete grade that year. I was probably the only kid in class who was actually interested in woodworking.
Then came forced busing and my being a part of the first integrated class at James B Dudley Sr High School right here in Greensboro. Greensboro's elites weren't going to send their children to Dudley, no way. The school board worked out the busing so that Greensboro's wealthiest white neighborhoods and Greensboro's wealthiest black neighborhoods went to Grimsley and Page while Greensboro's poorest neighborhoods, black and white, went to Smith and Dudley. Yes, there was still quite a bit of income disparity between the black and white students at Grimsley and Page but not like it was at Smith and Dudley. And to add insult to injury, Page and Grimsley got all the best teachers.
About 2 months into my sophomore year it happened. I was already a scared kid from years of violence but this time was worse than ever before. I excused myself from a 2 hour drafting class to go to the restroom. As I started out of the restroom a gang of 10-15 young men came rushing in and pushed me against the wall. They started beating and pounding on me. Things went black then I found myself flat on the floor with my eyes full of blood still being hit and kicked. I tried to get up but they kept knocking me back down.
As they left the room I went out behind them. I guess I crawled. Just outside the restroom door was a chair. I picked it up with the intention of hitting the last one but fell to the floor instead. Next think I knew, this black girl named Lee who lived 2 doors down from me saw me there, started screaming and ran towards the office. Then the assistant principal found me in a pool of my own blood and with and one of the teachers put me in a car and rushed me to Cone Hospital.
Broken ribs, the scars I've seen in the mirror every day for 40 years, the scars hidden under the beard I haven't shaved since 1974-- those were the easy parts. The hard parts are what's inside. Dr House, then Superintendent of Greensboro City Schools stood in his office talking with my mother while unbeknownst to him I waited just outside his open door wrapped in bandages like a mummy, scared to go back to school. He told my mother the incident did not take place on school property. (See paragraph above.) "Billy," my mother said, "Come in here, Dr House has something he wants to tell you."
Not only would Dr House not tell me, he didn't even have balls enough to look a 15 year old boy in the eyes. Fucking coward. And the young men who did it were not even students at Dudley High School. They were gang members who came in off the streets looking for easy targets.
We left there and went to Lineberry Funeral Home as Al Lineberry Sr was Chairman of the Greensboro City Schools at the time. The nice lady there told my mother that Mr Lineberry had gone home for the day. My mother told her to call him and tell him to come back. We waited for hours and no Mr Lineberry. The funeral home was closed for the night, the nice lady and the others wanted to go home and still no Mr Lineberry. She again called Mr Lineberry then explained to my mother that she had been instructed to call the police if we refused to leave. "Fine," my mother said, "when the newspaper and the television station does the story about our arrest I'll be sure to explain to them why we were here."
About 5 minutes later, Al Lineberry Sr arrived back in his office. Momma forced the Greensboro City Schools to put the first resource officers in Greensboro high schools in 1970. They weren't police officers then, they were out of work football coaches, 2 in each school, who walked around all day, sometimes carrying baseball bats and always making a difference.
That wasn't the last of the violence at Dudley but it lessened after that. Forty years of nightmares and bad decisions followed until finally, a few months ago a shrink found a drug that works. My brothers, one of which was only 2 years behind me never experienced anything like what I experienced there all because our mother had the nerve to fight the system when she was backed into the corner.
So there you have it, how we got here, how I got to be so stubborn and why I think it's so important we turn Greensboro, starting with Northeast Greensboro, in a positive direction so that your children never have to experience the kinds of lives myself and my ancestors experienced as we made our exodus from the old to start anew in Greensboro.
While you're reading this fine Sunday morning I'm in Burlington working on the business incubator. Hope you have a great Sunday!
