Thomas Wolfe, page 347
There have been critics unkind enough to suggest that throughout this whole extraordinary performance necessity was the mother of invention, and that the ready acceptance of the Catawba legend as historic fact was no more than might have been expected of a people who had too long been irked by their own obscurity and too long been indifferent to the claims of “family.” Thus, “a lady of family” in Virginia is known to have remarked one time, when informed that her nephew had married a mere nobody for no other reason than because he loved her: “Well, what else can you expect? He was brought up in Johnsville, and that’s practically a Catawba town.” This shrewd observation reflects pretty much the estimation in which Old Catawba has been commonly held by outsiders. And certainly it is true that the history of the state has always been more distinguished for its home-spun ruggedness than for its aristocratic splendor.
In spite of all gibes and taunts, The Society of the Sons and Daughters of the Aborigines grew strong and flourished throughout the eastern part of the state. And what had begun as a social organization quickly became the chief ally of entrenched power in the state’s politics. The Sons and Daughters brought up their heaviest artillery of “family” to stem the rising tide of the West, and in the pivotal campaign of 1858 they nominated one of their own number to run for Governor against a country lawyer from the wilds of Zebulon County.
The country lawyer stumped the state, pleading the cause of democracy, and telling his audiences that the ruling caste in the East, with its money and privileges and humbug aristocracy, was dead and didn’t know it. Like Swift when he announced the death of Partridge, the almanac maker, his logic was irrefutable: for, as Swift retorted, when Partridge came forward to assert he was still alive, if Partridge was not dead, he should have been—so the country lawyer held to the proposition that the East was dead, or should be; and his delighted followers called the fight that ensued “The Battle of the Quick and the Dead.”
Under that banner the East was beaten. The West had won at last. And the leader and hero of that victory became from that time on the symbol of the West.
His name was Zachariah Joyner—a name famous to everyone who since that time has lived upon Catawba earth and breathed Catawba air. Throughout his life he was a vigorous and undaunted champion of the common people. The pretensions of the Aborigines disgusted him, and he let no opportunity go by to flail them with the brutal lash of his coarse but devastating ridicule.
Joyner’s opponent in the campaign for the governorship was himself a Son of the Aborigines, his right to this distinction being founded upon the aristocratic claims of his mother, a charming lady who had inherited money and idleness, both together, and with this endowment had thus been one of the first to trace her ancestry back to the Lost Colony. Her son had campaigned vigorously to save what he called “our precious heritage” and “the Catawba way of life” from the raw crudeness of a Western victory. In the end he was even rash enough to accept Joyner’s challenge to appear on the same platform and debate the issues face to face. On this occasion the gentleman-champion of the East gave everything he had. He was not only eloquent in his show of filial devotion to his mother—“that delicate flower of Southern womanhood, etc. . . . to whom I owe, etc. . . . at whose knees I learned, etc.”—but he also sought to endear himself to the masses by condescension: he went so far as to admit that he made no claims to aristocratic lineage on his father’s side, his father’s people being descended, so he said, “from good old yeoman stock.”
“Good old yeoman stock, my——!” bellowed Zachariah Joyner in rebuttal. “They came here because the jails in England were crowded, and to keep from being hanged”—this was an exaggerated reference to the settlement of a group of exiled convicts on the eastern coast in 1683—“and the only yeomen they ever saw were the yeomen of the guard!”
So Zachariah Joyner won, and his victory was a great deal more than the triumph of one half of the state over the other half. It was the triumph of the common man—of all the obscure and unknown lives that somewhere had turned a wheel, or swung an ax, or plowed a furrow, or blazed a trail and made a clearing in the wilderness. His was the voice, the tongue, the language of every one of these who had lived and died and gone unrecorded to the earth—and who now arose again, incarnate in one living man, to say to all proud hearts, stiff necks, and Aborigines soever that in the final reckoning the representatives of privilege must bow before the insistent rights of universal humanity.
Old Catawba had found its man.
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CHAPTER 2
OLD MAN OF THE TRIBE
Zachariah Joyner was never one to indulge in the reverent pruning of family trees. When he was Governor of Old Catawba he often said that if people in the eastern part of the state would spend less time in thinking about where they came from, and more in thinking about where they were going, they would be a lot easier to get along with.
He was also impatient of all attempts to dignify himself and his own family genealogically. In the heyday of his later fame, the Aborigines made some conciliating overtures to bring Catawba’s most distinguished citizen into the fold. They did not quite dare hint that Zack had as good a right as anybody else to claim an ancestor in the Lost Colony, for they knew too well what he would say to that; but they did draw up quite a formidable account of the doings of the Joyners in the annals of history. They traced the name back to the Middle Ages. They even had one of the Joyners doing valiant service in defense of King Richard of the Lion Heart, when that great sovereign was surrounded by a murderous host of Saracens before the walls of old Jerusalem. They dug out others with baronial titles, and found some of them contending back and forth in the Wars of the Roses. There were Joyners who had fought loyally under the banners of King Charles, and others just as doggedly with Cromwell’s men. From that point the earliest migrations of the family were traced to Virginia, thence to the coastal regions of Catawba, and finally to their stronghold in the mountain districts of the West. By dint of much contriving, the whole thing had been linked together in a kind of chain.
But Zachariah was not impressed. His comment on the document, when it was presented for his inspection and approval, was characteristically blunt and to the point:
“I don’t know where we came from, and, what’s more, I don’t give a damn. The point is, we’re here now.”
There was not only good democracy in this, but the ring of sound truth, too. For the essential trait of the Joyner tribe was in those words. They were “here now,” and Catawba would have been inconceivable without them. They were, in fact, a kind of native dragon seed. They may have had some other and more ancient antecedents, but in their magnificent quality of Now-ness—the quality of being what they were because they were where they were—they were so naturally a part of western Catawba, its life, its speech, its history, even the clay of its soil, that any other previous existence for them seemed fantastically detached, ghostly, and unreal.
Since every mother’s son of us has got to come from somewhere, their lineage, no doubt, went back like everyone’s to Father Adam, or to the origins of primeval man. So perhaps their ancestor was some prehistoric anthropoid. But if anyone wants to know who the founder of the family was, the answer is that it was old William Joyner, the father of Zack, and the sire of the whole clan. Even today the memory of old William is still kept alive in the hills, for in his own way he attained a legendary repute which almost equals that of his more celebrated son.
There is some doubt about William Joyner’s antecedents, and no certainty whatever about where he came from. It is known that he came to Zebulon County because of a Revolutionary land grant. And the date of his coming is established. It was in 1793 when he took up his grant upon the south fork of what is now known as the Thumb Toe River. If he was not actually the first settler in that region, he was among the first. From this time on, people began to come in rapidly, and when William Joyner married, in 1798, the wife he took was the daughter of another settler who had recently arrived in the mountains.
Her name was Martha Creasman, and by her he had a family of seven. She died at the birth of her last child. Later, William married a second time. By this wife he had fourteen or sixteen children—for there were so many of them, and their destinies were so diverse, that even their number has been disputed. But of these matters, with all the ramifications of kinship and heredity they imply, it is our purpose to speak later. Here we shall tell a little more of William Joyner.
There were, in the earlier years of the present century, old men alive who could remember him; for he lived to a great old age, and there were people who were children in the 1840’s who had seen him and had heard the stories men told of him. Even at that time, a hundred years ago, he was an almost legendary figure. The stories of his great physical strength, for example, were prodigious, and yet apparently were founded in substantial fact.
He was said to have been, particularly in his earlier years, a man of a hot temper, who liked a fight. There is a story of his fight with a big blacksmith: a quarrel having broken out between them over the shoeing of a horse, the blacksmith brained him with an iron shoe and knocked him flat. As William started to get up again, bleeding and half conscious, the blacksmith came at him again, and Joyner hit him while still resting on one knee. The blow broke the blacksmith’s ribs and caved in his side as one would crack a shell.
He was known in his day to be a mighty hunter; and old men who remembered him used to tell of the time he “chased the dogs the whole way over into Tennessee, and was gone four days and nights, and never knowed how fer from home he was.”
There is also the story of his fight with a grizzly bear: the bear charged him at close quarters and there was nothing left for him to do but fight. A searching party found him two days later, more dead than living—as they told it, “all chawed up,” but with the carcass of the bear: “and in the fight he had bit the nose off that big b’ar and chawed off both his years, and that ba’r was so tored up hit was a caution.”
Then there is the story of the time when he walked off with enough leather on his back to shoe a regiment. The brother of Joyner’s first wife owned a kind of trading post or country store, and had besides a pound of savage and ferocious dogs. It was the storekeeper’s boast that no one but himself could manage these fierce animals, and certainly no one else had ever attempted to. People generally were afraid of them, and gave them a wide berth. Their owner was so proud of their untamed ferocity that on one occasion, when he was talking of his dogs to a group of men who were in his store, he offered any man who could subdue them “as much leather as he can tote out of here upon his back.”
William Joyner was present and instantly accepted the challenge. In spite of the efforts of his friends to dissuade him, he went out to the pound, and, while the others watched, opened the gate and went in. The great dogs sprang snarling at him with bared fangs. According to the story, “he jest snapped his fingers once or twice,” and the dogs whimpered and came crawling to him like a pack of curs. To add insult to injury, he is said to have stooped down and picked up two of the largest and most savage of the dogs and held them under his arms, “a-hangin’ thar real foolish-like, like a couple of pigs.” After walking about the pen with them a time or two, he tossed them down, snapped his fingers again, opened the gate, and walked out unscathed.
The storekeeper, although beaten and dumbfounded, was as good as his word. He pointed to the pile of leather in his store and told William he could take as much as he could carry. Joyner stood there while his companions heaped the leather on, and finally staggered out the door with eight hundred pounds of it on his shoulders.
There are many other stories about him, but these suffice to indicate the unusual qualities of his person, his great strength, and his undaunted courage. He was said by everyone who ever saw him to have been a person of remarkable gifts. Indeed, one does not have to probe a mystery to find an explanation for the amazing family he produced: the seed of all their talents was aware in him. Although he came to Zebulon with nothing but his rifle and his grant of land, within twenty years, through his ability as a shrewd trader, he had accumulated what was, in his time and place, a substantial property. He was the owner of a mill, to which his neighbors brought their corn for grinding. He increased his holdings until he owned and had under cultivation hundreds of acres of the most fertile land in the beautiful valley that now bears the name of Joyner’s Creek. And eventually he became the owner of the largest and most flourishing trading post in the whole district.
From these beginnings came the start of the whole clan. It is true that Zachariah, in the later years of his political career, made frequent and eloquent reference, in the phrases of the orotund rhetoric of which he was a master, to “the little log cabin where I was born.” It is further true that the little log cabin where Zachariah so often and so advantageously asserted he was born, still exists, kept piously by the State Historical Commission, in a condition of trimmed, sodded, planted, and be-flowered snugness that it assuredly did not know at the time when William Joyner lived in it. The State Highway Commission has likewise memorialized the sanctuary in a system of neat signs, which notify the modern pilgrim that he is now approaching “the birthplace of Zachariah Joyner—four miles.”
It is unfortunate, perhaps, both for the lovers of sentiment and the believers in historic fact, that Zachariah was not born here at all. William Joyner did live here for years, and built the cabin with his own hands, with the assistance of some friendly Cherokees; but by the time of Zachariah’s birth, his father was already a person of considerable substance, and in accordance not only with his new position, but with the expansive needs of his growing family, he had built the larger and much more substantial dwelling that adjoins it, and which also still exists. “The little log cabin where I was born,” existed in Zachariah’s childhood as a kind of outside kitchen; it was certainly in such a capacity that Zachariah himself must have known it, no matter how he remembered it later in the more imaginative flights of political oratory by which he gave it fame.
In his later years, William Joyner having now become a man of weight and standing in the community, his wife tried, as wives of successful citizens are apt to do, to ameliorate some of his social imperfections. The story goes that she tried to get him to wear shoes in summertime—for apparently he was a man who liked bare feet, and when he went out to the fields to work, the weather and the season permitting, he always worked so.
Failing to win this really formidable concession, the worthy woman then attempted to persuade him “at least to put your shoes on when you come into the house.” Her efforts in this direction were not successful, for although he made some effort to please her, he “kept forgittin.” Failing in all this, she finally tried to prevail on him “for pity’s sake, at least to put your shoes on when company comes.” But this also proved too much, for she used to say despairingly: “I don’t know what to do with him. I’ve begged an’ I’ve pled an’ he promises to try, but the minute we have company—even when the preacher’s there—here he comes without his shoes, trampin’ along out of the fields in his big feet.”
As for “Bear” Joyner—for, after his famous encounter with the grizzly, he was known by this name—he would often say: “I thought I was marryin’ me a wife, but I reckon what I done was to go an’ git myself hitched to a blacksmith. My advice to you young’uns is, if you ever go and git yourself married, make sure first whether you’re marryin’ a woman who is goin’ to cook fer you, or one who is goin’ to try to throw you down an’ shoe you every time you come into the house.”
He was a man of keen wit, and everyone who ever knew him said that he would have “gone far” if he had had the advantages of formal education. He was unable to read or write his own name until he was more than forty years old; but he learned how to do both in his later years. Indeed, he developed quite a taste for reading, and, limited as his facilities were, he managed to acquire a surprising store of bookish information.
Bear Joyner, like his famous son, was increate with myth, because the very nature of the man persuaded it. Such myths, then—facts most probably, indeed—as his bear-fighting, hunting, blacksmith-crushing, dogmastering, and his instinctive shoelessness we have adduced to give the flavor of the man.
These things get into the story, make the picture. Yet it is not the Myth that falsifies the true identity of man (our debunking truth-tellers of the present notwithstanding—would to God they were themselves debunked!) The Myth is true. Let those who doubt it deny that Lincoln liked a joke, and had a gift for making one; split rails; was very strong; said h—1 and d—n; so far as we can guess, was not averse to—; was pungent in his speech, and said his legs were long enough to reach the ground (which certainly was high sense); picked up the dirty pig; was chased out of doors by his wife—yes, and even when embarrassed by the presence of surrounding ladies on a railroad platform, told a little boy who pointed to a certain word scrawled upon the wall by other little boys, that the thing it stood for was “a station, son . . . the name, son, of a certain station . . . most important station . . . the station where more men get on and off than any other station in the world.”
