1
HOME, SWEET HOME
CAMP LEJEUNE, NORTH CAROLINA
September 24, 1945
Bill White had survived Guadalcanal and Tarawa. Now all that remained was a separation interview with Lieutenant F. L. Dixon, who rattled off a series of questions as he banged away on a typewriter.
The form called for basic information (RACE: W; SEX: M), the date he had joined (12JAN42), the fake birthdate he had used (4MAY23), and his time overseas (YEARS: 2; MONTHS: 4; DAYS: 11). The marines wanted to know where they were sending him (401 S. HILL ST., ATHENS, TENN.) and, finally, why: it was home, Bill said.
It was a long bus ride before familiar tall trees and rolling green fields came into view. The sign made it official: “Welcome to Athens—The Friendly City.” The clock tower appeared, followed by the rest of the grand old courthouse.
Every train car and coach in America was crowded with men coming home from war. They were returning from jungles, fields, the desert, and ships surrounded by water, but they all shared the dream of going home. Someday, when the war was over, they would resume their interrupted lives.
The courthouse square was filled with life when the weather permitted: people gathered to sell, shop, gossip, play music, or hear itinerant preaching. But Bill could see it was mostly empty, except for some leafless maple trees.
Four sheriff’s deputies wearing gold badges and guns were there to meet the bus at the dilapidated depot. They arrested a group of Bill’s fellow passengers, still wearing their uniforms, for public drunkenness. They’d had a few beers to celebrate being alive, but far from enough to intoxicate a navy sailor.
“What’s going on?” Bill asked a bystander.
“Those deputies meet every bus and every train, and if you’re drinking a beer or anything they’re arresting you and making you pay a fine.”
Bill couldn’t believe it. These boys had risked their lives. And now they were headed to jail and about to lose their mustering-out pay to a bunch of thugs. “Hellfire,” Bill said.1
2
ON THE LITTLE TENNESSEE RIVER
1924-35
“I was born on the Little Tennessee River,” remembered Bill White, with a sweetness and reverence he reserved for little else, “which flowed down out of the Cherokee Mountains.”
His parents, Edd and Elizabeth White, had three boys followed by three girls. Bill found it easy to get lost among his siblings, especially Edd Jr., his faster and stronger older brother. Bill bristled under any kind of authority, and was known to hide all night in the woods rather than face discipline. But he had a special connection with Grandpa Wiggins, with whom he spent as much time as he could. “Those years were real good years,” said Bill, “because my grandpa taught me a whole lot about hunting, and trapping, and fishing, and I admired and respected him.”
Grandpa Wiggins led Bill on summertime treasure hunts for arrowheads, spear points, bone needles, and effigy pottery. These were left over from the Cherokee, he explained, who had lived in these mountains and along the river for many years, and Bill was descended from them through his great-grandmother.
Bill learned the legends of his ancestors, like Atagahi, “The Lake of the Wounded,” hidden somewhere in those mountains, where injured animals could be restored to health by drinking the water. It was said that some Cherokee hunters found the lake by following a wounded animal, but once they left could never find it again, though some looked for the rest of their lives.1
Bill also learned about his family on his father’s side. His relative James White had fought in the American Revolution and founded the city of Knoxville. White had served as a senator in the rogue government of Franklin, a failed attempt to form a new state from the western counties of North Carolina. The Cherokee considered James White a man of honor, and he had twice prevented outbreaks of violence along the frontier.2
Grandpa Wiggins and Bill sat on the banks of the Little Tennessee River and waited for catfish, buffalo fish, and trout. Supposedly the Dakwa lived in those waters, a fish large enough to swallow a man. It especially liked to eat boys who walked too close to the water’s edge—at least that’s what Grandpa Wiggins said.
Grandpa would take Bill “plum over across” the mountain to Bass Dockery’s house when he wanted some whiskey. Bass had lost an arm in a shootout, and Bill helped him fire up the still and fed it with firewood. Bass let little Bill take a sip, sending him running to the spring behind the house to calm his mouth.3
Bill and his grandpa built traps for rabbits and wild hogs. They rode twelve miles to the mill to grind corn and flour and the same distance home to make corn bread and biscuits. Sunday mornings were for the First Baptist Church in the mountain town of Toccoa, where Bill’s parents had met.
People called it a Great Depression, said Bill, but “we didn’t have much to begin with. We lived about the same as our families had for the last one hundred and fifty years—just off the land. We were happy. We didn’t know we were poor until somebody out of the city came out here and told us we were poor people.”4
Bill once came across a tombstone in the woods: “Bushwhacked on Steer Creek Road While Cradling Oats.” He asked Grandma Wiggins about it. The bushwhackers were a gang of rough men who’d been hired to defend a nearby plantation. After the Civil War they ran roughshod over the mountains, raiding farms, stealing cattle, and “killing anyone in their way.” His grandma told Bill that they’d murdered her brother, a Union veteran who had fought at Lookout Mountain, shortly after his return from the war.
Then one day his time in the mountains with Grandpa Wiggins came to an end. Bill’s mother told him that his father had gotten a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, working at the new substation in Athens. He’d have to move with the rest of the family.
Bill cried. Couldn’t he stay? He wanted to stay. He knew Grandpa Wiggins wanted him to stay.
Bill’s mom explained to him. Grandpa and Grandma would love for you to stay. But they don’t have enough food for the three of you. Bill had never thought about it. Then he remembered how Grandma always ate the crumbs of the corn bread after he was done. He moved to Athens with his family.5
3
WARRIOR ROOTS
McMinn County, Tennessee, sits along the Great Warrior Path of the Cherokee and U.S. Route 11. A tribal elder remembered “a lovely land of hill and dale, free from the extremes of heat in the summer, or the bitter cold in the winter; a land of health, of pure air and pure water, whose clear running streams in every valley were filled with the finest fish; a land of singing birds, of flowers and honey, of wild grapes and nuts in great variety, and over all extended one almost unbroken, open, grass grown forest where roamed countless numbers of deer, and other game, in thriving abundance.… Our days were passed like a happy dream, in the hunt, in idly fishing from our canoes, in feasting with our friends, and in the joyous assemblage around the campfire at night.”1
Chief Atta-Kulla-Kulla was on a hunt when he discovered a badly wounded soldier fighting in the American Revolution. Nocatula, the chief’s daughter, was charged with bringing him back to health. The soldier joined the tribe and was given the name “Conestoga,” meaning “oak.” Nocatula and Conestoga fell in love, fishing in her canoe and hiding away at her favorite bluff. Shortly before their wedding, Conestoga was ambushed by a rival suitor, Mocking Crow. Nocatula came across him as he lay dying, pulled the knife from his neck, and plunged it straight into her heart. “Slowly he opened his eyes and seeming to realize the dear face now pressed against his, he smiled, and with a last effort slowly raised his now stiffened right arm, and placed it across her shoulders.”
The chief directed a hackberry seed to be placed in her hand and an acorn in his. They were buried together. When Bill White arrived in Athens, the oak and the hackberry tree had grown tall, their branches intertwined as though holding hands. They could be found on the campus of Tennessee Wesleyan College, founded on the eve of the Civil War, whose red brick buildings with white columns and porticos kept a respectful distance from the resting place of Nocatula and Conestoga.
The Hiwassee Purchase of 1819 opened East Tennessee to settlement. The Cherokee were curious about their new neighbors. The rest of America, it turns out, had been wondering the same thing since they first appeared on overcrowded docks.
The Quakers and Puritans had come to build Utopia; the Cavaliers, runners-up in the English Civil War, had come because they’d lost a political battle; the newest wave of immigrants were here because they’d lost every political battle.
They were dubbed Scotch-Irish, from the region spanning Scotland and England, descended from warrior Celts, the Romans who conquered them in A.D. 80, and the Saxons, Vikings, and Normans who invaded one after the other.2
They were Borderers—living near where one country ended and another began—and this was the central fact of their existence. From 1040 and for the next seven centuries, every king of England invaded the Scots or was invaded. Or both.
Stone beacons dotted the high hills of the borderlands. A farmer could look up at any moment and see one lit, and know that any one of a number of bad things was about to happen.
It didn’t matter which king was on top: the Borderers always lost. Marauding armies did just as much damage headed north as they did going south. Bandits preyed on this lawless region in the years between invasions. The Borderers relied on themselves and their families for survival, and hated the distant authorities that continually upended and endangered their lives. The chance to leave this world behind and start over in another one was the sweetest thing they could have imagined.3
There was one final indignity for them in their escape: a sea voyage with too many passengers, not enough food, and a mortality rate approaching that of slave ships.4
Borderers made awful servants. They became famous for not taking orders, beating up overbearing overseers, and, in at least one case, taking off with his master’s wife and daughters. It was observed of one, and could have been said of many: “His looks spoke out that he would not fear the devil, should he meet him face to face.”5
The Borderers loved their new home. People asked: “Where are you from?” The typical answers: Virginia, North Carolina, or maybe Pennsylvania. If pressed to name the city of their ancestors, many wouldn’t know, or care. There was no nostalgia for the Old World or their place in it.6
McMinn County was carved from the Hiwasee Purchase and named for Tennessee’s governor. The village of Pumpkintown was selected as the county seat and renamed Athens, after the cradle of Western civilization and birthplace of democracy, a signal toward their grand aspirations for the new community.7
Some expected trouble from two warrior cultures in new proximity. But they intermarried, lived as neighbors, and were buried together in the old cemeteries. The Cherokee “were living a settled, civilized existence that paralleled in every way that of their white counterparts,” and possibly had greater formal education than the new arrivals.8
The trouble started over the border in Georgia in 1828. Gold had been discovered in the mountains on Cherokee land. Thousands of “gamblers, swindlers, debauchers, and profane blackguards with morals as bad as it is to conceive” rushed to stake their claims. President Andrew Jackson decided to settle the matter by relocating the entire Cherokee people to the west, a journey of hundreds of miles for some and more than a thousand for others.
General Winfield Scott arrived in McMinn County with seven thousand men in 1838. The people protested and resisted and did everything they could to save their neighbors, friends, and family. One resident recorded: “The Cherokees are nearly all prisoners … dragged from their houses and encamped in military places all over the area,” with “no time to take with them anything except the clothes they have on. Well-furnished houses are left prey to plunderers who, like hungry wolves, follow in the train of the captors.”
The people of McMinn had failed to save the Cherokee. But they never lost their hostility to oppressors. They petitioned the Tennessee Constitutional Convention to phase out slavery and overwhelmingly opposed Secession.
During the Civil War they found themselves in a position familiar to their ancestors, on the fault lines between two warring parties. On any given day control could change from Union to Confederate hands and back again. Close attention was paid to the color of uniforms worn in the street. Men returned from Union and Confederate armies at war’s end and moved ahead with life.9
Copyright © 2020 by Chris DeRose