Malachi

I first met Malachi as a teenager during WWII. My father, mostly away during the war, had returned to the family farm which my mother and I had kept going while he worked at Camp Davis and Ft. Bragg.

Malachi, a young, black, intelligent, enthused soldier of the South Pacific, had just returned to his mother and father, who still lived very much as slaves on one of the Brady farms outside Kenly, NC.

In the effort to prepare returning veterans to earn a living, the government had set up schools for practical education at many of the high schools. My great uncle Silas, brother of my grandmother, an accomplished carpenter, was teaching carpentry at a local high school. My father, already an accomplished carpenter, was assisting him and there he had met Malachi.

My first experience with Malachi was in assisting my father in the trimming of the mules' feet on the farm. It may sound strange to the uninitiated but the hooves of horses and mules must be trimmed like toenails and fingernails, they grow and in order for the animals to work their feet must be kept in repair. My father was teaching Malachi about the various tools in this craft. It was my job to hold the “twist”. The “twist” was a mechanism that fitted on the lip of the mule in order to control the mule. Naturally, these dumb animals did not want anyone “messing around” with their feet. They had the ability to stand on three feet while one hoof was being trimmed. In other writings, in speaking, I have often referred to the twist as a wonderful way to control homo sapiens. We had a large tobacco farm and I “cropped” the leaves off the stalks of tobacco side by side with Malachi and several others whom my father hired to do this work.

This involves a young black man, the only child of a black couple who lived enslaved on one of Dr. James Calhoun Brady's farms. He owned much land and there was approximately 50 tenant families living on his land. Mostly black, some white, all in complete enslavement because not one of the families ever ceased to be in debt to this landlord.

The small town, small population, one main street and at the end of the street, as one can well imagine: Tara and Heaven. The great white house with the six great white columns in the front, manicured lawns and large cars in the driveway. This is the old type aristocracy of the old south, first half of the 20^th century. Dr. Brady was a physician and, of course, as always, the richest, most prominent man in the area, a member of the democrat legislature. Blacks did not vote and the whites were so intimidated by his influence since he controlled everything in the area (banks, drugstore, only doctor) that his election was always just a matter of formality.

On a side street, near the mansion, was his office for his medical practice and next to it, an office for his farming operations. He had overseers who kept the tenants in abject poverty and subjection, making sure they never got out of debt to the Senator who controlled their lives totally. Of course, law enforcement was at the command of the Senator. My grandfather, who lived in this small town, once showed me the jail. Hollywood would be unable to duplicate the horrendous appearance of this small building with its bars and no chemical company would be able to duplicate the smell from the building because the toilet facilities consisted of a hole in the rear of the one room structure. If the jailed inmate received any water or food, someone in the family had to bring it to him.

The thing I will never forget is Malachi's description of what happened to any one of the enslaved tenant farmers who rebelled in any way against the treatment, or the cheating from the crop sales, the usury involved in ludicrous charges for everything in keeping the farm families in total submission to the Senator.

Along with tobacco, grain crops such as corn and soybeans, much cotton was produced. Of course, at that time, all agriculture farming was done by hand plows with mules. Fertilizer bags were used in the picking of the cotton (I know because I have used such myself). Four of the bags were sewn together to make “cotton sheets”, sheets where you emptied the bags of cotton, kept until they were taken to the cotton gin, where baled. One of the most horrible examples ...use your own words...bigotry, racial hatred, discrimination...two overseers throwing one of these cotton sheets over a man, dragging him off to a deserted area and beating him half to death simply for not complying with one of the Senator's dictums. WE THOUGHT SLAVERY WAS OVER IN 1865. Slavery persisted in North Carolina among the tenant farmers, cotton mill workers, right on through most of my lifetime.

Malachi had come back from the war, his only clothing still his U.S. Army uniform, having participated in the battle of Guadalcanal. Little did I know then that eventually I would visit Guadalcanal, where some of those great US ships are still sticking up out of the water in the bay. Malachi was determined that he would not become a victim of the Doctor/Senator, as had been his father and mother. Alma, his mother, had been a cook in the great old house until her health kept her at home most of the time. But she had witnessed what this doctor, a descendant of one of N.C.'s greatest families, had done to his wife. Keeping her drugged so that, to the people in the community, she appeared a total alcoholic.

This legislator, so enjoying his prestige in Raleigh and elsewhere, believed himself to be so much better than anyone else in the community, he would even go to a large city nearby to get his hair cut. This family would not think of buying their groceries or clothing in the town which they had exploited their entire life. One would think that a physician, one duty-bound by every moral and ethical constraint of medical history, would have some empathy for patients. He was, from what I can learn, more or less an educated, rich drug pusher.

I knew physicians of his historical era who believed in preventative medicine, who used food as treatment, who counseled every age group in homeopathy methods of treatment and prevention. So easy in a rural setting. I never heard of that coming from him because I believe he had too much financial interest in the drugstore. Later, when another younger doctor came to the town, things changed. The old Senator just became an old politician, an old “land hog”, an old hypocrite astounded to see the black and white children going to school together. Probably looking at the church down the street and thinking how he had disgraced the very building by his presence in it.

Once, an elitist fraternity man, with whom I had classes, introduced me to his fellow fraternity brother, the old Senator's grandson. I told him that I was raised a few miles from the home, that my grandparents lived in Kenly, etc. He looked at me as if I had been the biggest pile of trash he had ever seen. Remember, this is the old south, the way it has been most of my life. There is nothing peculiar to this one little town. Most eastern North Carolina towns could tell this same story. The big house in town, where the controlling family lived, who tried to keep an absolute authoritarian control over everything and everyone in the town, particularly if a cotton mill were involved and certainly the tenant farmers on lands surrounding the town where God-fearing, humble, American citizens were just trying to eke out a living in spite of the extortion and oppression of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century slave masters.

I don't know whatever happened to Malachi, I have a feeling that Malachi became successful but, it goes to show again the disdain with which America's elitist hold those of us who have been willing to defend their country and their greed.

It gnaws at me every day of my life, the hypocrisy of our nation, the south, eastern North Carolina, the fact--and it is a fact--that for political and financial gain, Baptist pastors, lawyers who attended church, those fortunate enough to have an education permitted or turned a blind eye to this profane lifestyle, even to this day...so- called Christians voting for the Democrat lie.