A shave and a haircut

Opinion

February 7, 2013

A shave and a haircut

By Rhetta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Thu Feb 07, 2013, 08:00 AM CST

NATCHEZ, Miss. — Young Barney Schoby has an actor’s animation and a historian’s mind. Who better to guide you through the place that does more to explain the nuanced Natchez heyday than any other?

The big, red-brick building on State Street once housed the home and business of the free black barber William Johnson. Johnson, successful businessman and relentless diarist, sometimes called “the black Pepys,” chronicled the day-to-day dealings of a society when cotton was king.

The National Park Service has owned the house since 1990, but the Johnson diaries have been famous for their rare glimpse of antebellum history since LSU published them in 1951.

Schoby — who once taught, like his father before him — didn’t find his middle-school job a good fit. When his Alcorn State University professor told him about the Park Service opportunity, Schoby jumped at the chance.

Now he teaches, all right, but the lesson plan involves one man: William Johnson. That man was extraordinarily interesting, clever and complicated, straddling the line between black and white societies. And Schoby has made it his business to learn Johnson’s strengths and frailties.

Johnson was a money lender, some might say a loan shark. He even loaned money once to the Mississippi governor who signed his emancipation papers. Johnson loved duck and alligator hunting, and betting on the horses and cockfights.

“Bottom line, William Johnson was a gambler,” adds Schoby, who could make drying paint a lively topic. “He would bet on anything.”

Johnson, born a slave, was freed at age 11 by the white slave owner presumed to be his father, another William Johnson. The Natchez population in the mid-1800s was 3,000 whites, 1,600 black slaves and 200 free blacks. Johnson, the freed slave, eventually owned three barbershops and a bathhouse, lots of land, not to mention slaves.

Talk about your complex societies.

The diary Johnson began in 1835 and continued until his murder 16 years later was interrupted only once, for two weeks in 1840.

“And do you know why?” Schoby asks dramatically, rhetorically. That year a tornado leveled downtown Natchez, built mostly of timbers, and Johnson was busy salvaging the bricks from a toppled hotel. He used some of the brick to build the house you can now tour, and he sold the rest to builders who wanted more tornado insurance.

“He was not a man to miss an opportunity.”

Johnson’s story ended badly, his diary abruptly. A neighbor, Baylor Winn, had been selling timber from land both men claimed. Johnson hired surveyors to determine the boundary. On June 16, 1851, Baylor Winn ambushed William Johnson and shot him in the back. Before he died, Johnson identified his murderer.

The only witnesses to the crime were Johnson’s son, a slave and a mulatto boy. Under Mississippi law, none of the three could testify against Winn, who claimed to be white. After two trials and failing to prove Winn mulatto, prosecutors dropped the case and the murderer walked free.

Johnson’s story, especially as told by the energetic and scholarly Schoby, is proof that skin color doesn’t determine character or cleverness. But, at times, it can seal a fate.

(To find out more about Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com.)

Text Only

Opinion

A hard rain is gonna fall...
By Kathryn Jean Lopez/Syndicated columnist

After disappearing during his term in office and bringing scandal to his family and state, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford is going to Washington, having won election to Congress. And that’s far from the worst story reflecting the current character of our nation.

May 25, 2013
Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
More Opinion Headlines

Opinion

Search Results

A shave and a haircut

Site Map

Contact Us