Grandma Carrie and Me

One purpose unites two people from two different worlds.

By DALE HARTER

We came from two different worlds.

I was a white college student in Virginia chasing the ghost of a Confederate general forgotten in his hometown. She was an elderly black woman from South Carolina chasing the ghost of a grandfather she never knew.

In 1990, this same ghost brought us together in the Shenandoah Valley. The bond we forged would last for nearly 20 years.

Carrie Allen McCray already had enjoyed a long and fruitful life when I met her in Harrisonburg. Born Oct. 4, 1913, in Lynchburg, to a civil rights activist mother, she had been a scholar, teacher and a social worker. She became a serious writer after age 70, first as a poet and later as a historian researching her family heritage.
She journeyed to Harrisonburg with her sister Rose in 1990 to learn more about her roots. Her mother, Mary Rice Hayes Allen, was born here in 1875, but divulged little about her genealogy before dying in 1935. The memory of a photograph of a uniformed man on her mother’s mantle and the recollections of her mother’s best friend, poet Anne Spencer, led Carrie to believe her grandfather had been a Confederate general from Harrisonburg.

My Search

For three years before Carrie’s visit, I had been researching the life of John Robert Jones, a Confederate general accused of cowardice during the Civil War and forgotten by locals after his death in 1901. Early on, I discovered he had fathered two black sons. I also learned his wife had divorced him for adultery with someone named Malinda Rice. That name meant little to me before meeting Carrie.

Chris Bolgiano, then the Special Collections Librarian at JMU, had heard a few earfuls from me about Jones by the time Carrie and Rose arrived on campus. When Carrie told her she was looking for a Confederate general who might have been her grandfather, Chris contacted me and gave me the telephone number for their room at the Holiday Inn. Over the phone, I learned that Malinda Rice was their grandmother, and they learned that Gen. Jones was their grandfather. Within a few hours, I was sitting with two elderly women in their hotel room, connecting the dots of two separate research paths.

The next day, I took them to Woodbine Cemetery to visit their Confederate grandfather’s grave. Our interaction was cautious and guarded at first, but a relationship began that would transcend our research and change my life.

The Journey

Continues Our initial meeting led to an invitation to stay with Carrie and Rose at their home in Columbia, S.C. Carrie took me to the University of South Carolina to meet Tom Johnson, a friend and archivist at the South Caroliniana Library. Based partly on this meeting, partly on the university’s applied history program and partly on my relationship with Carrie, I moved to Columbia to attend graduate school. Tom, who also was a Presbyterian minister, performed my wedding service on the campus in January 1996.

After moving to Columbia in 1993, I saw Carrie and Rose more often. At first, every conversation was mainly between me and Carrie and revolved around Jones and her mother. As time passed, we talked of our own lives, current events, politics and racial issues. We enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner together and Rose’s homemade rolls. I went to one of their family reunions; they came to my wedding.

They had become Grandma Carrie and Grandma Rose. I had become their grandson.

In 1998, Grandma Carrie published “Freedom’s Child: The Life of a Confederate General’s Black Daughter.” The book, which told the tale of Jones but revolved around her mother, brought her national acclaim. Although I had spent countless hours in dusty archives uncovering previously unknown facts I wanted to keep for my own book, I shared it all with her. She made the dry facts of history sing, and she never stopped thanking me for my help.

We continued to keep in touch and visit after I returned to Virginia. Whenever I could, I went to hear her speak or recite poetry, to hear her gentle delivery and her delightful chuckle. She captivated every audience to whom I ever heard her speak, whether it was Civil War historians in Richmond or high school girls in Tappahannock. She brought tears to my eyes every time. Like other grandsons, I didn’t write, call or visit enough.

A Final Visit

In October 2007, I traveled to Lynchburg to hear her speak at a conference dedicated to an African pygmy named Ota Benga who had lived with Carrie’s family when she was young. She had been working on a narrative poem about Ota and read it at the conference. Although slipping some at age 94, she still stole the show. We spent too brief a time together, and she told me she was getting married. We shared some hugs, and I went back to Harrisonburg.

On March 28 , 2008, I drove to Columbia to see Grandma Carrie one last time. Shortly after marrying 95-year-old John Nickens, and mere weeks after speaking in Lynchburg, she had suffered a severe stroke. She had been in a rehabilitation center since December. Over the phone, Grandma Rose had sounded hopeful of her recovery.

When I went to see Grandma Carrie, she couldn’t speak. I showed her the latest pictures of my wife and daughter, I held her hand and I told her I loved her. I want to believe she knew who I was. Then I made a long, long drive home.

Carrie Allen McCray Nickens died July 25, 2008. Her passing was front-page news in South Carolina and was picked up by the Associated Press. Across the country, people who knew her mourned her death and celebrated her life.

When our different worlds collided nearly 20 years ago, we were just two people searching for the memory of a Confederate general. Now, the memory of someone else means much more to me.
Someone I called Grandma Carrie.

The Roaming Invalid

Thomas Jeffries’ books show the life of a disabled man in the 1800s.

Last year, Bridgewater resident Betty Blough Martin brought an old family photograph album to the Alexander Mack Memorial Library at Bridgewater College. As I leafed through a list of people pictured inside the album, my eyes stopped abruptly at the name “Mr. Jeffers.” (Actually his name was Mr. Jeffries, and the name in the book was incorrect.)

“I saw him at the home of my Grand Father Levi Shaver in 1873,” read an accompanying note from one of Mrs. Martin’s ancestors. “He was a cripple and men carried him into the house. He was an interesting man and much beloved and respected by his friends.”

My curiosity piqued, I turned quickly to his photograph and saw a man in a wooden wheelchair, baggy trousers draped over withered legs. The image confirmed what I suspected: The man in the photograph was none other than the “Crippled Fayette,” which is the title of a book he later penned.

Known also as “Roaming Invalid,” Thomas Fayette Jeffries left a sad but unique mark on the literary landscape of the 19th-century Shenandoah Valley. Although he long ago faded from historical memory, a few of Jeffries’ writings remain to provide a glimpse of Valley life in the mid 1800s, an unexpected accomplishment for someone with a major physical disability.

Jeffries was born Sept. 15, 1829, in Rockingham County, in the shadow of Massanutten Peak near Cub Run. He was the son of a school teacher, Harrison Rector Jeffries, and his wife, Margaret Darnell Jeffries. His mother died when he was 8, the first of two tragic events that shaped a tragic life.

Unable to care for his children alone, Harrison Jeffries sent Thomas and his five siblings to live with relatives and friends. A Miller family who lived alongside “Cheese Creek” took in Thomas. While working on the Miller’s farm one summer day, Jeffries experienced the first pains of an illness that altered the rest of his life.

Taking a break from making hay, Jeffries remembered feeling “a sharp pain in my left knee-joint.” The pains increased in severity and frequency and, he wrote, “gradually extended themselves to different joints of my lower limbs and to the spinal column, and tortured me more or less until they finally disabled me altogether in my 18th year.”

From 1847 to 1854, Jeffries remained almost constantly bedridden. All efforts to alleviate his pain or his disease, which he called “my great enemy, the Rheumatism,” failed. He tried a slew of remedies, including “Cod-liver” oil mixed with turpentine, arsenic, opium, laudanum, morphine and a contraption made by a Harrisonburg doctor to move his frozen limbs “by force.” His malady occasionally affected his eyes, sending “ten thousand pangs through those tender orbs.”

To pass the time, Jeffries wrote, first as a hobby and eventually to make a living. The Rockingham Register, the long-running Harrisonburg weekly newspaper, printed several of his first writings, not for their literary merit, but “more through sympathy,” Jeffries wrote. He called them “simple little pieces,” but the newspaper’s publishers liked them enough to reward him with an honorary subscription.

Once he was able to endure his pain enough to ride in a carriage, in 1854 Jeffries traveled up the Valley to Staunton and boarded a train for Georgia. He visited relatives in Atlanta, then traveled to northern Georgia where his father had moved a few years earlier. Jeffries continued on to Tennessee, then returned home to Rockingham.

Encouraged by friends, Jeffries compiled his poetry, his life story and an account of his trip to Georgia into a book called “Nine Years in Bed, Or Affliction’s Own,” published in 1856 by Joseph Funk of Mountain Valley (now Singers Glen). He then traveled throughout Virginia, hawking the book and generating enough interest to produce a second edition in 1857 entitled, “Crippled Fayette of Rockingham, Detailing His Times and Giving His Rhymes.” He published at least three more small books: “Invalid’s Offering, or, A Helpless Man on Wings,” 1858; “The Book of Sunshine, or The Bright Side of Everything,” 1861; and “The Secret Out, or The Curses of the ‘Credit System,’” undated.

Although Jeffries’ books reveal he lived in Dayton and Bridgewater for a time, he continued to travel outside Virginia and wrote about his excursions in the Register and another Harrisonburg newspaper, Old Commonwealth. In 1860, he traveled between New Orleans, La., and Hot Springs, Ark., seeking medical relief while also peddling his books, papers and pens. According to a recent article on peddlers in Arkansas Online, Jeffries stayed long enough in Hot Springs to publish a newspaper and sell photographs of the springs.

As much as he lauded his native land in his writings, Jeffries apparently spent most of his remaining years traveling in other parts of the South. An 1871 letter published in the Old Commonwealth reveals he was in Georgia. In a short biographical sketch in “Men of Mark and Representative Citizens of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County,” published in 1943, historian John Wayland noted that Jeffries died in Georgia about 1890.

Dale Harter is the curator of the Pritchet Museum at Bridgewater College and archavist for the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society.