The State Of Jones by Sally Jenkins
At what cost principles? Captain Newton Knight had many occasions to ask himself this question as, in a life largely devoted to standing up for his beliefs, he lost almost everything, unable to even keep his descendants from white-washing his memory. And why wouldn't they want to cleans themselves of this life-long rebel? The son of a plantation owner, Knight grew up abolitionist in the slave-holding South, a white man who would have had every advantage of history and class had he followed the company line and fought for what the Confederacy believed in. But when he refused to secede his conscience to what he considered to be the morally bankrupted Confederacy, he was cast out, labelled a lover of Negroes and shunned from proper society. He and his family were robbed, hunted and pilloried. Existence for Knight's offspring must have been brutal, unless of course they rejected their infamous ancestor and joined all right-thinking men in the idea that whites were superior.
The human need to force conformity upon his fellows will always astonish me. During the American Civil War, Captain Knight deserted the Confederate army, wanting no part in fighting a Union he believed in. He believed in equality among races. How could he not? Rachel, the love of his life was black, a woman he would marry and spend his life with. It was for that sin, the sin of love, that doom was visited upon him and those like him, people who did not want to hate, people who did not want to divide. Unwilling to go quietly into the night, Knight organized himself and his supporters into a band of guerillas, declaring their county free of the Confederacy. They defended their land from soldiers and their pro-slavery countrymen, all while trying to communicate with the North, to tell them that not all Southerners thought alike on the great question of the day.
The Confederacy claimed that slavery was a distraction from the main issue, the right to set their own laws as they saw them, to govern themselves as a state in a union of states. If their laws allowed for slavery, then slavery they would have and the federal government had no right to impose anything upon them to the contrary. But of course we know this is garbage. Humans act out of self-interest. Within a capitalist system, it is within man's best interests to accumulate wealth. Slave-owning was good business. Therefore, slavery was always going to be clung to by the states who practiced it. And it's this that distinguishes Captain Knight. In the dark sea of self-interest, he shone like a beacon of hope, a man a hundred years ahead of his fellows. But like all of those who are ahead of their time, he was punished for that grave crime of non-conformity, of rebellion.
Ms. Jenkins movingly captures Captain Knight, his family, their plight, and the hearts both open to and hardened against his cause. More tragically, she writes darkly of the years after the idealistic Knight's crusade, how he was thrust into post-war oblivion by a defeated but uncowed anti-black South, how his ancestors were obligated to denounce Rachel, their progenitor, because acknowledging her would be admitting they had in their veins the black blood that would disqualify them from being land-owning citizens. It is a gut-wrenching tale, but one I'm better for having read.
A moment in time will come for us all, a moment in which we are tested, Stick with the injustice we know because it is familiar and profitable to us, or acknowledge that it is wrong, go against our own self-interest and live knowing we do so righteously? History suggests many of us will choose self-interestedly, but I'd like to hope that there are, walking among us, enough Newton Knights to remind us that self-interest is not the only path, that the rightness of a thing matters more than its cost, and that this is the only way to a life lived justly. (5/5 Stars)
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