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For the Love of Rebecca
The Murder of Charlie Poole by the Black Legion
By Mary Teresa Coulter
As do many sagas, mine began with a
knock on the door. On a hot summer night in 1968, a
faint knock on our front door woke me up. Soon I began
to hear the low rumble of voices in the night. Two
black men with wide rimmed hats sat at our table talking
to my dad. They were very serious. My mother closed
the drapes and told me to go to bed. My dad yelled from
his chair, “Fuck the neighbors. Open that window!” My
mom slowly did and walked in the kitchen solemnly. The
men were Black Panthers, the time was the Detroit
riots. The mood was ominous. I never saw those men
again.
A few years later, I attended a
summer camp program with all black kids, with the
exception of two white girls from another town. At
bedtime the two white girls got to sleep in a separate
room by themselves. And I stayed with the black girls.
A black girl asked me why I wasn’t in their room. I
said I didn’t know. I just didn’t like the white girls,
I liked the black girls better. But, I didn’t know
why. During my stay, I kissed a boy. My brothers said,
“Wait until Grandma Becky finds out that you kissed a
black boy, she will have a heart attack! Upon my
arrival home from camp my mother sat me down on the
couch to have a talk with me. I was never to tell
anyone I kissed that boy, especially Grandma Becky.
Similar scenes played out during my
childhood and haunted my mind. “Why were so many
situations shrouded in secrecy and why did something eat
at my developing young mind to clue me into some deep
mystery that was unbeknownst to me?” I needed answers to
this tugging in my gut. “Something was not right. What
was it?”
Over the years, bit by bit, I would
hear things that began to spell out a picture for me and
an explanation to so many things I could not find reason
to. I am now 42 years old and I have all the missing
pieces to the puzzle. I know why I can’t tell anyone
that I kissed that black boy. It was all for the love
of my grandmother Rebecca.
I would always ask her about my
grandfather. I wanted to know who he was. What
happened to him and why we never talked about him?”
“Was he a bad man? Did he leave her?” She would rarely
mention him or talk about it. But from time to time I
would listen from another room and hear her talking
about Charlie, to my mother. My mother would always
have that same foreboding stare in her eyes. She did
not want to hear it.
I took care of my grandmother during
the last ten years before she died. Her declining
mental health allowed her to speak freely about the
past. Secrets she tried to carry to her grave, melted
into my ears like butter. I was hearing the truth and I
knew it.
This is what Rebecca told me when she
was 81 years old.
My grandmother spent a summer at her
sisters house at the same time a young man was staying
with her sister as a boarder. His name was Lowell
Rushing. He was enamored with Rebecca and fell in love,
secretly. Rebecca was married to Charlie and Charlie
was the only thing that stood between Lowell and the
object of his affection. A few years later, Lowell
started running with the Black Legion. Charlie told
Rebecca to tell Lowell that if he kept running with
those boys something terrible might happen to him. He
better get out while he had a chance. A few weeks
later, my grandfather was dead at the hands of Lowell.
My Aunt Marcy Rushing was a gossip.
She would sit at her kitchen table with her coffee and
cigarettes and loudly express her opinions for hours.
Lowell was unemployed, and sat for long hours at that
same coffee table hanging on for any news of Rebecca.
My grandmother called one spring afternoon in 1936. She
and Marcy discussed the details of a recent argument
that Rebecca and Charlie had. At one point in their
marriage Charlie was not working and Rebecca was. Even
though Charlie was at home, Rebecca hired a woman to
baby sit for her little girl.
Grandma said she thought that the
woman liked Charlie. She argued with Charlie about this
a lot. She was indignant with him over the fact that
while the woman was at home with the child, Charlie was
not out looking for work but hanging around the
babysitter. Rebecca was jealous. She would fuss at
Charlie for that past indiscretion. She would fuss at
Charlie over his drinking and bar life. She was not
satisfied with him and they would argue. When he would
leave, she would pick up the phone and call her sister
Marcy to pour out the details of all his failings.
When Marcy hung up the phone, she
would rave on for hours about my grandfather. On the
occasion that Charles and Rebecca had a more serious
fight, Lowell began to form a plan. Her downgrading
sunk deep into Lowell’s mind and soon he found his
avenue. He knew what he was to do. Soon he would have
Rebecca and no one would be the wiser.
Lowell walked to the wolverine club
and spread his news of my grandparents fight. He
changed the details of a terrible argument to a terrible
fight. Soon the Clan began shadowing Charlie. Men
would show up at Rebecca’s house all hours of the day
and night. Strangers would approach her on the street.
Some would ask where Charlie was. Some would just seem
interested in her, but she knew this was bad, very bad.
“But what was it?”
The Clan knew that Charlie and
Rebecca only argued. The Clan knew that Rebecca went
into the hospital to deliver her baby. The Clan also
knew that they needed to twist the truth to justify
their dark actions. They knew. They all knew.
Rebecca’s fear for her husband’s
safety grew. She started lying about his whereabouts to
everyone. Marcy told her that certain people had heard
about their fight. Everyone was on edge. “What did
Marcy Do?” The inevitable doom crippled them.
“Something was about to go down, but what, and when?”
This had gone on for some weeks now
and when Marcy got the call that Rebecca went to the
hospital, Lowell was there. It was time. He ran to the
club and they plotted the hanging of Charlie.
I think my grandfather knew too. As
a younger man he refused to join the Klan in Kentucky,
and as my grandma said, “They ran him out.” That is
where his vagrancy charge came in. He climbed aboard a
cargo train due for Detroit, and never returned to
Kentucky.
Charlie was Catholic and Rebecca was
Southern Baptist. That was a good starting point for
the hatred of the Klan, but Rebecca’s beauty and
contagious flirtations probably enraged them also. “Why
was such a beautiful white woman married to a
Catholic.” Not only that, but a Frenchman!” Charlie
poured out all his time and effort, trying to get into
one of the motor companies around Detroit. I don’t know
what he was doing for money at the time of his death.
According to my Grandma, he was unemployed.
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According to the media,
the last thing he did the day he died was
drop off a high chair and shoes for his
daughter Mary Lou. The media portrayed him
as working for the WPA. He only was
enrolled with their program, a program that
was a welfare type program. He was not a
fancy WPA official, he was an unemployed
worker on the dole. We never will know much
about who he was, because the Klan wiped out
his life, past and future like thieves in
the night. All is lost. |
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Grandma said that Charlie visited her
only once in the hospital to see his new baby girl,
Nancy. My grandfather had blondish hair and was fair
skinned like my grandmother. He sat on the edge of
Rebecca’s bed and pulled a piece of his hair and said,
“Look, I don’t have black hair.” Grandma said she
thinks he was referring to Lowell. She never explained
or returned comment. She was hiding an even bigger
secret.
Grandma knew what the Klan could do.
The fear was crippling to her. She was the keeper of
secrets and she never blinked at Charlie’s comment. She
never saw him again. She knew why Nancy’s hair was
black and her complexion was dark. She was a
Melungeon.
The story has been written in many
books and periodicals over the years. Speculating is
the best anyone could do. Not because the Klan was
shrouded in secrecy and the media reported. But,
because the Melungeons were.
The secret my grandmother was hiding
was not the fact that the baby’s father was Catholic,
French, and skeptical of the paternity. The secret my
grandmother was hiding was the fact that she herself was
black. She was the product of a tri-race nationality
with origins from before the 16th century in the United
States. The dark Melungeons have been passing
themselves off as “Scotch-Irish” for centuries, when
their real race was black, Portuguese, and sometimes
Indian, sometimes, white. My grandmother is the direct
descendant of Mahala Mullins, the most infamous
moonshiner at the turn of the century.
Mahala’s father Solomon Collins, was
black. Mahala was ½ black, her son James who served for
the north in the Civil War and ran moonshine and was
involved in one of the biggest raids on the mountains
where Mahala lived was ¼ black. His daughter Mary Jane
Mullins was 1/8th black, and her daughter Rebecca Booker
was 1/16th black. Rebecca, the beautiful white woman
whom the Klan defended and caused the demise of their
own organization over was a black woman. And Rebecca
knew it.
They could never know why my mom was
dark. No one could know. Not Charlie, not his family,
not the reporters that forced her life on the pages of
newspapers as far away as New York and Paris.
If the Klan ever found out surely
they would kill her children. This story must die.
Nancy and Mary Lou were sent back to
Erin, Tennessee for 6 years to live with their
grandmother. Rebecca stayed in Detroit. Worked and
sent money home for the girls. After 6 years her mother
Mary Jane who was raising them decided that the girls
needed their mother and she packed up her husband and
grandkids and headed them to Detroit. My grandmother
never bonded with her girls as a mother. She had been
forever stunted by the Klan. She was a shell. An empty
shell where nothing lived. Nothing but secrets she
could not tell, fear she could not shake.
On May 12, 1936, the Klan took my
mother’s parents away from her for no reason except
stupidity. I was raised by a wounded woman, who never
knew the joy of living, only the fear of dying. Dying
at the hands of the Klan if ever the secret of her dark
skin was revealed.
My mother Nancy, the baby Rebecca was
having that fateful May was dark and she always wondered
why. When I was a little girl, she would say, she
thinks she must have taken after her dad’s father since
he was French, or her grandmother as she was also dark.
It wasn’t until the 1990’s when my
mom spent time in Georgia that some self revelations
came to the surface. She was reading a Georgia
newspaper with an article about a strange race of people
around Sneedville, Tennessee. She recognized an old
photo in the article that she knew as her great
grandmother. She was curious. My mom, Nancy, went to
the Library and began research into the “Melungeons.”
She was very fascinated. She mailed my brothers and
myself copies of the articles and secrets were about to
be brought to light. The odd behavior of my grandmother
was all beginning to make sense.
One afternoon, years later, my
sister-in-law called excitedly and said that my nephew
was watching history’s mysteries and that our
grandfather’s story was featured on it. He taped it.
When I viewed the tape I was stopped in my tracks.
There were images of my grandfather dead in a ditch, and
my tiny little grandmother grief stricken and afraid
talking on the news about the murder.
Later on my kids came home from
school and said that our grandfather was in their 6th
grade history book. I was stunned. How could my tiny
unassuming grandmother hide such a world wide, secret
from us. Until I pieced the grandpa story with the
Melungeon story did I began to realize the deep reasons
for my grandmother’s behavior. She was protecting us
from the Klan because she knew we were dark. And she
knew what they could do.
Even now, 70 years later, my family
doesn’t want this story told. They want it to die. I
heard my Aunt Mary Lou say to my mother once. “If we
don’t tell our kids, it will die with this generation.
And the cord will be cut. But, if we keep telling it
over and over, the pain will just go on.” Now I fully
understand what she meant. But, I disagree with her. I
think this is a story that should be told, over and over
again. And I think the Klan should read this story. To
know that I am black and I am not afraid! But I do
remember.
The murder of my French Catholic
grandfather Charles Poole brought down the Black Legion,
the guardsmen of the Ku Klux Klan, for the love of a
white woman named Rebecca. Little did they know they
were in reality defending the honor of a woman with a
bigger secret than her husband’s faith. She was black,
and she took that secret to her grave. Rebecca died on
the 4th of July in 1997 quietly in her bed at 83 years
of age. She was the bravest woman I never knew.
Now I understand why my mother closed
the window shades that evening in 1969, and why members
of the Black Panthers sat at our table, and why I
couldn’t tell anyone I kissed a black boy. I just
wished I could tell my grandmother that I knew why and
that I understood. And the reason I waited until she
died to tell this story is for the love of Rebecca.
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Other
Sites:
The Murder that brought Down the Legion /
Time's "Black Legion"
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In
Black Legion (the film directed 1936 by Archie Mayo),
Humphrey Bogart gives an outstanding performance as factory
laborer Frank Taylor, who loses a promotion to a foreign-born
coworker. Filled with hatred, Taylor joins the Black Legion, a
secret white supremacist organization. The group burns down the
barn of Taylor's coworker, scaring him out of town. Thus, Taylor
receives the promotion. But when Taylor is forced to spend his
time recruiting new members for the Legion, he is demoted from
plant foreman back to factory laborer. The Legion attacks
Taylor’s new boss, making friends suspect Taylor's
involvement, while Taylor himself begins drinking heavily in a
fit of self-loathing. When Taylor finally loses his job and the
Legion gears up for an attack on a former friend, it appears
that Taylor has hit rock bottom--with only himself to blame.
This fast-paced, black and white tale of moral decay and
redemption is based on the true story of the Black Legion's
condemnable actions in Michigan in the 1930s.
Warner
Home Video, Running Time: 83 minutes, Not Rated, B&W, item
#VVWA65273
posted 8 January 2007 |
