Love & Whiskey by Fawn Weaver

Author:Fawn Weaver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melcher Media Inc
Published: 2024-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

CLAY RISEN, who grew up in Nashville, later shared that he’d had a hard time getting a sense of the weight of the Nearest Green story for Lynchburg residents. “You hear people talk about, ‘Well, we all knew [Nearest’s story],’ ” Clay said. But “no one celebrated it. No one talked about it as anything special. And why was that? One way to read that is, ‘Oh, it’s because it was normalized. And it was understood that Black people make a contribution to the community.’ ” On the other hand, Clay suggested, it might be read as, “ ‘Yeah, that’s something we don’t talk about because we don’t like the implications of it.’ ”

Clay later told me it’s often hard for outsiders (like me) to understand that these “bitter ironies or weird nuances about race relations are just taken as part of the water in the air” in the South. The ironies of having people like Nearest play such a pivotal role in Southern culture are “well-known and utterly uninteresting to a lot of people,” Clay said. For many of them it’s, “Well, that’s the way it is.”

The Heritage of Moore County book was a wonderful repository of history, and there were more Black people collected within its pages than I’d found through any other source. I learned what life had been like after the Depression, through World War II, and into the civil rights era through its residents’ own words. A member of the Bobo family wrote about the way Moore County was “racially segregated during the late thirties, forties, and fifties,” but that there was “a very good relationship between the blacks and whites.”

He went on to list a great many people whose names had become familiar to me, including quite a few of Nearest’s descendants or members of their families—Sis Eady, Hyram Daniel, Clinton “Possum” Daniel, L. B. and J. B. McGowan, Dill Dismukes, Hubert and Henry Green. Sis had worked at Holt’s appliance store; Hyram Daniel was the Farmers Bank custodian; Possum Daniel was the blacksmith. Hubert Green was in charge of the cemetery, and Henry was employed at Price’s Service Station.

Other people fondly recalled watching the Black baseball team play on the weekends. The team was full of talented players and often won their games against other Black teams from Shelbyville or Tullahoma. They wore red hats and socks and unofficially called themselves the Jack Daniel’s team. Plenty of white people seemed to watch both the Black and the white teams, which traded off weekends at the high school field. “There were enchanting Sunday afternoons spent watching the Black community’s baseball games,” a white man named Bill Copeland recalled.

“I remember ‘Ham’ Daniel was playing third base,” a white man named Frank Larry Majors wrote about a Sunday game when he was seven or eight years old. The batter hit a line drive, hard and fast, and Ham didn’t have time to turn to catch with his gloved hand. “He just leaped into the air toward the baseline and caught it with his bare hand.

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