Souvenirs I Still Cherish --- Helen Stanberry’s Story: Chapter 4

Souvenirs I Still CherishHelen Stanberry’s Storyas read by Lindsey Beth HummelChapter 4                  "1968 and Times are Changing"Let me tell you a secret. It is a secret everybody knows, but no one ever talks about. It is a secret you will never see in a history book. It is a secret that no one would ever tell an outsider. An ‘outsider’ (by the way) is anyone whose great-great-great grandpa came from someplace else, outside the county.The town we now call Boone, was originally named Councill’s Store.  Mr. Jordan Councill came up to the mountains and started a store even before Daniel Boone charted the road that now leads to Tennessee. Here’s the secret. When Mr. Jordan Councill came to the mountains, he came with his two wives and six children. Both his wives were black. They had been his former slaves, and he had a growing brood of children with them.  It didn’t matter much to Daniel Boone and the earliest settlers. None of them cared much for owning slaves (they couldn’t afford them) and besides Mr. Jordan Councill was a fair man who always honored his word. Jordan Councill’s descendants owned real estate, voted, drank whiskey, and intermarried with white women. Again, no one noticed or at least cared to notice. This was the frontier; all the social rules were loose. If you survived what the mountainous frontier threw at you, you were permitted to live however you chose.However, by about the 1840s, things changed. What had been an isolated frontier was now connected with roads and trade. More and more people came. With them came the expectations of the South, particularly regarding the status of free blacks in a slave-holding society.It came to bother the “upright” white citizens that there was this group of presumably free blacks who acted as if they were white citizens. One of the first manifestations of this was that the town’s original cemetery which included both Jordan Councill’s descendants and other (white) pioneers was now deemed inappropriate. A new all-white cemetery was built adjacent to the older one.By the 1890s, the restrictions of Jim Crow were in full force. Blacks were allowed to come into town only on Saturday mornings, and had to be gone by noon. They no longer could enter the front door of stores. They no longer could own businesses. They could no longer vote.However, here’s the secret. Most of Jordan Councill’s descendants were no longer black. They were not even chocolate brown or beige. They were as white-skinned as I was. Folks in Watagua County would not “notice” that they were black. So it was that Boone’s first official mayor was one of Jordan Councill’s direct descendants.Yet, there were still those to whom the race of an ancestor mattered, especially after the end of the brutal Civil War. Usually, these were outsiders not native to the mountains. Still their voices mattered.