Biographies: William Jay Smith, 2001, Winn Parish, Louisiana Submitted by Greggory E. Davies, 120 Ted Price Lane, Winnfield, LA 71483 ********************************************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ********************************************** From: 1) Army Brat: William Jay Smith: A Memoir (Story Line Press: 1991) Many years ago, Mary Smith Lawrence, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Norman Smith, told me about William Jay Smith. Mr. Norman, longtime Winnfield merchant and civic leader, and William Jay Smith were cousins. I recalled having seen an article in the Winn Parish Enterprise about him some years back, but did not think much about it at that time. Mary loaned me the book Army Brat and I became very interested in Mr. Smith as his book had quite a bit about his connection to Winn Parish. In 2000, I contacted Story Line Press asking for permission to reprint excerpts from this book in the Winn Parish Archives and they denied permission without payment of $75 even after I explained to them that ours was a non- profit group and that possibly through the advertisement of their book, they might possibly sell some copies. Still they said no. In April of 2002, I learned that Mr. Smith was about to be honored by the Louisiana State Library at Baton Rouge, and figuring I had nothing to lose, I contacted him with help from Mary Lawrence, his cousin. Mr. William Jay Smith, by far as nice a man as I have ever held conversation with, was not only honored that someone might wish to list his accomplishments on the Winn Parish website, but was gracious enough to give his permission. So, following are excerpts from his memoir, with his expressed consent. Mr. Smith's accomplishments are numerous. He is a distinguished poet, critic, and translator, was educated at Washington University, Columbia, and Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He served as Consultant to Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1968-1970, served as a Democratic member of the Vermont House of Representatives from 1960-1962, and was poetry reviewer for Harper's Weekly from 1961-1965. Chapter 9 Dugdemona And Dumas: Where We Came From Dugdemona and Dumas - the names resound through the long complex corridors of my childhood, sometimes with faint and pretty tinkle, then with a deep mysterious and religious fervor, and finally with a dark and dominant funereal sound. It was many years before I saw the words and when I did they had none of the charm that they held for my youthful ear; the sound came first. Dug- de-moan-ee with the stress, of course, on moan. Dugdemoanee it was - and the last syllables if said quickly were transformed into: money - money - money. Dugdemoney. Dugdemoney Swamp! And I saw it always in my mind's eye as a bayou where the fierce sunlight filtered through the bearded trees and leapt back in bright coins from the black mirror of the water. Actually Dugdemona is a river that flows from the northwest diagonally through Winn Parish in north central Louisiana, where I was born and my father before me, to the southeast corner. The name became associated for me with the River des Peres in South St. Louis, pronounced "River Dee Pair," and the River Des Moines, pronounced by everyone "River Dee Money." When I began to learn French and got to know something of the background of Louisiana, I associated the small rivers of my boyhood - emptying into the ever-dominant Mississippi - with the exploring French priests, their habits as black as their waters. Dugdemona I began to think of - or did someone tell me? - as a corruption of "Duc de Moines," but that is probably a false etymology. Dugdemona appears to be an Indian name whose meaning has been lost. (pp 93-94) Dugdemona and Dumas - their sounds gave me a sense of the South from which I had come. Traveling south by train was like traveling in a dream. The trail left Union Station in St. Louis in the evening, and the next morning I awoke to a wholly new and different world. The brown, rolling hills of the Ozarks gave way to the broad flat cottonfields of the Mississippi Delta. It seemed at once that there was an opening up and out, more air to breathe, more sun, more space. A mailbox leaning in an open field was a silver hand reaching up from the dark interior of the earth. Arkansas - Pine Bluff and its environs - was all light and flowers, but Louisiana was a complete dream landscape. The Spanish moss hanging from the cypresses and the cypress knees protruding from the dark water were like the limestone formations of the Missouri caverns brought into light and air. No Gothic cathedral could ever offer more intricate and heavenly vistas; no rose window was more splendid than the sunlight filtering through the bearded oaks. The rolling hills of Winn Parish possessed one of the finest long-leaf pine forests in the country. The great trees, towering fifty, seventy, eighty feet above ground, impressed W. T. Norman on his arrival in 1896; "Long straw pines, as thick as they could stand, as far as the eye could see, the waxy green needles, glistening in the sun, the fallen brown straw forming a carpet through the forest and over the little roads winding through them." I went over those roads as a ten-year-old with my uncle Eric in his Model-T to Dodson and Gaar's Mill, where my grandparents had first settled. On the edge of such a forest I helped my Uncle George clear the land on my grandfather's farm in Winnfield, where I was born, and where the smell of hot biscuits and gravy, black-eyed peas, and fried okra greeted us when we came back to my grandmother's table in the evening. Winn Parish, the seat of which is Winnfield, lies almost at the geographic of the state. Natchitoches, some forty miles southwest of Winnfield,, is the oldest town in Louisiana. St. Denis, who founded the French colony at Natchitoches in 1710, blazed the road from St. Maurice on the Red River across southern Winn Parish on east to Fort Rosalie (Natchez); this road became the famous Camino Real leading into Texas. Although not far from the oldest town in the state, Winn Parish itself was settled relatively late, and the families of my grandmother and grandfather were among the first settlers. The parish of Winn was created in 1852 out of portions of the parishes of Catahoula, Natchitoches, and Rapides. The name first proposed was Dugdemona, which would certainly have been more appropriate, but in the end it took its name from one of the families of the parish and from the lawyer who drew up the act creating it. In the early 1850s Michael Gaar led a migration of settlers from the Georgia counties around Atlanta. He established a trading post, a gristmill, a cotton gin, and a sawmill at Gaar's Mill, north of Winnfield. The Gaars were friends of my great-grandfather James Faith, and they urged him to leave Georgia and come on to Louisiana. In 1857 James Faith and his family, along with eleven other families, left Henry County, Georgia, in ox-drawn and horse-drawn wagons, and were seven weeks on the road. They stopped first with Toby Gaar in Plankville, near Ruston, and the moved south to Gaar's Mill. James Faith, a blacksmith and mechanic, set up shop. Although he liked the country, he did not want his children to grow up in ignorance. Since there was no church and no school nearer than Sikes, he was planning to move back to Georgia, but he lived only two years after his arrival at Gaar's Mill and his widow elected to remain. The wife of James Faith was a Willkie, born in Scotland, who had landed at Charleston, South Carolina. The family of James Faith may have also landed at Charleston, perhaps also from Scotland, but I am not sure. They may have been French Huguenots, who anglicized the original spelling of their name, La Foi. What persuaded these people to stop in Winn Parish and not to go on to Texas, as some of them had originally planned to do? Certainly the abundance of game and the fine country had something to do with it. The story was often told in my family that the settlers had stopped because their animals needed salt, and there was an ample supply of it in Winn Parish. Indeed, the early French explorers found the Indians thereabouts transporting salt in their pirogues. Legend has it that when De Soto was dying north of Winn Parish near present day Jonesboro (Jonesville), he sent scouts to the Indians south of him to bring the salt he thought might save his life. There are several salt domes in the parish, and the Carey Salt Company for years operated a salt mine there. It ceased operations some time ago when it was flooded. At the time of the first settlement, exploitations of the mineral resources was far from the minds of the settlers; they were farmers and afterward lumbermen. Later, however, a marble quarry was opened on the edge of Winnfield, and though the years there has been constant exploration for oil, which has recently intensified. Between Winnfield and Tullos a number of wells, twelve or thirteen hundred feet deep, pump ten to fifteen barrels a day. In 1977 in the area of Calvin, north and west of Winnfield, a well at roughly fourteen thousand feet came in producing some three hundred barrels a day, and the oil companies have moved in quickly to lease the land. One driller has called this one of the greatest oil strikes he had ever encountered. Colonel Samuel Henry Lockett, in his topographical survey of Louisiana, which he began in 1869, describes Winn Parish as one of the "piny woods parishes, quite open but with little underbrush. The surface is covered with a coarse grass that makes a pretty fair pasturage in the spring. Throughout the whole region there are numerous clear, bold streams of pure water, all of the abounding with fish, and many of them affording the mill sites, and water power sufficient for factory purposes....The inhabitants of the Piny Woods are proverbially poor, honest, moral, virtuous, simple-hearted, and hospitable. In some neighborhoods that I passed through I found little communities banded together by kinship or long friendship with many of the evidences of thrift, comfort, and prosperity among them." The family of my grandfather William Austin Smith also came originally from Georgia and the Carolinas, but it took a longer time to reach the piny woods of northern Louisiana. My great-great grandfather Samuel Smith came to Choudrant, Louisiana, in Jackson Parish before the Civil War. One of his sons had married and remained in Mississippi. Another son, my great grandfather James Freeman Smith, had married Mary Wilson of the Mississippi Delta against the wishes of her father, a wealthy landowner, and she moved with him to Choudrant. He died there at the age of fifty-two. On his death, Mary's father offered to have her return to Mississippi, but she refused. She remained in Choudrant and married again, this time a Pruett. (Mary Wilson was of the family of Woodrow Wilson, who wrote to my Mississippi cousins from the White House verifying the connection). Mary Wilson's second husband was, according to family accounts, a tyrannical slave-owner who beat his slaves. In any event, my grandfather was made very unhappy by him, and when the war came, he ran off at the age of fourteen and joined the Confederate Army. He played the fife, carried water, and tended the horses of his cavalry regiment. The roll of Louisiana Confederate soldiers shows a William Smith, a private in F Company of the Second Louisiana Cavalry. If this is he, he was captured at Natchitoches in March, 1864, taken to New Orleans, and exchanged at Red River Landing in July 1864. I now own the fife that he played, an instrument worn smooth by long handling. My father, with a penchant for intrigue, always persisted in believing that his father had been a spy and had actually served in the Union Army. There was certainly much anti-secessionist sentiment in northern Louisiana. In New Orleans at the beginning of the war representatives of Winn Parish voted against seceding from the Union and refused to go along to make the vote unanimous. The Parish is thus on record as never having left the Union (I disagree here as the entire state did secede and Winn Parish government was indeed beholden to the Confederate States of America; this is possibly due to the many legends/folklore developed over the years that Winn Parish seceded from the Confederate States of America to form "the free state of Winn", which never occurred). Once Louisiana joined the Confederacy, Winn Parish furnished a good number of men to the Confederate Army (and a number of men to the Union cause as well, but not as many). I was brought up with a constant awareness that my family on both sides had been among the defeated. Yet at Jefferson Barracks my father had me memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg address when I was a small boy. Although I loved its rolling rhetoric, I scarcely understood a word of it. My father must have thought of it as a kind of valedictory statement that somehow might help to heal the open wound of the terrible conflict, the memory of which he lived with every day. Whatever he had done during the war, my grandfather never spoke of it afterward. He was back in Winnfield as postmaster of the town at the age of twenty-one. He held the position during the years 1869 and 1869, at which time he also operated a saloon and general store. I have before me as I write the account book that he was keeping during these years. Each customer was given a page, and a careful page was kept all of his purchases. The account book is a thin book with marbled paper on the covers, and the accounts are carefully kept in a beautiful hand. The main items offered were drinks (whiskey) - usually noted as "Dks" - and oysters. Few accounts were marked "Paid" or "Paid in Full." He seems not to have made very much money either as postmaster or saloon-keeper, but he was to go on to be one of the most respected men of the town. When Winnfield was incorporated, the was one of three general councilmen named to run it, and in 1888 he was named Justice of the Peace of the Eighth Ward (the district around Gaar's Mill, where he had first settled). He was also road commissioner. He ended up being fairly prosperous according to local standards, but his beginnings must have been modest indeed. Winnfield was a Fifth Class Post Office, a classification that was discontinued in 1874. The salary in a Fifth Class Office could not exceed $300 annually, but the Winnfield Post Office must have had difficulty even maintaining the position of Fifth Class. My grandfather's quarterly report for the period from July 1 to September 30, 1868, which my Uncle George later forwarded to the Postmaster General in Washington, shows that he had sold stamps, envelopes, and wrappers (there was no parcel post) to the value of $32.65 and that his salary for the quarter was $9.50. My grandfather died when I was three years old, but he stamped his image so indelibly on all those who knew him that I felt growing up that he was the one person in the family with whom I could readily identify. I treasured my mother's descriptions of him. As a young bride she had spent hours in his company, and since she had left school at the age of thirteen to go to work, she felt that her father-in-law had taught her everything she knew. He was self-educated, but he managed to teach himself a good deal, and I was fascinated by the leather-bound books of law and history that as a boy I found on the shelves of his house. One of the few photographs of him that I own shows him with a derby hat that is tilted back slightly on his head and a faint smile on his lips. He had a slight build, fair complexion, reddish hair, blue eyes, and considerable Irish charm. He married the first time to Lucy Gaar, and had one son by her. But the marriage did not work out, and they divorced after only three years. Divorce in the strict Protestant society that then constituted Winn Parish was in itself a daring thing to undertake. His first wife must have been a strong- willed woman, indeed so strong-willed that their temperaments were sure to clash. My grandfather believed that she had made some damaging statements about him to a number of their neighbors, and he demanded that she make the rounds and retract these statements. They had met out on the lawn under a tall oak tree to settle their differences, and when he announced his demand, she turned to him and said, "I'll see you farther in hell than a buck can jump before I'll ever do such a thing." She mounted on her white horse, rode off, and that was the end of the marriage. He saw his son by his first marriage constantly, but he never once, in the presence of his other children, referred to the boy's mother. If Grandfather has suspected that any of the children had had anything to do with his former wife, who became known to them as "Aunt Lucy," he would have been furious. His second wife Frances Faith bore him eight children, one girl, the oldest, and the others boys, of whom my father was the youngest. She was also a strong-willed woman who ran her household with an iron hand. My mother did not find her at all easy to get along with. I saw her last in 1938 at the age of eighty-three, when her mind was still sharp; she died four years later. In early photographs beside my grandfather she looks straight out and her jaw is firm and set in a determined, no-nonsense way. When my father was bitten by a rattlesnake as a boy, she took a knife, cut into the flesh, and sucked out the venom to save his life. In 1900 my grandfather bought - from Hugh P. Long, the father of Huey - for the sum of $200, a twenty-acre farm on Center Street on the edge of Winnfield. This property was the southeast corner of the Long farm of some 160 acres. Before that my grandparents had lived within a hundred yards of the farm belonging to John Long, the senator's grandfather. My grandmother did not like being out at Gaar's Mill and she persuaded my grandfather to move nearer to town. The link between my family and the Long family went even further back. John Long had come to Winnfield from Smith County, Mississippi, where he married Mary Wingate and built a home and a race track. Smith County was populated by settlers of Scotch-Irish and German descent who had migrated from Georgia and the Carolinas; it was named for Major David Smith of Anson County, North Carolina, a hero of the Revolutionary War. The Austins, for whom my grandfather was named, came to Smith County from South Carolina. I was born in my grandfather's house at nine-forty-five on the morning of April 22, 1918. My mother, who had been in labor for two and a half days, almost died. The attending physician, an old country doctor, himself the father of fourteen children, stayed with her during the entire time. My father was away helping build Camp Beauregard at Alexandria, and my grandmother and grandfather were busy with chores around the place. I weighed twelve pounds, and word of my birth traveled quickly. One of the first people outside my immediate family to see me alive was Huey Long. As someone put it, if anything unusual happened, Huey was always first on the scene, and the birth of a twelve-pound baby to the wife of one of his old school friends qualified as an unusual event. I saw Huey Long later only once, in Shreveport, shortly after he was elected Governor of Louisiana for the first time. He was then thirty-four years old, and I was twelve. We were visiting my cousins, Grady and Elsie Caldwell, and al the talk was of Huey. My cousins suggested that my father telephone the Governor and go to see him, but he refused. My cousin Elsie telephoned, and before long I was with my father in Huey's office, where we spent the entire afternoon. I had never seen anyone like Governor Long: in his white suit, with his dark auburn hair, his flushed face, and upturned nose, he was a powerful figure, right out of a book, bigger than life, and so he remained over the years, growing more and more into a folk hero as the stories about him unfolded in our family. Huey grew out of the Populist tradition natural to Winn Parish. He always identified himself with the common man, and in doing so, he made his origins seem much more humble than they had been. Winn Parish had always had a somewhat unsavory reputation. My grandmother remembered that when she first moved there, her friend Toby Gaar in Ruston had advised her family against going down there "among the Winn Parish Hoosiers." Before and during the Civil War, the West Gang, a group of outlaws, had terrorized the region. They may have been the ones who set fire the first time to the courthouse. After the burning, Winnfield became a nest of crooked lawyers, all ready to reconstruct claims for the innocent victims of the burning. Huey Long boasted of his little "peapatch" in Winnfield and said that the hillbillies there were no different from the hillbillies of Arkansas: "They all come from the same stock." The inscription on the grave in front of the capitol that Huey Long built in Baton Rouge bears the inscription: "Here lies Louisiana's great son Huey Pierce Long, an unconquered friend of the poor who dreamed of the day when the wealth of the land would be spread among all the people." Dr. Harry Williams, the biographer of Huey Long, says of him: "He preached a rare and new politics in the South. He didn't talk about the past, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the 'niggers', the 'Yankees.' He talked about current economic issues and he said these things mattered." It is difficult for those who did not live through the Great Depression to realize the impact of Huey Long's words and the effect of his radio addresses with their Share-the-Wealth message. Outside the North Gate of Jefferson Barracks the entire neighborhood would gather round the loud speaker when the "Kingfish" came on with his rich Southern rhetoric, which had its northern equivalent in that of Father Coughlin, the Roman Catholic priest in Detroit. When Long was shot, the common man felt that he had lost his best hope. In our case, it was like the loss of a close member of our family. I was just beginning college when Huey was killed, and I was so naive politically that I understood almost nothing of what he stood for. For me personally, as my father's school chum, he represented all that my father might have been. I felt that if he had lived he would surely have become president of the United States, and then he would have been in a position to appoint my father to some office, perhaps an ambassadorship (Spain or Romania were the countries I had settled on in my mind). When the news came of Huey Long's death, I sat down and wrote a long letter to his son Russell, whom I had never met, explaining who I was and why I felt such sorrow on his father's death. My father, overcome with grief, also put down thoughts about the senator. Although there was any amount of decent writing paper in the house, for some reason known only to him he chose a long piece of brown wrapping paper in which the bread from the Commissary arrived and folded it down the middle. Then as if on parchment he wrote out in pencil these memories: "My recollection of the late senator begins at about age ten when in the classroom he could never keep quiet very long at a time. He would be snapping his finger for the privilege of sharpening his pencil which gave him access to talk to someone who owned a pocket knife and soon the teacher would become provoked and shout out to tell him to go to his desk and get his lesson. But when class time came and the teacher began asking questions maybe in history or geography he would have his hand in the air again and would prove that he knew his lesson almost perfectly. He was so good in fact that the rest of the class just stopped studying all together. About the time we entered high school there was a presidential and state election. Huey would get on a box and speak in behalf of some of the weaker candidates as long as he could get anyone to listen. He liked to boost Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, who at the time got no votes in the South and not very many anywhere else. As our high school progressed a voice teacher, Miss Lee, was added to the faculty. She came to our classroom and wrote a scale on the blackboard and asked us to sing it. I sang so badly that Huey laughed out loud. Miss Lee, realizing that her first attempt at teaching a class was to be a joke, sent us both from the room. Strange as it may seem, I turned out to be the musician, and Huey went on as you know. Before I finished high school I dropped out and joined the Navy, and after an absence of eight years I returned to the home town and found Huey newly married, recently admitted to the bar, and I can honestly say that he invited me to come to his office to study law. I declined the offer. A little later when I was married, Huey was a party to the wedding." My father concludes by recalling our meeting with Huey in Shreveport. At that time, when Huey asked him to name the most successful ruler of a people, my father answered, "Porfirio Diaz of Mexico." He explained his rather odd answer by saying, "My friends, if you will look up the life of this man and add a little Abraham Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan, in my opinion you will have Huey P. Long." It is understandable why many old people in the piny woods of Winn Parish still share my father's enthusiastic picture and why they have a portrait of Huey Long hanging beside that of Jesus in their simple parlors. (pp. 95-107) Chapter 9 Death of the Corporal ...My father took a job as a guard at a government building and lived in a small hotel in St. Louis. He left that job to join his brother George on Saline Lake in Winnfield, Louisiana, but the two could not get along, and my father then moved to California, first to Gardena, where he was a frequent visitor to the poker clubs, and then to San Diego, where he seldom left his small room. ....He died a few weeks later of a heart attack when he walked out one morning to have breakfast. It was June 7, 1974, exactly one month before his eighty-third birthday.....Porterville in the San Joaquin Valley in central California at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains is a town of some 20,000 people.....We laid my father to rest among the graves of some of those young men in a beautiful cemetery on the edge of town...... (pp. 205-206)