In case you missed it!
Last week, Buncombe County Special Collections joined forces with the Thomas Wolfe Memorial and Vance Birthplace State Historic Sites to host “Exile From Altamont? Race and Belonging in Thomas Wolfe’s Asheville,” a mini-symposium examining issues of race in Thomas Wolfe’s Asheville and how those themes continue to impact our community.
If you missed the opportunity to join us in person, the recording for day two is now available! (Day one of the symposium, readings from Thomas Wolfe’s Welcome to Our City and Andrea Clark’s The Road, was not recorded.)
Watch the recording below, or scroll down for an abridged transcription of the presentations by Dr. Darin Waters and Dr. Kevin Young.
Dr. Darin Waters is Deputy Secretary for Office of Archives and History, the secretary of the North Carolina Historical Commission, and the State Historic Preservation Officer. Originally from Asheville, Dr. Waters was most recently an Associate Professor of History at UNC Asheville, and the Executive Director of UNCA’s Office of Community Engagement. His dissertation Life Beneath the Veneer: The Black Community in Asheville, North Carolina from 1793 to 1900 explored social, economic, and political development of the black community in Asheville, North Carolina from 1793 to 1900.
Dr. Kevin Young is an English professor Appalachian State University. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, a Master’s Degree in English, and a Ph.D. in History. Dr. Young’s dissertation The World of Broadus Miller: Homicide, Lynching, and Outlawry in Early Twentieth-Century North and South Carolina is about an African American named Broadus Miller who was accused of killing a fifteen-year-old white millworker in Morganton, North Carolina. His work examines a number of interrelated topics in race relations and criminal justice during the early twentieth century. His book The Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas will be published in April.
Dr. Darin Waters
[edited & abridged transcript, from 00:08:15]
My engagement with Thomas Wolfe has really been driven by curiosity. That curiosity got started when I was writing my own dissertation about the African American community here. It’s interesting to read Wolfe’s work because while he fictionalizes most of everything in his work in Look Homeward, Angel and other books that he has written, the one place that he always identifies as in reality, as it is, is the YMI, the Young Men’s Institute. It’s very interesting that he does that, specifically identifies it as the Young Men’s Institute. As I was writing my dissertation, I decided to incorporate Wolfe, if I could.
The last chapter of the dissertation is called “Barely Seen and Rarely Heard,” and it looks at the politics of the period, beginning from the period of slavery all the way up to 1900. The bulk of it deals with the post Civil War period. It looks at how the African American community here in Asheville tried to be engaged in the politics of the city, but that many of the city leaders just ignored the community, especially the East End Community, where the YMI is located. So over time this community would become the one Wolfe describes in his work and in fact I’m just going to go to this page in my dissertation, where I ended up using Wolfe.
I was looking at the fact that the City Council, the Board of Aldermen, would hear what African Americans were saying the needs of their community were, but then would table it and never come back to it. No resources were being put into this community. So Wolfe, when he writes about this in Look Homeward, Angel, this is how he describes the community:
Based on these continuous complaints, the condition of the city’s most central black community appears to have been in the process of developing the conditions that Thomas Wolfe later described in his autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe recalled that his mother had often asked him to go into that neighborhood to find servants to work in her boardinghouse, and stated that his excursions […] required him to “enter a ‘city of rickets,’ where he was obliged to poke ‘into their fetid shacks, past the slow stench of little rills of mire and sewage, in fetid cellars, through all the rank labyrinth of the hill-sprawled settlement. ” Although Wolfe’s assessment of the conditions of what was really only one of Asheville’s scattered black communities was colored by his culturally racist views, the community, as the minutes of the city’s Board of Aldermen meetings suggest, was often neglected by the city’s leaders. Consequently, the conditions that Wolfe remembered from his youth in the 1920s did not develop overnight. Instead, those conditions were the result of an extended period of ignoring the community’s needs.
[…] When Buncombe County Libraries sponsored an event on Thomas Wolfe at the YMI to talk about Wolfe’s short story The Child by Tiger, I participated in that with Joanne Mauldin, who is a Wolfe expert, and my job in that was to really talk about the Will Harris story.
The response to that was really interesting, so I got pulled deeper into this look at Thomas Wolfe, and he still really fascinates me. He’s brilliant at actually capturing people and characters. He’s very detailed; people talk about that he’s wordy, but I find the wordiness actually kind of refreshing, because he really describes people in a way that I think just really gets at the heart of the reality of who human beings were.
That pulled me deeper in. Kevin’s dissertation advisor, who’s one of my intellectual heroes as well, Dr. John Inscoe, was one of the first people to write about Black life in Western North Carolina. […] John Inscoe and I started getting into this back and forth because after I engaged the story of The Child by Tiger I was just like, Wolfe is just a fascinating figure to me, and what was happening to him over time. […]
If history does anything for us, it should teach us to empathize, right? It should enhance our ability to empathize with people. I don’t know that it always does that, but I hope it does. I have been haunted for a long time by the words of Winthrop Jordan and his mammoth book which all of us who went through these PhDs had to engage with, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. What he says in the introduction of that book, when he’s writing it in the 1960s while the Civil Rights Movement is in full swing, he says, you know, the challenge for the historian is to be able to step back and to read history forward not backwards. That is a major challenge.
Think about it. What you’ve got to try to do is to put yourself in the feet of the actors of that time and look forward, and think about—we know what happens because we have the ability to kind of look back and see all of the ramifications of decisions that were made. They don’t have the benefit of that when you’re moving through the process, right, when you’re living in real time.
So the challenge for a historian is to be able to do that: try to step back, read history forward, don’t read it backwards. I have tried to do that with Wolfe, and I firmly believe that Wolfe, over time, had he lived, I believe that he would probably have fallen in the category of a Robert Penn Warren. I think that he would have become someone who bravely dealt with the issues of race even in his own heritage. […]
I could probably stay up here with you for the rest of the day just talking about Wolfe and what is happening in a story like The Child by Tiger. I mean, he had been thinking about this for a while. We know The Child by Tiger is based on the real events that happened here in Asheville, with the Will Harris episode. When Joanne and I did this together years ago, my job was to talk about Will Harris.
Who was Will Harris? And what happened? It was interesting to do it in the context of Joel Williamson’s book [The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South since Emancipation], because there had been other incidents that had happened that were similar to what happened with Will Harris.
If you read what happens to Robert Charles in New Orleans in 1900 it is so strikingly similar to what happened here. The story of Robert Charles, who Joel Williamson, describes here, probably is the first Black nationalist in New Orleans, and he is slaughtered. He is killed. And the interesting thing about reading that is that there is a reaction, not just in New Orleans, to what happens to Robert Charles, but there’s a reaction in other parts of the country. In Chicago a Black man is found in the middle of the street just screaming at the top of his lungs, because he thinks that he’s going to be killed by white people the same way Robert Charles was in New Orleans. There were incidents of reactions to Robert Charles’s murder and essentially lynching in 1900 in New Orleans, as far away as Detroit.
In 1906, Wolfe is 6 years old when this incident happens here in Asheville with Will Harris, the murders. Wolfe is 6 years old. This was deeply imprinted on his mind, and he remembered it. So even after Look Homeward, Angel, he’s over in Switzerland, he writes back to Max Perkins. He basically says, I’m thinking about my new book.
He tells Max Perkins, I want to write a story. I have a chapter in this book, I’m thinking about a follow up to Look Homeward, Angel that will be called The Congo and it will tell the story of a Black man who goes crazy and goes berserk and then kills a number of people in the city. It’s taken straight from what happens in 1906, and he wants to write about it. He ends up not writing it. You can find a letter of the exchange, and he goes through how he wants to tell the story, why he wants to tell the story. But it’s just amazing that it had that lasting impression on him.
If you go back to the Will Harris episode in 1906, it’s interesting to think that just four months before Will Harris went on a killing spree here in Asheville, you had had the Atlanta Race Riots. So to what degree was what happened here with Will Harris somewhat connected to that riot? I don’t know if it was, but that was something that we tried to explore, a reaction of what is happening to Black men, what is happening to Black people during this period.
The Child by Tiger is a fictionalized version of this real thing that happens here in Asheville in 1906. What is amazing about what Wolfe does is that he takes this Will Harris, the person who is described in the newspaper accounts here as “the desperado,” even to the point that the African American community in Asheville gets together meets in a joint meeting and they pass a resolution that they send to the city that ends with them saying, we repudiate Will Harris as a member of our race.
When I wrote that up for my dissertation, my advisor said, you’ve got to explain that what’s going on there, they’re essentially condoning what happened to Will Harris. This is essentially a lynching, and you need to explain it in the context of all this, they probably were trying to protect themselves. You read the news stories on Will Harris, you will see they talk about how when they brought Will Harris’s body back into Asheville that there were no African Americans on the street. They were all kind of hiding in their windows, looking out, so I’m sure they knew what had happened just a few months before in Atlanta, and there was some fear that the same thing could have happen here, given this episode. They meet in this mass meeting and said, we repudiate this man.
[Read 1906 newspaper coverage of the Will Harris murders, as reported in The Asheville Gazette News, excerpted in this series from The Mountain Xpress: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.]The news stories are trying to explain why he did what he did. Some say, well, he went crazy; he was on cocaine; he was—the same things they said about Robert Charles in New Orleans in 1900 to explain these things. But Wolfe creates a sympathetic figure in The Child by Tiger. He’s not this hardcore desperado. This is a sympathetic—and that’s saying something about what is going on in Wolfe’s head at the time.
And then I found out by reading further in another scholar on Wolfe that it’s not lost on him that when Wolfe wrote The Child by Tiger as a short story, that he was reading Black Thunder, which is the story of Gabriel Prosser’s rebellion in Virginia. One of the books that comes out of the Harlem Renaissance writers. He’s reading broadly. He’s doing what some people don’t do, they don’t read outside of what they want to read, what they agree with, and nothing else, right? You don’t want a challenge.
Wolfe is reading outside of this, and interestingly, he takes Will Harris. He names him Dick Prosser. He borrows the Prosser name right from Gabriel Prosser, leader of the slave rebellion. So it raises the question what is going on in Wolfe’s mind? What is happening as he moves across time?
People can change, right? People can make a move. And I firmly believe that Wolfe was one of those people. I’m just going to end with a quote that he gives about America, I think in Of Time and the River. He says this:
America—it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
And those miracles might be people moving over time as they engage different ideas. And I believe for me—and I may be wrong about this, as I said, I am no expert on Thomas Wolfe—but that may have been the case with Thomas Wolfe.
Dr. Kevin Young
[edited & abridged, from 00:36:50]
I too am very interested in the Will Harris case and Wolfe’s short story The Child by Tiger, 1937 short story about Will Harris. But who is, or who was, the “real” Will Harris? In October 1901, Will Harris had escaped from a Mecklenburg County chain gang to which he had been sentenced for arson. Over the next 18 months Harris allegedly committed barn burnings, burglaries, and assaults throughout Mecklenburg County.
In April 1903 he was arrested in Baltimore, Maryland and brought back to Charlotte to stand trial, pled guilty to nine counts of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon, and was sentenced to 25 years in the state penitentiary. Then in August 1903 Harris had escaped from prison and returned to Mecklenburg County, where he shot the husband of his former girlfriend—and he was outlawed.
So what does it mean that Harris was outlawed? Well, to be outlawed meant that a person was utterly stripped of legal protections, and could legally be shot on sight by any North Carolina citizen. This was following an 1866 North Carolina statute, the Outlaw Statute, that had its origins in Fugitive Slave Law. It would remain in effect and be used up until the 1970s.
It was based on the Fugitive Slave Law, but it could be used against wanted individuals of any race who have been charged with a felony. Any two Justices of the Peace or any Superior Supreme Court Judge could issue an outlawry proclamation, and it gave every North Carolina citizen the right to arrest the fugitive. If the fugitive was called upon to surrender and then attempted to flee or resist arrest, in every North Carolina county, citizens had the legal right to kill them. Without a trial, without having been convicted, the outlaw could still legally be killed.
This is Will Harris, Mecklenburg County outlaw. After being outlawed, Will Harris from Charlotte became a legendary figure. For months after being outlawed, Harris would be blamed for various unsolved crimes and suspicious fires in Mecklenburg County, but he was never caught.
The outlaw Harris became a legendary “badman,” something in the same tradition as famous Stagolee (Stackolee), John Hardy, Railroad Bill, these legendary figures who live outside of the law. And this was Will Harris, a famous man. A man who had become legendary, but the real individual behind the myth was elusive.
November 1906 Will Harris shows up in Asheville—or at least someone who called himself Will Harris. When Harris was outlawed, when an outlaw proclamation was issued for him that described him as being “a certain person, a colored man calling himself and supposed to be Will Harris,” the truth is no one knows who this man was. He could have been the Will Harris who had gained fame in Charlotte, but the fact that the individual himself in Asheville so openly boasted, “I am Will Harris” indicates what degree of fame Will Harris had gained, that Will Harris had become a legendary figure.
And the fact that he is described in The Outlaw Proclamation as “calling himself and supposed to be” Will Harris just shows the degree of uncertainty about who this man actually was. But what is interesting about the outlaw proclamation is that not only the way that Will Harris is described, but the way that his victims are described as well: “Will Harris did Kill and murder Charles R. Blackstock, J.W. Bailey, Ben Addison, Jacks Corpening, and Tom Neal, citizens and residents of the said county and state.”
What I find fascinating about this listing of victims is there is no differentiation between white and Black victims, which if you have looked at early 20th century newspaper accounts, invariably they will be differentiated. But in this one instance, there’s a type of equality in death that Will Harrison victims, Black and white, are listed together communally, without distinguishing between them.
These were the two white police officers that were killed in Will Harris’s shooting rampage: Charles Blackstock and James Bailey. Blackstock is buried in a family cemetery in the community of Jupiter. James Bailey is buried in Riverside Cemetery.
But what about the three Black victims of Will Harris? Ben Addison, Benjamin Franklin Addison, he’s also buried in Riverside Cemetery, with an inscription on his tombstone saying, “Killed by a desperado.”
Benjamin Addison kept a small grocery store on Eagle Street. In the words of the Citizen-Times he was known as a worthy, respectable man living in a peaceful manner, who was shot just inside the grocery door. There is phenomenal online research, an article that the Thomas Wolfe Memorial put on the Medium website, that traces in detail the personal history of Ben Addison, which is really amazing.
Born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, had enlisted in the Civil War in the closing months, had mustered out of service in Jacksonville Florida in 1866, had lived in Boston and then in South Carolina, first shows up in Asheville in 1892, marrying Catherine Haywood. He and his wife purchased several lots in the neighborhood that would come to be known as the Block and operated number of restaurants and stores. So they are very much an upper middle class family within the time period.
What about the others? Jacks Corpening. Corpening is interesting, because you can tell a lot simply from the name. In fact in Wolfe’s Welcome to our City, in the opening scene—and it’s really odd she only appears the one time that she’s mentioned—is Miss Essie Corpening. That surname is very common among African Americans in the early 20th century in Western North Carolina. So I think it is probably a safe supposition to believe that Jacks Corpening was a North Carolina native, but very little is known about him.
What about the next victim of Will Harris within the Black community? Tom Neal has a 1900 census listing for a Mr. Neal in Asheville. The census listing shows him living on Velvet Street, which actually connected to Eagle and Beaumont Streets until urban renewal eliminated the street, I think in 1971.
You can also see from the census listing that Mr. Neal, a North Carolina native was born in 1874, so he would have been around 32 years old at the time he was killed, boarding on Velvet Street. He worked as a waiter, could read but could not write.
Three of the five people “Will Harris” killed were Black, and as Darin had mentioned, there was a large community meeting in their aftermath adopting a resolution to denounce “the crimes of this alleged Will Harris … who had proven at such awful cost to others his utter unworthiness of human life,” which is rather severe.
And notice again though he’s labeled “the alleged Will Harris.” After his death, there were so many stories about who this man actually was. So much speculation. Some said that they had known him in Virginia, some said they had known him in South Carolina. It’s like he appeared from nowhere, from a mysterious background.
So was the man in Asheville really Will Harris? That’s the name that is assigned to him, but who knows?
What about the character of Dick Prosser in The Child by Tiger? “He was deeply religious and went to church three times a week he read his Bible every night.” It is amazing what a sympathetic character Thomas Wolfe has made Dick Prosser into. If you talk about Wolf’s intention with this short story, he is obviously making a sympathetic character out of the protagonist.
Wolfe later in the short story has a description of Dick Prosser as coming from a mysterious background. But when he’s first introduced there are certain clues about Mr. Prosser. The Child by Tiger opens in late October, and Dick Prosser is described as having arrived “looking for work just a month or two before,” in contrast to the alleged Will Harris who apparently showed up in Asheville the day before the shootings actually occurred. So that means that Dick Prosser would have arrived around August of 1906.
Wolfe described him as having been “a member of a regiment of crack negro troops upon the Texas border, and if the stamp of the military man was evident in everything he did.”
“He had, he said, only recently received his discharge from the Army…” and in his own words, he’s “an ole Ahmy man, you know. If they take his rifle ‘ away from him, Why, that’s jest lak takin’ candy from a little baby.” So all these clues about his background, I think, for anyone in the early 20th century, they would have suggested immediately the 25th Infantry Regiment which had been stationed in Texas along the border in 1906, and becomes quite famous for other reasons.
The 25th Infantry Regiment was a renowned, distinguished military unit. They had served in the West. I think this picture is taken in Montana in the 1890s. They then serve in the Philippines, had a distinguished background. But they’re most known for the Browns Middle Affair, which happened in August 1906, two months before October 1906.
July 28, 1906, the 25th US Infantry arrived in Brownsville, Texas. From the onset they experienced hostility from the local white residents. The white population of Brownsville did not welcome this Black military coming into town. And on August 12th 1906 a white woman in Brownsville was allegedly attacked, and the troops the entire regiment was confined to base, curfew was issued in town, then the following night, no one is clear what happened.
There was gunfire in the town. Who was firing, circumstances, no one knows. It was dark. There were a few people involved. Gunfire, and a white bartender was killed, and a policeman was injured.
What happened in the aftermath? President Theodore Roosevelt orders the dishonorable discharge of the entire regiment. A hundred and sixty-seven men. In this placard from the time period, you can see what an effect it had.
In the South, African Americans had been essentially disenfranchised, but in northern states the African American vote was important for politicians, and the Black community felt that Roosevelt had thrown them under the bus. Because he had promised the Square Deal every time to everyone, and then he—I don’t care how long and honorable any of your records are, you are all discharged, get out.
The dishonorable discharge meant they were no longer eligible for any military pension for the decades they spent in service. There was ultimately a review and about a dozen soldiers were reinstated, but the vast majority of the regiment were out of luck.
In the early 1970s in the Nixon Administration there was a review, and those dishonorable discharges were rescinded. Of course this is nearly seven decades after the fact. There was one surviving member of the regiment, and he ultimately got to receive his pension when he was in his 80s. All the rest, no.
So that description of Dick Prosser, I think it’s clear that Wolfe is connotating with the images that he’s drawing up for any 20th century reader. He has made Dick Prosser into a sympathetic figure. Someone who has been terribly wronged.
And then he talks about the display of the dead outlaw’s corpse when the alleged Will Harris was brought back into town and displayed in the undertaker’s front window in downtown Asheville. Approximately 2,000 people came to view the dead body.
Wolfe: “It was in this way, bullet-riddled, shot to pieces, open to the vengeful and morbid gaze of all, that Dick came back to town. The mob came back right to its starting point. … They took that ghastly mutilated thing,” the corpse, “and hung it in the window of the undertaker’s place for every woman, man, and child in town to see.”
“I think it has always been the same with people. They protest. They shudder. And they say they will not go.” They’re too refined; they’re too civilized. “But in the end they always have their look.”
What is amazing about this story is that the most disgusted, the most outrage that Wolfe shows in the story is ultimately toward the mob at the end of the story, and the display of the dead Black man’s corpse.
He talks about how he, the narrator, who was a young boy at the time, and his childhood friends, how “something had come into life—into our lives—that we had never known about before. It was a kind of shadow, a poisonous blackness filled with bewildered loathing.”
What Wolfe is doing in The Child by Tiger is amazing to me, because instead of dealing with what would have been the easiest fictionalization process of the story, which is to emphasize the bad man, to emphasize Will Harris as a villainous figure, makes Will Harris into someone who is a sympathetic figure. And instead of showing outrage at the killings, the shootings in Asheville—I mean, he describes the shootings, but he is very matter-of-fact about what is happening—but his outrage is saved for the members of the mob.
And his portrayal of Will Harris’s background, with these clear connotations, these clear hints about somebody who’s been terribly wronged, coming from a military background, was really thoughtful. I think it indicates that Darin is absolutely right about Wolfe’s progression, racially speaking, about his attitude.
[Q&A follows, from 00:59:47]Many thanks to Buncombe County Communications and Public Engagement (CAPE) Department for recording this event. Presented in partnership with the Thomas Wolfe Memorial and Vance Birthplace State Historic Sites.
Header image: Fountain on Pack Square, circa 1910s-1920s, possibly photographed by George Masa, MA025-4.