The Ghost Row of Frank Goldson

 

A section of the African American Civil War Memorial, Washington DC

The Ghost Row of Frank Goldson 

    This story begins with the building of a power-line east and west between State Highways 18 and 177 about two miles north of Chandler. One member of the construction crew was Bill Duke, a man with a historical sense and the intelligence to be curious. When he found a gravestone in the corner of the fence line that day in early November 2013, he came back the next day with a camera and took a photo of it. He thought the epitaph said “Roxie Goleson,” but was unsure of the dates. The yellow leaves of early November undergrowth are visible in the photo two pages below.

In search of Roxie’s stone, on a morning in mid-August of the next year, David Alsip and I started out in his Ford 4X4 to find what Bill Duke had seen and photographed, reporting to the County Historical Society that it was near Sweet Home, a black community northwest of Chandler. David and I spent the first morning looking for the Sweet Home Cemetery. Luckily, at a truck stop on the highway, we ran into a descendant of Sweet Home’s most important bootlegging family. He readily told us how to get there. It’s a large and still active cemetery built on a hillside, which we tramped out, but there was no state-built power line on that section line, and we found nothing to our purpose.

The next morning we started from David’s home, located on what we had always called the Lake Road but recently re-designated the 890 Road to help tornado spotters give directions. This time we ignored the red herring of Sweet Home and found the power line that ran east and west. It wasn’t possible to follow the line due west because the section line was blind after the second mile. We had to dogleg a mile south, then a mile west, and back north to recover the 890 road.

We were reasonably sure that the stone would be inside the fence line, otherwise it would have been in the right-of-way maintained by the county and long since reported, so we searched both sides of the road looking for undergrowth tall enough to hide it. At the previous corner, we had passed a house whose owner David knew--Freddie Lynch--and it occurred to David to call him. He used his cellphone first to call home, where his wife looked up the number and gave it to him. Davie and Freddie must have known each other pretty well, as I noticed they dispensed with polite palaver. David explained that we were looking for a gravestone and had just passed Freddy’s house. Freddy said sure, he knew where it was. Come back and get him and he’d show us. He thought it was a Civil War stone. 

We did a T-turnaround and went back to Freddy’s place. He was waiting in the front yard, and a few minutes later we were pulling up at the western end of his property--80 acres marked off by an uncultivated fence corner where undergrowth had been uncut since the introduction of the tractor in the 1940s. Inside that corner was a jungle of post-oak, blackjack, and thorny brambles grown up so thick as to make a wall impenetrable to the view. “That’s it,” Freddy said, pointing into the jungle. “In there.”

Freddie led the way, and the two of us climbed his fence, fighting the wall made of blackjack, whose lower limbs grew downward, and the thorny brambles, which grew upward. Ten feet further on, the clean lines of the granite stone came into view. It was learning 30 degrees, supported by a large tree behind it. We had to brush away a coat of moss to read what was incised there: Roxie Goldson, we made out, 1882-1901. 

Roxie Goldson 1882-1901

Beside it, more than half buried in the red-clay soil were what appeared to be two field stones, as grave-seekers call them--two small boulders of native stone, which in central Oklahoma means sandstone. When we got back to David’s truck, I noticed that Freddy’s forearms were bleeding from pushing through the underbrush. With a handkerchief from his overalls pocket, he wiped off the blood as though it were sweat. 

I came back the next day by myself with an ax and a shovel, and cleared around the field stones enough to be sure there was no visible writing on them. A few weeks later, after studying the census and land records, I decided that these marked the graves of Roxie’s parents. Fortunately, Roxie had been picked up by the 1900 census, which gave her parents names as Frank and Alice Goldson. It also records that they were black.

The censuses for 1900 and 1910 show Frank Goldson as born in Missouri, but an earlier record shows him born in Carroll Parish, Louisiana. He was probably born near the Mississippi River, which divides Carroll Parish, as it was called at that time (now East Carroll) from Bolivar County, Mississippi. Both of the censuses show Alice as having been born in Louisiana. 

In 1863 Frank joined the Louisiana Colored Infantry, and in 1864 was serving with Company C, the 47th Regiment. The United States Colored Infantry seems to have begun in Louisiana in late 1862, just before the Emancipation Proclamation. Approximately 175 regiments composed of more than 178, 000 free blacks and freedmen served during the last two years of the war. By the war's end, the men of the USCT composed nearly one tenth of all Union troops. 

The first major engagement featuring the use of black troops was fought at Milliken’s Bend in Louisiana in June of 1863 as part of the Siege of Vicksburg. The Confederates thought that Grant’s supply line still ran through Milliken’s bend, which was held by a brigade of newly-recruited African American soldiers. Wikipedia devotes a full article to this engagement:

Leaders on both sides noted the performance of the African American troops at Milliken's Bend. Unionist Charles Dana reported that the action convinced many in the Union Army to support the enlistment of African American soldiers. Dennis stated "it is impossible for men to show greater gallantry than the Negro troops in this fight." Grant described the battle as the first significant engagement in which the Colored Troops had seen combat, described their conduct as "most gallant" and said that "with good officers they will make good troops." He later praised them in his 1885 memoir, stating "These men were very raw, having all been enlisted since the beginning of the siege, but they behaved well." Confederate leader McCulloch later reported that while the white Union troops had been routed, the Colored Troop had fought with "considerable obstinacy." One modern historian wrote in 1960 that the fighting at Milliken's Bend brought "the acceptance of the Negro as a soldier," which was important to "his acceptance as a man."

Though there is no certainty, in all probability Frank Goldson got his first taste of battle at Milligan’s Bend, losing two fingers in the process.

An 1871 Freedman's Bank record from Bolivar County is the source for my statement that Frank was born in Carroll Parish. It also gives his parents’ names as Basil and Polly Goldson:

Freedman’s Bank Record for Frank Goldson

Sometime before 1871 Frank married Martha, who bore him a daughter of the same name. This first wife must have died in that decade, for in 1881 he married Alice, with whom he had four children that are known: Corine, Mary, Roxie, and Daniel. About 1897, he and Alice homesteaded on 80 acres in McKinley Township, Lincoln County. The patent was proved on 12 March 1902. It included two lots or tracts in addition to the 80.

Alice was alive in 1915, as a pension application record exists for that year. On December 17 of that year, she applied as a widow, allowing us to date Frank’s death. Alice must have died before 1920, when her name disappears from the census. (Later correspondence supplies the specific dates.)

Of the four known children, the eldest child, Corine Goldson, married a man named White (first name unknown), and her children include Blanch, Hoyt, and Dorsey. It is thought that these children used their mother's maiden name. The name of the second child, Mary, doesn’t appear after 1910, probably indicating that she married. The fourth child was a son named Daniel, born in 1883. He married a woman named Lillie and had two sons, Alphon and Ezra, but again they disappear from the records after 1910. 

Two members of this family have permanent records. Roxie’s granite stone fixes her name, though one can’t help wondering where the money came from to pay for it. Since the 80 acres was sold in December of 1903, eighteen months after Roxie’s death, speculation suggests they may have sold one of their two lots to pay for the fine stone, though if so the deed is not published. They must have loved their nineteen-year-old daughter dearly.

Frank Goldson has no name on the sandstone that marks his grave but nonetheless his name is registered in a way that is permanent. It is inscribed in shining brass along with tens of thousands of others in the African-American Civil War Memorial in Washington DC. No doubt, other African-American soldiers buried in Lincoln County have their names inscribed there as well. I have not verified the records in Washington for all these veterans, but elsewhere I have given thumbnail biographies and noted the cemeteries where they are buried (http://genealogytrails.com/oka/lincoln/africanamericancivilwarsoldiers.html). 

Some have the standard Civil War marker of white marble supplied by the federal government, while some have ordinary markers or field stones. Frank Goldson’s marker is a field stone, but he should have more. Probably at one point he did have, for correspondence filed in the National Archives in Washington shows that the family applied for and received a government marker, which should have arrived in Chandler or Wellston about 1920. A letter from the War Department dated July 5, 1940 states:  “our records indicate that a Government headstone was furnished for one Frank Goldson, Pvt. Co. C, 47th Regt. HSC Inf., who died December 15, 1915 and is interred in the Goldson Cemetery, Chandler, Oklahoma.” (Recall that Freddie Lynch remember a Civil War stone.) It’s impossible to understand the reference to “Goldson Cemetery,” for Lincoln County has never had a cemetery by that name. The phrase can only represent some clerical galimatias based on the supposition that Goldson was buried on the family farm so that the burial place bore his name. 

Alice, however, appeared in the County Clerk’s office and gave an affidavit for Frank’s death that is signed by two men who helped bury him on the Goldson farm--H. D. Raney and O. D. Miller. A hand written letter in pencil, dated June 1940, says the government stone was shipped about 1920 or 1921. The letter is from B. H. Martin, handwritten in pencil. It is to be observed that Mr. Martin, whoever he may have been, has no idea how to spell “Goldson.” Frank Goldson may have been the last member of the family who knew how to spell his name, perhaps basing himself on the Freedman’s Bank record, which he would have kept. He certainly spelled it correctly on Roxie’s gravestone. Alice, we know, was illiterate and thus not a dependable source for spelling. The 1870 and 1880 censuses for Frank and Alice, spell the family name Gholston and Golston. 

These odd spellings return like restless ghosts in the 1940s in the correspondence between the War Department and the Goldson family, friends, and relatives.

An obscure phonetic spelling occurs in the middle of the second page with the paragraph beginning “The.” The next word is “government” abbreviated “gov” and followed by a semi-colon. The next word, which looks like “durrad” is a crux without apparent meaning. It’s clearly a phonetic spelling, but the meaning is not apparent without analysis.Though the first letter looks like a “d”, inspection of the word “before” at the end of the second to the last line on that same page shows the writer’s b’s can look like d’s. The “b” in “before” matches the “b” in the word in question, so the word must be “buried.” The writer is saying that about 1921 the government buried Frank and shipped his tombstone.

It would be stupid and wrong-headed to criticize an uneducated writer for his lack of education, but it’s hard not to wish that D. H. Martin could have studied the Palmer method of penmanship, the standard pedagogy in white schools. I make this comment primarily to alert the reader to the topic of a later story in the present book called “Daisy Palmer, Teacher at Oak Grove.”

We are left now with the matter of the military tombstone. My colleague Matt Hayes visited the National Archives and retrieved all of the correspondence pertaining to Frank Goldson, his Civil War pension ($35 per month), and his gravestone. From the correspondence it is clear that the family did order the stone, and replies from the War Department make it evident that the stone was sent. Diligent and prolonged searches around the county, however, have produced no sign of the stone--a search that includes all databases and old newspapers from the appropriate dates. 

The stone may share the fate of other memorial stones around rural Lincoln County. Any mortuary-produced stone would be made of granite and thus would have been much more durable than native stone, which is almost always sandstone. Thus it would have been prized as foundation material for barns and outbuildings around the farm that needed shoring up. Farmers are likely to retrieve these stones, not because they lack respect for the dead, but because the cemetery itself is not kept up and appears fallen into ruin and the name of the dead person is one they don’t recognize. In this way, need trumps piety. 

As a historian, I am on the side of the pious who respect markers no matter how old and illegible. In the case of Frank Goldson, the present essay stands as a very minor memorial. If it does nothing else, it lifts Roxie Goldson’s stone from the covering of blackjack scrub in which was buried to the visible world of public discourse. 

Some years after Frank’s death, a scrap of sack was found with a poem written in pencil. I like to think it is spoken by Frank. I seem to hear his voice echoing down the ghost row, which is the endless row of cotton he spent his life chopping. If I could gives this poem a title, that’s what I’d call it: “The Ghost Row.”

In the hunnerd years I lain here I learned where before I couldn’t even write my name.

I saw words only thru a glass darkly 

but now I see them face to face.

Borned in the swamps of East Carroll County 

along the banks of the that god-brown Mississip

in ‘63 I joined the 47th U. S. Colored Infantry.

South of Vicksburg at Milliken’s Bend

with nothing but pitchforks and cane knives

we showed the world that slaves could be men.

I lost two fingers there but better men lost their lives

and after that they gave us long-barreled guns.

I see my name’s in brass in Washington city,

on the African-American Civil War plaque,

me and a hunnerd thousand others.

I wish I could behold it, and face to face be seen.

It’s bright enough in my mind’s eye

But not as bright as my cubs Roxie and Corine.

Homesteaded here eighty acres near Sweet Home

fine Irish neighbors: Dorseys, Raneys, McBrides.

They buried my black butt out here in ought ‘15 

and later my wife Alice she laid down too

but fifteen years before we’d buried little Roxie.

Went to Wellston and paid my last dollar 

so she could have a town made stone.

Uncle Sam gave me a gov’t grave mark

till some one stole it to prop a corner of his barn. 

On Roxie’s stone we had it writ

“We trust our loss will be her gain.”

I don’t know where the Lord’s gonna fit.

A  man and wife grow old and disagree-- 

the ghost row is a mighty long row to hoe

but a child lights up a life while the heavens roll.

Typhus took my Roxie, in ought 1, just nineteen. 

Her stone stands tall, erect and sassy as she.

Sources

Special thanks to my colleague Matt Hayes who traveled to the National Archives and retrieved the correspondence about Frank Goldson’s Civil War stone and pension that are cited above.