And God said unto Cain, "Where is thy brother?"

 

Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus

 Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo

The story that follows has such an arrow-like dynamic of form that it reads like a parable, but I discovered it online at Ancestry.com while looking at records for Sam Williams (1906-1974), born in Wolfe County, Kentucky. Wolfe is a name and place to reckon with in my small world, for it is there that my paternal grandmother (maiden name Roxie Stidham) came from when she and her numerous kin migrated to Lincoln County, Oklahoma in 1912. The kinfolk included three families: the Stidhams, the Days, and the Williamses. The families had intermarried so often that later generations, looking at photos of the children--the girls were thought to be especially attractive--had trouble deciding which child belonged to which family.

Sam and Roger Williams with a friend between them, 1935

The tale I have to tell is about two brothers, the elder born eight years before the younger. World literature, from the most ancient times, is replete with stories of brothers fighting for dominance with one killing the other. A very short list would name familiar stories. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris is murdered by his brother Set who usurps the throne. In ancient Scandinavian myth, Hod slays his brother Balder, and in Canaanite legend Cain kills his brother Abel. The book of Genesis ends with the tale of Joseph and his hateful brothers, a pure type of the Hebrew fairy tale.  In historical times, legend states that Romulus killed his brother Remus to become the first ruler of Rome. Medieval legend provided Shakespeare with the slayer King Claudius and his victim King Hamlet. 

An anonymous British poet from the Middle Ages, summed up the repetitious quality of the matter:

This was, and is, and yet men shal it see,

When a thing is shapen, it shal be

My comment on this medieval formulation is to say that the power of the form to endure comes from its archetypal nature.

Though I began by speaking of the tale’s formal arrowlike shape, the arrow is now going to disappear into the briar patch while we chase the rabbit of the archetype. Since Cain and Abel represent the most famous instance of fratricide in the  West, and since the story comes to us from the ancient Hebrews, I have consulted the late professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. In 1991 Yerushalmi published Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, a title that plays on Freud’s 1937 work Analysis Terminable and Interminable. Yerushalmi’s is a remarkable study that tempers the wind of its scholarship to the shorn lamb (the lay reader). In contrast to Freud’s proposal of a primal horde in which the father is killed by his male children, Yerushalmi argues that the first crime in the biblical narrative was not a patricide but a fratricide. 

First he discusses the contest between the Jewish and Christian bibles as a fraternal struggle:

Christianity is a “Son-Religion” because it deified the Son and because it is an offspring of Judaism and stands in an Oedipal rivalry with Judaism. At the same time, in their relationship to God the Father, Judaism and Christianity are both son-religions, each claiming its exclusive legitimacy at the expense of the other….the rivalry between the sons is over whom? you may well ask. Who is the mother? I would answer the Torah, the Teaching, which in Hebrew is grammatically feminine and which in the midrash is called a bride. It is over possession of her that Christianity, the younger son, came to challenge, not so much the Father as Judaism, the elder son. For this struggle, “sibling rivalry” is perhaps too tame a phrase. Psychologically (and alas, all too often even historically) we are talking about fratricide.

In a mood of playfulness, the author interviews Sigmund Freud: Why it is that throughout your work you have concentrated so exclusively on patricide, he asks, “why only the Oedipus complex and not a ‘Cain complex,’ has remained an enigma to me, especially since you yourself were able to admit your murderous fantasies toward your infant brother Julius….The first crime in the biblical narrative was not a patricide but, precisely, a fratricide.” 

Yerushalmi is aware that Freud knew the story of Cain and Abel intimately and by heart, for Freud had been raised on the Hebrew bible and studied it in the original language. (His father Jacob was a well known scholar of Torah.) His question is then why in looking for the human malaise Freud found it embodied in the figure of Oedipus rather than Cain. Freud knew the Cain and Abel story, but “did nothing with it,” says Yerushalmi, contrasting him with Augustine, who made it more important. “Where you took Oedipus as your paradigm for our malaise,” Yerushalmi says to Freud, Augustine found him in Cain, and in The City of God he universalized him by making him the founder of the earthly city.”

The first founder of the earthly city was consequently a fratricide; for overcome by envy, he slew his own brother….this archetype was followed by a copy of its own likeness long afterwards at the foundation of the city that was destined to be the capital of this earthly city . . . and to rule over so many nations. For here too, [as the Roman poet Lucan put it] when he recorded this crime: "In blood fraternal were the first walls steeped." This is indeed the way that Rome was founded when Remus, as the history of Rome tells us, was slain by his brother Romulus. (92)

I have quoted Yerushalmi at much length, wanting to provide a glimpse of the big picture. As usual in discussing fraternal pairs, the focus is on struggle and killing. Do we find no opposite examples in ancient literature? Of course they exist, but they are not well known. The most famous example might be the love between Gilgamesh and Endiku, who were not brothers by blood but who loved each other as brothers, though at the outset they fought like the wild beasts they lived with. A love-hatred example closer to home would be that of Jesus and Judas, but this example is not scriptural. It comes from the mythopoetic genius of Jorge Luis Borges. 

The preceding excursion through ancient literature was intended to remind the reader of the ubiquity of fraternal archetypes and to point out that if some of them are of the love-hatred variety, the darker emotion is dominant and drives one brother kill the other. Not so, however, in the story of Roger and Sam, which to my mind is a love story.

To get to the heart of it, I confess first of all to a paucity of sources--only two in fact. The first is a journalism article from Lexington KY dated 28 Marcy 1936, headlined Perry County Man Is Killed: 

Hazard, Ky., March 28--Roger Williams, 23, son of W. E. Williams, merchant at Hilton, this county, was found dead on the L. & N. railroad about 10 miles from Hazard at 6 o’clock Friday night. At an inquest, conducted at the scene, it was announced that he was killed when he fell from a freight train on which he was riding as a hobo.

He and his brother, Carl [sic!] Williams, were reported to be riding the freight home after they had been down the line to collect a bill for their father. Carl [sic!] was brought to Hazard and locked up on a charge of drunkenness.

The inquest was conducted at the scene of the accident by Coroner Billy Combs, Deputy Sheriff John D. Combs, and Depot Agent J. M. Johnson who went from here on a railroad motor car. The body of Williams was brought to the Engle undertaking establishment in Harvard. 

The saddest fault in this piece is almost comical--in that it gets the older brother’s name wrong, calling him Carl.  (One also wonders if Sheriff Combs and Coroner Combs were also brothers, or only cousins.) 

An outlander like yours truly cannot help pausing over a town named Hazard, wondering if it might describe a noted feature of hobo-ing on freight trains. But no, the encyclopedias caution us. Founded in 1821, it was originally named for the American naval hero Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. The town was usually referred to as Hazard, however, and in 1854 Hazard became its official name. Growth was slowed by the long blood feud between the French and Eversole families (1887-1894). The worst gun battle occurred in Hazard in 1888, when 12 men were killed. (In my callow youth, I suffered from the illusion that “Hazard” might refer to the killings 

French-Eversole Feud, tintype, 1890

of the French-Eversole Feud.) Repercussions of this feud, especially after Ed Callahan was shot and killed in an ambush in 1912, might have been part of the motivation for the Stidhams leaving for Oklahoma that year. The arrival of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad the same year boosted development of local resources (coal, oil, natural gas, and timber), and twenty-four years later would provide a freight car for the premature death of my cousin Roger Williams.

When Sam abandoned home, he went west, and in doing so he was following a famously well trodden road. From eastern Kentucky, of course, the west beckoned as the land of opportunity, especially during the Depression when there said to be jobs and chances for self improvement on the West Coast. He was also following a family tradition, for after the first migration which brought the Kentucky folk to Oklahoma about 1912, others followed the westward trail. The earliest I can discover is the family of Percy Day, whose life was brought to a premature conclusion by pneumonia in 1920 while living in Lincoln County, Oklahoma. In Wolfe County KY he had married Mary Jane--Roger Williams’ ten-year younger sister--somewhere between the years 1910 and 1912. Their first child to be born in Oklahoma was Renne Day, born in Chandler in 1917. Percy’s wife Mary Jane was a courageous woman, the oldest daughter in her family, and was among the first to make the journey westward, arriving with her husband in Lincoln County, where they are reported on the 1920 census.  

The earliest member of the Stidham-Day-Williams family I find on the West Coast is John Riley Stidham-Day, born 1867 in Kentucky, probably Wolfe County. He and his family evidently came to Oklahoma a few years before the Stidhams’ 1912 arrival, with a 1910 census record marking him in McIntosh County OK. It’s unclear how long he stayed there, but he was in Lincoln County with most of his other kin in 1920. Again the transitional data is indeterminate but the 1930 census locates him and his clan in Fresno Co. California. Thus the trail westward for Sam Williams would have been well marked when he left home in 1936, but it is not likely he wanted a well designated trail. His feeling of shame was such that he broke all connection with his family, and he wrote to none of them during the rest of his lifetime. 

A silence of a biblical forty years now follows. Years in which a large family--two parents, a dozen children, numerous kin--are looking for the one sheep that has strayed from the fold. The well known parable of Jesus as the Good Shepherd shimmers in the background:

What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.

In the case of the lost sheep Sam Williams, the joy of finding had a strong mixture of sorrow, for he was not located until after his death.

The tell-tale heart of this story is told eloquently but succinctly by a cousin named Deborah writing after Sam’s death in Spokane Washington in 1974 and was posted on his Find-a-Grave memorial. She is the second source of which I spoke above:

Sam (age 30) and younger brother Roger (age 23) went out drinking. Hitching a ride on a train, Roger fell from the train and died instantly. Sam, feeling responsible for the death of his brother, left town never to be heard from again.

Several years later, a man went to James Silas Williams (Sam's father) with news of Sam. He told James that another man had seen Sam getting on a ship going to war (WWII). James went to the man for more information, but he knew nothing more than he was sure it was Sam. James contacted the War Department, but was unsuccessful in his search for his son.

On January 13, 1938, Sam applied for a Social Security account number in Stockton, Joaquin County, California. He gave his date of birth [and the names of his parents]. There is no record of Sam having served in WWII.

On April 22, 1974, Sam, age 68, was found dead in his apartment at South 156 1/2 Brown Street, Spokane, Washington. His name, date of birth, birth location and social security number were provided by the Department of Public Assistance for Sam's death certificate. His marital status was listed as "widowed" and parents names as unknown. 

A brief death notice for Sam was published in the Spokesman Review on April 24th. Sam's body remained unclaimed and was buried by the State on May 8th in Fairmount Memorial Park, Spokane, Washington.

These words, mark Sam’s journey across the trestle of forty years.. I do not know how much time passed between Sam’s death and his family’s discovery of his grave, but judging by the way the grass had covered his modest stone, the years had turned into decades.

Sam Williams’ grave marker

As a writer and researcher, I count myself very fortunate to have been granted a correspondence with the author of the above obit, who is also the principal person involved in identifying Sam’s grave. She is a cousin on the Williams side and lives in Ohio, but I will protect her privacy by using only her first name Deborah. The emails that I will cite below were all received in May and June of 2024. 

Here is Deborah:

I was the source for locating the actual death location and records for Sam. The story I posted was passed on to me by two different people. One was Darlene Mihaloew (first cousin to Sam's son Chalmer "Buster" Williams on his mother's side - Clair Family). The second was Mildred Mayabb-Selby (daughter of Sam & Roger's sister Ethel May Williams-Mayabb). Darlene had posted a message on a message board looking for information on Sam (trying to locate information for Buster).

The story I posted is all that Sam's son Buster knew about his father until I located the death and burial records Buster had just turned 2 a few days before the accident. I was able to provide Buster with the date, location of death and place of burial for his father a few years before he died in 2010.

About the next day, Deborah mailed me some of the story of her adventures in family history:

Although it has been many years, here are a few more details of how I located Sam. Sam's eldest brother Daniel Webster Williams was my husband's grandfather; the reason I was researching the Williams family. While trying to add Sam to the tree I hit a brick wall. He just disappeared. My research was mostly before Ancestry and I was using Family Tree Maker along with purchased records on CD including the SSDI. Looking at every possible Samuel, Sam, S. Williams, I came across Sam Williams, birth date close but not exact - issued in California (where someone had once claimed to see him boarding a ship during WWII) and took a chance and ordered a copy of the original SS application. Believing that it was a wild shot, I was surprised and happy when it arrived in the mail and seen that it was in fact Sam from the parents names listed and state of birth. From there, the SSDI told me his last residence. I found the brief death notice in a newspaper and contacted the funeral home listed, told them the story and asked if by any chance they might still have the record.

I append the brief obituary Deborah found. 

The Spokesman-Review - 24 Apr 1974 - Page 22

In another letter she details the family’s response to Sam’s disappearance, but she is careful not to evoke the pain and sorrow that was part of it:

After the possible reported sighting of Sam in California, James Silas Williams contacted the US War Department.  I don’t know if that was by written letter or he went to a local office.  The War Department did do a search of records for him and was told they had no record of Sam.  

I believe the possible sighting of Sam in California may have been correct.  When Sam completed his SS-5 form in January 1938 he was living in Stockton, California.  While I have found no record that Sam served in the military, it could be possible that he was working at the location in some other capacity.  It was this reported sighting that led me to order the SS-5 form issued in California that eventually located the death record for Sam. 

James Silas kept in close contact with all of his children throughout his life, both writing and personal visits to their homes even after he moved to Oklahoma.  If any family member had heard anything from or about Sam the information would have been passed along to his father immediately. . . . 

Sam’s mother Elizabeth died in February 1946.  Sam was strongly on the minds of the family at that time.  The family believed that if Sam was anywhere in the area or in contact with anyone in the area, he would learn of and attend his mother’s funeral or at least write to his father.  Sam’s son, age 12, attended the funeral with an uncle from his mother’s side of the family in hopes that Sam would be there.  Sam did not attend the funeral or write to his father.  Hushed conversations followed about the possibility (probability) that Sam was no longer living. 

Deborah continues the story of her initial discovery and then extends it into a hazardous area of the eastern Kentucky mountains: 

The woman I spoke to [in Spokane] was so moved by the story that she rummaged through old file boxes in the basement of the funeral home and located the record. I can't recall is she actually sent me a copy of the death certificate or if I ordered it by mail, but she did tell me that the funeral home had run the death notice in hopes that someone would come forward and claim the body. No one did. She also told me the date of death was the date he was "found". The story only became sadder. A man died alone and no one knew anything about him while a large family desperately wanted him back in their lives or at least know he was ok for years. 

As I told you earlier, my husband and I made a trip to Hazard, Kentucky to try to locate a newspaper article. When the visit to the library didn't work out we headed out to see if we could find the cemetery in Yerkes. Having no exact location of the cemetery, we stopped at the local post office to inquire. Yerkes was a tiny little town and if I recall the post office was the only building in town. The postal clerk tried to discourage us from going to the cemetery saying the road was very bad and my car could likely be damaged. When I said I would like to try, they gave me directions to "Stidham's" store located about halfway up the mountain. Telling us to stop there for further directions. The road was very bad indeed, but we made it to Stidham's. 

Here Deborah gets my particular attention, because as I have noted earlier my maternal grandmother was a Stidham and from this very part of Kentucky’s eastern mountains:

Mrs. Stidham was the only one in the store. The store was built into the side of the mountain, It was oddly empty. Nothing on the shelves, but soft drinks, snacks and cigarettes at the front counter. I explained to Mrs. Stidham why I was there. She was a very kind woman and became clearly worried about my mission. She told us it was not safe to go up the mountain alone without explaining why and offered to call her husband. She was not able to reach him and she was verging on panic when she realized she hadn't deterred me from my mission. Shaking, she begged us to only go up the mountain until we reached a house around a bend and stop there. She would call them and let them know we were coming. They would give us further directions. We left the store and got back in our car. There was no one in sight when we entered the store, but when we came out the area was busy with four wheelers buzzing around. My husband decided that it was time to head back down the mountain and head home. 

From previous trips to the area, we knew the mountains had secrets and outsiders were not welcome beyond the one gas station/general store on the main road of town. What I didn't realize until a few months after our trip to Perry County was that the mountains hide large marijuana fields. Seeing a news story about a large field being located by helicopter by the Feds explained a lot. Anyway, that's probably more than you want to know but when you mentioned Stidham it brought back memories of the sweet protective lady I had met. She must have worried that we would disappear off the face of the earth. I am also familiar with the Stidham/Williams connections. You are welcome to publish the story about Sam and Roger but as I mentioned before it was passed on the me by others. I know that Mildred is deceased now but I don't know about Darlene. It's been many years since I had contact with her. You probably already know this, but Sam & Rogers father, James Silas Williams, also moved to Chandler, OK after the death of his wife Elizabeth. One of his daughters also lived there.

Yes, I did know about the Williamses in Chandler, but only as a result of my own adult research. As a child, I knew nothing but the surname and thought of the Williamses, in a childish way, as my grandmother’s relatives rather than mine. At the same time, however, I do remember the house where the Williamses lived, and that has to be a childhood memory. I don’t think I was every inside it, though it was a mere three blocks from my grandparents’ house. 

The James Silas Williams house in Chandler OK, photo 1999

I’ll let Deborah tell one more story of her experience of the hazards of Kentucky. (Excuse the tired joke, but Hazard is the seat of Perry County, making the pun irresistible, especially if one recalls the numbers killed in the French-Eversole feud that put it on the map.)

My husband and I made a trip to Hazard, Kentucky to try to locate a news article on the accident in the local paper at the library many years ago. Outsiders not welcome in this area! As soon as I inquired about locating a local news article, someone from behind the desk got on the only microfilm reader and stayed there for two hours while I sat close by waiting. It was clear they were not actually looking for anything but just letting me know that whatever I was doing there, I wasn't welcome. We got the point and headed back to Cincinnati.

Since the advent of the internet, the sources for family history have shifted radically. Now the researchers stay at their desk at home. In the early days, they had to travel--sometimes long distances-- to visit the county seat where the records were kept. I knew one such scholar in the 1990s when I was just beginning--a true gentleman generous with his time and knowledge--and for that matter I spent several summers in such travel. It was not without its perils. I remember driving alone on a country road in the hills of Halifax County Virginia one night when everything got so pitch black--like the proverbial inside of a cow’s belly--that I turned around and drove back to my motel in South Boston. The reluctance I showed may have been the better part of wisdom.  

Because Deborah is more closely related to Sam Williams than I am, she deserves to have the last word in this tale of the lost sheep and his kin, who played the part of the good shepherds. Her first reference is to Mildred Mayabb-Selby (daughter of Sam & Roger's sister Ethel May Williams-Mayabb).

My impression from speaking with Mildred was that Sam's disappearance was a very heavy burden for his father James Silas Williams throughout his life and the story of Roger and Sam was well known and spoken of within the family. Much of the family quietly blamed Sam's mother Elizabeth for his disappearance. She was unconsolable and blamed Sam alone for Roger's death. Some believed it may have been her harsh words that sent Sam away.

This brings up the question of guilt, one which I hesitate to broach, except that within the archetype of fraternal rivalry it is always present on the part of the dominant brother. Logically, it has to be. Families are built from complex blood ties that include responsibility. This is widely recognized in he case of small children who feel guilt for the death of a parent. I don’t see how it could be any different for brothers. Here I speak from experience, having grown up with an abusive older brother, who later repented his violence when it was too late.

We are fortunate to have a photograph of Sam and Roger seated together in a scene of fraternal companionship. It was taken about 1935, one year before the train accident and shows them with an unnamed friend sitting between them. Readers will judge for themselves, but for me, it seems that in Sam’s face I already see traces of the melancholy that after 1936 will turn to remorse and drive him away from home and into the wilderness for forty years. Unlike the wanderings of the ancient Hebrews, no land of Canaan appears to lighten the end of this fraternal tale. It is a sad story. The land of promise turns out to be the grave. Forty years without a body, without proof of passing, such children don’t die. They keep us aware of the void, of silence and loss. 

The good shepherd never found the lost sheep.

Sam and Roger Williams with a friend between them, 1935

Sources

Barker, Pat. The Ghost Road. New York: Viking Press, 1995; Penguin Books, 1996. Based on the lives of shell-shocked British soldiers in WWI.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Three Versions of Judas.” In Collected Fictions. Tr. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books, 163-67

Pearce, Ed J. Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky. The University Press of Kentucky, 1994.

Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.