The Ghosts of King House III: Uncle Frank, Edmund King, and a “signifyin’” peach tree

Ed. note: This is the last in a three-part series about ghost stories told by formerly enslaved African Americans to a pair of college students in 1913. The young women went out into Montevallo's Black community seeking tales about "hants, ghostes, en sperrits." The interviews, printed in a college publication two decades before the FWP's Slave Narrative project, 1936-1938, preserved stories handed down by word of mouth from members of the first-freed generation and their descendants. They offer a rare opportunity to hear the distinctive voices of individuals too easily lumped together as "elderly negroes" or "ex-slaves." Quoted material retains the original dialectic spellings and contains language some may consider offensive today. 

We saved "Uncle Frank" for last. Uncle Frank had been enslaved by Edmund King and, after Edmund died in 1863, was claimed as property by his youngest son Frank. ("I guess yer knows I usen' ter 'blong ter Massa Frank King.") Uncle Frank worked in King House and had first-hand experience of the mysterious sights and sounds that haunted its precincts. His ghost stories provide an insider's view of life and work within "thet ole house." 

Frank does not doubt the existence of ghosts. He was born to see them: "I knows I'se bawn to see 'em casin I been seein' 'em er good many years." He is certain that the source of mysterious goings on at King House is none other than the hant of "old Marse King." Edmund King has "been hanging' roun' ever sence he fell out of thet peach tree en disceased to lib."

We will return to that fall from a peach tree.

Why is "Ole Marse" still hanging around as late as 1913? "He is scart somebody'll git the money he's got hid 'roun' thet old house." Fifty years after his death Edmund's spirit is still troubled by the dread of losing the ill-gained wealth he amassed while alive. 

Let us pause to relish the irony here. Uncle Frank himself is part of the wealth gained and then lost by the King family when Emancipation wiped out half the White financial assets in the South. 

Obsession with lost wealth is conspicuous in Uncle Frank's recollection of a spectral man counting money in a second-floor bedroom. (The detail of an old gentleman spied through an upstairs window counting money is often retold today, seldom with appreciation of its coded implications.) Frank recalls hearing a noise from above, a "clink-clink-clink-ity-clink" sounding to his ears very like the counting of metal coins. He investigates, lamp in hand, but sees no one. The clink-ity-clink continues. The scoffing mistress brushes his impressions aside. She is sure the sound is nothing but the banging of the shutters. Frank knows better: "I guess I knows ther diffunce 'twixt bangin' shutters en clinkin' dollars, ef I ain't nothin but an old black nigger."

Uncle Frank knew something about the sound of money. In 1863, he along with his wife and some of their children, was sold to Frank King for $3570. That's $87,385 in today's dollars.  

Greed, acquisitiveness, obsession with lost wealth: these are recurring themes of stories told about former masters. They may seem to be entertaining tales of the supernatural -- who doesn't enjoy a good ghost story? -- but for those who can hear, they deliver a coded judgment on the moral and human failings of the South's enslaving social order. They conjure a greed so deadly that it persists beyond the grave, heard in the clink of coins from dark parts of the plantation's "big house."

The sense of injustice encoded in these stories get a more comical treatment in stories of stumbling, tripping, and falling masters -- white men who fall off their horses, for example. Or in the case of King, fall out of one of their own peach trees. 

The family account has him in declining heath for years before his death, dying of digestive failure in 1863. But the men and women who had been held in bondage by King -- people once described in mainstream accounts as old or faithful "servants" -- had a different story to tell. "Old Marse King," they said, fell out of a tree.

Did he fall? Perhaps not. But the story is true in a "signifyin'" sense. If we listen with ears attuned to African American griefs and hardships, to the songs of people in bondage longing to be free, we may hear something deeper. 

We may hear wish-fulfilment in the fantasy of a master's comeuppance in his own orchard. We may hear intimations of an appetite for wealth so overpowering that it fueled terrible treatment of people with dark skins. We may even find justice in the thought that the master tumbled to his death from a tree tended by slave labor. 

The ghost stories of Uncle Ben, Aunt Julia, and Uncle Frank are legacies to be cherished. They teach us the "signifyin'" power of storytelling when freed people of African descent get control of the narrative. We honor them now, these men and women who used bits and pieces of ghost tales to express their own inner experience, in stories told their own way. 

Sources: Uncle Frank is quoted from "'Hant' Philosophy" by Orrie Stitt and Evelyn Beasley in Technala (1913, 142-45), available online in UM's Milner Archives Digital Collection. Submitted by Kathy King and Anitka Stewart Sims on behalf of the Montevallo Legacy Project. We have benefited from Paul Mahaffey's wide knowledge of African American storytelling traditions. Visit MLP at themontevallolegacyproject.com and, if you want to learn more, sign up for our newsletter.

Volume 2 of Untold Stories of Black Montevallo, beautifully printed, is available at the circulation desk at UM's Carmichael Library and at Montevallo's Parnell Library. Suggested donation of $5.