Chapter Fifteen · Grace
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GRACE
Nobody had ever gone through the scrapbook.
“When the front of the file gives you nothing,” Ada says, “go to the back of the file and look at the thing nobody catalogued as evidence.”
The notebooks are the thing. Pike Danner kept a running record of this county from 1979 to 2022 and it convicted a man, and every visitor who signs that log wants the notebooks and Evelyn Barnes hands them the notebooks, and at the bottom of that footlocker under the notebooks there is a scrapbook that belonged to Pike’s mother.
Newspaper clippings. Church programs. A ration book. Two funeral cards. The kind of thing a woman kept in 1936 and pasted into a ledger with flour paste because paper was worth keeping.
Ada Grier went through it on the eleventh of August because Ada goes through everything, and she called me at 7:40 in the morning, and she did not say hello.
“Grace. What was the newspaper in Blackthorn County in 1937?”
“The Blackthorn Recorder.”
“No it wasn’t,” Ada said.
I want to lay this out the way I laid it out for the club, because everything that comes after rests on it and because I have had to explain it about forty times since and I have gotten it down to a page.
A tax sale is a taking. The government seizes a person’s land and sells it, and the only thing that makes that lawful instead of theft is process. Notice, in the manner the statute requires, so that the owner has the chance to come pay and keep his ground.
In 1937, in Virginia, the required notice for a delinquent land sale was publication. The treasurer certified the list, the clerk published it in a newspaper published in the county, once a week for a set number of weeks, and then the sale went forward on the courthouse steps.
Publication is not a formality. It is the jurisdictional fact.
If notice was not given as the statute required, the sale is void.
Not voidable, not curable, not fixed by the passage of time.
Void, meaning it never happened, meaning the deed that came out of it conveyed nothing, meaning every deed that ever came out of that deed conveyed nothing.
The 1937 tax deed to Cardwell Land and Timber recites, as such deeds do, that notice was published in the Blackthorn Recorder on four consecutive weeks in September and October of 1937.
In the scrapbook of a woman who died in 1961, pasted onto a page with two church programs and a photograph of a hog, is a clipping about four inches long.
It is from the Blackthorn Recorder. It is dated the tenth of September, 1936. And it is the paper’s own notice to its subscribers that with that issue, after twenty-five years, the Recorder was suspending publication.
Under it, in pencil, in a woman’s hand: last one. Hate it.
Ada read the clipping to me over the phone twice and then said, “Grace, I need to say the careful version before you get excited, because I can hear you getting excited.”
“Say it.”
“This is a clipping in a scrapbook. It is not a record of anything. A paper suspending in September of ’36 does not tell us there was no paper in ’37, and it does not tell us there was no other paper, and it does not tell us the clerk didn’t publish in a Roanoke paper or a Fincastle paper, which was lawful in some circumstances and I do not yet know the 1937 statute cold.
” Ada is the only person alive who lectures me.
“So before you say one word of this to that club, you are going to let me spend two weeks proving there was no newspaper published in these mountains in 1937, and I am going to do it the boring way.”
She was right, and I let her, and it took three weeks, and everything I say in the rest of this chapter rests on those three weeks and not on a clipping.
I did not tell anybody for four days except Ada, and I want to explain why, because Cinder asked me later and it is a fair question.
A newspaper suspending publication in September 1936 does not prove that no newspaper existed in this county in 1937. It suggests it. It is a clipping in a scrapbook, and a clipping is not a record, and a suspension is not a death; papers suspend and resume all the time, especially in the thirties.
What would prove it is the bound volumes.
I asked Charity Teague on the fifteenth of August whether the fire hall had anything old in it besides the cabinet.
She said, “You mean the newspapers?”
I put my coffee down.
“Ms. Whitmore, there’s four shelves of bound newspapers in the back of the equipment bay behind the compressor. They been there my whole life. My daddy used to say don’t ever throw them out and I never asked why and neither did anybody else.” She was already getting her keys. “Come on.”
They are in a metal cabinet with two doors, seven feet tall, painted the same gray as everything else in that building, standing against the block wall behind the compressor where you cannot see it unless you go looking.
Inside are twenty-six bound volumes of the Blackthorn Recorder, one per year, 1911 through 1936.
The last volume ends on the tenth of September, 1936.
There is nothing after it. There is no 1937 volume.
There is no 1938 volume. There is no Blackthorn Recorder after the tenth of September, 1936, in the fire hall, in the courthouse, in the Library of Virginia’s holdings, or in the microfilm at Radford, and Ada checked all four over the following three weeks.
Taped inside the left-hand door of that cabinet, on a piece of index card gone the color of weak tea, in a man’s handwriting, is this:
These are the county’s. Chief T. R. Voyles began burning them for kindling January 1961 and found his father in the issue of March 8, 1919. Stopped. Kept.
Charity Teague read that card out loud and then sat down on an upturned milk crate behind a compressor and put her hands over her face.
I called Wrench Sullivan from behind that compressor at ten minutes past four in the afternoon, standing on a milk crate to get a signal, and I said four words, which is the only time in my life I have matched him.
“It was never printed.”
He did not answer for a second.
“Then the fire hall’s got it,” he said.
“That is exactly what Charity just said.”
“I know it,” Wrench said. “I been saying that building’s the piece since March and couldn’t tell nobody why, and now I know why, and I’d give a good deal to be wrong.”
“Sixty-seven years,” she said. “A man quit burning them because he found his daddy.”
“Yes.”
“And they been setting behind a air compressor ever since because don’t nobody in Blackthorn County ever throw nothing away.” She took her hands down. “Ms. Whitmore, is this it?”
“Charity, if there is no newspaper published in these mountains in 1937, then the notice recited in that deed could not have been given, and the sale of eleven hundred and forty acres was void, and it has been void every single day since before either of us was born.”
She looked at the cabinet.
“Then the fire hall’s got it,” she said. “The thing that says who this ground belongs to has been setting in the fire hall the whole time.”
I told the club on the nineteenth of August and I told the county at the fire hall on the twenty-fourth, four hundred and forty people, and both times I said the same eleven-word sentence first, and I had written it and rewritten it and it is the best sentence I have ever built.
“I have found something and it does not help us.”
Then I laid it out. The clipping. The volumes. The card in the cabinet door. The statutory requirement. What void means.
And then the part I had spent nine days getting right.
“If I am correct, then no one in this room owns their house. Not one of you. Not the county, not the church, not the fire department, not me. Every deed under this floor comes out of a sale that never lawfully happened, and the only people on this earth with a legal claim to eleven hundred and forty acres of Blackthorn County are the heirs of Isaiah Ambrose, wherever they are.”
The bay was silent for a good while.
Then a man in the back, and I have never learned which one, said, “Well, how do we fix it so it don’t count?”
And I said, “You don’t.”
“There’s got to be some kind of a law where it’s been long enough.”
“There is,” I said, “and I have looked at it every way there is to look at it, and I am not going to stand up here and give this county a hope I cannot support. Adverse possession does not run against a void deed the way people think it does when the possession began under color of a taking. There are doctrines. There are arguments. Any of them might work, and a court might hand this county its own ground back on a Tuesday afternoon in about four years and nine hundred thousand dollars.” I put my hands on the lectern.
“And every one of those arguments has the same shape, which is: it has been long enough that we should get to keep it.”
Charity Teague stood up in the fourth row.
“Say the rest,” she said.
“The rest is that in 1937 a family here was taxed out of eleven hundred and forty acres by a sale that appears to have been unlawful on its face, and in 1938 every one of them left, and this county has spent ninety-one years living on that ground and not one of us ever asked. And now that it is finally useful to us, I could stand up here and build you an argument about how much time has passed.” I made myself say it slowly.
“I will build that argument if this county tells me to. I will build it well. But somebody in this room needs to say aloud what it is, because it is the same argument the man in Charlotte is going to make, word for word, and if we make it first we do not get to be angry when he makes it too.”
Cinder Sullivan stood up out of the second row.
“We ain’t making it,” he said.
“Cinder, you should not decide that for four hundred people in a room.”
“I ain’t deciding it.” He turned around and faced the bay. “I’m asking it. Same as May. Anybody in here wants to stand up and say we ought to run the clock and keep the ground, this is the room and now’s the time, and there’s no shame in it and I’ll shake your hand after.”
Four hundred and forty people. Nine of them had sold their land in the spring. Six households on the Coleman road had not spoken to each other since May. It was hot in that bay and it was twenty past eight at night.
Nobody stood up.
“All right,” Cinder said. “Then here’s the county’s position and it’s the same as May, only now it’s got a price on it. We find them. We tell them what we found before we ask them for one thing. And whatever comes of that comes of it.”
He looked at me.
“Ms. Whitmore. How do we find them?”
And I said the truest thing I had.
“Slowly,” I said, “and about a year later than the man who has been reading the same records I have.”
“Then tell us how, and tell it so a fella can do it Saturday,” Cinder said, “because four hundred people are fixing to walk out of here wanting a job.”
So I gave them jobs, and I had them ready, because I have never once walked into a room with bad news and no work.
“Four lines,” I said. “One. Everything Isaiah Ambrose ever recorded in this courthouse, back to the beginning, and I want every name in every one of those instruments, because a man’s neighbors and his witnesses and the men who signed his deeds are a map of his family. That is Ada and the vault crew.
“Two. The church. There was a church at the Gap and there were funerals in it and Lorna’s mother went to one in 1931, and a church has a book. Somebody find out which denomination and where its records went when it closed, because they went somewhere, they always go somewhere.
“Three. The school. There was a school for those children and a school has a register, and Virginia kept school census records by county, and those are in Richmond.
“Four, and this is the one that will actually work.” I looked out at that bay.
“The 1940 census. If a family left this county in 1938, they were somewhere in 1940 and a man with a clipboard wrote down where. It is fully indexed and any of you can search it from a telephone tonight, and I want everybody in this room who has ever looked up their own people to spend one hour on this instead.”
Charity Teague said, “What do we do if we find them?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You bring it to me and you do not write to anybody, and you do not call anybody, and you do not knock on one door. These are people, not a lead. When somebody talks to that family it is going to be one time and it is going to be done right.”