{"id":10028,"date":"2010-11-11T22:26:31","date_gmt":"2010-11-11T22:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=10028"},"modified":"2014-04-17T02:21:51","modified_gmt":"2014-04-17T02:21:51","slug":"rachel-knight-slave-white-man%e2%80%99s-mistress-and-mother-to-a-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=10028","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Knight: Slave, White Man\u2019s Mistress and Mother to a Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rachel Knight: Slave, White Man\u2019s Mistress and Mother to a Movement<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Johnathon Odell: Discovering Our Stories
\n2010-09-20<\/p>\n

John Odell<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rachel\u2019s Children<\/em><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but think of the Old Testament Abraham<\/a> when I hear stories about Newt Knight<\/a>. Both men sired children by a wife and a slave. In Newt\u2019s case it was Serena and Rachel. With Abraham, Sara and Hagar. According to religious texts, one of these women went on to become the matriarch of God\u2019s chosen people. Exactly which one, depends on what you happen to be reading, your Bible or your Koran. Jews and Christians claim the wife Sarah and Muslims claim the handmaiden Hagar. Several Crusades were launched trying to settle that matter.<\/p>\n

In Jones County<\/a>, there\u2019s always been a fierce crusade of competing stories about Rachel, the white account versus the black account. Like most stories, the white interpretation gets written down and called history, while the black story gets handed down by word-of-mouth and called folklore.<\/p>\n

Growing up as a white boy, I swore by Ethel Knight\u2019s written-down version. According to her, Rachel was a light-skinned temptress with blue-green eyes and flowing chestnut hair. But evil as the day is long. Ethel alternately calls her a vixen, a witch, a conjure woman, a murderer and a strumpet.<\/p>\n

Serena, Newt\u2019s white wife, is but an innocent captive, forced a gunpoint to live in this den of iniquity, and like Newt, powerless as Rachel\u2019s sorcery wrecked and degraded their family.<\/p>\n

As a child of Jim Crow<\/a>, this narrative satisfied my budding sensibilities about race. In my white-bubble world, there could never be any possibility of true love or affection between a white man and a black woman. Nor would any white man sire children by a black woman and then choose to live amongst his mixed-race offspring. Unless of course, the black woman had either seduced him unmercifully or mysteriously conjured him, or both. It just wasn\u2019t possible that he actually loved her, or her children.<\/p>\n

Imagine my surprise when I heard, as they say, \u201cthe rest of the story.\u201d It was as shocking as sitting down in church and listening to the preacher get up and declare from the pulpit that Abraham\u2019s birthright went to Hagar\u2019s kid Ishmael, instead of Sarah\u2019s son, Isaac, and it was we Christians who were the infidels!\u00a0 Boy would that turn some peoples world upside down!…<\/p>\n

Read the entire essay here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Knight: Slave, White Man\u2019s Mistress and Mother to a Movement Johnathon Odell: Discovering Our Stories 2010-09-20 John Odell Rachel\u2019s Children I can\u2019t help but think of the Old Testament Abraham when I hear stories about Newt Knight. Both men sired children by a wife and a slave. In Newt\u2019s case it was Serena and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[459,8,1459,6940,20,25],"tags":[3876,1457,1456,3884,4374],"class_list":["post-10028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media-archive","category-mississippi","category-slavery","category-usa","category-women","tag-john-odell","tag-newt-knight","tag-newton-knight","tag-piney-woods","tag-rachel-knight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}