‘We Had Some Land . . . ‘ but Oil Brought Trouble

“I need to know who I am, where I come from.”

It was Memorial Day 1997, and Edward Lee was sitting on a worn sofa in a worn house in Jackson. He was talking to an old man with a raspy drawl and a pacemaker--his grandfather, Edgar Lee.

They hadn’t seen each other in three years. Edward Lee had been living in California and Texas and had lost touch with most of his relatives. They had left Mississippi long ago, scattered north and west.

He was 35 now, separated from his wife. He had no job, no kids, no house, no roots.

“Please, Grandpa, tell me who I am.”

Edgar Lee gave his grandson a long, hard look. Then his eyes fluttered shut and memories flooded back. . . .

Spanish moss . . . an auburn horse . . . a cabin in flames. . . .

“We had some land,” the old man said, “and they discovered oil on it.”

Edgar Lee pulled out a creased photograph of a slender man in ragged overalls sitting in front of a cabin with a crooked front porch.

“That’s your great-great-grandaddy, Sie Lee,” Edgar Lee said. “That’s the old home place.”

And then, as his grandson remembered it later, Edgar Lee began a tale of klansmen and oilmen, of midnight fires and murder.

When he finished his story, Edgar Lee stood up.

“Now that you know,” he told his grandson, “do something about this.”

What happened to the Lee family has happened to others. The Associated Press, in a series of stories published in December, reported a pattern in which black Americans were cheated out of their family land or driven from it through intimidation, violence, even murder. The AP documented 107 such land-takings and located thousands of additional cases that have yet to be investigated.

Behind every land-taking is a human story. This is one of them.

Throughout the summer of 1920, Edgar Lee’s father, Anderson, slept in the woods with a shotgun.

It was a routine Edgar Lee could recount in detail 80 years later: At nightfall, his father would tuck in his four sons, whisper good night to Edgar’s mother, Melvina, and his grandfather, Sie Lee, then slip out the back door and into the buzzing blackness.

The seven of them lived in a three-room log cabin surrounded by pine forests south of Paulding. The land had been in the family since the early 1890s, when Sie Lee arrived from Alabama.

The earth was rocky, but the deacon and his wife earned a living by cutting timber and raising pigs, chickens and cows.

Then, in the fall of 1908, geologists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture stumbled onto something that would change their destiny.

Beneath eastern Jasper County was a basin of light crude. The oil was deep--so deep that the oilmen couldn’t reach it. Not yet.

After word of the discovery seeped out, trouble started.

Black farmers in the area found it harder than usual to get loans, Edgar Lee remembered. They were paid less than ever for their crops and could no longer get credit at supply stores. Some lost their farms.

Other pressure was less subtle.

What Edgar Lee saw and heard as a 10-year-old boy one May night in 1920 was forever trapped in his memory: Galloping horses, torches, hooded men at the cabin door, a shout.

“Where’s Anderson?”

“He’s gone,” Anderson’s wife replied. “Out in the woods.”

The klansmen laughed.

“We’ll be back.”

They returned each week, Edgar said.

So Anderson Lee would sleep in the woods, returning at sunrise. His wife would check him for lice and ticks before breakfast. A few times, he returned to find his children staring at a cross ablaze in the yard.

Finally, the family left their land and fled to nearby Moss Hill. One night, their cabin there went up in flames. They built a third cabin in the forest a few miles south of Paulding. They didn’t dare return to their farm.

The Ku Klux Klan was never far away. Edgar Lee’s aunt, a housemaid, sometimes found herself washing and pressing their robes and hoods.

In the late summer of 1924, the klan came calling again.

“We was sleeping,” Edgar Lee recalled. “I heard my momma screaming. The house--it was falling in on us. Then I remember standing outside, watching the fire eat it up.”

This time, the family scattered.

Anderson Lee ran all the way to the Delta, leaving behind his wife and children, who moved to a white landowner’s farm. Sie Lee moved to another part of Jasper County and worked as a sharecropper until his death in 1951.

In 1930, Edgar Lee married and moved to Laurel. He never saw his father again. In 1931, Anderson Lee’s body was found in a barn on a Delta plantation, a bullet in his chest.

By then, the Lee property had fallen into other hands.

*

Paulding had long been the Jasper County seat. In 1906, however, a second seat was established in Bay Springs, in the western, predominantly white, half of the county. That year, land records for western Jasper were transferred to Bay Springs.

So when 15 whites set fire to the Paulding courthouse on Sept. 10, 1932, only the records for the mostly black section burned.

According to the Jasper County News, the door to the records vault had, as always, been locked the night before. The next morning, the newspaper said, it was wide open.

Property records for thousands of acres of farms and timberland--some of it with oil lying deep beneath--were mostly ashes.

All of a sudden, there were no documents to prove who owned what land.

One of the biggest landowners was Masonite Corp, a wood-products company founded in 1925 in neighboring Jones County. Five years after the fire, William H. Mason, company vice president, asked the court to clear its title to 9,581 acres in Jasper County.

In court papers, the company said it had “exhausted every potential source,” but had found no rival claimants to the land. Less than a month later, on Jan. 11, 1938, the Chancery Court declared Masonite the “real owner” of the land.

Sixty years later, Edward Lee entered the Paulding courthouse to search for his family’s lost land. He left defeated. The two-hour drive back to Jackson felt like a 10-hour haul.

“I got bad news,” he told his grandfather. “That courthouse burned in 1932. There probably aren’t any records of Sie Lee owning any land.”

“Who says so?”

“The court clerk.”

“Go back there, son, and look for yourself.”

*

Edward Lee spent days inside the musty courthouse vault. In the back were some charred books--a handful of volumes that had survived the fire. In one, he spotted something that made his heart leap.

It was a deed of trust, dated March 3, 1910. Sie Lee, listed as the owner of a 180-acre tract, was putting it up as collateral for a $350 loan. An attached stub, dated April 1, 1913, said he had repaid the debt in full. It was signed by the lenders, two local white businessmen.

With property coordinates from the document, Lee tracked the land as it was leased, bought and sold. He discovered two paper trails: One for a 40-acre tract, the other for 140 acres.

Edward Lee started by tracking the 40-acre parcel. He discovered that it had been claimed by J.H. Abney, one of the white lenders, just three months after the klan ran off the Lees.

According to records that survived the fire, Abney used the 40 acres as collateral in December 1924 for a $1,500 loan from the Bank of Pachuta, a local branch of a federal land bank run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is not clear what gave Abney a right to the land, and records indicate he never repaid the loan.

Records show that Abney did not pay taxes on the land in the early 1930s. They were paid, instead, by his brother-in-law, a state chancery court judge named Stone Deavours.

The Bank of Pachuta foreclosed on Abney and conveyed the land to another man who sold it to Masonite on Aug. 5, 1937. The 40 acres were among the 9,581 to which Masonite received clear title when it petitioned the court four months later.

Masonite, which became a subsidiary of International Paper Corp. in 1988, still has title. Jenny Boardman, an International Paper spokeswoman, said the company did not know the history of the land but was concerned when told about it.

Tracking the other 140 acres was trickier. There were no surviving records of transactions involving the land between 1913, when Sie Lee paid off his loan, and 1936, when records suddenly show the Bank of Pachuta as owner.

The bank’s receiver “quit-claimed” the property--sold it without a guarantee of title--to a member of his family, on June 23, 1936.

Here, the trail turned muddy.

One index said that on March 11, 1941, the state of Mississippi conveyed the land to a businessman. The sale was never signed or notarized, and was not filed until Oct. 13, 1972.

How had the state acquired title? Edward Lee asked the Mississippi public lands division. The agency replied in a 1998 letter that the state had acquired the land from Abney for taxes on Sept. 20, 1937.

But how could this be if, as the courthouse records had shown, the bank owned it in 1936 and quit-claimed it that year to J. N. Horne? The Associated Press checked county deed records, land indexes and court proceedings and found no evidence that Horne sold the land to Abney or anyone else. There were no records showing that Abney owned the property in 1937.

Edward Lee kept tracking the 140 acres. After several sales, the land was acquired in 1963 by the Hall Bros. Lumber Co., a Masonite subsidiary, which still owns it today.

“We had some land . . . ,” Edgar Lee had said, and now his grandson had accounted for 180 acres. But Edward Lee was not through.

In his search, he had stumbled across a third paper trail.

*

Court records showed the Lee family had lost a lawsuit over acreage that bordered Sie Lee’s 180-acre farm.

In 1951, the year Sie Lee died, Willie B. Vaughn, a black man, claimed that his family was heir to 120 acres that had been owned by his grandparents, Giles and Clara Vaughn.

The Lee family contended some of it was theirs. After Giles Vaughn died in 1900, Clara married her divorced neighbor, Sie Lee. He eventually survived Clara, and as spouse, was entitled to part of her 120-acre estate--a 20% interest--the Lees argued.

The judge who presided over the 1951 case was Jack Deavours, whose father, Stone Deavours, had once paid taxes on some of Sie Lee’s lost land. The judge ignored the marriage issue and awarded the entire 120-acre tract to the Vaughns on grounds that they had been living on it for 50 years. Willie Vaughn later sold some of the land for an unspecified amount.

Edward Lee copied these documents and returned to Jackson to show them to his grandfather. Edgar Lee chuckled. In 1972, the old man recalled, Getty Oil Co. paid each member of the Lee family $100 to sign an oil lease on the disputed land. (The company apparently was protecting itself from the possibility of the Lees’ reviving their claim to the property.) The leases remain on file at the Paulding courthouse.

By the 1960s, technological advances made it possible to extract the oil that lay deep beneath Jasper County, a region that has since yielded more than 12 million barrels of oil, according to state records.

The old Vaughn and Lee properties, by the 1960s almost entirely in the hands of white families and Masonite, produced at least 850,000 barrels, state oil and gas board records show.

Edward Lee now knew his family’s estate once totaled 204.5 acres. He brought copies of the records to his grandfather in 1998.

Edgar Lee had never learned to read. Seeing the stack of papers, however, the old man smiled. He was proud of his grandson, though he had no illusions.

“I believe we own the land,” he said. “But I don’t never believe they’ll ever pay us back for it.”

*

On Aug. 11, 2000, Edgar Lee died of heart failure at 89.

Edward Lee, now 40, operates a floor-cleaning business and lives in Memphis with his girlfriend and their 10-month-old daughter. He says he contacted 14 lawyers and each refused his request for help.

The AP verified all the tax, court, census and corporate documents Lee had collected.

For three decades, Masonite and others have received royalties for oil from the former Lee and Vaughn property.

According to records at the Mississippi State Oil and Gas Board, the Lees have received nothing.