By Spessard Stone
Today, the media is rampant with reports of accidental deaths by firearms at the hands of children. Over one hundred years ago at the Joshua Creek community in DeSoto County, Florida there occurred a similar event, which is veiled in mystery.
"The 1885 Mortality Schedule" of Manatee County, Florida for June 1, 1884 to May 31, 1885 recorded that Emma Hendry, a 35-year old black female, born in Florida, had died in August 1884 due to an accidental gun shot.
But who was Emma Hendry? Available evidence tends to show she was also known as Emma Hicks and Emma Lanier and was a black servant of the Robert C. "Cab" Hendry family.
In the early 1870s, when John W. Whidden and his brothers-in-law, Charles Hendry and Cab Hendry moved to Joshua Creek, their servants accompanied them. These included Nancy Hicks, born ca. 1817, and her children Lewis, Abigail (born ca. 1859), and Cain. The 1880 census is unclear but Emma Lanier, identified as a 30- year-old mulatto servant, was either living with the Cab Hendry or was in a neighboring household.
On December 22, 1974, while at Joshua Creek Cemetery with other family members, Bessie Wood Burton (1893-1981), a granddaughter of John W. Whidden, in response to queries by Col. Wiliam K. Moran, Jr., her nephew, reminisced about the death of the black servant:
"Who was the black woman you say Mama [Adella Whidden Wood Robertson, mother of Bessie, grandmother of Col. Moran] raised,?" Col. Moran commenced.
"Jeanette," Mrs. Burton answered.
"Jeanette!," he affirmed. "Jeanette, she was a slave girl,?" Col. Moran queried.
"No," Mrs. Burton responded, "She, her great-grandmother was a slave, and then her mother, and she, uh, I forgotten what she. They were playing tricks some way, and, John, oh, I know what. John Hendry came. John Hendry, Uncle Cab's son, came down to their cabin dressed as a ghost to scare them."
"And you know," she continued, "They were scary in those days, and said, 'If you don't come out here, I'm going to shoot you.' Well, she was scared to come out there. And he had a gun and he shot her, but he thought it was unloaded. He was just a boy, thirteen or fourteen years old, and he shot her."
“Where were they living at?," Col. Moran inquired.
"Joshua Creek, right out here," Mrs. Burton answered.
She had always said, 'Now if anything ever happens to me; maybe she had a premonition, she said, "I want Miss Dell [Adella Whidden Wood Robertson] to take Jeanette," and she raises her up."
"And Mama had a store and Belle cooked for her, and Jeanette had a room right by ours, and she made up our beds," Mrs. Burton proceeded, "and wherever we went to play, she went with us. And everywhere we went, Kate [Katherine Whidden Welles, 1894-1962, a first cousin of Bessie] and them."
"Their cook had a girl," she recited. "And, oh, we had swings and would swing with her, and seesaw, and thought nothing of it. They all wore asafetida around their ankles to keep off germs. Phew!"
"What ever became of Jeanette,?" Col. Moran asked.
Mrs. Burton answered: "My grandfather told two of his slaves' sons, who were about six feet four, that the war was over, and he gave each of them an acreage and one hundred head of cattle on the Alafia River. This one didn't marry, and he sent for Jeanette. And I don't know whatever became of her. She inherited what he had, and he was considered pretty well to do. Cain was his name."
"Ab was Jeanette's mother's name, no last name, I guess?" opined Col. Moran.
"No, they always took the people's name," concluded Mrs. Burton."
A slightly different version was related by Pete Hendry, a great-grandson of Charles Hendry, on December 19, 1988:
"My father Eugene Hendry told me that this slave woman Nancy Hicks was killed by the little boys with a rifle while washing at the wash shed down at the branch. The story was that they would poke her with a stick, and 'Bang' and she would act like she was shot. One day an older man rode in on a horse, got off, leaned his rifle up against the wash house, and one of the little boys picked it up and playing put it against Nancy and this time it was for real. "My father didn't say what little boy. It must of been the age group of my grandfather, and the branch must have been Joshua Creek, as Nancy is buried there."
Oral history is often unreliable. The two different versions further compound the conundrum as the Burton-Moran account has the slain woman as Ab while the Hendry report has her as Nancy Hicks. Furthermore, there is no record that the family slaves, freed by the end of the Civil War, moved to the Alafia River. Lewis Hicks, for instance, was only about twelve years old in 1865 and as late as 1880 was living in the Pine Level area.
No definite conclusions can now be verified, but these observations are offered:
"Ab was Jeanette's mother's name, no last name, I guess?" Col. Moran queried. If, indeed, Ab was Jeanette's mother then the mystery would appear to be solved with Ab being Abigail Hicks, daughter of Nancy Hicks and the mother of Jeanette, but the "Mortality Schedule" recorded Emma Hendry as the gun shot victim.
Buried in Joshua Creek Cemetery in a family plot in undated graves are Emma Hicks, Aunt Nance Hicks, and Abby Hicks. Emma Hicks' relation to the other Hicks women is uncertain, perhaps an in-law.
Cab Hendry did have a son, John Parker Milton Hendry, born December 1877. If he was thirteen or fourteen at the time of the incident, it would be 1890-92. Jeanette was born in February 1889, so the early 1890s was most likely when Abby died, and, if so, she was not the woman killed in 1884.
True to her word, Della took the orphan as Jeanette, as a servant, was living with Della Wood and her three children, Harry, Bessie and Lillian, when the 1900 census of DeSoto County was e numerated in July 1900.
In conclusion, in August 1884, Emma Hendry, also known as Emma Lanier and Emma Hicks, died from an accidental gun shot; how- ever, if oral tradition is factual, then "Ab" who, most likely, was Abigail "Abby" Hicks also died in a similar mishap, which seems highly improbable. Most likely is that the death of Emma and that of Jeanette's mother became confused with the passage of time.
This article was published in The Herald-Advocate (Wauchula, Fla.) of August 11, 1994.
February 28, 2001& links = October 17, 2001& May 6, 2002, midi = "Hard Is the Fortune of all Womankind," arranged by Mary Tipton.