The names that appeared in the Thomas family also fit this pattern of exceptionalism. Although she was in her forties, which was an advanced age to bear children in the nineteenth century, India had a daughter at some point in the 1880s and named her Ophelia. Like Bruce, Frederick’s middle name, Ophelia was an uncommon name among black Americans in the postbellum South.
Frederick was most likely named after Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became a celebrated abolitionist, author, and statesman. Douglass was widely known throughout the United States starting in the 1850s, and his name would have appealed to black people like the Thomases. A possible source of Frederick’s middle name, one that was quite near at hand, was Blanche K. Bruce. He was a former slave who became a rich landowner in Bolivar County, Mississippi, during the late 1860s, and a politician both there and in Tallahatchie County, before being elected in 1874 to the United States Senate, where he was the first black man to serve a full term. Because Coahoma County shares borders with both Bolivar and Tallahatchie counties—and the latter was very near the Thomas farm—it is possible that the Thomases knew Bruce personally. In later years, Frederick continued to pay considerable attention to the implications of personal names. He always used his middle initial when he signed his name, and often wrote out “Bruce” fully. In Moscow, when he was starting to put down roots, he adopted a typically Russian name and patronymic—Fyodor Fyodorovich. He also kept his first and middle names alive in his family by naming his youngest sons, who were born in Moscow, Frederick Jr. and Bruce.
“Ophelia” suggests evidence of her parents’ unusually broad cultural awareness, or at least that of India, since she was the literate member of the couple. The nearest plausible source for the name was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published in 1852 and became the second biggest best seller in the United States in the nineteenth century, after the Bible. In the novel, Miss Ophelia St. Clare is an admirable secondary character who manages to overcome her northern prejudice against blacks. India might have known of the novel even without having read it because of its fame and notoriety in the South, where slave owners angrily attacked it.
Farming was a family affair out of necessity, and the work it entailed sheds light on how the Thomases lived after they bought their farm and on what Frederick’s childhood was like. During the final third of the nineteenth century, the major cash crop in Coahoma County remained cotton, followed by corn. Clearing the land, plowing and seeding it, weeding the fields until the plants were tall enough to shade the ground, and then picking the cotton and ears of corn when they had ripened and dried sufficiently were chores not only for men and women but also for children, as soon as they were six or seven and big enough to manage a hoe or drag a sack. Everyone had to pitch in with the other tasks as well. Farm families grew their own vegetables, raised chickens and hogs, and kept a milk cow or two if they could afford it. They needed mules, horses, or oxen to pull the plows, to haul the crops, and for other heavy work like ginning the raw cotton and baling it; all the animals had to be fed and watered regularly.
Hunting and fishing were also a part of a farmer’s life in the Delta, for whites and blacks alike, because these were the simplest and cheapest ways to provide meat for the table. At the end of the nineteenth century the woods were full of deer, bears, panthers, wolves, opossums, and many other small animals; there were turkeys, ducks, and other fowl. Catfish, buffalo fish, trout, bowfin, crayfish, alligators, water moccasins, and snapping turtles as big as washtubs filled the waterways. Even after the Civil War, alligators preyed on domestic pigs so regularly that children had to be warned constantly to be on guard lest they be seized too.
The daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms of agricultural labor and life on the edge of a wilderness would have largely determined the world that Frederick knew from earliest childhood. Church and school would have been the most important exceptions, but these probably started later. Most of the year, chores filled the daylight hours, playmates were scarce in the sparsely populated countryside, and amusements would have been whatever one could devise.
A child growing up in the Delta would probably never forget its smells and sounds, because of the way these imprint themselves on one’s consciousness. Smells such as the sweetness of sun-warmed tangles of honeysuckle; the heavy brown aroma of newly turned loam behind a plow in the fields; or the delectable, banana-like scent of the pawpaw tree that sometimes grows on riverbanks. A farm in the Delta was like an island in a vast green sea, and the sounds one heard came mostly from nature. At dawn, the dew-laden air was filled with the cries of mourning doves, the staccato rattle of yellow-headed woodpeckers, and the grating calls of crows that flapped by on heavy wings. During still, hot summer days, the fields would resound with the oscillating buzz of grasshoppers. At dusk, the big-bellied bullfrogs would mark the end of day with a bass chorus that would alternately swell, then fade, while the last mule team trudged back from the fields, and the final, flat, ringing blow of a hammer on a distant anvil dissolved in the growing darkness.
After 1869, the Thomases emerged from the anonymity that typified the lives of most black people in the Delta. As landowners they had to interact with the white power structure of Coahoma County and began to leave traces in governmental records. The consequences of this would be far-reaching for them as well as for several prominent local planters.
During the 1870 United States census, Lewis and Hannah were canvassed for detailed information about their farm production. From this it is known that their exceptionally successful first year’s crop included 48 bales of cotton, each weighing 450 pounds; 250 bushels of sweet potatoes; and 300 pounds of butter. Most of the $5,100 they earned that year came from cotton. In a way that the majority of black people could scarcely imagine, the Thomases had become independent and self-reliant landowners, with their own home, fields, animals, and freedom to set priorities.
They had also started farming on a fairly large scale. The 48 bales they produced indicate that a sizable portion of their land was planted with cotton, perhaps 70 out of 200 acres. Sweet potatoes would have required additional acreage, as would fodder for their animals. The 1870 census recorded that the Thomases owned seven mules or asses, seven working oxen, four milk cows, and six other unspecified “cattle.” Fourteen draft animals were too many for Lewis and Hannah to use by themselves in tilling the land or in ginning and baling the cotton. Moreover, Hannah would have been busy with many other responsibilities, including her children, housekeeping, the milk cows, the vegetable garden, chickens, and the like. From the very beginning of their land ownership, the Thomases could not have managed without either hired hands or sharecroppers to help with the work. For a black family to employ other freedmen was a remarkable change in the normal labor relations in the Delta. And it also made the Thomases stand out in the eyes of their white neighbors.
During the next decade and a half, the Thomases engaged in many land transactions as their fortunes, and the Delta’s economy, waxed and waned. In 1876 they actually lost ownership of their farm for a year because of debts, but they repurchased most of it in 1877. They then gradually built it up to 400 acres in 1880, 504 in 1884, and 625 in 1886. The core of the Thomas property straddled what is now Highway 49, two miles south of Dublin and twelve miles southeast of Clarksdale, where Hopson Bayou comes closest to the road.
As records in the Coahoma Chancery Court show, the Thomases regularly used their land as collateral for loans and as capital to repay debts. Banks were scarce in Coahoma during the 1870s and 1880s, and a farmer who needed cash or supplies before he could sell his current harvest would often mortgage all or part of his land, frequently together with all his farm animals, tools, equipment, and buildings, to a bigger and richer local landowner. Once the farmer sold his crops, he could pay off his mortgage, which, in addition to principal, would include annual interest, usually between 6 and 10 percent a year, and usually for a period from one to three years. Between 1870 and 1886, Lewis signed financial agreements of this kind eight times with five rich, influential white men for sums ranging from $2,600 to $9,600 (the latter would be around $200,000 today), and he often had notes coming due once or even several times a year. In this way, the Thomases’ total acreage varied over the years: they would sell or buy pieces of property as obligations demanded or opportunities allowed.