A constant feature of Lewis’s efforts, and India’s as well, judging by her active role when things began to go badly for them, was trying to increase the size and profitability of the farm. Lewis even tried to branch out beyond farming by setting up a steam-powered sawmill on his land with a white English emigrant as a partner in 1873. This initiative is notable because it foreshadows what Frederick would discover years later in London—the English did not impose a color line on black Americans.
As Frederick was growing up, he could not have missed hearing about his parents’ business dealings. These transactions were frequent; people on a farm lived in tight quarters; and children are always curious. Even a vague awareness of his parents’ financial plans and deals would have given him a sense of life broader than an endless cycle of labor, food, and sleep—a sense that very few other blacks in the Delta would ever get. Frederick never returned to rural life or farming after he left Mississippi. However, he also never gave up the idea that true success was defined by growth. This may have been a commonplace of American enterprise and capitalism in general, but it is also something that he witnessed at home as a child.
However, material gain was not the only thing that moved Lewis and India. In 1879, they made a dramatic change in their own lives and in the life of the black community in the Hopson Bayou neighborhood by donating land to establish a new church. In light of how few blacks owned any land in Coahoma County, the Thomases’ donation demonstrated their unusual generosity. This initiative would also have done much to expand Frederick’s worldview and sense of life’s possibilities.
Before and during the Civil War, it was common for slaves to attend their masters’ churches. Afterward, the sweeping changes in the social order led whites to refuse to let the newly emancipated blacks participate in the life of their churches, and freedmen either left their old congregations or were expelled. On June 14, 1879, the Thomases sold three-quarters of an acre of their land on the west side of Hopson Bayou to the African Methodist Episcopal Church for the token sum of one dollar. It may have been India’s initiative even more than Lewis’s because, typically, the mother in a black family took a special interest in spiritual matters, and India’s signature accompanies Lewis’s “X” on the deed. When it was built, the Thomas Chapel, as it became known, was probably a small log cabin, like virtually all new buildings in Coahoma County in those days, including the residences of planters. It was also one of the earliest A.M.E. churches established in the county after the “mother,” Bethel A.M.E. Church in Friars Point.
It was not the first church in the Hopson Bayou neighborhood, however, and the initiative that the Thomases made toward their fellow freedmen may well have struck whites in the area as presumptuous because, once again, the Thomases were standing out. The Cherry Hill Methodist Church, around which the town of Dublin eventually grew, and which was two miles northwest of the Thomas Chapel, had been there since the 1850s. Lewis would have known it because its congregation included his former owners, the three Cheairs brothers, and their extended family. In fact, it is quite possible that Lewis and Hannah had attended the Cherry Hill Church with their masters, but that they had been excluded from it after the Civil War.
The churches in rural Mississippi typically extended their role far beyond worship and served local residents as gathering places for various purposes, including entertainment, politics, and especially education. The 1880 United States census indicates that Frederick and his brothers Yancy and John attended school during the previous year. It is likely that the boys’ school shared space with the church their parents helped found; it is possible that India taught there. The boys’ school “year” would typically not have lasted more than four months, thus leaving them free to help on their parents’ farm the rest of the time. In a small one-room country school such as this, children would have been grouped in different corners by approximate age and ability (in 1879, Yancy was around seventeen, John was ten, and Frederick was seven). All would have been taught by one teacher, and education would not have gone beyond the third or fourth grade.
If the Thomas Chapel was also used as a school, it was probably the first one in the area for black children. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, a federal agency established in 1865 for the purpose of aiding newly freed blacks, had originally been charged with organizing schools in the South, in addition to providing various other forms of assistance. When southern state legislatures took over their black school systems, funding was cut and some schools were closed. As a result, in 1880 only one in four black boys aged ten and over was literate, in comparison with four out of five for southern whites. Frederick and his brothers were in very select black company in the Delta by virtue of their schooling as well as their parents’ land ownership and social leadership.
The Thomas family’s prominence, however, would also be the cause of its ruin. The second major turning point in their lives again involved their farm but it was, unfortunately, for the worse.
Early in 1886, at a time when the annual cycle of cotton farming had come to a close, William H. Dickerson, a rich and well-known white landowner in Coahoma County, showed up at the Thomases’ farm. Seeing him arrive would not have surprised Lewis and India, because they had had regular business dealings with him during the past eight years. They had borrowed money from him twice (and once from his father) by mortgaging their property in the usual fashion. As they saw it, their relationship with Dickerson was based on friendship and honesty. They had paid off all their notes on time, a fact that Dickerson had officially acknowledged. They also trusted Dickerson to such an extent that over the years they had relied on him to keep accurate accounts for them of the numbers of bales of cotton they delivered to him for sale and of the various goods and supplies they received from him.
This time, Dickerson’s visit was not a friendly one. He showed Lewis and India a wad of papers he claimed were letters from other white landowners in the area who had written to him, and then began to read extracts aloud. The Thomases’ neighbors complained that Lewis “had become very obnoxious” to them “because of his ownership of property to a considerable amount.” They did not want Lewis “to reside among them” any longer and, knowing Dickerson’s long-standing relations with Lewis, warned Dickerson “to close out” his business dealings with Lewis.
Dickerson then revealed his second reason for the visit and began to play the double role he had apparently intended all along. First, he underscored the implied threat in the letters by stressing that it was “dangerous” for the Thomases to remain on their farm. Lewis and India would have understood very well what this meant. Then Dickerson delivered his second blow. He announced that Lewis and India owed him nearly $13,000. This was a very large sum for the time, the equivalent of roughly $300,000 in today’s money. Dickerson told them they had accumulated this debt over a number of years and he was ready to seize their personal property and to have it sold to satisfy the debt. Then he got to what was presumably his motive all along. Playing on their supposed friendship, Dickerson suggested “an amicable settlement.” If Lewis signed a deed transferring the entire 625-acre farm and all the Thomases’ personal property to him, Dickerson would give Lewis $2,000 plus “two good mules and a wagon.” In other words, Dickerson would provide the Thomases the means to escape with their lives and a stake to start over somewhere else in exchange for everything they owned. He thus cunningly tried to present himself as their “savior.” To cinch the argument, Dickerson then reminded Lewis that if his property was sold for his debts, the sum realized might be less than the amount due and Lewis not only would be penniless but would have a “large debt hanging over him.”