Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...making malt whiskey and selling it to the survivors of the Iroqois Five Nations, and nobody would care until the night when Jaybird Bell, liquored up on his own hooch, killed a man in a knife fight. Then he would have to flee, back across the line into western Virginia, up into one of those hollows where a man had kin. The only excitement of the trip, made in mid-winter on horseback, was that it would kill the two children he had even while his wife gave birth to another, whom Jaybird named William McLean Bell, after...
...when those hill people in 1861 seceded from Virginia, herself seceded from the Union of Abraham Lincoln, William Bell would be offered a commission by the Restored Government of Virginia, by his own governor Francis Boreman and the legislature that met at Wheeling, despite the eye he had lost in a fight that followed a poker game in Martinsburg, because it was acknowledged that William Bell knew every backroad and trail in the state. A commission he would turn down, because unlike most of the people of the new state caught in the grip of the third Great Awakening William...
Ralph Bell finished his studies at Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School and settled down in that same old house, even though nobody gave him any business after that day in 1955 when he stood on the steps of the county court house and vowed that Kanawha County schools would goddam well integrate; two years later his son Thomas Scott Bell was born and Ralph still slept with a pistol under his blanket, the same one he would use to blow his brains out with, six months to the day after taking out $250,000 insurance policy that...
...received a reply from Grand Dragon J.L. Baskin, a retired Methodist minister whose Klan realm included West Virginia; Baskin encouraged Byrd to organize his own klavern of 150 members. He did just that and was then unanimously elected Exalted Cyclops, the group's leader. Impressed, the Grand Dragon told Byrd: "These people believe in you. You ought to set your cap for Congress...
Byrd then bought his own grocery store in Sophia, W. Va., and started earning credits for a bachelor's degree at three different West Virginia colleges. In 1952 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. "There was no time for leisure, no time for anything but work, work," says Byrd...