Elder Greene is (gone), Elder Greene is gone
Gone way down the country with his long coat on
Elder Greene told the deacon, let's go down in prayer
It's a big ‘ssociation at New Orleans, come and let's go there
Don't you leave me here, don't you leave me here
Lord I don't care where in world you go, don't you leave me here
I like to fuss and fight, I like to fuss and fight
Lord and get sloppy drunk off a bottled in bond and walk the streets all night
Elder Greene told the deacon, let's go down in prayer
You can find highway robber on the road somewhere
Charley Patton “Elder Greene Blues” (Paramount 12972B)
Recorded in October 1929 in Grafton, Wisconsin
This article came out of a question someone posted on a country blues message board, someone recently asked, “Has anyone ever asked or investigated if the ‘Elder Greene’ from Charley Patton's song was an actual historical person?” At one time, some record collectors assumed that Patton had been to every town and known every character mentioned in his songs. In an early article from 78 Quarterly, Stephen Calt takes on the persona of “Jacques Roche” and explains that Son House suspected that “the proper names which abound in Patton’s blues, right down to ELDER GREEN, were faked,” or invented.[i] Patton, however, “would hardly have had to fake his ‘Elder Green’ piece,” as Bob Groom subsequently pointed out, because “it was already in common use” at time of the blues singer’s October 1929 recording session in Grafton, Wisconsin. The most intriguing research on the subject thusfar comes from the recorded interviews and research notes of Gayle Dean Wardlow. In one 1968 interview in Greenwood with Booker Miller, Wardlow relays that some believed that Elder Green was a real-life preacher from Memphis, whose vice was games of chance. To avoid encountering his congregation or family, Wardlow added, the supposed elder used to come down and take care of his gambling jones in the Delta.[ii] While he offers a very unique tale, the much more interesting elements of the interview come in the reactions and responses of Miller. As Wardlow speaks the words “Elder Green,” Miller immediately recognizes the term and associates it with the repertoire of Blind Lemon Jefferson, who—like many other artists--did indeed record a song about the alleged reprobate preacher.[iii] Miller, however, recalled it from somewhere else; it definitely rang a bell. “That must have been before my time,” he admitted, “I can hear my father and grandfather talk[ing] about something like that.” He tried to tell him that he needed to look a bit deeper into the past, a bit deeper into the folk culture of earlier generations in the Delta.
“Most likely,” contends Stephen Calt in Barrelhouse Words, the term “Elder Green” is the “personification of a preacher or lay preacher, deriving from green-apron, a term for lay preacher of 17th century vintage, or lady green, a thieves’ term for a clergyman.”[iv] For his lifelong endeavor to understand the meanings behind all of the slang used on blues records, Calt consulted John Farmer and W.E. Henley’s Slang and its Analogues, first published in seven volumes between 1890 and 1904. Though neither of the London-based authors spent much time in the United States, they were leading lights in literary circles and provided relevant information for a host of terms later found in blues. Renowned blues scholar Paul Oliver, also from Britain, in his 1984 monograph Songsters and Saints, demonstrates that “Elder Greene Blues” has close affinities to the version of “Alabama Bound” collected by Gates Thomas, in which “the wayward elder sheds his religious obligations to indulge in more worldly pleasures.”[v] The fictional Elder Green, in this sense, served as a tool for the blues singer to provide social commentary on the “hypocrisy riddling the church,” and this interpretation of Patton’s “Elder Green Blues” has been widely accepted over the years. David Evans and Luigi Monge embrace the contentions of Oliver and take them a step further in suggesting that Elder Greene was in the pentecostal or “sanctified” church, in which ministers known for their highly emotional style of worship and were often called “Elder.” Many folks in old-line churches ridiculed the “saints” or “holy rollers” and circulated all sorts of rumors about the pastors in these so-called cults.[vi] Monge even locates an Elder Green living in Greenwood, Mississippi around 1909--when “Alabama Bound” was first popularized.[vii] He admits that there is no way to determine whether or not he is the subject of the folk song.
The folk culture of African Americans in the South produced two gendered cultural constructs, the Bad Negro and Bruh Rabbit, both of which are useful in analyzing the legacy of our Elder Green from the Delta. While having their origins in traditional African society, each of the cultural prototypes were constructed during slavery, remained active under Jim Crow, and continue to demonstrate their resiliency in the contemporary experience of African Americans.[viii] The individual and informal acts of resistance that reinforce these cultural constructs also supported the maintenance of an insurgent black consciousness in an era when accommodation was a dominant ideology in African American communities in the South.
African Americans possessing the resources or physical property to avoid the constant humiliation of subjugation experienced by the majority of black southerners were often seen as “Bad Negroes.” Unlike their sharecropping brothers and sisters, African American landowners possessed the resources to live a semiautonomous existence away from segregated society. Some black folks in the rural Mississippi Delta, who owned land and managed to support their households without being involved in agrarian peonage, might also be considered “Bad Negroes."
Though African American resistance was often acknowledged and revered in the form of “Bad Negroes,” defiant actions and consciousness were rarely overt and visible to the public.[ix] “Bad Negroes” were exceptional figures and rare in history. The “tricksters” of black folklore—whether an animal, such as Bruh Rabbit, or person, such as Elder Green—manipulated others and used deception to overwhelm their enemies. The majority of African Americans, similarly, “feigned deference while maintaining an oppositional consciousness, quietly rejecting the assumptions of White supremacy.”[x] Historian Neil McMillen believed that African Americans living in apartheid-era Mississippi possessed a dual consciousness, exhibiting an “accommodative demeanor [that] often masked a resentful spirit.”[xi] It was indeed more common to show disdain for the imperatives of white supremacy in the privacy of their own communities, away from the eyes and ears of whites. Thus, the majority of African Americans in the South maintained two selves: one persona for white society and another within their own world.
This essay compiles evidence from newspapers, government documents, discographies, and secondary scholarship on blues, folklore, and the Mississippi Delta to argue that, contrary to the assumptions and musicological deductions of numerous scholars over the past fifty years, Charley Patton’s “Elder Greene Blues” may not be about a preacher who lacks conviction and indulges in various earthly pleasures. It may be about a formerly enslaved and rather ingenious African American farmer in the late 1880s who devises a plan to avoid debt peonage using his knowledge of the existing prejudices in white society. The protagonist, Elder Phillip Green, who had also served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War, successfully circulates a story about his own lynching and disappears until his creditor in Vicksburg recoups what he can of his outstanding debt, at which time he returns to his family and resumes his life, only now free from the burdensome debt. The references to getting “sloppy drunk off a bottled in bond and walk[ing] the streets all night,” in this context, comes off as more of a celebration of his economic freedom rather than a preacher’s confession of libidinal desires, or social commentary on hypocrisy in the church. Patton’s lyrics, in essence, may contain a hidden transcript, dramatizing different scenes in the clever saga of a black folk hero of the Jim Crow era.
Born into slavery in Virginia sometime between 1829 and 1841, Phillip Green was one of an estimated one million enslaved blacks sold into the flourishing domestic slave trade, which, according to historian Steven Deyle, not only contributed greatly to the emergence of the deep South, but also exacerbated tensions between the upper and lower South and helped push the country towards Civil War.[xii] The speculators and traders who dominated the interregional slave traffic between the Upper and Lower South were practical and likely motivated by purely economic concerns when separating him by sale from his family and sending him to Issaquena County, Mississippi.[xiii] The internal trade in human property “led to the creation of the Cotton Kingdom” and “contributed to its eventual demise,” as the enslaved had simply become too valuable to surrender for the South.
In mid-1863, Union General Ulysses S. Grant laid siege to the city of Vicksburg and took control of the Mississippi River, a major turning point in the Civil War which crippled the South. The United States War Department, in addition, had issued General Order Number 143 earlier that year on May 22, 1863, which established the Bureau of Colored Troops and actively recruited African-American soldiers for the Union.[xiv] According to his USCT service record, Phillip Green was still enslaved in “Eseguena”[sic] County, Mississippi when he enlisted at “Camp Hibben” on November 22, 1863 to serve three years in the 52nd Colored Infantry.[xv] Standing five feet, three inches tall, the 22 year-old “field hand” seems to have had an intermittent service record. Rather than being mustered out of service, he’s noted as missing in action on July 4, 1864, perhaps having deserted from military service. In any case, it seems Phillip Green made the decision to embrace his newfound freedom and return to Issaquena County, perhaps to find his wife Martha, to whom he is married later in 1870. One census enumerator documents that he lived in the Issaquena town of “Schola” with his wife, a five-year old son Tom, and a four year-old daughter Lucy.[xvi] By 1880, he had relocated his family to District 3 of Sharkey County, specifically near the town of Cary.[xvii] Over the next six years, he established a line of credit in Vicksburg with a merchant named Albert Formowski, who had immigrated from Danzig, Prussia and amassed considerable property and wealth. Known as one of Sharkey County’s “leading colored planters,” Phillip Green had managed to take advantage of the available tenant farming lands, the Delta’s rich soil, and the continuing demand for cotton during the 1880s.
Not until after the Civil War did the Mississippi Delta begin to open up the bottomlands, ninety percent of which remained undeveloped. The great swamp attracted thousands of domestic migrants to the frontier of the old Southwest, many of whom hoped to clear enough land to eventually purchase some of it through the sale of lumber. Though both black and white settlers came to the region, an estimated two-thirds of the independent laborers in the Mississippi Delta were African American by the end of the century. The low price of cotton caused many black folks who settled in the hill country to go deeply into debt, and some of them decided to steal away to test their fortunes in the Delta. Some of them were given other incentives to leave their homes in the hills to come help on the large cotton plantations of the Delta. On December 17, 1886, a special to the New Orleans Times Picayune from Edwards, Mississippi exclaimed that the “negro exodus from this vicinity continues unabated.” Every freight train, the special complained,
“carries off carloads of plunder and darkies, who go, not in single files, but in battalions—men, women, and children—victims of the immigration agent, leaving homes and unpaid accounts, for the Yazoo bottom, which has been painted to them as a veritable negro’s heaven, where crops can never fail and where money grows on trees.”[xviii]
The community of Edwards signed a proclamation stating that since the emigration agents carried away the local labor force, all of the agents had to either desist or leave the community. The town also appointed fifteen people to deal with, “in a becoming style, all such agents who refuse or neglect to comply with our modest but earnest demand.”[xix]
The excitement created by the proclamation, its enforcers, and the accelerated emigration of black folks from the Mississippi hill country to the Yazoo Bottom created a potentially hostile environment in the Pine hills of southwest Mississippi. The creation of a “law and order” league in Edwards to deal with any labor agents who failed to desist certainly reflected the formation of a lynch mob. Since the serious warnings at the Edwards meeting, therefore, labor agents generally started to work though black deputies. Everyone realized that carrying out the duties of a labor agent was a very risky proposition. Being one of the largest African American farmers near the town of Cary and bringing to Vicksburg well over a hundred bales of cotton each season, Elder Green regularly induced workers from around Gloster Station, in Amite County, to relocate for a while to the Delta.
In the second week of January, Elder Green took the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley south to Gloster Station. According to him, he had to pay some workers for their help the previous year and arrange for their permanent transfer this year from the hills to the farm. While he was sitting at the train depot if Gloster, a group of white men walked up and started to harass him. Elder Green lit out for the woods as fast as possible with the mob on his heels. He may have managed to escape from the men, but they returned to the train depot, warned a white planter, Col. T.J. Gibson, also of Sharkey County, against stealing away their hands, and explained that they would not stand for it. Thus, Gibbons claimed that he had not come to Amite for any such reason, but rather to clear a few debts. The men allowed Gibson to leave in peace, and Green managed to outrun the men and catch a train back to Vicksburg.
According to a special out of New Orleans to the New York Sun, Elder Green was terrified, yet decided to return to Gloster to arrange for the emigration of labor.[xx] On the morning of January 8th, an unsigned dispatch was received in New Orleans from Gloster. It read: “If you want Elder Green you had better send a box for him.” The dispatch did not reveal any particulars about how Green met his death. Robert Smith McLain, the mayor of Gloster Station, read about Elder Green’s terrible fate in the New Orleans Times Picayune, which prompted an investigation that failed to locate his body. Thus, in his own dispatch to the Picayune, the mayor denied the reported murder of Elder Green and informed that his body was nowhere in the town. “I desire to state,” he opened, “after investigation, that Elder Green visited Gloster at the same time as Col. Gibbons, but each of them left the city that evening.”[xxi] One dispatch from Vicksburg to New Orleans states that Elder Green was afterwards seen by Gibbons in Vicksburg, and the mayor of Gloster maintained that Elder Green never returned to Gloster. “If Green has been foully treated,” the mayor concluded, “it has been somewhere else and under different circumstances, and these bogus dispatches have been gotten up to mislead the public.[xxii]
Notwithstanding the formal denial of Mayor McLain that Elder Green was not lynched and left in his town, reports in several newspapers still maintained such was the case. The Leland Record, for example, forwarded a circumstantial version of events, though no names were mentioned.
“A colored man, who was acting as a labor agent for Goodman & Company out of Cary, MS was found dead on the streets of Gloster, LA, where he had gone to pay off some balances due, by parties who expected to leave Wilkerson County and come to Sharkey He had all his money and pistols on when found. There were three or four gunshot wounds on his body, but little blood nearby. He was evidently killed outside of town and his body brought to where it was found. Of course no one there tried to find the dastardly murderers.”
The editor of the Vicksburg Evening Post asserted that there were “more versions of this affair than of any similar incident that has happened in the State in many years.” At the time, all indicators suggested that the facts of the case would never be ascertained.[xxiii] The last news items about Elder Green that January concerned his alleged burial. Assuring that “there is no question about the death of Green,” a planter from the Deer Creek section named John Hogan informed that Elder Green had been buried near the home of Colonel Gibbons at Cary, on the Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railroad.[xxiv] Other brevity’s forwarded the same general information with a new title, “Elder Green Planted” at Cary.[xxv]
Barely a month had passed since the people living at Gloster Station, in the hill country of Amite County, found themselves accused in the New Orleans newspapers of lynching labor agent Elder Green. The mayor of the town refuted the assertion, but subsequent reports of his burial exacerbated the psychological interplay in his continued absence. Since he had not been heard from in a month, Elder Greene’s wife and son-in-law “give it out that he was dead” and set their minds to handling his affairs. As a tenant farmer, Elder Green was indebted to the sum of about $1,000, secured by a deed of trust. Not long after his reported burial, Elder Green’s son-in-law A.G. Washington came to the city, informed Albert Formowski of his death, and suggested that a visit to Cary Station was in order to take charge of the Elder’s effects. The court appointed Frank Little, a local constable, as trustee to confiscate and dispose of the effects of Elder Green. Having posted the required legal notice and seen it expire, the constable sold all of his five mules, three cows and three calves, the wagon used on the farm, for forty bushels of corn, which amounted to $750 towards his outstanding debt. His wife, daughter, and son-in-law were relocated, along with the personal effects of Elder Green, to the farm of the constable about 12 miles outside Vicksburg. He provided them with two mules, one cow and one calf, a wagon, and enough supplies to last two months.[xxvi] Although certainly not ideal, the arrangement gave Martha Green, her daughter, and her son-in-law some time to mourn and then get back on their feet
It might have worked out well too, but the “wily” Elder Green proved a lively corpse when he turned up in February at the farm of Albert Formowski. He decided to turn up coincidentally at the same time that his creditor’s sister passed away. Her death was reported on the same day reports of his reappearance surfaced, February 11, 1887.[xxvii] According to the New Orleans Times Democrat, Elder Phil Green and his son-in-law wasted little time in moving away their effects. Save for one mule, which he left behind for one of the farmhands recruited in Gloster, they took everything of value that had not been nailed down. To give them time to escape, Green instructed the farmhand to wait a couple days and then ride the mule into town and tell Formowski about his resurrection and flight. He followed instructions and refused to tell; the creditor anything else. Formowski, however, was otherwise occupied with the funeral being at his home, so he sent his clerk with farmhand to look for the other mule and supplies, which he had furnished his family. On the way out of town, the clerk spotted “Squire B.B. Bowie,” a justice of the peace, who forced the farmhand to reveal the location the creditor’s property. Upon securing the information, Bowie went to the station at Redwood, about 12 miles away, where he found the creditor’s property, according to the Times. Green’s son-in-law, soon after Bowie’s arrival, sent a telegram requesting that his effects be sent to north to Huntington, which sits above Greenville on the Mississippi River. To end the matter, Bowie confiscated the creditor’s property, and the Times concluded:
“It now appears that Greene had become involved with his merchant and, being cunning, circulated a report of his murder in Gloster, where he had been recently recruiting workers, then he went to Arkansas in quest of a new field and a new merchant, intending to secure a place, come back, and spirit away his effects before Formowski suspected any wrongdoing. Yet, he never let his son-in-law in on the subterfuge, and to make himself whole notified Formowski.”[xxviii]
On the same day the above report appeared in the New Orleans Times Democrat, however, the Vicksburg Herald featured a brevity based on the testimony of constable Frank Little, who reported that Elder Green had been found and positively identified. He had accepted a position on a plantation near the Vicksburg & Meridian railroad in Warren County.[xxix] He couldn’t be working on a plantation outside Vicksburg and awaiting his effects up in Huntington. It’s clear that no one really knew what happened. On February 14, the Vicksburg Herald commented that “the celebrated Elder Green…has turned up alive and vigorous. There is no room to doubt that his alleged death was a subterfuge of his own invention.[xxx] Several days after that comment the Delta Democrat Times noted that he turned up in Warren County as well and declared, “perhaps he thinks it is the right season for greens to turn up.”[xxxi]
Elder Green had returned to the Delta, and soon he and his family returned to Sharkey County. Almost exactly two years later, Albert Formowski followed his sister to the grave, leaving the wily elder free from any potential debts.[xxxii] Elder Green fell ill later in life and procured the services of a preacher to submit his military pension application. The editor of the Vicksburg Herald, in a lengthy editorial on pension fraud, offers one last newspaper account in the life of Elder Phil Green. In describing the crimes of a so-called pension agent named Rev. T.A. Young, he explains how the agent made an application for “Phil Green, of Cary, a poor old negro ex-soldier,” in exchange for $1.50 cash. Soon thereafter, the agent wrote to Elder Green saying that he had the desired pension document and needed another three dollars sent to him, “which was done by express and received, as books” showed. Elder Green, however, did not receive the document or any more information after the lapse of a year (nearly) and repeated efforts. Someone agreed to help him and offered to procure a duplicate free of charge. Once they made a claim on his pension, however, it came back refused on the grounds that the records showed the applicant listed as a “deserter.” His military record did indeed list him as a deserter. At last realizing “how such divinity had got him,” the editor asserted, Elder Green “regretted he had ever seen a negro preacher.”[xxxiii]
I obtained a copy of the application card for the military pension of Philip Green, and it was filed for him a few months later. On March 6, 1891, an African American attorney and staunch supporter of the Republican Party named C.J. James submitted the application under “invalid” status and secured the pension despite the notation that he deserted the USCT. The following year, his attorney was shot four times by a man named Joe Chefus, who claimed that James was “ruining his sister.”[xxxiv] James’ death, however, did not impede Martha Green from applying to receive his pension on November 9, 1896, which was apparently required upon her husband’s death. Martha Green is listed in both the 1900 and 1910 census as living in Beat 2 of Sharkey County, Mississippi.[xxxv] It is not clear when she passes away exactly. Nor is it clear at all where either Elder Green or his wife were buried.
Alas, this was not "our" Elder Green after all.
Chapter 2 - Coming soon
NOTES
[i] Jacques Roche, “The Words,” 78 Quarterly 1:1 (1967): 51-55.
[ii] Booker Miller, interview with Gayle Dean Wardlow, 1968, Greenwood, MS, tta0182ee,
[iii] For an extensive list of these artists, see Luigi Monge and David Evans, “New Songs of Blind Lemon Jefferson,” Journal of Texas Music History, 3:2 (2003): 6. (1-21)
[iv] Stephen Calt, Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 84; John S. Farmer and W.E. Henley, Slang and its Analogues: Past & Present (London: Harrison & Sons, 1893; 1896).
[v] Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 117; Elder Green also appeared in early printed versions of “Alabama Bound” collected by Newman White in Alabama and Will H. Thomas in Texas.[v] The reprobate preacher, moreover, appears in many recorded versions of “Alabama Bound,” specifically those of New Orleans-native Papa Charlie Jackson (May 1925), Pete Harris of Texas (May 1934), Leadbelly of Louisiana (March 1, 1935), and Mance Lipscomb of Texas (1961). Natchez bluesman Cat-Iron (William Carradine) talked about him but called him “Jimmy Bell” (Folkways FA 2389) in 1958, and a white string band called the Tennessee Ramblers waxed vaguely nostalgic on “The Preacher Got Drunk and Laid Down His Bible” (Brunswick 259) in 1958.
[vi] For further information on these themes, see Horace Clarence Boyer, The Golden Age of Gospel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 12-29; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Shocken, 1964), 47-67; Joseph R. Washington, Jr., Black Sects and Cults (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1972), 58-82; Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 199-228; Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times, rev. ed. (New York: Limelight, 1985), 173-186.
[vii] An Elder Green, described as “minister,” is included in a 1910 list of black residents of Greenwood, Mississippi. See http://www.rootsweb. com/~msafamer/msleflore1910Dir.txt. We wish to thank Bob Eagle for calling our attention to this source. There is no way to determine if this Elder Green is the subject of this folksong.
[viii] Lawrence Levine, in his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 367-440, discusses several archetypes of African derivation in the culture of African Americans. These archetypes include the “Bad Man,” a merciless killer who lacks remorse; “the moral hard man” who possesses the strength and courage to flout the limitations of white society; and the “tricksters,” who attain their goals through wit and guile rather than power and authority. The “moral hard man” develops from concepts of the warrior in the folk culture of Central Africa, whereas the trickster archetype in tied more to West African origins; for more on the warrior, see Clyde W. Fords Hero with an African Face (New York: Bantam, 1999), 68-94, for a description of the warrior in traditional African folklore.
[ix] Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 23, 249, 534.
[x] Akinwele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 21.
[xi] Neil McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 49.
[xii] Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 97.
[xiii] Michael Tadman’s Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
[xiv] Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 130.
[xv] Phillip Green was born in “Esegueui [sic]” or Issaquena, Mississippi circa 1841, according to his United States Colored Troops service record; see, U.S. Colored Troops Military Service Records, 1863-1865 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007.
[xvi] 1870; Census Place: Schola, Issaquena, Mississippi; Roll: M593_731; Page: 275A; Image: 51896; Family History Library Film: 552230
[xvii] Phil and Martha Green had two children, Tom, 15, and Lucy, 14; see, 1880 US Census, Sharkey, Mississippi; Roll: 664; Family History Film: 1254664; Page: 117B; Enumeration District: 113
[xviii] “Edwards, Indignation of the People with the land Agents,” (New Orleans, LA) Times Picayune, Dec 17, 1886.
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] “They Killed Elder Green: He Was Enticing Laborers to Leave the MS Hills,” The (NY) Sun, Jan 12, 1887.
[xxi] Vicksburg (MS) Evening Post, January 13, 1887.
[xxii] “Negro Exodus,” Fort Worth (TX) Daily Gazette, Jan 13, 1887, p.6.
[xxiii] “The Elder Green Affair,” Vicksburg (MS) Evening Post, Jan 17, 1887.
[xxiv] “Gloster: Elder Green Dead and Buried,” (New Orleans, LA) Times Picayune, Jan 14, 1887, p.1.
[xxv] “Elder Green Planted,” Vicksburg (MS) Evening Post, Jan 14, 1887.
[xxvi] “Elder Green Turns Up: And Attempts to Defraud Merchant Out of Advances” The (New Orleans, LA) Times Democrat, Feb 11, 1887.
[xxvii] “Death of Mrs. Biedenharn,” Vicksburg (MS) Evening Post, Feb 11, 1887.
[xxviii] “Elder Green Turns Up: And Attempts to Defraud Merchant Out of Advances” The (New Orleans, LA) Times Democrat, Feb 11, 1887.
[xxix] Vicksburg (MS) Herald, Feb 11, 1887.
[xxx] Vicksburg (MS) Evening Post, February 14, 1887.
[xxxi] Delta (Greenville, MS) Democrat Times, Feb 19, 1887.
[xxxii] Vicksburg (MS) Evening Post, February 23, 1889.
[xxxiii] “Pension Frauds,” The (Vicksburg, MS) Daily Commercial Herald, Dec 5, 1890.
[xxxiv] “Killing Yesterday Evening,” Vicksburg (MS) Evening Post Nov 8, 1892.
[xxxv] 1910; Census Place: Beat 2, Sharkey, Mississippi; Roll: T624_749; Page: 2A; Enumeration District: 0083; FHL microfilm: 1374762.a
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