In newly-formed Clay County, Alabama, William Lafayette Black ("Fayette") married his brother's sweetheart, Martha Ardellah Toland ("Della"), after his death the Civil War. The W.L. Black family struggled in meager circumstances until Fayette used the money and influence of Della's Uncle Merit Street to gain local political clout after Reconstruction. As a conservative, Fayette was the political enemy of the local, poor farmers and their party, the Populists. Four years after the birth of their last son, Hugo, The Blacks moved to the County seat, Ashland, and W.L. Black set up a merchant's business. Hugo grew up and away from his father and his father's ways as death, alcoholism, religion, and politics divided the Black family and community. After his father's death in 1900, Hugo went to medical school and later to law school. He practiced law in Ashland until a fire destroyed half the town square, including his office. In 1907, Hugo Black moved to Birmingham.

At age twenty, ... 1868, Martha Ardellah Street Toland ...swore before her Baptist God that she would love and cherish William Lafayette Black, in sickness and in health, for the rest of her life. She made her holy vow in her father's house in Bluff Springs, Alabama, near Hillabee Creek running between Jet Mountain and Mount Ararat, where within living memory Andrew Jackson's soldiers had massacred the Muskogee Indians.

" ...her heart truly belonged to Fayette's older brother, Columbus, killed five years earlier on the battlefield which Abraham Lincoln memorialized "as the final resting place of those who here gave their lives that our nation might live."

... Fayette and Della faced the realities of living in a poor section of Alabama in the aftermath of a lost war fought primarily on Southern soil....

In August 1877, Fayette Black was elected justice of the peace ... in Clay's Wickers beat ... to help guarantee that only the right class of citizens held office, state law required local elected officials to post an assurance bond in an amount far beyond the means of almost all citizens. In the case of a local justice of the peace, one thousand dollars of property or cash was needed. With total assets of around $250, about the Alabama household average, Fayette Black had to rely on the sponsorship of the far wealthier Merit Street.

Clay's politics seemed ordained by its origins... the Whig governor and legislature named the county for Henry Clay and the county seat as "Ashland" in honor of Clay's Kentucky plantation. Clay was also a Whig ... His prime political opponent was Andrew Jackson, perhaps the greatest hero of Alabama's frontier people, including many of Clay's settlers.

The county let a contract to a local Ashland merchant, H. A. Manning, a loyal, conservative Democrat, to make bricks for the construction of a new county jail in 1882. Shortly afterwards, reports circulated that the county treasurer had loaned Manning more than two thousand dollars in public funds to enable the project... The treasurer dismissed the rumor as someone's "tongue in full practice of guile,"... It is far more likely that Manning received funds from [Merit} Street, who was at the time a silent partner in Manning's business. Street was the only person in the county who could have afforded such a loan..."

John Breckenridge Toland was Della's half-brother ... Della's children often had sat listening to Uncle Brack tell stories of the ancestral Tolands' battles alongside the Irish rebel Robert Emmet at the start of the nineteenth century.... Robert Emmet was captured as he bid farewell to the woman he loved. He was tried for treason by a jury that did not deliberate in order to reach a guilty verdict. Within twenty-four hours, Emmet was hanged and beheaded within sight of Dublin Castle.

Ashland was built on three sides facing at its center a planked courthouse, now with a new bricked jail beyond the town square...The stores were crude barnlike structures where merchandise from local farms and distant manufacturers were stacked, kept in large kegs, or displayed on rough shelves. The stores' uneven facades had awnings of protruding planks to shade pine benches where Confederate veterans idled until their next state government check arrived by pony riders at the probate judge's office.

W. L. Black was an avid, boisterous partisan for Grover Cleveland, and his every word of praise was echoed during the campaign by his youngest son who, like his father, talked for Cleveland, argued for Cleveland, and shouted for Cleveland.

When women prepared the sanctuary at Ashland's First Baptist Church, with its pyramid-shaped doors, sharply pitched, angular roof line, and its tall, pointed bell tower--each tier successively directing all eyes towards the heavens--Ashland's white women joined in a unique communion where the modest rituals of service to others symbolically brought to earth religious postulates of kind-ness and human interdependence.

A Populist nominee for the state legislature, Joe Manning, showed little respect for the South's sacred past. Concerning one opponent, he said: "... you have spoken about your forefathers fighting and dying for Democracy. It is a pity all of your sort didn't die when they did."

"I, Merit Street . . . will and bequeath my soul to God who gave it, and that my body be interred in the old family grave yard [on Mount Ararat] near where I now live, and that a neat, substantial enclosure and tomb be placed over the same, not an extravagant, costly one . . ." After assuring that his wife would have all she needed to live comfortably, Street ordained four hundred acres of land and $15,000 for the establishment of "an Industrial School for Girls and Boys" within sight of his grave.

Simmons ran on a theme of "more schools, more money, and more teachers," a substantive program attacking the practices of limiting education and teaching posts to a privileged few.

Street named his oldest son, Jay, Judge Hiram Evans, and J. L. M. Curry, a nationally known educator who began his career in Talladega, as school trustees.

Within three weeks of his son's [Merit} death, W. L. Black traveled to Atlanta's Cotton States Exposition to forget his misery. Whiskey was plentiful, and the attractions included the Hall of Confederate States, a giant Ferris wheel, Middle Eastern camels, and the first silent movies or "living pictures."

Clay was destined in 1896 for an acrimonious campaign, but across Alabama and the nation sharp political differences were fading. ... At the same time, the national Democratic party nominated for president William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska who also became the national Populist nominee. Bryan was the nation's most effective advocate for the silver standard of American money.

Growing up in Ashland since the age of four, Hugo at thirteen ... chose as his best friend Barney Whatley, the son of the county's Populist probate judge. A year apart in age, the older Barney and younger Hugo quickly became inseparable, as united in friendship as their fathers were divided in politics....

Now accompanied by Barney, Hugo raced up the courthouse steps each day during court term to get his preferred seat for watching and assessing attorneys. ...The criminal docket was cluttered with cases involving a banal spectrum of human wrongs...

...the unschooled nature of race relations in Clay did not create a more tolerant society or any liberating force for blacks or whites to avoid some of the worst moments of Southern history. It provided merely a small, fragile psychological space through which a young person might see other possible terms for human relations.

W. L. Black's death released his grown boys from their father's yoke, and they quickly set out with new directions... Lee traveled extensively around the South and paid the Talladega newspaper to publish his book, The Deserter, "the only novel ever written by a Clay County author and published in bookstores." ... Lee's book tells of a Southerner who deserts the Confederate army and hides in the county's northern mountains. It was published under an assumed name, a fashionable and prudent precaution in a region where reverence for the Confederate past had become idolatrous.

Pelham was strikingly handsome, a naturally gifted athlete, and a ladies' man whose sad, small eyes, like those of all W. L. Black's boys, were the only outward signs belying a happy childhood.

Recognizing a fire alarm, Black rushed to the new courthouse where he saw his law office and half the town ablaze. The fire was omnivorous, consuming all the buildings on the east side of the square and sparing nothing, not even Black's seven-dollar street sign. To keep the entire square from burning, city leaders dynamited a restaurant to create a fire break.