February 26, 2012

In late February 1862 a woman who had sensitive information about a secret Confederate project made a perilous and grueling journey from Norfolk to Washington. It was especially dangerous for her. She was a slave. She was a spy.

Most accounts identify her as Mary Louvestre, who may have worked for the family of an official at the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth. Or perhaps knew someone who worked there. At any rate, she had crucially important news about the status of the Confederate’s secret weapon, the Ironclad CSS Virginia: It was almost ready.

In a memoir, Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles said the woman told him that the ship, the former Merrimack, had come out of the shipyard’s Drydock Number One and was being outfitted with guns and ammunition.

“The woman had passed through the lines, at great risk to herself, to bring the information,” Welles wrote, “and, in confirmation of her statement, she took from the bosom of her dress a letter from a Union man, a mechanic in the Navy Yard, giving briefly the facts as stated by her.”

The news caused the Union to abandon plans to send its secret weapon, the new ironclad Monitor, to the yard and blast the ship out of the water. If there was to be any blasting, it would have to be done in open combat.

Only sketchy details about this gutsy woman have come to light. But now My Haley, who collaborated with her husband, the late Alex Haley, on his famous book, Roots The Saga of an American Family, has written a novel about Louvestre and her harrowing journey.

“The Treason of Mary Louvestre,” which has not yet been published, begins in wartime Norfolk and is rich in detail about the city and the people who inhabit her world. There’s “Fat Johnny Two-Fingers,” a fishmonger, and Devereaux Ranier Leodegrance de Perouse, a driver for Mary’s owners, among others. The city is crowded with Confederate volunteers and entrepreneurs. Rough around the edges, the place stinks of manure. Drunks share the streets with pigs, rats and scrawny chickens. There’s something else, as far as whites are concerned, “uppity” free blacks who regard themselves as equals. And then there’s Mary Louvestre.

She is owned by the family of Simeon Louvestre, a naval engineer who’s involved in converting the frigate Merrimack to the ironclad Virginia. Alarmed that the deadly ship will tilt the war in the South’s favor, she stealthily traces the ship’s plans onto tissue paper and escapes.

Although it’s hard to believe the real Mary Louvestre made the entire 200-mile journey to Washington on foot in the dead of winter, the fictional one does just that, encountering several more memorable characters and all the while dodging a mean-spirited deputy sheriff. At last she meets Welles and changes the course of history.

Haley, who has spent several years researching the novel, told me she was captured by Louvestre’s character. “How can a person like her, a slave, be willing to risk everything? What kind of strength does it take? She intrigued me in so many ways.”

The book ends with Louvestre agreeing to do more spying for the Union, and that, Haley says, will be included in her next historical novel, one of six she’s hoping to publish.

She will be speaking Thursday, March 8, -- the 150th anniversary of the first battle of Hampton Roads – at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum at Nauticus. The talk will be at 6 p.m. and admission is free.


Photo: My Haley, author of The Treason of Mary Louvestre. Courtesy of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum,

February 19, 2012

The interesting thing about a history column, I’ve just realized, is that it’s everybody’s.

Take this past month. I wrote about a general store in Fentress, and one reader mentioned the moonshiners who once plied their trade nearby. I wrote about moonshiners and half a dozen people told me I should take a look at the origins of stock car racing. I wrote about stock racing and another half dozen picked up on my mentioning “Chinese Corner,” the intersection of Witchduck Road and Virginia Beach Boulevard where there used to be a race track.

There were as many theories as emails about how it got the name. There was once a small Chinese settlement there; a laundry owned by a Chinese family; a Chinese farmer who owned land there. Furthermore, another reader pointed out, the 1870 census showed there were two Chinese residents among 8,273 people in Princess Anne County.

And nearly everyone wanted me to write about Joe Weatherly.

Chinese Corner Speedway, a three-eighth-of-a-mile dirt track, was built in 1948 and was in use until 1960, according to NASCAR. It was also called Virginia Beach Speedway and, at one point, Joe Weatherly Speedway. That’s because the famous driver and a partner bought it, along with others in Richmond and Wilson, N.C.

Weatherly was a legend, a clown prince, a tragic figure. And he had one of the ugliest scars to ever haunt a face – and it wasn’t from racing.

Joe Herbert “Little Joe” Weatherly Jr. was born in Norfolk in 1922. After a hitch in the Army during World War II, he began racing motorcycles – a one-time high school passion – and racked up an impressive record, winning several national racing titles. Then he turned to stock car racing.

As Pilot reporter Earl Swift wrote in 2007, Weatherly became one of NASCAR’s first big stars, winning 25 races, placed in the top five 105 times and won the points championship two years in a row. “He was a favorite among fans for his flair as much as his victories. Weatherly was an archetype of the early NASCAR hero, an inveterate practical joker and hell-raiser, a resilient hard-partier, a rough-and-tumble southern rogue.”

And the scar? Most assumed it had been acquired on the racetrack. Or, as Weatherly sometimes boasted, from a bullet that creased his face while he was chasing Germans during the war in North Africa.

But Swift revealed the true story. It was in October 1946, before he began racing cars. He was driving with five passengers eastbound of 26th Street in Norfolk in a 1942 Buick sedan. The car hit the curb in a tight S-turn, careened across the road, jumped the far curb and crashed into a tree.

Three of the passengers weren’t badly hurt but one of them, Edwin “Eddie” Baines suffered a fatal head injury. Weatherly’s girlfriend, Jean Flanagan, had both of her legs broken and Weatherly had his face cleaved in two” by the windshield, with blood spurting from a puncture in his neck.

One of the police officers who arrived at the scene probably saved Weatherly’s life, staunching the blood flow by clamping his hands on the driver’s neck until an ambulance arrived.

Weatherly, who was driving without a legal license, was initially charged with homicide, but after lengthy court appearances the charge was reduced. He ended up paying fines, serving suspended sentences and later paying damages to his girlfriend and the family of the man who died. He had several other traffic misdeeds, losing his license for a time to drive on public streets.

But not on racetracks. Weatherly went on to a fabulously successful racing career. But it ended abruptly at a race in Riverside, CA, when the left side of his car slammed into a wall. Weatherly, who never wore a safety belt, died instantly of head injuries.

A barely relevant footnote: The fellow I met the other day who was wearing a “Moonshine” t-shirt, said he carried a quote in his wallet from the legendary baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean: “It ain’t braggin’ if you done it.”


Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com

Photo: Joe Weatherly, Pilot file photo.

February 12, 2012

Angolan musicians and dancer, from a 1690 drawing by Antonio Cavazzi. Courtesy of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.

As you walk into the exhibition hall at Jamestown Settlement you’re suddenly plunged into a village in the small African kingdom of Ndongo, surrounded by sounds of the forest and greeted by the serene figure of a woman smoking a long-stemmed pipe.

There’s a circular hut and, just beyond, a woman tending a field with a hoe, a baby nestled into a sling on her back. There’s a man stripping bark from a baobab tree, which was to be hammered into fibers and woven into a fine, soft cloth.

If you pick up an audio stick you hear the cheerful voice of a native speaking in Kimbundu. Chances are you won’t understand a word, unless you’re familiar with the languages of West Central Africa. And I’ll wager not many of us has ever been to this region of the world.

But it’s very much part of our culture, and may now be, because of the historical importance of Fort Monroe, more relevant than ever.

Old Point Comfort, where the fort is located, is the spot where Dutch privateers, who had captured a Portuguese slave ship in the Caribbean, stopped in 1619 and traded the slaves for provisions. These 20 or so residents of Ndongo, now part of Angola, are considered to be the first slaves brought to America.

As the American colonies and the Caribbean sugar plantations grew more and more dependent on forced labor, the Europeans obliged by setting up a massive slave trading industry, with headquarters on the western African coast. Port cities like Norfolk and Charleston were gateways for this massive human cargo. The slave population in Virginia grew from those original 20 to 472,494 in 1860, according to the group Slavery in America.

It’s fair to say that many blacks in the U.S. today can trace their origins to these West African villages.

The Jamestown Settlement, the state-supported facility next to Jamestown Island, has a major exhibition hall that depicts “The World of 1607,” with equal attention to the English, Native Americans and Africans. During Black History Month in February the staff has highlighted parts of the exhibit with gallery guides titled “From Africa to Virginia.”

That African culture, both before and during the slave years, was richer than I realized – and the reason I’ve returned to see the exhibit.

West Central Africans lived in rural villages, towns and cities. Ruled by kings and queens, they prospered from extensive trade networks. They had developed the technology to make tools and weapons from smelted steel.

Ndongo religious practices were a blend of Christianity that was imported from Portugal and indigenous beliefs that included a high god called Nzambi and territorial deities and other lesser spirits. Daily religious life revolved around ancestors, and priests who – not unlike European counterparts – offered spiritual advice, problem-solving and healing.

They played a wide variety of musical instruments – drums, tambourines, flutes, guitars and lutes; they perfected crafts like weaving and wood carving; and they danced frequently, even adopting European-style court dances for special occasions.

One of the striking parts of the African exhibit is a life-size, bronze-like statue of Queen Njinga, the ruler of Ndongo for nearly 40 years who spent much of her reign battling the Portuguese who had sought to enslave villagers they had captured.

She was evidently a shrewd leader, aligning herself with powerful African military factions to defeat the Portuguese, then, later, converting to Christianity and signing a peace treaty with them. Still later, with help from the Dutch, she fought off the Portuguese again, often leading troops into battle.

Then the inevitable happened. After her reign, the English set up the Royal Africa Company. English-made goods were sold to Africa for gold, ivory and slaves. The slaves, hundreds every year, were shipped to Virginia and sold to planters – who used them to produce tobacco, which in turn went back to England. It was a vicious triangle that lasted for almost two centuries.

There you have it, Among the baobab trees, farm fields and thatched mud huts, awaits a whole lot of history and culture.

February 5, 2012

One of the former Alcohol Beverage Control agents I interviewed recently mentioned a moonshine maker who supercharged his car so he could make fast getaways when the “revenuers” showed up.

“He used to brag about how he could out-run ‘em and out-smart ‘em,” the agent said.

It turns out that this moonshiner was right smack in the middle of a hell-fer-leather tradition that ran deep into backroad traditions of the rural South. You might have thought the movies “Thunder Road” (1958) and “The Last American” (1973) and the TV series “The Dukes of Hazard” (1979-1985) were fantasies, but they were straight out our not-very-distant past.

Stock car racing and its grandchild, NASCAR, came straight out of those traditions.

I’m not sure why, but the whole business of white lightning and wide-open car chases, with moonshiners outracing hapless law enforcers in souped-up cars (think Deputy Cletus Hogg in Dukes of Hazard) has an element of pure comedy about it. The folks who made the likker and stomped on the gas when cops showed up came across as good old boy entrepreneurs. Just tryin’ to make a living, don’t you know, without all them bothersome reg’lations and taxes.

Sure, people got killed, and some who drank bad “corn” got plum sick, but these guys, some of them at least, were just about heroes.

Witness Tom Wolfe’s trailblazing piece in the March 1965 Esquire, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”

The article, which established Wolfe as one of the first masters of “new journalism,” made Robert Glenn Johnson Jr., a former moonshine runner from North Carolina, famous. And Wolfe, too.

In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper still operators of all times, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a rich stock-car racer. . . .

It was Junior Johnson specifically . . . who was famous for the “bootleg turn” or “about face,” in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were two close behind, you threw the car into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on down the road exactly the way you came from. God!

Wolfe’s article was turned into a 1973 movie, “The Last American Hero,” staring Jeff Bridges.

NASCAR itself has acknowledged its indebtedness to moonshine runners, and included a whiskey still made by Johnson in its Hall of Fame in Charlotte. Johnson himself, the winner of 50 NASCAR races before he became a race car owner, helped assemble its barrels, condenser and so forth.

The best of the moonshine runners felt the urge to compete. In the late 1940s, one of those legendary fellows gathered racers, car owners and mechanics in Daytona, Fla., where they established rules for racing, and the next year staged a race on the beach.

I have no doubt that some of the drivers dubbed their cars “White Lightning,” and maybe “Corn Likker. “ Those early race cars were directly linked to those early supercharged cars.

There were many not-exactly-high-class tracks around here. William Petty of Virginia Beach writes that there was a dirt track racetrack at “Chinese Corners’ – can anyone tell why it was called that? – at the corner of Witchduck Road and Virginia Beach Boulevard. There must have been many others.

They and the big daddies of them all, the tracks in places like Langley, Richmond, Charlotte and Darlington owe their heritage to this illegal, but definitely good-old-boy, activity.

The legend lives on. One legal product you can buy in liquor stores is “Junior Johnson’s Midnight Moon Carolina Moonshine.” And online stores sell t-shirts with slogans like the one I saw the other day in Norfolk: “Moonshine. If it wasn’t so good, they wouldn’t chase us.”


One of the former Alcohol Beverage Control agents I interviewed recently mentioned a moonshine maker who supercharged his car so he could make fast getaways when the “revenuers” showed up.

“He used to brag about how he could out-run ‘em and out-smart ‘em,” the agent said.

It turns out that this moonshiner was right smack in the middle of a hell-fer-leather tradition that ran deep into backroad traditions of the rural South. You might have thought the movies “Thunder Road” (1958) and “The Last American” (1973) and the TV series “The Dukes of Hazard” (1979-1985) were fantasies, but they were straight out our not-very-distant past.

Stock car racing and its grandchild, NASCAR, came straight out of those traditions.

I’m not sure why, but the whole business of white lightning and wide-open car chases, with moonshiners outracing hapless law enforcers in souped-up cars (think Deputy Cletus Hogg in Dukes of Hazard) has an element of pure comedy about it. The folks who made the likker and stomped on the gas when cops showed up came across as good old boy entrepreneurs. Just tryin’ to make a living, don’t you know, without all them bothersome reg’lations and taxes.

Sure, people got killed, and some who drank bad “corn” got plum sick, but these guys, some of them at least, were just about heroes.

Witness Tom Wolfe’s trailblazing piece in the March 1965 Esquire, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”

The article, which established Wolfe as one of the first masters of “new journalism,” made Robert Glenn Johnson Jr., a former moonshine runner from North Carolina, famous. And Wolfe, too.

In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper still operators of all times, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a rich stock-car racer. . . .

It was Junior Johnson specifically . . . who was famous for the “bootleg turn” or “about face,” in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were two close behind, you threw the car into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on down the road exactly the way you came from. God!

Wolfe’s article was turned into a 1973 movie, “The Last American Hero,” staring Jeff Bridges.

NASCAR itself has acknowledged its indebtedness to moonshine runners, and included a whiskey still made by Johnson in its Hall of Fame in Charlotte. Johnson himself, the winner of 50 NASCAR races before he became a race car owner, helped assemble its barrels, condenser and so forth.

The best of the moonshine runners felt the urge to compete. In the late 1940s, one of those legendary fellows gathered racers, car owners and mechanics in Daytona, Fla., where they established rules for racing, and the next year staged a race on the beach.

I have no doubt that some of the drivers dubbed their cars “White Lightning,” and maybe “Corn Likker. “ Those early race cars were directly linked to those early supercharged cars.

There were many not-exactly-high-class tracks around here. William Petty of Virginia Beach writes that there was a dirt track racetrack at “Chinese Corners’ – can anyone tell why it was called that? – at the corner of Witchduck Road and Virginia Beach Boulevard. There must have been many others.

They and the big daddies of them all, the tracks in places like Langley, Richmond, Charlotte and Darlington owe their heritage to this illegal, but definitely good-old-boy, activity.

The legend lives on. One legal product you can buy in liquor stores is “Junior Johnson’s Midnight Moon Carolina Moonshine.” And online stores sell t-shirts with slogans like the one I saw the other day in Norfolk: “Moonshine. If it wasn’t so good, they wouldn’t chase us.”

Photo: Junior Johnson after winning pole position for a race in Atlanta in 1954, averaging 146 mph. AP file photo.