Legendary lawman
Marshal Bass Reeves, one of Arkansas’ first Black deputies, rides into the American ethos in Sidney Thompson’s historical-fiction trilogy
It is 1883 and a Black man in tramp shoes, a floppy felt hat and patched overalls walks 28 miles alone through Choctaw Nation to the home of the Coldiron family. He stops at the Coldiron place to beg for a little food and perhaps a place to rest.
Mama Coldiron takes him in, feeds him supper and offers a spare room.
What she doesn’t know is that the poor, hungry traveler is actually famed lawman Bass Reeves, a deputy U.S. Marshal from Arkansas. The clever Reeves has come to her home in disguise to nab her outlaw sons, Thomas and Wayne.
So begins “Hell on the Border,” the gripping, hard-to-put-down second entry in a trilogy of historical novels about Reeves by Sidney Thompson, professor of creative writing and African American literature at Texas Christian University.
The book, published by University of Nebraska Press imprint Bison Books, will be released Thursday.
As far as heroes go, Reeves is a hard one to
beat. His story is the stuff of American legend.
★★★
Reeves was born enslaved to Arkansas state legislator William Steele Reeves in July 1838 in Crawford County. He became an expert marksman as a teenager and was sent off to the Civil War at the side of George Reeves, William’s son, a Texas legislator who fought for the Confederacy.
During the war, Bass Reeves escaped and took refuge in Indian Territory among the Creek and Seminole, according to the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
Freed by the 13th Amendment in 1865, he settled in Van Buren with his wife, Jennie, and their children.
In 1875, Reeves became one of the first Black deputy U.S. marshals for the Western District of Arkansas, which had jurisdiction over the notoriously lawless Indian Territory. He became one of Judge Isaac Parker’s most valued deputies, bringing in some of the most dangerous criminals of the time. When he retired in 1907, he was responsible for more than 3,000 arrests. A deeply religious man, Reeves often apprehended his suspects without violence, although he did kill a good many men — perhaps more than 20 — in the line of duty.
He died of Bright’s disease on Jan. 12, 1910, at age 71 in Muskogee, Okla.
“He was bigger than any lawman in the wild West; Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok — he was bigger than them,” says Art T. Burton, a retired history professor and author of 2007’s “Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves,” the first scholarly biography of Reeves. Burton also wrote the Reeves entry for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas and is the author of “Black, Red and Deadly: Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territory, 1870-1907,” as well as “Black, Buckskin and Blue: African American Scouts and Soldiers on the Western Frontier.”
“He was a real good detective and was really good at solving crimes,” Burton says. “He treated people with respect and he never tried to bully them. And there were probably half a dozen assassination attempts on his life.”
Though he was written about a little during his time, and his obituary ran in a Washington paper, Reeves’ name was never among those wild West legends whose images lived on long after they had passed.
“Due to the fact of who he was, he didn’t get a lot of [publicity],” Burton says.
Thompson notes that Reeves’ story was excluded from S.W. Harmon’s 1898 nonfiction book, also called “Hell on the Border,” about Parker.
“I think there was a purposeful attempt to erase him from the historical record,” the author says from Fort Worth. “He overshadowed everybody
else — white, Black, Native American.”
But Reeves’ profile has been on the rise. In 2012, a bronze statue by sculptor Harold T. Holden of Reeves on a horse was dedicated in Fort Smith’s Pendergraft Park. The exploits of the high-riding deputy were featured in the HBO series “Watchmen.” He is the titular character in the 2020 comic book written by Kevin Grevioux, drawn by David Williams and published by Little Rock-based Allegiance Arts & Entertainment; and appeared in “Un Cow-Boy Dans Le Cotton,” a 2020 issue of the Franco-Belgian comic “Lucky Luke,” which will publish in English next month as “A Cowboy in High Cotton.”
★★★
Thompson, 55, grew up in Memphis. He liked reading biographies and started writing late in high school, after discovering the work of beat poet Richard Brautigan.
“I realized poetry doesn’t have to rhyme,” Thompson says. “It can be cool and break rules and I fell in love with poetry and short stories.”
He attended what was then Memphis State University and took creative writing courses under acclaimed novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah at the University of Mississippi.
“That changed my life,” Thompson recalls. “He was instrumental in teaching me so much. He treated me like an equal when I didn’t deserve it.”
On Hannah’s advice, Thompson went to the University of Arkansas for his masters of fine arts in creative writing (Hannah was an alumnus).
“If that was his Athens, then it needed to be my Athens,” he says. “It was a great experience.”
Thompson bounced around as an adjunct professor and
taught high school in Mobile, Ala. About 11 years ago, he was watching an interview with actor Morgan Freeman on CNN when something caught his attention.
“He’s promoting a movie and one of the anchors asked him, ‘What’s your dream role?’” Thompson recalls. “He said, ‘Oh, Bass Reeves, the greatest lawman of the wild West.’ And he starts talking about this person I’d never heard of before.”
Thompson, also the author of “Sideshow: Stories,” began researching what little there was out there about Reeves and found Burton’s book. An obsession was born.
He wanted to write a novel about Reeves and he wanted to earn his doctorate in Reeves’ old stamping grounds. So he enrolled at the University of North Texas in Denton, where he specialized in Black narratives and researched Reeves.
“It’s right in the back yard of Reeves’ territory,” he says. “I could take day trips around Oklahoma and the area.”
★★★
Thompson soon realized that no single book could contain Bass Reeves — he would need a trilogy.
The first book, “Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves,” was published in 2020 and details Reeves’ time on the Arkansas plantation, the Civil War and his complex relationship with George Reeves.
In a blurb for the book, Burton says: “Sidney Thompson has the ability to pull you into the narrative and give you a glimpse of the antebellum life of a young slave destined for greatness as a lawman … highly recommended.”
The second book deals with Reeves’ career as a lawman and the killing that found him on trial for murder.
Thompson skillfully weaves in flashbacks to earlier
bounty hunts and Reeves’ time as a slave to bring the reader up to speed (there’s no need to have read the first book, though one might feel compelled to seek it out after finishing “Hell on the Border,” whose title is a literary nosethumb to Harmon’s book).
He follows Reeves not only to catch the Coldirons, but also to apprehend the killer Jim Webb in a thrilling battle of wits and weapons.
Little Rock author Kevin Brockmeier has known Thompson for about 15 years.
“I think, like the most effective historical fiction, Sidney’s work brings the immediacy of the present to the past,” he says in an email. “The worlds his characters inhabit aren’t alien or antique to them, so they aren’t to us, either.”
Brockmeier says in a blurb for “Hell on the Border” that Thompson has written “a finely calibrated trilogy about a subject who couldn’t be more necessary to our moment. The Bass Reeves he depicts is as transparent to us as he is to himself, and also as mysterious — he is, that is to say, human — and the voice with which Thompson pursues him, at once austere and ornamented by its historical circumstances, is just one of the book’s many enviable achievements.”
★★★
So, why fiction? Why wouldn’t Thompson take a deep dive into a biography?
“I was as fascinated with Bass Reeves’ psychology as I was with his history,” he says in an email. “I wanted to resurrect the man and his mind, how he saw the world, or how I honestly believed he saw the world anyway, as much as possible, and that would require fiction. I’m a storyteller. That’s simply who I am … In my books, I want to show what he did, too, but also why and how. To do that, I had to dig around in point of view for a long time; that’s the labor of a fiction writer.”
And, he adds, the weight of history and facts helped ground the story.
“I didn’t want free reign of his story like I usually want as a storyteller. I didn’t want to cheat history and spin a yarn just to spin one. To honor his story, I believed I needed to summon his spirit, so to speak, and to do that, I needed to remain as faithful to the historical record as I possibly could, and then fathom the rest. I hoped ‘the rest’ would then be closer to the truth, the psychological truth, of who Bass was, how this miracle of a man was humanly possible.”
Thompson is also aware that some may question how a white man can tell the story of a Black icon.
“My parents were from Mississippi and they were well aware of Jim Crow laws. They made a great effort to make us aware of the feelings of others and the unfairness of [the] laws.”
He attended majority-Black public schools in Memphis, he says, and his father taught what was then called Black English and literature at Memphis State University.
“My upbringing in Memphis,
a city known for racial turmoil, was beneficial to me. As a writer, I’ve always felt free to write about issues that dealt with race. When I heard Morgan Freeman talking about Bass Reeves, I was inclined to jump on it.”
Burton, who is Black, notes that “every individual has to look at history and life as they see it through their own eyes. He’s writing about American history and he’s American. I think it’s fine.”
Thompson is at work on the third book and says that the last decade-plus of researching, writing about and living with the life of Bass Reeves has left a lasting impression.
“The more I have thought about him, the more I’ve thought from his perspective; it has taught me to process things more and be more patient,” he concludes. “When I was younger I would have come out guns blazing, but I wanted to get this right. I feel like Bass Reeves has taught me to be more observant and calm under duress. It’s all I’ve been thinking about.
“Episode after episode, he managed to keep his cool and always believe in himself.”