HOW THE PONDER BOYS TOOK BLOODY MADISON
by Hunter James
On the higher slopes the morning hung heavy with fog, an ominous introduction to
the county known as Bloody Madison and to the man whose political career has
helped keep its reputation alive.
Generations of flatlanders have listened in awe to the many strange tales that have
come out of these hills—tales of magic, witchcraft, folklore rich with talk of ghostly
midnight visitations, of mysterious lights that race up and down old Brown Mountain,
apparition-like, just at sunset of a summer's day, with never yet a logical scientific
explanation of their existence despite the thousands who have gazed on them during
the last two-hundred years or more.
Yet, of all those tales, few are stranger than the story of Zeno Ponder, who bought
New Deal politics into a county that was as solidly Republican in 1950 as it had been
almost a century earlier, when it was fighting to help Abraham Lincoln preserve the
Union.
It has been more than ten years since I first visited him at his mountain hideaway, far
off in a dreamy cloud-hung land right up next to the Tennessee line, unmatched in all
of Appalachia for its scenic splendor, with the highest mountains in the east right next
door, Mt. Mitchell kkkk feet in the clouds and Clingman’s Dome also up there among
the sun and rain and fog and snow, all of which might come swirling down in a single
hour, with bursts of sunlight in between.
The fog rolled heavily in on us, my photographer and ,I as we went up a steep
mountain trail leading to his home. This old land of Madison County, is also famous
for something else— for the often-degrading poverty of its inhabitants. And neither
the New Deal nor the Great Society nor Zeno Ponder who was there a lot earlier, for
all of his storied accomplishments, had been able to do a whole lot to alter the
situation.
We went up a past a mailbox with the single word Zeno on it, not knowing exactly what
we would find , what kind of reception we would get—whether gunplay from behind
the windows or an invitation to a duel—when we arrived at his door at the top of the
hill.
Back during the War between the States—that was when the county first got its
name. Bloody Madison. It all goes back to the afternoon that a renegade band of
Confederate sympathizers massacred a band of Union loyalists who had come into
the county-seat town of Marshall demanding the monthly salt ration promised to them
by the Lincoln government. Since then, the county has kept the nickname current
with an inordinate number of homicides.
We were above the clouds now and soon found ourselves at last alongside a
spacious ranch house that looked out across a great sweep of valley toward some of
the highest mountains in the Southern Appalachians.
I knocked at the back door, a bit warily at first, still a little uncertain, remembering all
the old stories of ballot rigging, gunplay and bloodshed—of how in the early days
Ponder never presided over an election without keeping his snub-nosed .38 in easy
reach.
A second knock brought Boss Ponder to the door, much younger in appearance than
his sixty-four years, even with a torn undershirt hanging off him. We waited for him to
strap on his gun and holster. There was no gun, not even a holster hanging on the
wall. Maybe he wasn't really expecting company this morning in spite of my phone
call. He hurriedly yanked on a checkered sports shirt and smiled faintly beneath the
wisp of mustache that had adorned his lip ever since he left North Carolina State
College in the early 1940s with a degree in soil science.
A handshake, another smile, a pat on the back. Sit down, sit down. Have some
coffee and talk a spell. An engaging fellow, Ponder. But I couldn’t help myself: I was
still looking around for that revolver. Nothing like that in sight. Was it possible that his
enemies had exaggerated the unsavory characteristics of our host?
Not that there hadn't been plenty of juicy scandal. Zeno freely admitted—no
hemming and hawing—that in some ways his "rascally" imagine was richly deserved.
How did he come by it anyway? "By running roughshod over custom," he said,
rocking back in his chair, not yet reaching for the gun, wherever it was hidden. "Why
this county had been rock-ribbed
Republican for more than a hundred years when I got back from the war. And it's just
not so damned easy for anybody to explain how you reverse that kind of thing
overnight."
Not so easy, maybe. But there were plenty of reasons. In those days Bloody Madison
appeared a likely target for almost any kind of takeover. It was and still is among the
poorest and least populous of North Carolina's one-hundred counties, with little to
redeem it except vast stretches of unmatched scenic beauty: the great mountains, the
mighty expanse of the French Broad, as it sweeps past the hill-shadowed town of
Marshall, the mossy, bird-loud Appalachian Trail skirting its western borders. There
is little industry. Most men get by on the barest of livings, scratched out from patches
of burley tobacco or from thickets of marijuana hidden deep within the Pisgah
National Forest.
At sixty-four, Ponder was and had always been a man for these mountains, rascally
image and all, as rough-hewn as the rockbound cliffs from which he has long wrested
a comfortable living as a dairy and cattle farmer. When he came back from the army,
where he had spent time at Oak Ridge, Tenn., working in civilian service on the
atomic bomb—he was brimming with heretical political ideas. He was angry that the
New Deal had never showed its face in this county. Farmers were still wielding old-
fashioned scythes to cut their wheat. Go back into the country a ways and you would
find yourself in a land where people had barely heard of electricity, much less
glimpsed an electric light bulb.
He brooded about it a long time. After turning briefly to teaching—and making
himself thoroughly unpopular by mixing New Deal dogma with his chemistry lessons—
he began devoting all his time to dairy farming and politics. At least half of his time to
politics, if not more. By the mid-fifties he and his older brother, E. Y.—a more courtly
fellow who served as sheriff for all but one four-year term during Zeno's career as
"kingmaker"—had seized political control of Bloody Madison with a wild mixture of
bravado, ingenuity and sheer intimidation.
Up until that time Republicans had enjoyed a more than three-to-one edge in
registration. In almost no time at all it was precisely the opposite: more than 7,500
Democrats to fewer than 3,000 Republicans. There's an old story that before the
Ponders came along the Republican registrars had traditionally worked only the
painted houses in Madison's small towns and villages. But the Ponder brothers did a
lot more: They went out into the coves and hollows, climbed the unpaved roads, and
sat on the porches of stilted, vine-covered shacks, spreading the gospel of Franklin
D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. And, as unforgiving Republican partisans often
allege, yanked ne’er-do-wells drunk on “popskull” and herded them stumbling into the
courthouse to get their names affixed on the Democrat register.
Since those early days hardly a year had gone by without Zeno being haunted by
some sort of scandal or other. And he had spent an awful lot of time in court, yet
never spent a day in jail or on probation—never even had the slightest infraction
proved against him. Still the hint of scandal persisted. Even as we sat talking he was
preparing once more to go to court, this time to defend himself against charges that
he had profited from a land deal while serving as a member of the State Board of
Transportation.
During all of his years in politics Ponder has never held an elective office higher than
that of school board chairman. But he is still the boss all right, despite his brother E.
Y.’s long tenure in the one office that counts most in rural North Carolina counties.
That's another funny thing about Madison County. Most places, the sheriff's office is
the Holy of Holies. That's where you are supposed to find the political "boss." It
never worked that way during the time of Zeno and E.Y.Ponder stayed in power.
Here, it is Zeno who played that role even though he himself never aspired to high
office.
Scandal—it has been his whole life, and he has just sat back and laughed at it. And
let the "goddamned liars" do their worst. Had he ever stuffed a ballot box or even
been witness to such? "No," he said, suddenly somber. “I honestly have not. But I'd
be the last to pretend that all my friends are saints. Just wouldn't want to go that far.
I mean, I'm not that stupid—to pretend that I never got some help I didn't ask for or
even to think people would believe me when I denied knowing anything about it."
Only time he admitted to breaking the law was back when he had just come home
from college. His brother, still ten years away from his first term as sheriff, reminded
him that the election was nigh and that he'd better go on down and get registered to
vote. He was only nineteen, too young to register. But he already had that
mustache, which made him look a lot older.
Nobody though to raise a question about his age, either then or on election day. "So
I went on in, voted. Never even seen a ballot before." He didn't realize he had
broken the law until he left the precinct and told his brother how he voted—that he
had mistakenly cast his ballot for the Republican clerk of court candidate, a genial
fellow by the name of Clyde Roberts.
"I told E. Y. that I knew Clyde real well and didn't know the other fellow at all. And E.
Y. he says, 'My god, out of college and still hasn't got enough sense to know how to
tell a Democrat from a Republican."
Ponder, more relaxed now, talked philosophically and often humorously of those
days. "That's the only Republican I ever vote for. I sure do hope the Lord’ll forgive
me for it."
E.Y. himself was something of a character, everything Zeno was not, never looking to
stir up a lot of agitation, often coming along to stomp out the fires that his brother had
got started.
In days gone by, visitors passing down a narrow side street in toward the river were
often startled to hear a voice leap out at them from the jailhouse door: "You boys are
free to proceed unmolested. I don't believe I have any warrants out for you today."
Well, that was E. Y. Always good for a joke—and far more wary than Zeno, a little
more sophisticated when it came to some of the less savory details of the Democratic
takeover in Madison. For the unvarnished straight of what happened there one had
always to go back to Zeno, who never failed to admit even some of the more
embarrassing moments. Like the fight . . .
-*-
There's only one thing Madison County ever lacked in the way of political conflict: the
racial question. There were never slaves in this part of the world, very few of them
anyway, which, of course, is why Madison and much of the Southern mountains
remained solidly Unionist during the Civil War. Which is also what has made it easy
for Zeno and his pals to remain fiercely loyal to the Democrat Party during the most
raucous days of the civil rights movement and the white backlash that followed hard
upon it.
He eventually reached the point that he could do just about as he pleased when it
came to Madison politics. Once, during a county convention, he boldly endorsed his
close political ally and card-playing buddy, Lauch Faircloth, for the Democrat
governor's nomination. After that, people kept coming up to him and saying, "My god,
Zeno, you can't do that. That violates every known party canon, to take sides in a
primary." And Zeno would say: "Naw, boys, naw, that doesn't apply to politics in
Madison county." (If he had lived he would be mighty sorry by now; Lauch Faircloth
went on to become North Carolina’s junior Republican U.S. senator.”
He had come a long way, Zeno had, far enough to see—though he hated to admit it—
that the Republicans were regaining much of the clout they began to lose back in
1950. In those days, when the two brothers were still in the early stages of their
takeover and far from invincible, brother E. Y. won his first term as sheriff. That is
about all he won. He went into work on the morning after he was sworn in and found
the old sheriff carrying on just as though there had never been an election. The
incumbent wouldn't leave. He and his cohorts charged fraud, the first of the many
times Zeno was to hear that word over the years.
"Well, they wouldn't leave and they wouldn't leave." And the Ponders weren't yet in a
position to play really rough. "So we left instead. E. Y. just went down to the
jailhouse, emptied out one of the offices down there and took over. After awhile he
decided he liked it better down there anyway, even after the courts upheld his
election as entirely above board."
He remains there to this day, often standing in the door his office, which looks out on
a lovely stretch of the French Broad, shouting out his jokes at passersby and often
engaging them in long whimsical conversations.
"Never even tried to get in the courthouse anymore,” said the younger Ponder, as we
sat talking. We knew we were still on uneasy ground because we hadn't won any
other offices up there. We could go in and use the toilet facilities, and that was about
it."
By 1954, after registering a lot of people no upstanding Republicans would have
been caught talking to on the street, Zeno took over as chairman of the county
elections board. Though the Republicans still held a majority of the county offices,
they had no real claim to the chairmanship. In North Carolina, custom and law alike
dictate that whoever controls the governorship controls the local elections machinery;
and to that point the state had not had a Republican governor since post-
Reconstruction times. So the Democrats had been running the electoral machinery
in Madison and all of the state's other Republican counties throughout the Twentieth
Century.
In Bloody Madison, however, they were a special breed of Democrat. "Sweetheart
Democrats," Zeno calls them, men who ran the county with the connivance of the
Republican majority. It was then, as the new party chairman, that Zeno faced his first
real test of strength, defying custom and skirting the edge of the law by throwing out a
slate of precinct officals approved by the sweetheart Democrats and putting in his
own people.
"Wouldn't have been surprised to see bloodshed at half a dozen spots around the
county that year."
Came election day and Zeno strapped on his holster and went out to look around. At
one precinct he found himself outnumbered by four armed Republicans. He was fond
of telling the story of how he strode into the place and got the drop on them.
"I told 'em, 'Don’t wanta kill nobody, but I'm prepared to do it. I got six bullets in here
and I can can get all four of you before you can get your guns outa your pockets.'" It
was a bit of a bluff. Just then the Democratic poll watcher, one of Zeno's own men, a
76-year-old who had also come armed and ready for trouble, got out of his chair and,
as the "boss" remembers it, said: "Zeno, you take them three over there. I'll get the
first one on the left."
-*-
The only time Zeno ever found himself in any real trouble was the time he decided to
seek a seat in the State Senate in a multiple-county district, his first attempt to a
legislative office or to any other higher than his school board chairmanship. The race
was a disaster. He had been running the county for ten years, but this was the first
time the word "fraud" really took hold.
The trouble began when somebody realized that one of the ballot boxes was missing.
Then someone discovered that all twenty-three of the county's poll books, plus one of
the registration books, had mysteriously disappeared. They eventually resurfaced,
but by then the State Board of Elections, which had convened in Marshall to
investigate the controversy, had what it wanted: Zeno's scalp.
It was touch and go for a while. After recovering the missing box the board
discovered to its disappointment that it was worthless as ammunition against the
"Pondercrats."
"Two-year-old ballots and a big question was all that came out of the crudely-
fashioned box which some eighteen days ago triggered a fight at the Mars Hill
precinct and brought out armed men to retrieve it," a reporter for the Asheville Citizen
wrote.
"Nothing but rubbish in it," Zeno says. "Maybe two handsful of old wrapping paper,
some tape and half a dozen ballots left over from the 1962 election." Never mind.
Neither the box in question or the missing poll books were much of a factor anymore.
The board of elections had found "tainted" boxes in six Madison precincts where
Ponder had won heavily and, on that basis, declared runner-up Clyde Norton, an Old
Fort attorney, as the winner.
Once in Raleigh, Norton set out on a crusade to reform the whole balloting process in
Madison County and wherever else reforms appeared to be in demand. The reforms
never came to much in Madison County; Zeno was still the "boss." Boss and
kingmaker, but very much out of favor with Governor Terry Sanford and the "liberals"
who were now running the party in the name of a martyred Jack Kennedy and other
Washington "elitists.".
Ponder naturally had his own ideas as to why the board voted to deprive him of his
State Senate seat. He saw himself as a victim of "negative publicity," a man who for
all of his good work in behalf of the Democrats had become an embarrassment to the
liberal branch of the party and had therefor made himself "expendable."
"That's the only reason they denied me that seat. The only reason. There was never
one shred of evidence that anybody ever tampered with any of those ballot boxes or
done one damned thing that was illegal. There was no fraud in that primary—or it
there was, I sure didn't know about it, and they sure as hell didn't prove it."
-*-
Those were his worst years. Dynamite going off near his house. Gunshots in the
night. Shattered glass on the floor of his bedroom. For all his years in power, Zeno
still had powerful enemies: among them, the best-known of Madison's "sweetheart
Democrats," a Marshall lawyer named Joseph Huff. I had talked to Huff a week or so
earlier in his office, and found that he was still profoundly contemptuous for Zeno and
the "Pondercrats."
He had a whole different story of how the Ponders came to power. "Sure, they
registered people. They registered a lot of people."
With that he got up and led me to his window and pointed toward a stone wall that ran
around the courthouse lawn. Two old-timers were sitting there and appeared to be
swapping drinks from a quart jar containing something that looked suspiciously like
moonshine whiskey. They were half standing and half sitting and sort of wobbly and it
was hard to tell whether attempting to get up and still trying to sit down.
"Right there you are, that's the kind of folks they registered. Sure, they registered
everybody in sight. They catered to the one-gallus crowd that sold liquor and all that
sort of thing." And to his mind Zeno was the worst of the lot. "If he ever had a good
motive, I don't know about it. A sorry man, Zeno."
In the long rivalry between Huff and Ponder one glimpses the whole history of
Madison politics in microcosm. For it was Huff who in 1964 was the stoutest defender
of Norton's right to hold the office that Zeno had sought.
"It was the old story of voting tombstones, voting names out of the Old Testament,"
Huff said.
The case dominated the news for months. At one point Huff got off a memorable line:
"The situation in Madison County is so bad that even the buzzards hold their noses
when they fly over it."
After that, the Pondercrats took to calling him Buzzard Huff. One day Zeno made the
mistake of calling him that to his face. "I knocked the goddamn hell out of him," said
Huff, a learned man whom Ponder describes as "basically a redneck."
"Well, after I got in that lick I reckon it was two or three weeks before Zeno was seen
on the streets again. Had a beautiful black eye, I understand. He didn't fight back.
He backed off in the corner and put his hands in his pockets and said, 'Now, I'm a sick
man. I can't fight you. I'm a sick man. Don't come on me now."
-*-
"A pack of lies," Zeno says, reddening a little and half rising out of his chair. I had the
sudden disconcerting thought that he was going after that six-shooter for sure this
time. "Hell, everybody in that courthouse was fighting to keep me off him. Especially
Liston. Ask Liston. He'll tell you the real story of what happened that day."
Liston was Liston Ramsey, an old ally who had risen to become speaker of the North
Carolina House. Some weeks after talking to Zeno and Huff I dropped into his
Raleigh office trying to get the straight of it. But the clear-thinking speaker's memory
failed him on this crucial point: "Been a long time. Hard to say exactly who did what to
whom."
Not for Zeno. "Liston was holding me back, saying, 'Don't hit him, Zeno! Don't hit
him!"
After his loss to Norton and his wild fight with the State Board of Elections Zeno went
right back to being the same old Zeno. Still "boss." Still in charge. And never out of
the headlines for long. His foes constantly dragged him into court for one reason or
another. So far, as indicated earlier, they had yet to make one of their charges
stick. "Sure, they can indict me anytime they can round up a whole bunch of liars,
but they'll never get a conviction because I've done nothing wrong.”
Now that he is getting along in years — he received his first Social Security check the
week before we talked—Zeno still has friends willing to do him a good turn, but even
they weren’t convinced they could keep him in power much longer. Too many new
people coming into Madison County now. In a way even that is Zeno's fault. The
superhighways that penetrate the Madison County backcounty, roads built largely
because of his influence in the state capital, have brought in too many new ideas, too
many new people over the hills from nearby Asheville. Too many Republicans who
know not the ways of their forebears. Drug addicts looking for a safe hideaway.
Marijuana producers looking for good land hidden amid the deep hillside forests.
Some of the new breed of Republicans have even begun to win office again, a truly
ignominious development to Zeno's way of thinking. What is worst, some Democrats
have been winning without Zeno's blessing. Not long before Zeno’s death a Mars Hill
dentist registered as a Democrat ran with two Republicans solidly behind him, but he
ran as a Democrat and was elected solely because he was on the Democratic ticket.
But he won't get away with it again." Steen, meantime, had only this to say: "We
made use of the people the Ponders used and abused."
As for all of his legal difficulties, Zeno just shook his head and walks me do the door.
"Nothing but goddamned harassment," he says, "and I'm getting damned tired of it."
Ponder had secretly bought great parcels of land along a proposed 15-mile right-of-
way, and everybody was saying, "Well, it sho does look like we're getting rid of the
Ponders at last."
He explains it all this way: he had bought the land merely to benefit the schoolchildren
of Trust, a remote hill-blocked community in the southwestern corner of the county.
Children from that area had been obliged to travel more than two hours across
mountain roads to the new Madison County High School; and there were fears, he
says, that reluctant sellers might stand in the way of a road first promised some
fifteen years earlier.
"Naw, they ain't through with me yet. They might get a grand jury somewhere down
the line—like I say, if they can get two or three goddamn liars before it—to indict me.
Sure, they'll get their trial all right. They're already down there trying to get a jury
together. But it’ll be like all the others. I'll lay one million dollars with anybody
anywhere that they're not gonna lay a hand on me in court, because Zeno Ponder
has never done anything wrong—never done anything that didn't have the better of
this county and its people in view."
His enemies eventually found their "liars." But he was right. The trial would turn out
to be just another failed attempt "to get the Ponders." He would win easily, cleanly. It
took the jury only forty-five minutes to clear him of all charges. As for the rest of it,
the world was changing quickly, much too quickly, for Zeno Ponder. As for Faircloth,
once a close Democrat ally and now a “turncoat,” Zeno only shook his head in
disgust, refusing even to mention his name.
"They still ain't through," he would say, after his acquittal. "Ain't nothing but
goddamn harrassment and ain't never been anything but goddamn harassment.
Republicans feel about me the way Christians feel about the Devil, and they sho won't
give up till they think they've got something that will turn that will trick."
I never saw Zeno after that. He would not long outlive his friend's defection. There
were no more trials, however, even if there were to be very few victories, as in the old
days. I remembered how, after the last verdict came in, he had laughed and said:
"Well, maybe that's the last of it. Maybe at least I won't have to keep spending myself
into the poorhouse to defend myself against charges that never will be and never
have been anything but damned harassment."
Almost the same words he had spoken on the day of my visit to his mountain home.
"Damned harassment. That's all it is. Nothing but damned harassment." Leaving, I
paused for a moment to look out across a side swept of valley toward the mist-hung
rim of the Great Smokies and then off to the north toward Mt. Mitchell again.
"No sir," Zeno says, still talking about the great future he sees for himself and for the
hard, unyielding land that has been his home since birth, "they'll never get a
conviction on this old boy, and I've got some more news for them: I have absolutely
no intention of getting out of politics—not now, not ever."
The fog had vanished from the nearer slopes and for the moment, as I drifted back
down the hill past the mailbox that said "Zeno," Bloody Madison no longer seemed
quite so bloody or so menacing as it had an hour or so earlier. The sun, in fact, had
thoroughly taken the valley now, and the mountains on every side—sort of like the
ponder boys themselves took Madison way back when.
-*-
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