The Smoky Mountains are a place of beauty. There is something surreal about them. If you pause inside their enfolding arms and listen to the sounds, you will hear and feel it. The mountains hold stories, secrets, and imaginings. Stanford Johnson grew up surrounded by these mysteries and secrets. His own imagination and the story his grandparents told him about a mysterious grave were fodder for a novel.
Visitors to The Great Smokies almost always visit Cades Cove. It was inhabited until the Great Smoky Mountains National Park took the farms from those who lived there. The road locals used to get there was called the Rich Mountain Road. It is now known as the Old Cades Cove Road. It was once the main road from the foothills to the Cove before the federal government took over the private landowners’ properties.
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There is a grave and a story behind the grave near that road. Research could not uncover who the grave held or the exact reason it was there. There were family stories, but they did not tell the whole tale. Stanford Johnson, the author of Our LITTLE Secret, set out to fill the hole. His imagination tells readers the story in a novel. I heard the real story directly from him.
While growing up, Stanford Johnson was told that a body was buried on his grandparents’ farm that was not part of the family. There was also a marker. Stanford saw it but was told it was merely to mark the grave. The name on it was insignificant. The marker was a sample from a store that sold markers. It was used to preserve the sanctity of the person lying underground and mark their burial place.
The Rich Mountain Road now is a one-way unimproved road that leaves the Cades Cove Loop Road, crosses the mountain, then snakes down the non-Great Smoky Mountains National Park side of Rich Mountain unit it ends up at a place once known as Lawson’s Crossroads. Stanford Johnson lived at Lawson’s Crossroads growing up. The crossroads moniker no longer exists. It is now just an insignificant rural road intersection at the foot of the Rich Mountain Road (now known as the Old Cades Cove Road) in the Townsend, Tennessee, area known as Dry Valley.
At the old Lawson’s Crossroads intersection, there is a house known as “The Wormy House.” It is in this house that Stanford Johnson grew up hearing stories about the mountains and the grave. Members of his family have owned the property since the 1860s. There is a field behind the house, being overtaken by woodland. The creeping forest gently rises beyond the field until it becomes the Hickory Flat Ridge. There in the woods, on the crest of the ridge, is the grave.
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According to a local historian, when the state of Tennessee contracted to improve the Rich Mountain Road in the 1920s, the contractor used convict labor. Some of those convicts were black. Stanford’s paternal grandmother, Lou Blanche Lawson Johnson, told him the story when he was a small boy. According to his grandmother, one of the workers on Rich Mountain Road was a black man named Albert Peoples. He was shot in the back of the head and killed for allegedly cheating at cards.
Locals have since passed on another version of the story. Stanford has been told that Albert Peoples was killed because he was winning at cards. The killers were going to dump Peoples’s body in the fill of the road and cover it with gravel, but Johnson’s second great-grandfather objected and let them bury the body on his farm. In recent times Stanford has been told that there are more graves of black men killed when the road was being built. They likely ended up under the roadbed, covered in gravel as was planned for Albert Peoples until Stanford’s great great grandfather interceded.
Stanford’s grandparents used a sample grave marker to mark the resting place of Albert Peoples. In Stanford’s growing-up years, it was referred to as “The n-word grave.” As a child, Stanford thought that was an ugly word and hated how people referred to it.
For years Stanford was haunted by the grave. He tried to research Albert Peoples but could not find any record of either the name or the people who worked on the Rich Mountain Road in 1920. The grave was not the only thing the young Stanford was haunted by. Stanford was also traumatized in his growing-up years by a racist and violent father. Stanford turned to alcohol to ease the pain of that relationship. He had some bad years. Twice he did stints in the U.S. Army. The second time he was discharged because of his alcoholism.
Stanford’s addiction led to homelessness, and telling the story of Albert Peoples in Our LITTLE Secret led to his sobriety. He filled in the story of Peoples with imaginative characters from the past and present. He tells the story through the eyes of another young boy traumatized by an abusive father. He reconciles the hatred and is the salvation of several people in the book. Our LITTLE Secret: A Smoky Mountains Family Saga and Coming of Age Story Inspired by True Crimes is a novel that comes from the creative genius of its author. It is a terrific book, tells a relevant story, and provides healing to the heart and minds of many who have lived through racial or family trauma.
The book is full of the language of the people who lived in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains for generations. The colloquialisms, the food, and the life of those folks are part of the book’s storytelling. Only someone with a background and roots in the Smokies could tell the story as well as Stanford Johnson has.
Stanford has been recovering from his addiction and co-occurring mental health disorders since 2015. He credits the desire and subsequent writing of the story of Albert Peoples for some of that recovery. Now, living in the “Wormy House” at the former Lawsons Crossroads, he oversees the grave and writes. Those of us who know him credit the beauty, nature, and the majesty and mystery of the Great Smoky Mountains he lives among as part of his healing.
