Kinfolk

Lucian Fletcher was born in 1824 at Lynchburg, Va., where he passed a harum-scarum life which came to its first climax when he became involved in a disgraceful shooting scrape. To save his skin, his father, a well-to do planter, packed Son Lucian off over the Blue Ridge into what is now West Virginia. And to care for this handsome but troublesome son, Planter Fletcher sent along two slaves, Arch and Mary.

Arch died. Lucian, again mixed up in some shady gunplay, fled north with Mary. Arrived in Detroit, Lucian decided he would be safer across the river in Windsor, Ont. But Canadian law permitted the immigration of no slaves. So Lucian Fletcher married dusky Mary, settled down in Windsor's Negro district. In 1861 the Canadian census recorded the Fletcher household as consisting of Lucian. "one washerwoman, Mary Fletcher," and four pickaninnies: Sally. Moses. Maria, Sampson. Shortly thereafter a tax list reported Mary as "Mrs. Fletcher, widow and free-holder."

But black Mary was no widow. Her husband, who had gone home to enlist as a private in Lee's Battery of Virginia Light Artillery, was fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the flower of Southern chivalry against the invading hordes of Yankee "nigger lovers." With the exception of one court-martial and two months in a Federal prison camp in 1865, little is known of Lucian Fletcher's Civil War record. His amatory progress after Appomattox, however, was crystal clear.

Soon Lucian Fletcher began keeping company with a white girl named Frances Everett. When their eldest daughter was 8, the union was solemnized.

In 1932 Frances Everett Fletcher, widow of Lucian Fletcher, died, aged 87. She was survived by one daughter in Cincinnati, two daughters in Charleston, three great-granddaughters in Latonia, Ky., all the descendants of Lucian Fletcher of Lynchburg and all pure white. In 1932 in Chicago died Maria Fletcher Turner, Lucian Fletcher's chocolate-colored daughter by the late slave Mary. Of all his progeny, it turned out that Maria had done the best for herself in the way of worldly goods. She had married an enterprising blackamoor named Sheadrick B. Turner who had represented Chicago's Black Belt in the Illinois State Senate. When he died in 1927, he left his widow an estate of $79,000 and a house on Chicago's South State Street.

So well had the late Maria Fletcher done, in fact, that last week her white half-sisters and white grandnieces were more than willing to acknowledge their mulatto kinfolk in order to win from the Illinois Appellate Court the right to contest the late Maria's will in the hope of cutting a black foster son out of the late Senator Turner's tidy fortune. Commenting on her family's privy past, Lucian's white Daughter Flavonia Fletcher Coffey cheerfully admitted: "Father was in a good many scrapes."

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