After reading the almost daily accounts of how people are losing their lives in Guyana today, I would like to share the following bit from a book recently on the bestseller list – Outliers – by Malcolm Gladwell.
The author gives the meanings of outlier:-
1. something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body;
2. a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from others of the sample.
The following is a slightly edited version of part of what the author wrote in Chapter Six of the book, titled ‘Harlan, Kentucky.’
Harlan County was founded in 1819 by eight immigrant families from the northern regions of the British Isles.
Harlan was a remote and strange place. Two of the town’s founding families – the Howards and the Turners did not get along.
Page 162-164 of Outliers reads:-
“The patriarch of the Howard clan was Samuel Howard. He built the town courthouse and the jail. His counterpart was William Turner, who owned a tavern and two general stores. Once a storm blew down the fence to the Turner property, and the neighbor’s cow wandered onto their land. William Turner’s grandson, ‘Devil Jim,’ shot the cow dead. The neighbor was too terrified to press charges and fled the county. Another time, a man tried to open a competitor to the Turner’s general store. The Turners had a word with him. He closed the store and moved to Indiana. These were not pleasant people.
“One night Wix Howard and ‘Little Bob’ Turner – the grandsons of Samuel and William, respectively – played against each other in a game of poker. Each accused the other of cheating. They fought. The following day they met in the street, and after a flurry of gunshots, Little Bob Turner lay dead with a shotgun blast to the chest. A group of Turners went to the Howards’ general store and spoke roughly to Mrs Howard. She was insulted and told her son Wilse Howard, and the following week he exchanged gunfire with another of Turner’s grandsons, young Will Turner, on the road to Hagan, Virginia. That night one of the Turners and a friend attacked the Howard home.
The two families then clashed outside the Harlan courthouse. In the gunfire, Will Turner was shot and killed. A contingent of Howards then went to see Mrs Turner, the mother of Will Turner and Little Bob, to ask for a truce.
“She declined: ‘You can’t wipe out that blood,’ she said, pointing to the dirt where her son had died.
“Things quickly went from bad to worse. Wilse Howard ran into ‘Little George’ Turner near Sulphur Springs and shot him dead. The Howards ambushed three friends of the Turners – The Cawoods – killing all of them. A posse was sent out in search of the Howards. In the resulting gunfight, six more were killed or wounded. Wilse Howard heard the Turners were after him, and he and a friend rode into Harlan and attacked the Turner home. Riding back, the Howards were ambushed. In the fighting, another person died. Wilse Howard rode to George Turner’s house and fired at him but missed and killed another man. A posse surrounded the Howard home. There was another gunfight. More dead. The county was in an uproar. I think you get the picture. There were places in nineteenth-century America where people lived in harmony. Harlan, Kentucky, was not one of them.
“‘Stop that!’ Will Turner’s mother snapped at him when he staggered home, howling in pain after being shot in the courthouse gun battle with the Howards. “Die like a man, like your brother did!” She belonged to a world so well acquainted with fatal gunshots that she had certain expectations about how they ought to be endured. Will shut his mouth, and he died.”
Yours faithfully,
Winston Moore
