Those who have an interest in Delta history and love to delve into their own ancestry might like to read "Only a Few Bones", a book that explores the lives and unique times of the Ring family of Warren, Issaquena, and Sunflower counties.
It's the result of 30 years of research. The heart of John Philip Colletta's work comes from old newspaper headlines from 1873, and these headlines give him his subtitle: "A True Account of the Rolling Fork Tragedy and Its Aftermath".
Colletta tells as best he can the story of his ancestors, German immigrants Joe and Barbara Ring, who follow Joe's younger brother, George Ring, into Mississippi from Buffalo, N. Y., following the Civil War. The Rings and many of the relatives and associates Colletta traces are carpetbaggers. Is this the reason Joe Ring and four others go up in flames inside the Ring & Co. store at Rolling Fork Landing the night of March 4, 1873?
The author, who has many other researchers to thank for helping compile the information ultimately used in his book, first learned about the deadly fire from his grandmother, the late Frances Josephine Noeth Ring when at age 14 Colletta asked her about the history of their family.
She dropped a bombshell - a hand-me-down so horrific Colletta made notes of it but didn't believe it. A slave revolt, the elderly woman recalled, had occurred and they'd burned down the Rings' plantation house with everyone inside.
It was murder, she said, and Colletta's research as an adult was centered on this "Rolling Fork tragedy". As is often the case with old family stories, Colletta and his coterie found that the facts didn't always dovetail with the oral history.
Yet, those people had indeed burned to death where they slept in that huge wood frame wilderness store. It had been investigated as a murder more than once. It had gone down in written as well as oral history as a mass murder for which nobody had ever been punished, and during Reconstruction times, a period Colletta pointed out in the South at least was one of the bloodiest times in American history.
The history includes a dramatic riverboat sinking. This occurs when Joe Ring's widow and offspring as well as other relatives are on the way back north after the Rolling Fork fire. Why the boat sank isn't tied here to sabotage, but another Ring dies and in the aftermath a black manservant disappears. His body isn't found, and he apparently doesn't show up elsewhere later.
While it's admirable, all that Colletta has found out about the lives and times of his family and has shared in the manner he has shared by writing "Only A Few Bones", it's a poignant lesson, too. In the end he presents his conclusions about the truth of that awful night - he challenges the reader to come to his or her own.
Truth is, all Colletta's absorption with the past while not for naught, is a poignant reminder that sometimes you are going to find out things you might not want to know, and while the truth might be "out there", all that digging in and of itself, isn't going to reveal it. Whatever conclusions he's come to about the fatal fire, they're highly subjective.
Colletta, who lives in Washington, D. C., has written two other nonfiction books.
