Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/528216
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 7 0 Tillman typically walked home for lunch. It stands to this day. Surviving brothers, Ambrose and William, ran The State for the next 20 years, campaigning against corruption, for equal rights for all citizens, white, black, male, or female. In 1922 Ambrose Gonzales published The Black Border, the first of a four book series about his grandfather's Gullah slaves and free black neighbors, who turned to subsistence farming, hunting, and fishing after the Yankee army laid waste to the coastal plantations. Like his grandfather's Carolina Sports, The Black Border is still in print and continues to delight lovers of outdoor adventure and authentic Americana. After enduring his brother's assassination and founding a major newspaper and nursing it to solvency, Ambrose considered his Black Border series his life's foremost accomplishment. But what of the third son, William Elliott Gonzales? He enlisted in the US Army in 1898 to finally free his father's homeland from Spanish rule. And in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson appointed him ambassador to Cuba. And a fourth son? Yes, Alphonso Beauregard Gonzales was born on the family plantation in 1860 and refused to leave. Join his brothers at The State? No. Run for public office? Definitely not! He was a fisherman, a duck and deer hunter without peer who kept his family and neighbors well fed during chaos of Reconstruction. "He was a man of many friends," his obituary noted in 1908, "and the account of his death brought sorrow to them all. For 17 years he had been in ill health due to an accident . . . but he never lost his cheeriness or his talent as a raconteur and wherever known was a favorite." A raconteur? A teller of tales? Isn't that what writers do? William Elliott would have been mighty proud.