James Burkett

James Burkett, later known as James Barber and referred to as James Burkett-Barber, is the earliest clearly identified figure in the family history of violence that Andrew Barber traces across generations. Born near Minot, North Dakota, around 1890, he moved east, took a new surname, and established himself in New York as a persistent violent offender. The few surviving details about him—an old photograph, a disputed account of his flight, and a criminal record—make him at once a historical person and the first visible link in a family story Andrew tried to contain rather than pass to Jacob.

Identity and Background

Andrew describes James as his great-grandfather, a man whose early life is largely undocumented. He knew nothing about James’s parents, childhood circumstances, or education. The outline he could supply placed him on the High Plains of Dakota in the years after Little Big Horn, as the American frontier was closing. Even the account of how he left North Dakota was secondhand: Andrew’s mother had heard it from Andrew’s grandfather, Russell Barber.

According to that family account, James left North Dakota to evade an armed-robbery charge. He spent time on the southern shore of Lake Superior, clamming and working on fishing boats, before making his way to New York under a new name. The reason for the name change remained uncertain. It may have been intended to evade an arrest warrant, to begin again under a different identity, or to serve another purpose; no one in the family knew why he chose Barber in particular.

The Photograph and the New Name

The most concrete record of James’s transition from Burkett to Barber was a sepia photograph on thick card stock. Taken at the H.W. Harrison Photographic Studio on Fulton Street in New York City on Wednesday, August 23, 1911, it was the only image Andrew ever saw of him. Pencil notes on the back recorded the date and the new name, “James Barber.”

In the photograph, James was about twenty or twenty-one. He stood full figure, slim and taut, with bandy legs, wearing a borrowed coat and holding a bowler in the crook of his arm. Andrew read his squint and the curled corner of his mouth as a Bowery smirk. The picture cannot settle why James fled or what he had done before arriving in New York; its evidentiary force is narrower and more striking. It fixes a date, a place, and a chosen name where the rest of the family history is uncertain.

Criminal Record and the 1916 Case

Andrew inferred that the North Dakota charge may have been more serious than armed robbery. In his view, the distance James traveled and the extent of his change in identity suggested that a minor stickup charge alone would not have prompted such a flight. Once in New York, James appeared in the record not as a novice gradually escalating from petty offenses, but as an established violent criminal.

His New York arrests included assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, assault with intent to rob, assault with intent to murder, mayhem, possession of an infernal device, possession of an unlicensed firearm, rape, and attempted murder. From his first New York State arrest in 1912 until his death in 1941, he spent nearly half his time in prison or in custody awaiting trial. Two charges of rape and attempted murder alone resulted in a combined fourteen years in prison.

A 1916 attempted-murder case supplies a rare narrative episode within that long record. The dispute began at a Brooklyn bar, where James and a man named Payton argued over a debt. James claimed Payton owed him; the state’s account was that James was working as a debt collector. James attacked Payton with a bottle and continued the assault after the bottle broke and the confrontation moved out onto the street. Bystanders who knew Payton intervened, struggled to restrain James, and held him until police arrived.

The judge’s decision recorded one further detail: “The defendant’s reputation for violence was well known to Payton, as indeed it was well known generally.” That observation makes the case more than a single outburst in Andrew’s reconstruction. By 1916, James’s reputation had already become public knowledge, confirming the pattern suggested by his repeated arrests and lengthy periods in custody.

Family Legacy and Narrative Significance

Andrew presents James as the beginning of the lineage he knew how to name, not as a fully recoverable origin. He imagined the family’s violence running backward beyond James, perhaps to Cain, but had no desire to investigate that possibility. The stories he inherited were lurid and often unverifiable; the photograph and court record offered firmer points of reference without explaining the causes of James’s conduct or proving an unbroken biological inheritance.

That distinction matters to Andrew’s own account of fatherhood. He says he deliberately refused to research or analyze his family history, choosing instead to absorb its burden and stop its transmission to Jacob. His knowledge of James is therefore both evidence and a boundary: enough to recognize a history of violence, but not enough to reconstruct the life behind it. James’s record sharpens the force of Andrew’s fear while leaving open the central uncertainty between family history, individual action, and what can truly be passed from one generation to another.