The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  As the morning air grew chill, the crowd headed for the warmth of the courthouse. There, packed tightly as cotton bales, they clapped and cheered like children as Hoke Smith, having promised, “We are above politics,” portrayed a halcyon future for a region sorely wronged and misunderstood by history. The South would rise back up to glory and the leadership of the nation, a virtual Camelot. In melodious tones and effusive language he praised Generals Lee, Beauregard, and Jackson, along with the humble foot soldiers of the local soil. He paid homage to the brave white women who kept home fires burning and the plantations producing during those four mean years but made no mention of the slaves or of black men like Alfred Williams, who’d accompanied the judge’s brother Charles to battle. Now the courthouse janitor and living close by, Alfred would likely have observed the festivities from a doorway or against a balcony wall.

  Sometime that evening, as he and his crew cleared the leavings from the box lunches off the lawn, soon after the judge and Miss Lula saw off on the 7:22 p.m. train to Atlanta the man they hoped would be the next president of the United States, the clock on the courthouse tower inexplicably stopped working.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  New Sheriff in Town

  The unveiling of the statue was simply the beginning; the following year would mark the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s beginning. Throughout 1911, a shiny new Hamilton came alive with Lost Cause festivities, coupled with more church revivals than anyone could remember in one year. At Hamilton Baptist, the young women swooned over Rev. Willie Upshaw, a golden-haired, silver-tongued, wheelchair-confined Atlanta evangelist, who urged them to repeat each day the biblical injunction in Romans 12:19, “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.”

  In March, Friendship Baptist consecrated its handsome new brick structure, finer than any church, black or white, in the neighborhood. During Rev. Forbes’s long tenure there, 1,500 people would be baptized in its pool. The Harris County Journal announced that the colored Masons were building a new two-story building.

  It was in the midst of all the hoopla—February 1911—that my maternal grandfather, Deputy Sheriff Buddie Hadley, moved his countrified family from a rented split-rail cabin in the honeysuckle tangle of Blue Springs to the stately old Mobley place, just off the newly named Monument Square. A month earlier he’d been sworn in for another term and the move into such palatial quarters tipped some off that he’d soon be running for sheriff.

  “Convenient to church, near school, 2 wells, splendid water—all conveniences,” the ad had read. The indoor toilet alone might have cinched it, but there was so much more. The idea of living in such a fine house would have both delighted and unnerved Emma Hadley, for it meant moving into the midst of Hamilton society. A plain-faced woman with piercing black eyes who wore her long black hair halfway down her back, Indian-style, and sewed her own dresses, would feel out of place among the college-educated, book-club-attending, operagoing women of her new neighborhood.

  Still, she’d have appreciated the convenience of the shops, a good Baptist church for her children and herself (if not her husband, never a churchgoing man), and the safety of people nearby, all brightened by the new gaslights along the paths. Mostly she’d revel in the spaciousness of the house—four large rooms up and four down, high ceilings, fine draperies, carpets, a fireplace in every room (including a marble mantelpiece in the parlor), six elegant porch pillars, a deep veranda, and a front balcony. All this was a far cry from the linoleum floors, wood-shuttered windows, and outhouse of their former homestead.

  Elegance, however, was second to safety for Emma and her children. Annie Laurie, her eldest, was newly married with a toddler, living up on Pine Mountain with a headstrong ne’er-do-well of a husband who’d just shot and wounded a Negro—in self-defense, he’d claimed. Worried for her daughter and grandchild, with smallpox on the spread as well, the practical Emma quickly brought them to live with her and Marion, as she called the sheriff. Clifford, her eldest son, had just been hired at the Hamilton post office and planned to take lodgings at Susan Robinson’s hotel, but that posed a problem since the somewhat peculiar young man found it difficult to eat in others’ company. So now he’d also move in with the folks. And Bessie, a pretty teenager, would have a high school to attend and a boost to her marriage prospects.

  The move signified a victory for Hadley, long considered down on his luck. In 1897 he’d moved the family to Pensacola, taking a job with his brother-in-law selling insurance to sailors heading off to war in Cuba and the Philippines. Emma’s headaches, the futility of cotton farming in a depression, family feuds, and neighbors’ vendettas had set his teeth and stomach on edge and so they’d left for the smell of the sea and the hope of prosperity. By 1899 they were back, tails between their legs, with nothing to show for the effort; most of the money they’d received from their share of the grist mill that Buddie and his brothers had inherited was gone.

  In 1900, brother Joe had won the sheriff’s post and hired Buddie as his deputy. He’d had to take up the plow as well, just to survive, but stayed in the job through two more sheriffs over the next decade, winning his share of plaudits in the Harris County Journal as he brought in more lawbreakers than others, tracked down fugitives in Alabama, even survived bullets through his hat and in his leg.

  Sheriffing ran on both sides of my Harris County families. Between 1858 and 1956 the county saw two Williamses, one Moore, and three Hadleys in the office. For Williamses the job had been a launchpad to greater power, but for Hadleys it was the penultimate political position.

  Hadleys were solid middle-class people. Buddie’s late father, William Henry “Buck” Hadley, and his wife had raised their five children on a six-hundred-acre farm that abutted the Williamses’ Blue Springs Road Plantation. Their farms lay seven miles southwest of Hamilton and seven miles east of the Chattahoochee River. Mulberry Creek snaked through Brit’s place. While Williams boys were privately tutored and attended academies and college, Hadleys, if lucky, finished eighth grade in the one-room Hadley School. Their father, a master carpenter, respected miller, and justice of the peace, handled many of Brit Williams’s business matters and was his friend. What Hadleys lacked in wealth and polish they made up for in character, common sense, and good disposition.

  Unlike Williamses, who married laterally or upward, Hadleys tended to marry laterally or downward, making them perfect for bridging the crucial gap between the elites and the discontented whites of the county. Over the years Hadley family members had increasingly married into the more rough-edged clans living in the western districts near the Chattahoochee, in towns called Mountain Hill, Mulberry Grove, and Antioch. These included men called “wool hats,” who ran afoul of federal revenue agents, drank heavily, and frolicked at night with Negroes, male and female. These were men who didn’t care much for the law, unless they were the ones meting it out. Early on it became clear to Mobley-Hudson-Williamses that if they were to hold Harris County whites together politically, they’d have to use Hadleys. In addition to that, with Buddie Hadley they got a man black folks liked and respected. His father had been a small slaveholder but was known as a “good one.” He’d lived most of his adult life in a section of Blue Springs highly populated with blacks. He employed dozens at his sawmill and was said to get on well with them.

  As for Buddie Hadley’s future, the move into town couldn’t have been wiser. By the end of the year Sheriff Middlebrooks would retire and Buddie would throw his hat into the ring. In the meantime he’d be elected senior steward at the Masonic lodge and complete his initiation into the inner circle. Living in a Mobley house symbolized the kind of acceptance and financial backing that would be necessary to win future elections, but it would also create doubts in the minds of some family and friends along the river, men who did not always see eye to eye with the Hamilton elite.

  Events had taken a troublesome turn in April, when an old Hadley
friend, Edgar Stripling, rolled into town aboard the Central of Georgia. Stripling had left town as a fugitive felon and returned a conquering hero in handcuffs. His trial for the murder of another Hadley friend in 1896 had pitted brother against brother and torn the community to shreds; when friends helped him escape from jail most felt relief and good riddance, but fourteen years later he’d been captured in Virginia, where, incredibly, he’d served for years as Chief of Police R. E. Morris. Newspapers nationwide were turning him into a hero. Now the local brothers’ battle over his fate would resume and Buddie Hadley would be drawn into it.

  On January 10, 1912, a special election was held for numerous vacated posts. It had been a cantankerous political year and more than the usual positions were up for grabs. Buddie Hadley, the natural choice, was elected sheriff without opposition. Ordinarily this would predict sure victory in the May primary, but within four days, the celebratory smiles of his large extended family throughout the county would be wiped clean.

  When I began this quest, I believed I was looking for the woman my father killed. This was not a threatening prospect: my father was dead and, being a seeker himself, would likely have been intrigued at my dedication to finding out the truth. Instead, once I began to dig, I found myself poking about in my mother’s family. This posed more of a problem because my mother was very much alive and had, throughout my upbringing, brushed aside any questions I had about her family. I’d sensed that she was ashamed of many of them—their poverty, their lack of education and social standing. Just before I arrived home bearing the lynching articles, Mamma had been interviewed by her grandson for a school project. He’d asked her what she was most proud of in her life and she’d answered, “My children and my sheriff father and grandfather.” Some time ago she’d written to congratulate me on an article of mine and added, very uncharacteristically, “I admire you for going after the bad guys.” I didn’t think she’d admire me for going after our bad guys, however. Still, at that point I held tight to the idea that, as the articles had suggested, my great-grandfather tried to prevent the lynching. Maybe we weren’t the bad guys after all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Norman’s Murder

  The Journal had announced that December was as “pleasant as May for Hamilton’s rose gardens,” but by mid-January it was reporting that “winter is now upon us with icy grasp,” and white petals lay brown and sodden on the ground. The village, so recently suffused with the sweet afterglow of church revivals, now hunched under dense clouds as a hard cold settled over the region. Mules stumbled along icy roads. Sleet pummeled the countryside and made any sort of outdoor work impossible. Men sat about idly. Some cut wood; others cleared land when rains slackened and bought mules in preparation for farming. Others nursed grudges. In order to drive up prices, Farmers Union leaders urged farmers through the Journal to order their tenants, mostly black, to hold back cotton and plant less next year. This was not popular among sharecroppers and renters already deep in debt. As an edict from an organization that forbade their participation, it was even less popular among blacks.

  Schoolhouse meetings for January 15 were announced to prepare white farmers to go “with a member of the committee and get tenants to agree to this proposition.”

  “There is no excuse that is worthy of consideration,” the announcement asserted. “A man who does not want to do a thing can find an excuse. A MAN WHO DOES WANT TO DO A THING CAN FIND A WAY.”

  The Hadley household was asleep when a fierce hammering and a God-awful holler came at the front door near midnight on Sunday the fourteenth. The news wasn’t something the sheriff would be much surprised by; in fact, he’d half-expected it. His nephew Norman Hadley—more son or brother than nephew, a handsome bachelor playboy with a quick temper—had been shot twice in the head and left dead on the frigid front porch of a Negro woman’s shack on Mulberry Creek.

  Buddie and Norman were alike in many ways—handsome, fun-loving, irreverent outdoorsmen—but there was a big difference. Buddie had long had a stern wife, four children, and a trio of spinster sisters-in-law in his house, all of whom served to keep him in harness. He’d been raised by a solid miller father who built a school for his children and brought them up with middle class values. As a young man Buddie had taught Sunday school. Norman was a rakish, guitar-playing bachelor, raised by his mother’s Gordon family in a moonshine culture out along the Chattahoochee River in a notorious section called Mountain Hill.

  News of Norman’s murder hit the new sheriff like an anvil. Norman was six months old when his parents married, a toddler when his father, Buddie’s oldest brother, either died mysteriously or just disappeared. He grew up on the Gordon place, a plain pine-log folk house grandly named Twelve Oaks. His grandfather, George Washington Gordon, proudly claimed to have been the first white man born in the county. When Norman’s mother remarried, he stayed on with the old folks and a houseful of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Gordons were God-fearing, whiskey-loving, quick-tempered folk. Hadleys were, through their mother’s Moore family, intermarried with Gordons six ways to Sunday and most Gordon and Moore men distilled, drank, and peddled moonshine down to Columbus and up to Atlanta. They often showed up in the U.S. district courtroom in Columbus.

  Georgia was for decades the largest moonshine-producing (and, probably, consuming) state in the nation. The stringent efforts of the temperance movement had turned most counties “dry,” thereby increasing illegal production. Brewing mash was seen as a “right” and a “freedom,” and the fact the North outlawed it during the Civil War and began to send its agents after southern moonshine men in the wake of the war made it more of a political act than it might have been otherwise.

  For the past two decades, even as he struggled himself, Buddie Hadley had worked hard to rescue his nephew from this lifestyle, doubling down his efforts since 1896, when Norman’s uncles Sambo and Mans Gordon, with Norman at their heels, had fired at a federal revenue officer and barely escaped a long imprisonment. The following two years had seen a spate of arrests and trials of Gordons and Moores, white and black.

  Buddie related to his nephew like a father; he’d seen potential in him and fought to be his better angel. He took him to Pensacola with the family, hoping he’d join the insurance business. When war broke out against Cuba, however, Norman had jumped the train back home and signed up, serving a total of one day before it ended. This past spring, Buddie included Norman on a fishing trip back to Pensacola with the prosperous Williams men, hoping they’d see something besides sport in him and provide more substantial prospects than the nightly Negro frolics, fraught with booze, guitar blues, and mixed-race women, which so fascinated his devil-may-care nephew.

  Norman’s murder was not something Buddie Hadley would have wished for at any time. It was especially not something he wanted on the honeymoon of a job he’d dreamed of for more than a decade.

  It had been many years now since Norman was arrested for illicit distillery, which didn’t mean he’d stopped, only that he’d grown smarter over the years and that Gordon and Hadley-connected sheriffs had managed to maintain a buffer between their whiskey-making kin and U.S. marshals. The current and former sheriffs in Norman’s family—Buddie, his brother Joe, and his uncle by marriage Mitch Huling—had doled out the occasional deputy, jail guard, and bailiff assignment in hopes Norman, now thirty-four, might someday be sheriff material. But hopes for his future had begun to dwindle.

  Then one hot night the previous September, Sambo Gordon, Norman’s uncle and strongest influence, was found dead on a dirt road near the river, a dead black friend beside him, a hot pistol in each man’s hand. The black man, Josh Caldwell, was Sambo’s tenant, longtime gambling buddy, and partner in the moonshine business. Soon afterward fires began to break out in Mountain Hill and its environs.

  First, the Negro society hall. Then a Negro church. Then a Negro lodge. Then a Negro school. Some white folks rushed in to help rebuild the school but these things take on a momentum. Gun toters’ licenses were b
eing issued to white men in record numbers. More men than usual were deputized as constables. A black ferryman turned up dead in the river; he was said to have been ratting to the revenuers. Somewhere in all this, a black man jumped on the back of Bose Moore’s buckboard and was removed with a quick rifle blast from Bose’s Winchester. Bose was Norman Hadley’s uncle. Of the man, he said to his stunned children beside him, “He wasn’t one of our nigrahs, and he had no business on this wagon.” Even the blind could see that Mountain Hill was coming unraveled. Politicians began calling for policemen to patrol each of the rural districts of the county “for the preservation of order on Sunday especially and the routing of gamblers and rowdies.” And the fact that Deputy Sheriff Buddie Hadley was making an arrest a day was small salve to heightened anxieties. “We never get tired of the war cry ‘Quit your meanness,’ ” proclaimed the Journal in late August, concluding, “The Harris County jail is now too full.”

  Mountain Hill wasn’t the only place that was roiled by gunfire; the entire South’s 1911 Christmas had been riddled with violence. Newspapers, white and black, reported black leader Booker T. Washington’s pleas to fellow blacks to suppress other black “gun-toters.” Judge Price Gilbert of the U.S. Superior Court in Columbus lectured grand juries that things were so bad it was easier to convict a man for horse theft than for murder. Back in 1907 the Harris County Journal opined upon “too many homicides” and a lack of “fear of the hangman’s rope.” Primarily it was white men murdering white men and blacks murdering blacks, all claiming self-defense, and, especially in the case of whites, going free. Almost always the issue was a woman or money lost in a card game, or both. Juries, the editorial argued, were at fault, rarely convicting anyone of homicide. The “good people” wanted to put a stop to this, but every time someone came before a jury looking guilty he turned out to be someone’s relative or neighbor; it was hard to be objective in such a small and interrelated community. Occasionally a politician would introduce a bill to expand jurisdictions in order to water down the blood ties, but such efforts never went anywhere.