by Karen Branan
January 14, 1912, had been the coldest day of the year. Late in the evening, Buddie Hadley was told that a Negro woman, Loduska “Dusky” Crutchfield, a tenant on the Gordon farm, had sent someone for “Mr. Norman.” Sometime around 9:30 p.m., an unknown assailant or two pumped three bullets from two pistols into his body, propped him up against a tree beside the Mulberry Creek or on the woman’s porch (depending on the storyteller), and left him to die.
Sometime between the discovery of Norman’s body and the wee hours of the morning when the Columbus Daily Enquirer was put to bed, someone had decided exactly who killed Norman, and a front-page headline announced not only the murder but the murderer. The evening Ledger followed suit, also naming unequivocally “a negro named John Moore.” Moore, also a Gordon tenant, lived near Dusky and her husband, Jim, and their children, George, fifteen, and Lizzy May, twelve.
The two papers, however, disagreed on which night Norman had been killed: the morning paper said “Sunday,” the evening “Saturday.” While the first reports claimed Norman was killed “at High Bridge over the Mulberry Creek,” later reports changed from “shot in the head by two pistols through his bedroom window” to shot outside “a negro woman’s house,” to “the shack of a man named Jim Crutchfield, who happened to be the negro woman’s husband.” Still, there were clues to the nature of the killing. The evening Ledger’s first report informed readers that the “killing is said to have grown out of an existing feud between certain negroes and white men in that particular neighborhood.” Soon, however, the word feud would disappear, for in those days it connoted disputes among families and no one wanted anyone making that connection. A safer motive such as “a dispute over rents” was introduced and, for a time, stuck. Sharp minds would notice the switches and see right away that a cover-up was under way. If anyone troubled themselves to prod the newspapers to dig deeper or to offer conflicting information themselves, they got nowhere.
Sheriff Hadley’s whereabouts on the Monday following the murder went undocumented. John Moore and his alleged accomplices were not brought in until late Tuesday evening, so presumably he was out questioning witnesses and potential witnesses while the trail was still hot. Because his and Norman’s own closest family members were former and future sheriffs, deputies, and justices of the peace, most of them living near the scene of the crime, it can be assumed he had a lot of help in this matter and that the suspects, while not under arrest or confined, would not be going anywhere. Each lived on or next to the land of a Hadley, a Moore, or a Gordon.
So questions were asked and notes were taken and white men huddled in lodges and churches and barns while the women bathed Norman’s handsome body, patted it with herbs, and dressed him in his only suit with the fancy little riverboat gambler’s vest and cried and dipped snuff and cried some more and tended to Norman’s mamma, Josie, who was close to death with grief. Meanwhile, others cooked up big steaming pots of pork and chicken and greens and large greasy pans of cracklin’ bread.
While the women cleansed the body, the citizenry and the press cleansed Norman’s reputation. Before it was over papers far and wide were calling Norman Hadley a well-loved, well-disposed, prominent citizen, from one of the best-loved, most-respected families in the county, a wealthy farmer. The “well-disposed” part was true, at least most of the time. The rest was pure fabrication and worked with many other factors to rile folks up more than they already were.
In truth, Norman Hadley was, at his death, little more than a near-penniless playboy-plowboy living hand to mouth on the largesse of his land-poor grandparents. At one time he’d been one-fifth owner of a 625-acre plot of land divvied up among his grandparents and their living children (with grandpa’s name removed so he’d be eligible for his veteran’s pension), but somewhere along the way he’d been eased out or bought out or had borrowed himself out. He grew up as the little orphan boy under their protection, always getting the biggest piece of chicken, the last slice of cake, never having to work for anything or pay for his misdeeds. When he was arrested on illicit distillery charges, his grandma Harriett put up for bail the farm she’d inherited from her biological father. The spoiled but charming grandson had never succeeded at anything he’d ever done—unless you count guitar playing, singing, poker, fighting, brewing and swilling moonshine, and loving all the wrong women. The 1900 census listed his occupation as “laborer,” and in 1910 it was “odd jobs.” He claimed ten dollars in total worth on his 1910 taxes and used his grandmother’s land as collateral for the small loans he was always getting for seed and fertilizer. He’d never married and had no children, at least not any that anyone claimed.
But now dead, with newspapers large and small from Chillocothe, Ohio, to Paris, France, burnishing his image, Norman Hadley’s failed careers as insurance salesman, soldier, and jailhouse guard would go unmentioned. His relative success as a distiller of illicit alcohol would likewise be left out. Before it was all over, Norman Hadley would be known worldwide as “a wealthy planter,” or a “well-disposed, highly-popular young farmer.” Norman was a man with a wicked sense of humor and would doubtless have relished his newfound reputation. Two days after his murder, on Tuesday the sixteenth, he would have the biggest funeral Mountain Hill had ever seen.
CHAPTER SIX
Though Silent He Speaks
By the time of the funeral, Norman had ascended into local sainthood as the murdered-by-a-Negro nephew of the new sheriff, and so his burial had turned into a spectacle. Folks nobody knew were crossing the swollen river, traversing the mountain, and braving the slick roads from Columbus to stand in solidarity, ankle deep in mud, and pay their respects to a family under siege, though some simply came to gawk. Since word of his murder burst forth at breakfast table, in barbershop, lodge, church, parlor, and riverbank camp, vengeance lay like a rank perfume on the wet air of Mountain Hill.
The place, while chockablock with churches, had never been a model of decorum. In earlier days, proper folks were frightened to travel through. Columbus newspapers painted pictures of widespread drunkenness, gambling, and gunfights. White kinfolk who’d long ago left for holier regions wrote often, begging “the connections,” as they called cousins, to join them in more “christianable” climes. In the late 1880s the Columbus Ledger happily informed readers that Mountain Hill had transformed itself into a place of “orderly” and “upright” people. Somehow during the 1890s that transformation, if true, came unraveled, and the district once again resembled the Wild West. And it wasn’t only the making and consuming of the demon rum that was causing the trouble and raising membership in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and Anti-Saloon League; it was also the frolicking that went on between black and white after the sun went down, the ways in which, as one Gordon descendant would tell me in the 1990s, “the whites forgot they were whites and the niggers forgot they were niggers.”
As sleet coated the cypresses surrounding the Gordon family cemetery, people gathered by the hundreds. Three Masonic lodges presided alongside the Woodmen of the World, whose fancy gravestone was an impressive marble tree stump entwined with ivy, adorned with a maul, an ax, a wedge, and a dove and inscribed Dum Tacet Clamat—though silent he speaks.
Rev. Brady Bartley presided at graveside. Bartley had already moved out of the district in disgust over its wild sinfulness, but he returned out of respect for the family. He’d lived next door to the Gordons almost his entire life.
Bartley was not the only good and temperate man who’d lately lost patience with Mountain Hill. Recently Rev. Cranford had preached on “a great wickedness” that stalked the district and of men who said “prove it on me” rather than beg God for forgiveness. Old-timers yearned openly for the days of the three-day camp meeting, where tear-stained men fell to their knees and confessed their crimes to large crowds and in great detail.
When Norman’s uncle Sambo Gordon was murdered, the Journal obituary writer, routinely polite to the dead no matter who it was, broke tradition and admitted,
“I do not say he had no faults. Far from it.” Norman, on the contrary, was almost universally adored and good memories flowed freely this day.
Young women who’d long sought his hand recalled the sweetness of his tenor voice as he sang at Miss Ora’s birthday party back in June. They had no need of embroidering, for Norman was a good son, a thoughtful grandson, a loving friend, and a most fetching man.
It’s possible, however, that he was forbidden a church funeral. Many of his comrades had been removed by their churches, which served up their own sort of justice, “ousting” members for a wide range of immorality—cards, whiskey, women, cussin’—much of which had engaged Norman since adolescence.
Over time moonshine had become such a staple of the Mountain Hill area economy, alongside a lusty temperance movement, that a network of “wet” and “dry” churches had sprouted and ever-widening faults had formed beneath the surface harmony of families and friends. But family came first for these fierce Scotch-Irish folks, and, truth be told, almost all the white folks in those parts were kinfolk in one way or another.
Forbidden a church funeral or not, it’s just as likely Norman would not have wanted one. His true church was the Masonic Lodge. The magic of organized manhood—its hoods, poetry, blood oaths, ancient rituals replete with quotes from Shakespeare in the deep forest—mesmerized him. He was an outdoorsman and it was only fitting that his service should be held in the weather, under the cypresses, encircled by giant holly trees.
Rev. Bartley said a few words but it was the Masonic brothers who ran the program. The evergreen sprig and the lambskin apron were laid upon the pine casket. The sprig stood for immortality, the lambskin for God’s care. Norman’s mother, Josie, was kept inside, nursed and comforted by her children and her tough old mother, too sick and grieved to stand. Within six weeks she’d be in a box beside her errant son.
Gordons were poor, homespun people yet were also deeply revered by their neighbors. The county newspaper’s boilerplate on them, used frequently, stated they were “lineally descended from the Scotch Gordons so honorably mentioned in American as well as English history and of which illustrious stock our lamented Gen. John B. Gordon was a noble scion.”
Scattered in and among the graves of the recently deceased Love, Brooksye, and Sambo were countless infant stones, fifteen in all, four belonging to Norman’s tiny stepsiblings, most lost to disease during the tempestuous 1890s.
The fact that three Masonic lodges presided indicated strong feelings at work. Granted, Grandpa Gordon had been a member of Kivlin Lodge for fifty years and that fact had recently been celebrated in grand Scottish style, but if Norman had died of whooping cough or TB there’d have been no such outpouring.
Ordinarily the family’s black folk—both “help” and friends—would have been there, gathered around the fringes of the crowd, to wish Norman farewell, and perhaps a few did bustle about the kitchen preparing coffee and cake for the visitors, but this funeral was different. A racial tension they could feel on their skin floated about the shorn fields and clay paths of the district, and blacks with any sense at all stayed indoors and kept quiet.
Had Norman been a young woman, raped and murdered, their anguish and the mourners’ need for blood could not have been any greater. Being the nephew of three sheriffs and the grandson of another put him on a sacred plane. The Law, like the White Woman, symbolized the holy of holies of the South. In striking out at the beloved bachelor nephew of the beloved sheriff these “nigras” had struck deep into the heart of white supremacy. Never in the eighty-two-year history of Harris County had black folk cut so close to the quick of things.
Many of the mourners had fought beside one another at Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Monocacy, had fought under the very General John B. Gordon to whom this Gordon clan claimed kin, the John B. Gordon who’d proudly headed the state’s Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. Harris County’s local militia was named for him. Some had doubtless listened well on Confederate Memorial Day as featured speaker Arthur Hardy implored them: “If ever again we are threatened with the scourge of the invader, if ever again a war of conquest is waged against us, we pledge you, in the language of the immortal [Irish poet Robert] Emmet, that ‘we will contest every inch of ground, burn every blade of grass, and the last entrenchment of our liberties shall be our graves.’ ” They’d raised sons and grandsons to do just that, but lately they’d turned on one another.
It started back in the 1890s when men and women and children were forced to find work in the mills of Columbus and became infected with unionism and populism. Intrafamilial schisms appeared and widened around politics, and when the old planters ran for office they often had to put mothers on the podium to shame their errant sons back into the conservative fold. Beginning in the nineties, Hamilton candidates from the ruling elite received fewer votes in the Mountain Hill and surrounding districts than elsewhere in the county.
Tempers were even hotter than usual, with Edgar Stripling back in jail and folks taking sides over whether he should be freed or sent up for life. The fact that so many were kin made matters worse. Sick of scrapping, too many of the best people were packing up. Something was needed to hold folks together, keep them in place, something more than those Saturday afternoon scrimmages with the Gordon Militia, more lasting than the Lost Cause rituals. Something big and loud and final was needed to avenge the honor and good names of Gordon, Hadley, and Moore and put an end to all this crime.
Bound by white supremacist ideology, skin color, common rage, bolstered by the Holy Bible—not the thou shalt not kill but eye for eye, tooth for tooth—these Masons had long ago sworn blood oaths in their lodges to stand by one another, whether or not it was deserved.
The Woodmen also had strong bonds along these lines; their founder, Colonel William J. Simmons, an insurance salesman and former Methodist minister raised in southwest Georgia, was already trying out the ideas that would take form three short years from now atop Stone Mountain when he would resurrect the KKK.
Some had begun to see how divisions had risen among them, weakening them in the face of real enemies—how they’d wasted their powers in quarrels over cotton-holding and boll weevils and women and religious dogma and the drinking of spirits and the treatment of Negroes and land rights and inheritances and which moonshine man had turned in another moonshine man to the feds.
On a day like today these once-urgent matters shrank in light of the fact that so many loved ones, struck down in the prime of their lives, now lay dead at their feet. And so Norman Hadley was magically transformed from a handsome, cocky, guitar-picking playboy into a fallen warrior, his sacred name calling out for redress.
All the feuding factions of the neighborhood—most of them intermarried—bowed their heads together that day in the Gordon cemetery. It was a crowd—red-faced and rough, jut-jawed and fierce-eyed—containing both law enforcers and lawbreakers, cops and criminals. Lately black and white crime was on the rise but it was black crime that was noticed more; in the absence of a rural police force, every white man played the part. These men had been disciplining blacks and other whites outside the legal system all their lives. From white-on-white and white-on-black “whuppings” to white-on-white ousters from churches (and white-on-black church “ousters” during slavery) to lodge trials with various punishments, they did not see courts and jails as the only (or even the best) way to handle criminal behavior. Still, the county had not had a public lynching since a slave called Boy George was staked and roasted just before the war broke out. Harris County white folks prided themselves on a more cultivated form of “Negro control,” and when time and again that failed, they took their bloodletting deep into the thick jungles out along the river, or into the river itself.
Sheriff Hadley wore several hats that day. As senior steward of the Hamilton Masonic Lodge he helped preside; as grieving uncle he wept and comforted and was comforted; and as sheriff he listened and watched. And he, a tall, quiet man with sky-blue eyes and a thatch of gray
curls, was in turn observed, implored, queried, and counseled. The situation did not look good. Basic facts were still under dispute: where Norman was killed, when he was killed, why he was killed. What wasn’t disputed, at least not openly, was by whom he was killed.
Some were puzzled as to why, with Norman dead in a pine box at their feet, his killer—already proclaimed guilty on front pages across the region—remained free. Not “at large,” but not yet in custody. In other places, under similar circumstances, John Moore and his suspected accomplices would have already been strung up.
But this was the new sheriff’s first month in office and some believed he, being their sheriff, deserved the opportunity to do things correctly. Others, however, wanted to put him to a test. It was a common urge in that era.
Whatever the cues Hadley received that blustery afternoon, he went directly from Norman’s grave to the rude tenant shanty of twenty-four-year-old Johnie Moore there on the Gordon farm and put him in his wagon. The fact that Moore stayed put within easy reach of angry white men was proof to some that perhaps the papers and whoever gave them the story were not entirely on the right track. Or it’s just as likely that he had protection, perhaps called protective custody, during this brief span. Such were the tangled loyalties of the place where he’d lived all his life. For a black man, especially a mixed-race man like Moore in those days, the line between protection and prosecution was a fine one.
