The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  However, the “hatred and fear of such relations” Baker referred to among the better classes, was not, Northen found, enough to galvanize them to action against it. He often expressed his frustration at these “sun-kissed men” who showed up to lend their moral support to law and order but remained silent when asked to make efforts.

  Others wrote to him claiming that their counties had no rapes, no lynchings, no problems. They did not see this as their task and did not wish to draw attention to the widespread miscegenation they all knew existed in the county. The inner circle preferred a code of silence where race was concerned. So much of what the crusading preacher-politician Northen said came too close for comfort: things like the undemocratic nature of the legal system, that white men had taught black men their wastrel ways, and the need for good whites and blacks to put bad whites and blacks under a special watch to prevent crime before it could occur.

  It wasn’t the antilynching aspect of Northen’s campaign that kept him out of Harris County so much as the anti-miscegenation piece. Black leaders like Turner, Du Bois, Wells-Barnett, and Cooper, along with a few white Yankees, had long preached that message, but for white southern leaders the subject had been mostly, until now, taboo. Taken with Northen’s message and pulling strings from his gilded peaks in Manhattan, George Foster Peabody counseled his Columbus friend, Gunby Jordan, to form regional commissions to attack the problem. These attempts were quickly thwarted by southern governors who wanted the matter, however crucial, to remain local. And, indeed, it would not be long before this inflammatory issue would find public utterance in Harris County.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Clutch of Circumstance

  It is October 1996 and, while conducting my research, I am staying with my mother in the house on Clubview Drive where I grew up. Mamma’s attitude on race has not changed. Edna still works for her and still enters the house through the back door, though now, when I take her home, she sits up front beside me. She tells me stories of police roundups at black nightclubs in earlier days, where men were locked up long enough for “police to have their way with the women.” Sometimes Edna would be locked up along with them. I can remember our phone ringing late at night and it would be Edna calling Mamma begging her to come get her. My mother never went. I like to think that she called her sheriff father and had him put in a call to a friend at the station to let Edna go, but I can’t be sure. Edna also tells me that she picked Mamma to work for because there was no man in our house. That had been her big sister’s advice when she first left home to find a job. “It’s safer that way,” her sister said.

  While my mother was determined not to aid my quest for the truth, she sometimes forgot herself and handed me a treasure. The best of these was her revelation of the “two-family families” of Harris County where “a white man would have a black family and a white family and the children all looked alike.” I remembered that as a teenager, I had remarked on how I often saw black people who looked like white people I knew and suggested to her that “maybe God made two of each of us.” She told me I was crazy. Now here she was telling me about these families, even naming names—Hudson, Jones, Land. She said to me: “If you find that in our family, I don’t want to know.”

  In the midst of Northen’s crusade and Baker’s articles, Hamilton lawyer-author-orator Arthur Hardy sat down in his cottage across from Hamilton square to pen a novel.

  A voracious reader, Hardy was aware of the growing acceptance of open talk about miscegeny. He knew full well he’d moved to a county filled with all manner of sex among white men and black women, past and present. He’d been excited to see how Thomas Dixon’s books and plays pillorying white southern men’s interracial peccadilloes were winning him international fame and great fortune. So in 1908—the year the new courthouse was completed—he hastened to finish Clutch of Circumstance, which, while set in the Reconstruction era, would hold modern miscegenators’ feet to the fire.

  Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots, which Hardy bought and read in 1902, portrayed white southerners’ “sin” of miscegenation as a curse that led inevitably to black men raping white women and the utter downfall of Western civilization. At the same time, a new generation of blacks, creative, educated, and outspoken, men like Charles W. Chesnutt and W. E. B. Du Bois, were writing on the subject from their own perspective, enticing white writers to bring their white supremacist fire to the battle.

  Spots struck a strong chord with the ambitious Hardy, who began to slip short articles on the theme into the Journal. But when his sensitive new wife, Irene, became apoplectic over a racially mixed infant who looked entirely Caucasian and lived next door, Hardy could no longer resist his creative urges and wrote a novel based on an old Harris County family.

  This “plump, rosy, fluffy little baby” next door was, it turned out, one-sixteenth Negro; her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were white and “of good family”; her maternal lineage, increasingly white as well, was nevertheless “negro.” Irene was distraught at the notion that this fair child was doomed to life as a black person.

  Hardy dedicated the novel “to my wife, whose pity for a helpless babe, and whose indignation toward an unnatural parent suggested and inspired the story.” Now his book would go out into the world and inspire white men to stop their evil, philandering ways. Through the white northerner of the novel, who points out to his blind southern cousins the curse of miscegeny on themselves and their illicit offspring, Hardy would open the blind eyes of his own townspeople and those beyond. If he harbored fears that certain white leaders in the town would take umbrage, this did not stay his hand.

  Surely there would be gossip about who old “Col. Gurley,” who fathered the “comely” Angelus by an enslaved woman, represented. He’d have known the possibilities were manifold among Mobleys, Williamses, Copelands, Whiteheads, Hutchinsons, Lowes, Hudsons, and Bealls, all of whom had seen café au lait babies born to their enslaved women. No one of the county elite needed to feel singled out, however; “Col. Gurley” could easily represent any one of dozens, many long buried beneath this soil. Besides, Hardy’s book was written for the common enlightenment and surely they would honor his motive.

  If there’d been any doubts in the young author’s mind as to his book’s local reception they were immediately dispelled. “[T]he book of the decade, yes, of this generation,” the Harris County Journal proclaimed. Invitations poured in to speak at school commencements, Sunday school classes, Lost Cause events, and ladies’ book and poetry clubs. But with the book’s subject being too taboo for public discourse, he was asked to speak on subjects such as the Bible, the nation’s history, and the Civil War.

  In the midst of all the fanfare, Irene Hardy was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for “nerves.”

  I asked my mother if she knew about Arthur Hardy’s novel. Clutch of Circumstance, she replied without a second thought. My cousin Buster, now called Doug, on the other hand, had never heard of it, though Hardy, who mentored my scholarly cousin, had bequeathed to him much of his library. To me this illustrates the change that came about with my generation. I believe a conscious decision was made at some point to protect us from this seamy history so we could live free of its weight. Still, it lay close enough to the surface to tease and even haunt some of us, especially me.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Special Court

  Early on the morning after Sheriff Buddie Hadley locked up Dusky Crutchfield, Johnie Moore, and Eugene Harrington, he climbed aboard the Central of Georgia for the short trip to Columbus. Hamilton had not faced so serious a crisis since the burning of Boy George and, soon afterward, the Yankee invasion. The stumble-tongued sheriff would need assistance when he confronted the venerable Judge Stirling Price Gilbert, so he was accompanied by Arthur Hardy and Ben Williams, Jr., a wealthy planter.

  Only a week had passed since Hadley had placed his work-hardened hand upon Judge Williams’s Bible in the Hamilton courthouse and sworn to God to uphold both the Georg
ia and U.S. constitutions. Now he sat in the plush seats of the train with that judge’s nephew and Hardy, whom some considered partially responsible for the local upsurge in antimiscegenation fervor—smoking cigars and nervously mulling the upcoming meeting. No public mention had been made of legal representation for the suspected murderers, but Hardy regularly represented poor blacks in court and was possibly there in that capacity.

  The outcome was anything but predictable. None knew just yet how the judge would take to this new sheriff. Already Hadley had failed to take into custody men seeking to prevent him from carrying out his duty, a clear violation of law. Likewise, he’d ignored another law requiring him to call out a posse to protect prisoners threatened by a mob. Likely he figured he’d used horse sense and knew that to make arrests would only incite others to further efforts against the prisoners. These things had to be weighed and balanced. Besides, Hadley had been dealing with a dozen or more masked men—what chance would any charges stand in court? Support for the mob’s cause was growing all over the county, and though some of the mob members were now walking around unmasked in broad daylight watching the jail, they’d still be, now and forever after, “parties unknown,” nameless, faceless instruments of the public will. Never in the history of Georgia had a man even been charged with a lynching, much less with the attempt to lynch.

  The lynch threat was used more often than not simply to control the legal process and likely that’s all it was here, especially since most of this mob was the sheriff’s own kin. Hadley had to reckon he was approaching the judge not as lawbreaker but as a hero of sorts, just as the papers had portrayed him, for he’d stood his ground and, for now at least, spared the lives of one woman and two men. He’d kept the matter, more or less, in the hands of the law.

  Harris County had another hero, Judge Marcus Beck, who now sat on the state Supreme Court. Beck, a Hamilton native, had personally used his status as superior court judge in Zebulon, Georgia, many years ago to rescue a black man from a lynch mob. Perhaps the men on the train spoke of it, imagining that this was what their new sheriff had done.

  Still, this situation had its own twist. These three petitioners were savvy men and knew they’d be asking Judge Gilbert to back them up on a promise made to a mob, even though they knew that Gilbert despised mob rule with every fiber of his being. Two years earlier, before a Columbus grand jury, he’d called mobs “scalawags . . . and the scum of the earth.”

  Riding down that day to confront the judge, they knew they held a two-edged sword. None of them wanted a lynching, and for a variety of reasons. Mob violence was bad for business. It made sheriffs look weak. It made white southerners look barbaric in the eyes of the North, especially the investors and new residents the business community sought to attract. More pressing, it scared off black servants and field hands needed for the conduct of normal life. The town’s main industry, Hamilton Female College, now called West Georgia A&M, would suffer if masked men with torches and pistols terrified the young ladies boarding nearby or, worse, roused blacks to riot and caused anguished white parents to remove their sons and daughters. Such turmoil would send family members and other “better people” scurrying to Columbus for safety and civilization. Already too many, including younger Williamses, had set up housekeeping in the city’s richer neighborhoods, seeking better schools and the finer culture of the rapidly growing city.

  Nevertheless, there was no firm consensus on lynching among whites. Proper folks spoke against it, but many privately condoned some. Many of the more refined whites even thought in terms of “good” and “bad” lynchings. “Bad” ones snared innocent people or people accused of minor infractions. “Bad” ones barbecued bodies, sliced off parts, drew large raucous crowds—including women and children—and produced photographs often printed in Yankee newspapers. “Good lynchings” were for blacks accused of raping white women or killing law officers, in which case a message needed to be sent. Mixed messages about lynching were sent all the time. The Harris County Journal remained mostly silent on the question but had, on occasion under Hardy’s aegis, reported lynchings almost in a how-to style, only occasionally furrowing its brow. Under the New South order—with black leaders led by Booker T. Washington urging followers to submit to “good whites” in exchange for those white leaders’ protection of blacks—more whites felt compelled to speak out against the practice.

  The “special court” involved the calling of a grand jury to seek indictments for a specific crime and the holding of the trial at that time. In the past they’d been held within days, even hours, but now a new law required a minimum thirty-day wait. The “special court” was one of those measures good men supported as a way to curtail lynching, but others protested, with cause, that it prostituted the legal system, turning judges and juries into legal mobs. When officials begged lynch mobs to “let the law take its course,” as my great-grandfather had done at the fork of the roads one day earlier, they were understood to be promising death under a legal guise. That view changed a bit after a wait was required by law in the hopes mob tempers would cool and adequate evidence would be gathered for a fair trial.

  As their train slowly chugged into downtown Columbus, the Hamilton men could not help but notice the city’s renaissance. Everywhere they looked they saw brick streets, handsome new homes, refurbished mills, new banks, and shops. In 1903, Harper’s Magazine had sung the Queen City’s praises. Columbus titans, observing and fearing the great union movements and worker uprisings under way across America, had worked hard to satisfy its mill and foundry workers with factory schools and libraries.

  Since the 1890s, when textile barons had reaped riches on the backs of women and children paid as little as fifty-six cents per week, they’d successfully fought off, both with payoffs and goons, the National Union of Textile Workers. Fearing race riots on the heels of the Atlanta riots, they hired Rev. Ashby Jones at First Baptist. Jones was one of Atlanta’s most prominent spokesmen for racial peace. His first Columbus sermon, “Atlanta’s Lessons for Columbus,” expressed white leaders’ thinking: There will never be racial equality. Whites will always be superior and must be the guardians of black people. Blacks are not capable of the vote. And lynching is not a solution to “the unspeakable crime.” He urged his listeners, and they were many, to form biracial groups for working on problems. With Rev. Jones as their spiritual guide, the city fathers—funded by their favorite philanthropists, George Foster Peabody and Levi Strauss, New York millionaires raised in Columbus—built the nation’s most elegant YMCA for black people. They poured money into the large black A.M.E. and Baptist churches and brought Booker T. Washington and prominent black ministers to town to speak to both races.

  Since Reconstruction, wealthy whites had supported those black churches that agreed to keep politics out of the pulpit. Nothing had changed. Sermons continued to focus on honesty, thrift, and industry, and parishioners were often told that to win respect they must be respectable. Women’s clubs formed in Columbus churches, sometimes bringing in as many as eight hundred women to hear lectures on how to raise their sons or keep clean houses, and other messages of “upliftment.”

  Columbus newspapers, controlled by the families who spearheaded economic development, also sent messages to white housewives on racial control. Recently the influential Gunby Jordan had called on white housewives to stop sending food home with their maids. Such access to free food made black men lazy and unwilling to work, he argued. He was especially concerned that the brickyards, crucial to his development plans, were having trouble finding workers. Until 1909, when the infamous convict labor system was shut down, only prisoners worked these hellacious jobs. Now new ways were being sought to coerce non-prisoners to take them.

  Meanwhile, black leaders were expected to soothe whites’ anxieties. When a black minister used the Daily Enquirer in 1907 to ask whites to release black employees to attend Emancipation Day ceremonies, he assured them: “[W]e do not anticipate anything that may cause an unfriendly fee
ling between the white and colored races,” adding that event speakers would “denounce a class of young men who do not work but loaf and do everything possible to degrade the race.”

  The Hamilton delegation recognized that Hamilton was no longer its own little fiefdom. In recent years the county had been increasingly affected by Columbus development, which reached physically into that section of their county along the river both ruled and sullied by the moonshine cabals now causing the current troubles. The very forces the Populists had opposed—syndicates, bankers, giant corporations—had slipped into Columbus and, unlike anything General Sherman or Abe Lincoln envisioned as their troops stormed the city, were now laying claim to streetcars, utility companies, railroads, and anything else promising hefty, long-term profits. Men who lived on Beacon Hill, had studied at Yale and Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne, vacationed in the Alps and on the Mediterranean, were quietly taking part or full ownership of sectors long owned and controlled locally, both private and public. And their reach didn’t stop at the county line.

  As they invested millions upon millions to build dam after dam up the Chattahoochee, they were also acquiring thousands of acres of some of the richest cotton and moonshine land in Harris County. The possibility of harnessing the river’s vast potential had been envisioned before Columbus was even laid out. It had taken a half century to make that dream come true. But since 1908 profits had increased astronomically, and now the pressure on Columbus residents to give the Yankee investors what they wanted—and be happy about it in the bargain—was tremendous.

  One day before Norman Hadley’s murder, officials from Stone & Webster, as well as General Electric, Westinghouse, and other behemoths of the newly emerging electrical industry, gathered at a spot called Goat Rock in Harris County to survey construction of the latest hydroelectric dam. Ordinary residents of Columbus had opposed the increased electric rates this modernization was causing and Gunby Jordan, the project’s chief promoter, along with other city fathers, was eager to impress both corporate investors and leaders from the area with the progress that this new technology would bring to all levels of society.