The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  Even if there was evidence of guilt, they’d never be able to bring it to court, not with the defendants claiming they were protecting a black woman from a white man’s sexual advances.

  As the Atlanta Constitution would soon reveal, no actual charges were ever brought against any of the four. All were being held “under suspicion.” According to the law, they could only be held without charges for seven days. Time was quickly running out.

  It is possible that Prosecutor Palmer learned from Crutchfield, at whose house the murder had allegedly occurred, that another white man had been there and then ascertained his identity. It is also possible, even probable, that Palmer had come to the realization that none of these four people had anything at all to do with the murder. It is not likely, however, that Palmer, facing a contested election in May, would have wanted to announce that all four blacks were innocent and that he was bringing a white man, possibly another relative of the sheriff, to trial. If the sheriff was in on the possibility of a white suspect, it’s not likely that in the glare of that spotlight and with those guns at his head, he’d have confessed to it. From the time he walked out of Judge Gilbert’s chamber, he stuck to his story that he could prove them all guilty, either of the killing itself or of conspiracy to kill.

  The days following the preacher’s arrest were busy ones in the county. Farmers did light winter work in readiness for what they hoped would be early spring planting. The Robert E. Lee Lodge near Mountain Hill celebrated their hero’s January 19 birthday. Miss Lula’s WCTU women met to talk about the upcoming trip to Washington to lobby for Prohibition. Preparations to rebuild a black school recently burned in Mountain Hill got under way, with both blacks and whites joining in. White farmers met at local schoolhouses to plan ways to convince their tenants to withhold cotton from the market in order to drive up prices. In Atlanta, a change of governors was afoot, with Joseph M. Brown to replace acting governor Jack Slaton on the twenty-fifth.

  Throughout Georgia, ordinary white folk were voicing their dislike of miscegeny. One south Georgian wrote to a newspaper: “Deeper than physical fear must the blow be struck. Look at the hordes of mulatto children swarming in the cities, the towns, and even the country, and say how far is the white man responsible for conditions. If he stoops to the black man’s woman, what then when the black man dares to lift lustful eyes to the white man’s woman. Can the Anglo-Saxon exterminate the children of his own blood, half-breed though they be? Let him who is without blemish cast the first stone.”

  The white women of Mountain Hill were harshly stirred by the recent talk about interracial sex. One even wrote, in a newsletter, a snippy little piece about men getting away with some unnamed deviltry that would never be tolerated in women. What got to them the most was the part in Hardy’s book about these disowned children of mixed race rising up to punish their white fathers. The novel had warned them of the turmoil to be visited upon them for the sin of miscegenation. For decades many of the whites and the mulattoes had been close, helping each other, as much like family as it was possible to be in those days.

  But now whites were beginning to see that they’d been too lenient, too kind, had even brought about their own destruction. Some had begun to turn on the mulatto Moores back in 1910, when Johnie’s mother, Lula, had been arrested for trying to kill another black woman. When she’d been released without a trial it got a lot of folks’ goats, baffled as they were by the whys and wherefores of the system. Now that her son had supposedly killed Norman Hadley—and no family had done more for those mulatto Moores than Norman’s family—most folks were just fed up with the entire bunch.

  There was something else nobody discussed. Many of the sheriff’s white Moores were swarthy people. Some looked like gypsies. The sheriff’s grandmother, Fada Moore, had come down with dozens of other Mountain Hill residents from Edgefield, South Carolina, a place famous for mixed-race folks who “passed.” Who’s white and who’s black? These were questions being asked, quietly yet increasingly, in the newly segregating South. But for most of Harris County’s whites—on a conscious level, at least—it was the murder of a sheriff’s nephew that sealed the deal.

  Law enforcement was under siege. They knew that the previous year there had been two lynchings not so far away, one in Eufaula and the other in Union Springs, both in Alabama. Both involved law officers allegedly killed by blacks. In both places white men had quietly slipped into town around midnight and quietly taken the law into their own hands. No one got named. No one was punished. During the Atlanta riots, Atlanta Georgian editor John Temple Graves proposed a municipal unit to monitor blacks’ movements and lynch them when necessary. If a big-city editor like that could think it was right, then wasn’t it? And if their sheriff had said he knew for a fact that these folks were guilty, had told it to the judge, had told it to the papers, then surely these folks were guilty. Who would deny family members the right to avenge their loved one’s murder?

  The motives for a lynching abounded, enough to fill four barns. One or more for every man who’d make up the mob.

  For those in the know, there was Norman’s real killer to protect. In 1897, right after the Columbus lynching, Governor Atkinson had addressed the General Assembly on the subject and detailed how black men were lynched to protect guilty white men. This wouldn’t be the first time.

  There was a need for miscegenators to declare their whiteness, a need for antimiscegenation forces to send the word to black and white folks alike about “the brazen iniquity.”

  There was the increasingly attractive idea—popularized by brilliant ministers, writers, politicians—that the Negro was a subspecies not able to handle the niceties of a democratic society. Now that he could not vote, why, many wondered, should he have a court trial?

  There were the temperance forces who found the prospect of stringing up blacks associated with moonshine to be titillating. For some it was a campaign ploy, to show prospective supporters where they stood on these matters. For others it was simply a way to jab a thumb in the arrogant Judge Gilbert’s eye. Others just wanted to make a big, bloody billboard to say to blacks, “keep your mouths shut and bow to the racial hierarchy.”

  Then, certainly, there was the need to protect families’ reputations, a county’s reputation, the South’s reputation, to rid themselves of the guilty consciences these four symbolized. There was also their holy calling to avenge murder. They’d grown up on eye-for-an-eye theology and no one gave a damn if they got the wrong eye. There was, above all, the need to draw a thick bright line between black and white. The races had come too close and their separation called for something loud and violent.

  For most of their lives these men and this woman had enjoyed the protection of white people, mostly Moores and Gordons. Events had placed them outside that protection. Norman’s mother, Josie, was dying; anyone else who might speak for them would, in this explosive atmosphere, hold their tongue.

  One powerful man with multiple motives was former sheriff Mitch Huling, Norman’s uncle. Huling, having lost the last sheriff’s race to Buddie Hadley, was now residing in Columbus, planning a run for sheriff of Muscogee County. A fierce foe of moonshiners, he had a violent temper, was quick with fists and guns, and had unusual ways of getting his man. In 1908, while he was sheriff, the county paper gave him the entire credit for a county in “the best moral condition it’s been in in 40 years.” He’d have hated seeing that now in tatters.

  As for Sheriff Marion Madison “Buddie” Hadley, the man sworn to protect the prisoners, he’d take this as a loyalty test—perhaps a whiteness test, perhaps a class test, though by this time Hamilton’s upper crust was as ready to be done with this impudent black woman who called herself “Miz Mobley” as anyone. He’d also seen the dollars and cents involved. Mobleys provided his ten-thousand-dollar security bond, as well as campaign cash and some loans. He had a large family and an overwrought wife to think about. He didn’t want any of them to suffer the infamy that would come with such a trial.
<
br />   Whiteness was at issue, but manliness even more so, and the two were so intertwined in the white man’s bible by now that it was impossible to separate them. The elders would remember what happened to the men who fought to save the life of Boy George, burned on a tree in January 1861. Several days after the heinous deed a crowd of Hamiltonians met and passed resolutions deploring the act and the men who did it.

  In the tiny brick courthouse on the south end of the square, the mob leaders and defenders then held their own meeting, where they too passed elegantly worded resolutions, calling themselves “a law-abiding people” justified (even ordained by God) in their action. Hailing their manhood, the mob questioned that of their detractors and reminded them of what every true white male southerner must do in such a circumstance, especially where kinship was concerned.

  Detail after detail of the entire matter was published in the Columbus papers. Now, fifty years later, in these tense hours, some men and women around the square would recall James Monroe Mobley’s oft-repeated lesson—learned at the wrong end of a mob—from those long-ago days: that when the community wants a lynching, the community will get a lynching.

  It’s unlikely, however, that Miss Lula Mobley wanted to see Dusky Crutchfield lynched, regardless of her embarrassing revelations about the family. As a longtime member and officer of the WCTU, Miss Lula had been engaged since the 1880s in efforts to stop white men’s widespread, chronic rape of and cohabitation with “colored” women and girls. Perhaps she’d read Anna Julia Cooper’s book. Regardless, Georgia’s own Rebecca Felton, also a WCTU leader, had throughout the late 1880s and 1890s lobbied the members and the state legislature for laws to protect, first black women and children in prison from assaults by white guards, and then all women and children.

  Long under the tutelage and the thumb of her powerful father, Miss Lula was in her seventh year without him and was only now beginning to find her own voice.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Lynching

  Whatever went on behind those bars, those closed doors, those hushed parlors, those rude cabin walls, those official offices, by Monday afternoon, January 22, men had knocked on doors and issued invitations and the new sheriff had been alerted that he’d “best catch the afternoon train to Columbus.” In other words: get out of Dodge to avoid being associated with this act of vigilantism. Three days after Robert E. Lee’s birthday celebration and one day after attending church services, the farmers began gathering in front of the courthouse. The weeks’ long rain had stopped and temperatures rose to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. It would be a balmy evening with a bright moon.

  Most had ridden in on horses and mules, many following the Blue Springs Road and the Lower Blue Springs Road, paths followed by General James H. Wilson’s Yankee marauders fifty-one years before when they came with their torches to burn down the town. These men, sons and grandsons of those who fought those troops, now had their own torches, their own just cause. Their generals for the evening had plotted matters every bit as carefully as had Wilson’s a half century before. Late in the afternoon, from a respectable distance they’d seen the sheriff off on the train to Columbus.

  All day they’d trickled into town, forming small groups in front of the courthouse and in the square, smoking, swigging ’shine from brown-bagged jars, scanning the horizon, and playing a knife-throwing game called mumbledy-peg. Norman’s stepfather’s gun shop was a popular gathering spot. Everything was in order. Invitations had been issued and most accepted. Woe be unto the man who refused. When the time came, they would not speak among themselves or holler in anger or joy. It had all been arranged.

  By midnight, townfolks—children, at least—would be deep in slumber. The leaders would use hand signals, learned in the lodges. Most would just follow along, do as told. Men not in lodges were not invited; the brotherhoods ensured the lifelong silence required in these matters. They had not counted on the woman’s howls, awakening even the deep sleep of small children, embedding themselves in white folks’ brains, turning up in the strangest places decades later, becoming the stuff of myth and story. All would wear masks.

  All day the ordinary goings-on of Hamilton life seemed to float along on a nervous undercurrent. As little knots of stern men conferred outside his office window, Judge Williams went about the ordinary business of adjudicating human travail, ruling on estate matters, divorces, and adoptions, and signing marriage licenses. Across the square, cotton was being ginned at Hudson’s and new plows purchased at Mobley’s. Down the way, the blacksmith pounded hot iron into horseshoes while a crowd of women gathered at the window of Janie Prichard’s millinery shop to admire winter bonnets. Around the village, women and their servants beat rugs, pruned rosebushes, and purchased grits and black-eyed peas at Cook’s Mercantile.

  In Washington, D.C., the black leader Ralph Tyler prepared for his meeting to discuss lynching the next day with President William Howard Taft, who was caught up in seating arrangements for a state dinner with Ireland’s Lord and Lady Asquith. The party, held that evening, would be one of the most elaborate the three-hundred-pound president had ever hosted, and he was taking a personal hand in the details.

  As dusk fell, only men dared venture outdoors. They wore broad-brimmed hats pulled tight over their ears and stood about in edgy clumps, gloved hands jammed deep in their pockets, rifles propped in wait behind the stores.

  Toward evening, Fanny Graddick’s water broke. She lived a short way from Friendship Baptist. She was expecting twins.

  When the men and women and children drifted home for supper, homework, darning, and reading, the village seemed to settle into an ordinary evening. A smaller klatch of men, twenty-five or thirty, would take command at the appointed hour.

  At precisely 11:20, after the last train had made its run, after most lights were out and folks had fallen into slumber, a larger crowd moved slowly westward down Blue Springs Road toward Friendship Baptist while their leaders marched resolutely over to Dr. Bruce’s house, where the jailer and his family boarded. There they called out Zeke Robinson, who, though more addled than usual, went docilely, as they knew he would. Zeke’s previous job was clerking at the drugstore. In addition to being a husband and new father, he’d lost his brother Will, the town marshal, to gunfire a decade earlier and was now helping to raise Will’s orphan boy. He understood Harris County men and their temperament and Zeke was not made of hero material.

  Inside the jail, Dusky Crutchfield and her cell mates huddled in wait. Throughout the day they’d have heard the stronger rush of business outside the stone walls, soaked up the tension, noticed Alfred Williams’s or his wife Ealy’s drawn face, downcast eyes, or slower-than-usual shuffle as one or the other brought food and removed slop jars. If they were given a Bible it was not recorded, but they were churchgoing people and their pastor and one of his deacons was with them. Bible or not, they’d have girded themselves with scripture and song.

  The men who yanked open the bars wore masks and brandished ropes, hunting rifles and pistols. They bound the prisoners’ arms and shoved them outside, where more armed and masked men awaited, holding kerosene torches against the night air. Zeke Robinson, sworn to protect the prisoners, followed along as he’d been told to do.

  The death march extended diagonally through the square, past the Confederate shrine. From her house on the southeast corner, Miss Lula Mobley was likely reminded of the Yankees’ torches beneath her window that April day in 1865. Next door her nephew Brit Williams may have comforted his wife and young daughters, assuring them that everything was under control. The procession passed the Confederate soldier, gleaming like a god of war in the gaslight, under a radiant moon, a sign unto them of the righteousness of their mission.

  Leaving the square and crossing the road, they continued past the bedroom window of little Edna and Mary Fort, who were startled from sleep by Dusky Crutchfield’s shrieks. They lay there trembling, clutching their dolls, afraid to move. Nearby their little friends from the Juvenile Missionary
Society also lay abed trembling. Francis, the daughter of former sheriff Joe Hadley, lived next door. Along with Brit Williams’s daughters, they’d all read from the Bible’s book of 1 Samuel at the Juvenile Missionary Society meeting the day before.

  On the opposite corner lived Arthur and Irene Hardy. Next to them lived the young mulatta girl who had inspired his novel. Past Hardy’s window they marched, past the desk where he composed his recently published, wildly popular poem “The Demagogue.”

  A guessing game had been played around the county as to whom Hardy referred, and now some perhaps believed they’d guessed correctly, had him in hand and on his way to a permanent silence and held the rope that would shut this troublemaker’s mouth for good. The poem had been printed in the Journal and in the Golden Age only a few months earlier. Could it be that Hardy, the writer and former newspaper editor, was now already at his desk composing the well-scripted lines he would submit to the Columbus and Atlanta papers in time for the morning news?

  Only Hamilton Baptist and the Blue Springs Road sat between Arthur Hardy’s house and the sheriff’s. Magnificent in the moonlight, its windows dark, its occupants were quiet, though several pairs of eyes watched fearfully as the men shuffled past. The sheriff was away, hiding out in Columbus, and Emma was glad for that and glad that little Louise was deep in sleep, but worried for Douglas, whose whereabouts she would not know but must have suspected. She was unstrung that such a mess should mar her husband’s first month in office. Perhaps she prayed hard, as had southern women for years, that the mob would not do their dirty work there on her sweeping back lawn. Mobs sometimes slaughtered and burned their prey at the white victim’s homes or that of their kinfolk. Likely it had been arranged in advance that this should not happen, for everyone knew that Emma Hadley was a fragile woman. And the upper-crust residents in general would not want such a messy business performed under their very noses. It would be best to do it a few blocks down the way, at the Negro church, beside the Negro baptismal pool. Emma had worked hard to make the move from country farm wife to manse dweller, to hold her plain head high among the fancier townfolk. And now this. It was all so unnerving.