The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  As the death squad neared its appointed place, terrified quarry in tow, people in the little Negro houses nearby sat silent, drawn into themselves as if trying to disappear. This included the house of Fannie Graddick, who was now deep into childbirth, slightly west of the church and within easy earshot of the hollering, then the gunfire.

  Friendship Baptist deacons and a pastor lived close by and would know immediately what was going on. They also likely knew where the mob was headed, since it had been near their church that the mob made its first attempt when the three were brought to jail. Perhaps a great moan rose in the pastor’s throat after all the sweat and the prayer and the tears and the love that had gone into the recent rebuilding of this, their only communal home, this place the freedmen had first called home and named Friendship for the fact the white men had given so generously of their money and time in the building of the first church and with the short-lived hope of an eternal amity between the races.

  This was hard to understand, especially since, so recently, good white men like Brother Alex Copeland and his mother and Preacher Upshaw had come with olive boughs and prayed and sung with them and Preacher Upshaw had told them “never be discouraged” and “never give up.” Now it seemed that all this rebuilding of both brick and friendship would be washed away by this devil-seized flood roaring past his door and headed for the heart of Hamilton’s black community. Might he have been reminded of another radical preacher despised and crucified for his honesty? And rather than curse the darkness, did this good man bend over his Bible and pray for four souls, with that screaming woman so close he could almost reach out and touch her, with one of the men, like him, a preacher of the Word? What could he do when he saw where those torch lights stopped beside the sacred pool, except hold tight to his Bible and pray loudly to shut out the woman’s screams as they reached a pinnacle of terror and desperation. He would look for fire and smell for smoke because every black man knew that white men seized so demonically would almost inevitably set their victims ablaze, along with anything “Negro” in sight—church, school, or person.

  As the mob’s high command and their captives neared the massive live oak beside the baptismal font, they were awaited by dozens more men, masked and armed.

  Four ropes were pitched over the lowest branches of the magnificent tree, a tree they’d later say looked like those in the paintings of the Old Masters, an ancient, massive tree, one hundred years old or more. As each bound prisoner was moved into place, a noose was dropped over his or her head, and left slack about the neck. The three men loudly and frantically protested their innocence. Reports later claimed that, to the bitter end, John Moore blamed Gene Harrington and Harrington blamed Moore.

  As for Dusky Crutchfield, the mob had a plan, which was revealed when one of its leaders slipped the noose around her neck and said, “This is war. You tell us who done it and we’ll put you on the next train out of here.” Or words to that effect. Some say he said, “This is war.” Others say it was, “You’re a woman,” a way of explaining that they preferred not to kill her. With not so much as a word, with only a pointed finger, she could save her life.

  She’d have known that no matter what she did or said her life wasn’t worth spit anymore. All she had left was her word and what she took to God. The preacher had possibly talked with her about that.

  She did not pause to think about it. What she had witnessed throughout her hard life she would not participate in. So many black women like herself had been forced to do the dirty work of white men. This one would not go to God with the blood of black men on her hands.

  “Pull the rope, white man,” she said.

  At that, four nooses were yanked tightly, four bodies snatched brutally upward. Within seconds hell opened its mouth and rained forth hundreds of bullets and buckshot, and four human beings—Johnie Moore, Dusky Crutchfield, Eugene Harrington, and Burrell Hardaway—were cut to ribbons.

  At the sound of gunfire, some of the adults in the Williams families and the wife of Zeke Robinson slipped out onto their porches and later told their grandchildren they’d never heard such a racket.

  From his elegant Victorian on the hill, the sensitive young Alex Copeland gazed through a large window, through the trees, down toward the sheriff’s house, where dozens of torch lights twinkled like stars around the baptismal font, and wept as the gunfire began. Two years earlier he had returned from the conservatory in Atlanta, a new graduate and already an honored musician, and performed a recital at the library. He was, along with Hardy, Hamilton’s genius. But neither his fierce Christianity nor his beloved Beethoven would comfort him in this hour. A regular guest and occasional speaker at Friendship, this was his church, too. Many in its congregation shared his blood; he knew that as well as anyone and in his dotage would not hesitate to acknowledge it.

  Across College Street from where Copeland watched, Judge Williams was coming down with la grippe, but that did not deafen him to the familiar sounds coming through his window that night, the sounds of Gettysburg or Monocacy, reminding the old sharpshooter of just what such fire could do to human flesh. His influenza could not ward off old memories of men’s brains tossed about on the ground, nor prevent his nostrils from recalling that coppery stench that comes when a body is savaged by bullets and buckshot. His near death as a mere boy on the banks of Monocacy Creek had taught him a thing or two. He knew what men were capable of. He knew as well the uselessness of individual heroics, like that of Major W. W. Thomas in nearby Coweta County, who’d served with the judge’s late brother Ben in the Senate. Thomas had risked his life to save the life of that preacher they tried to hang after they were done with Sam Hose. To no avail. He thought he’d won when the mob promised to take their man to jail, but soon as his back was turned they savaged him. No, there would be no heroics tonight by Hamilton’s most respected man nor by any of his network. Most of them considered this to be mainly Hadley family business anyhow; the Mobley aspect was a mere footnote in the minds of many. Williamses took care of their own Negroes, the good ones anyhow, and whether they approved of others’ handling of “their Negroes,” they generally kept their mouths shut about it.

  Still, these men and this woman now being massacred were no strangers to the judge. Each had presented himself or herself at his office for marriage certificates or other civil matters at one time or another. Possibly he remembered many years ago when a newly freed woman named Jane appeared at his door with her former master, James B. Moore, to sign over to him her children, their children. Depending on the detail of conversation about kinship backgrounds of black men, he might have known the youngest man being shredded by bullets was Jane Moore’s great-nephew, thus a cousin to both the sheriff and his son, the deputy. Perhaps he wondered if the young man’s cousin the deputy had any such thoughts as he stood somewhere on the edges of this killing field, sworn by the majestic law the judge was also sworn to, sworn by the judge himself to protect all prisoners in his charge. But he knew well that the law in these days was mostly guided by politics and public opinion and he didn’t think there’d be any inclination to haul in this sheriff, his deputy, or his jailer for turning their heads at this particular moment.

  This was, however, the Judge’s sweet village and he would be fearful for it now, concerned for the family’s old “darkeys” and their offspring. Would they pack themselves off north as some already had? Many still lived in town, worked in homes as servants. Others had their own land, out where the trouble began. They’d be worried sick. Word would have been sent quickly, if it hadn’t already been. This and no more. He would be trusting the sheriff or his deputy to issue these orders and see that they were carried out. Perhaps he slept soundly, being in his elder years, and knowing things had been worked out in advance.

  In the center of town, closest to the gunfire, but for two men who decided it was a good time to rob the post office, none dared venture beyond their front porch.

  No Hamiltonians, neither white nor black, would rise up as he
roes that night. As though scripted, everyone stayed put, cowering under their covers, ears stuffed, praying to God, reading their Bibles, weeping, breathing sighs of relief, praying their sons were not there, and if there, safe from apprehension and Hell’s damnation. Some of my relatives, others recalled, simply sat on their porches and listened to the gunfire. Doubtless there were those who quietly clapped their hands and murmured “Hallelujah,” imagining the scourge of drink and miscegenation and gambling and interracial troubles of every ilk magically washed away in that hail of hellfire. Perhaps they imagined themselves better than the mob and slept more soundly for that. They would have little reason at that point to know how these things lodge themselves in the cells and sit there, reverberating far into the future.

  The air reeked of gunpowder, tobacco, adrenaline, of bullet and blood, horse and dog. A few hounds bayed as the four ravaged bodies swayed and more than one hundred sated white men—newly baptized and bonded beside the Friendship font in one of the oldest rituals of the Lost Cause—made their way home to families, gunpowder in the wool of their jackets, the creases of their necks, some carrying bits of skin and hair beneath their nails.

  A small group escorted the jailer back home to his family, wishing him a good night’s sleep. Next morning they’d arise, wash, and avoid the mirror and the eyes of wives and children at the breakfast table, though some told what happened and told it proudly. Said something had to be done. It was hard but it was right. Some said their only regret was the woman. But she could have saved her life. Over time, a fantastical story about the woman emerged out by the river. She ran from us at the tree. Ran screaming like a banshee. We chased her, but she was too fast. She’s out there somewhere still. Others claimed they went to prevent the men from running roughshod over innocent Negroes in the neighborhood.

  If the young deputy was there—and several say he was—that was certainly his reason. It was his duty to protect the town, since his father was, as the papers would say, “away in Columbus”; it was also his family duty to see that his mother and sisters were safe in their house just yards across the meadow. Some later told their black field hands they went to keep the mob from rampaging through Negro neighborhoods, from inciting an exodus of black people, the sort of thing that happened in other towns. They’d tell them, This has nothing to do with you. This is a private matter. Though no one dared call it what it was: a family matter.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “So Quietly Was the Work Done”

  Around 12:30 a.m. either Zeke Robinson or someone else picked up the phone and called the Columbus Daily Enquirer to tell the story. By sunrise its headlines would blanket the Chattahoochee Valley. The caller must have used the word excitement several times or appeared excited himself, for both Columbus papers that day spoke of the night’s “excitement,” as if a midnight carnival had pulled into town.

  Word quickly spread that the four bodies yet dangled from the tree. Great banks of thick black clouds massed in the sky, but temperatures again were warm and no rain fell, so there was nothing to stanch the flow of men, women, and children as they poured into town on foot, by mule, buggy, and car. They came from over the mountain, up from Columbus, in from the riverbank to gawk at the shredded bodies and the pools of blood beside the baptismal font and to step into the shadows cast by the dead and seize the few souvenirs left lying about. The masks, shell casings, and cigarette butts were soon gone, so the crowds milled about under the tree and just stared. “A perfect quietude prevailed,” according to the Daily Enquirer. In a morning interview with a reporter, the sheriff had used the word quiet numerous times. Elsewhere the article mentioned how “quietly was the work done.”

  Perhaps the morning onlookers posed smiling and pointing together with their children, as happened in countless other southern towns. Many owned Kodaks; the Harris County Journal had a special one for group shots. Likely, the “better people” had determined to prohibit them. After a time, when more was learned, a great shame seized even those who had been glad or simply caught up in the excitement. If photos were taken, they were destroyed or lost or lay tucked away in trunks, long forgotten. They were not, as elsewhere, made up as drugstore advertisements or postcards to be mailed to family and friends. None has ever emerged for public view—even today with good money being offered.

  By phone the sheriff told a Columbus reporter that since “he had not been able to get any negroes to touch them, to take them down,” he did not know when they’d be removed. His toddler granddaughter, Louise, and his new daughter-in-law, Berta, had already viewed the sight, and each, as did many others, would carry its imprint for life.

  Carefully avoiding the gruesome scene, Hamilton’s black residents, both Baptist and Methodist, gathered for worship and communal sustenance at the black Methodist church that morning. Little two-year-old Louise, the sheriff’s granddaughter, was taken there by her nurse, Dig. Decades later, when in her eighties, Louise claimed to remember the moaning and the hollering in that pain-filled place on that day. No one seemed to notice or care that the sheriff’s grandbaby was there. On the way back to the sheriff’s house, where she lived, they passed the tree. “Mamma told her not to show me, but she did,” Louise later recounted. More than anything else, she remembered Dusky Crutchfield’s bulging tongue, pierced by a bullet, a sight that engraved itself on her memory for life.

  When they got home, the sheriff’s house overflowed with family and guests, eating and talking. Baby Louise toddled around babbling “nigger in the tree, nigger in the tree.” This unnerved everyone, especially her grandmother Emma, an easily unstrung woman, and her mother asked Dig to please take the child to her room.

  One of the early curiosity-seekers that morning was seventeen-year-old Berta Hadley. Her husband, the deputy, had told her not to go. But she was awakened early by the steady rush of footsteps outside her window and at dawn slipped from bed, dressed, and climbed through her window like a child so as not to awaken her quick-tempered father, who’d likely have been there drunk and would now be sleeping it off.

  Her new husband had been out for hours, or all night for all she knew, seeing to things. She’d go just to the edge of the field, grab a quick glimpse, and be home before anyone knew she was up, hoping Douglas wouldn’t find out. She knew she shouldn’t, but she went because, as she later told me, “everyone else was going.”

  Jailer Robinson’s nephew followed him everywhere he went. So, when he saw him head out for that grim scene the next morning, he took off after him. He later told his grown children: “I went and I’ve always wished to God I hadn’t. It was a horrible sight. It was the biggest mistake of my life.” The four bodies, he told them, were so full of bullets and buckshot that they rattled like wind chimes in the breeze.

  A little boy seated high atop a cotton bale on a wagon bed came so close to the four that the foot of Dusky Crutchfield tapped his shoulder.

  Later that afternoon, a coroner’s jury performed their duties by craning their necks upward at the still-dangling bodies. Coroner Burford, a Confederate vet who’d shrouded countless of his comrades’ bodies at Gettysburg and Cold Harbor, and who was a Mobley kinsman as well, came down sick that day and was replaced by Judge Lynch, Hamilton’s newly retired mayor. The jury included one Williams, one Mobley, one Moore, and one Robinson. The Mobley was Henry, who had shot and killed a white man in 1908 and was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. I was told he was the man involved with Dusky Crutchfield. Hewing to an old script, the men concluded that the victims “came to their death by being hung, by the neck and by gunshot wounds at the hands of unknown parties.”

  Despite concerns that the lynching would stain Hamilton’s reputation, life quickly resumed its normal pace. Many of the sightseers turned to shopping, and storekeepers noted they hadn’t seen so many country folks in town on a weekday since the Jesse James Wild West Show in 1906. To everyone’s relief, no frantic parents showed up at the college to gather up their daughters. Maids reported for work. Laborers
resumed their plowing. Farmers hauled bales of cotton in to be ginned at Hudson & Company.

  It was a busy day. Judge Williams shook off his grippe enough to show up in his office and sign marriage licenses for several couples, some black, some white.

  That evening President Taft sat down to prepare for a meeting next morning in the White House library with four black men, all appointees to federal posts. Since 1910, when southern newspapers and leaders had lambasted the president for attending a celebration in honor of the black president of Wilberforce University at Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington, D.C., because the man’s wife was white, he’d been careful about his public contacts with black people. But the 1912 presidential elections lay ahead and the campaigns were already being called the most racist in history. Taft’s meeting with the four men was aimed at swaying a black vote now leaning toward Wilson, who lacked the racist record of Taft and Roosevelt and whose doctorate and campaign promises indicated to some he’d be more worldly and intelligent in racial matters despite the fact that he was born and raised in the South.

  By the end of the day in Hamilton the bodies were removed from the tree.

  The following day, Zeke Robinson journeyed to Columbus, carrying a few “souvenirs,” and held a small press conference. As an unwilling eyewitness, he wished to correct the record on two counts: 1) there were fewer men in the mob than the 100 being reported; and 2) far more bullets were fired, probably 500, not the 300 in most news stories.