The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  But it wasn’t black men the white citizens of Harris County were worried about these days so much as their own fellow whites.

  The Bible verse from 1 Samuel that Miss Lula’s little Juvenile Missionary Society girls had read the afternoon of the lynching carried this ominous message: “and I tell him that I am about to punish his house for ever, for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.”

  Some would swear this was happening to them, but it would become harder and harder to tell just whose house was Eli’s, given the large numbers of houses being punished, though close examination would reveal familial connections among them all. In 1914, several men from prominent families fell dead or met with serious accidents. John B. Mobley, son of James Monroe Mobley, brother of Miss Lula, and most prominent of all the Mobley men, dropped dead on a sidewalk just before Christmas. “Acute indigestion” was cited as the cause. One minute he was laughing and chatting on the sidewalk with the postmaster and another friend; the next he was gone.

  The sheriff’s brother Joe, himself a former sheriff who lived along the “Avengers’ ” line of march, spent months in an Atlanta sanatorium that year. Dr. Charles Williams died without warning. The judge suffered a stroke that paralyzed one leg. His brother Will’s son Henry suffered life-threatening gunshot wounds in a hunting accident. In addition, four Hargett men died in 1914, including H.V., who suffered severe burns when a church furnace blew up in his face right after the lynching, then died of Bright’s disease two years later. At the same time, Judge Williams’s son would suddenly drop dead on his front porch. In 1918 Bessie Hadley, Buddie and Emma’s youngest, beloved daughter, would be cut down by typhoid fever, leaving her two-year-old daughter Helen to be raised by her grandparents. And over the next decade, more Hargetts, Mobleys, and Williamses would meet untimely deaths, including Gamble Mobley, Miss Lula’s nephew, stomped to death by a mule in 1920 when his buggy overturned. Will Williams’s beautiful sister Mattie Florrie Kirven, married to the Kirven’s department store heir, died in Will’s Big House, recuperating from an illness in 1921; just a few years later, Will’s eldest son, Worth, a musician with a new wife and baby, hit a large hog on the road and died instantly.

  If this wasn’t enough, there was also the long wave of white-on-white killings. In Harris County, as in most of the South, white men had always murdered other white men more freely than they murdered black ones, and with just as much impunity. But, after January 22, 1912, whatever floodgates still stood split wide open.

  By 1915, five white men had been murdered by other white men. All the dead and some of the killers were believed to have been “Hamilton Avengers.”

  When I returned to the county for research, this is what I’d hear again and again: “Every man in the mob died with his boots on.”

  I took my cousin Louise with me to visit the Fort sisters. The three had played dolls together as children and talked about it as if it were yesterday, though all were in their late eighties and early nineties. They even remembered the dolls’ names. Edna Fort, still living with her sister Mary, recalled how, at five and eight years old, they were awakened by the bloodcurdling cries of Dusky Crutchfield. “There was a country road over there. They marched them down beside Sheriff Hadley’s house, down to [the Askew Creek] to an old tree that hung out over the road and they hung them there. It was just terrible, just terrible.”

  “And not a one of them was guilty,” her sister added. It was Mary Fort, former American history teacher at Columbus High School, who told me, with some sense of satisfaction, that “every man in the mob died with his boots on.” Edna, a former elementary school teacher, added for clarification: “Unnatural deaths, you understand.” I asked them for names of these men, but they declined. Mary would later send me a note. She wanted me to know that “we were not stained.” I believe she was referring to the curse many felt had fallen on the mob, and perhaps the town, and wanted me to know that she and her sister remained untouched by it. Possibly she also wanted me to know that no one from her family had been involved.

  The boots-on killings began in 1913 and looked on the surface like white moonshine guys mad about getting ratted out or having something stolen or a fight over a woman. It hit the Hamilton Irvins first, then the Mountain Hill Teels, and by the time the long spate of murders among families all tightly connected to Norman Hadley and the lynching ended in 1922, fifteen were dead, six had been tried for murder, and two imprisoned.

  Nineteen fifteen was a year of enormous racial hatred in Georgia. The movie The Birth of a Nation had played steadily to huge Columbus crowds for most of the year. Audience estimates for that city alone were at a hundred thousand, with folks coming elsewhere by train to see it.

  In a sensational case that same year, Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman, was convicted of murdering a young girl who worked in his Atlanta-area pencil factory. He was taken from the state prison and lynched by powerful men after Hoke Smith called for a retrial. Smith’s old enemy Tom Watson returned from obscurity to rouse men to vengeance. Galvanized by the lynching, a new Ku Klux Klan had been resurrected outside Atlanta on Stone Mountain and a new conservative populist spirit was in the Georgia air.

  Governor Nat Harris, who had been arranging Frank’s retrial, visited him in prison just before he was lynched. There he bumped into Edgar Stripling’s six-year-old daughter. Christmas was just weeks away and the winsome lass implored the governor to free her daddy. He promised that he would and he did.

  Among the many killings, it would be those dubbed “the River Killings” that finally spelled doom for Buddie Hadley’s short, stumbling career as sheriff.

  The year 1913 had ended with a Christmas murder in Mountain Hill. A white moonshiner named Mack Melton shot a son of the powerful Teel moonshine family in front of his wife. Melton was rushed to safety in Atlanta by Sheriff Hadley and tried there. A Mountain Hill mob showed up to scare the jury into not making a decision. In his second trial he was acquitted and vowed never to return to Harris County, but in 1915 he and his brother and another man were pulled out of the Chattahoochee River (hence the name “River Killings”) by a fisherman and a ferryman. They had last been seen in the company of their old enemies, the Teels, as well as Hargetts and Lands.

  Again Columbus papers jumped on a juicy Harris County story, one with legs that would run for months. “One of the bodies was strung on a trot line like a fish. An incision had been made in his neck and the line passed through the mouth,” the Columbus Ledger informed its readers. Their heads had been shot through, then crushed with a thirty-five-pound stone.

  If ever there was a time for Sheriff Buddie Hadley to stand tall, this was it. But an early news item signaled that would not happen. This case, even more than the 1912 lynching, demonstrated to any and all that it was the Moonshine Mafia of Harris County that ran things and that, for the time being, Buddie Hadley did their bidding. By now, Mitch Huling, having roundly lost his race for Muscogee County sheriff, was justice of the peace in the Mountain Hill district. Confidently, he told a reporter that he was quite sure the men under suspicion would be cleared. Two of those men, Charlie and Shaffer Hargett, were his relatives. From the beginning, Buddie Hadley’s efforts appeared sadly ludicrous. These were his people—relatives by marriage, old friends and neighbors, and political backers. Most important, however, they were the men who’d engineered and carried out the 1912 lynching, proven killers, firm in the belief they could do anything and get away with it.

  Hadley would know as well as anyone the sophisticated ways these little moonshine fiefdoms had long organized themselves to fight the feds and to punish those who went against them. The newly formed Klan had nothing on these men, who for decades had polished their networks of information, informers, and executioners. They didn’t yet go around in robes, or give themselves comical titles, but they cou
ld strike fear like none other. Because they were about the only people making any money in those rough times, they could easily buy protection from local law officers. Also, like the modern Mafia, they had many house lawyers, men of their own families. The mere fact that there were so many of them, most intermarried, provided considerable protection.

  By October, Sheriff Hadley had issued at least a dozen subpoenas to people to appear before the grand jury to testify in the River Killings. When the day came, however, the blacks among them had mysteriously disappeared and the whites refused to talk. At this point, both Judge Gilbert and Prosecutor Palmer publicly blamed the sheriff for the county’s high murder rate.

  It was on the heels of this mammoth failure to obtain justice that Buddie Hadley went to Columbus to crow to reporters about the upcoming triple execution of three black men, who had been tried and found guilty at the court session in which the “River Killers” were supposed to be produced. Seeking to burnish his tattered reputation he announced the three would die in one month and described a hangman’s stand rigged to handle three hangings at once. But, once again, he’d have egg on his face when two of the men escaped and later appealed. One’s sentence was reduced to life. The next year, in separate executions, Hadley got to “pull the trap” on the other two.

  Late in 1915, a Mountain Hill woman broke ranks. In an anonymous letter, she detailed firsthand reports about Shaffer Hargett, one of the River Killing suspects, and the white men’s bodies, telling the sheriff just where to go to find eyewitnesses. It did no good. Rumors circulated that more dead black bodies had turned up in the Chattahoochee near where the white ones were found. Nothing happened, despite the fact the October grand jury had strongly recommended the case be continued.

  In 1916, Sheriff Buddie Hadley was severely defeated in the white Democratic primary by Homer Williams, a man unrelated to my family but backed by the Williams-Mobley clique, in an effort to put moonshiners out of business and stop the killings. Knowing Hadley would likely lose, the moonshine district of the county had backed another of their own, a Gordon uncle of Norman Hadley.

  The River Killings were never brought before another grand jury. Shaffer Hargett and his wife, both of them young, died of pneumonia in 1918. Stories of his violent, racist cruelty were still being told in Harris County in the 1990s.

  In the fall of 1916, Buddie Hadley removed his badge, donned an apron, and became a grocer on the square. His son Douglas worked alongside him. He and Berta now had two daughters, ages one and five. The eldest, Marion Elizabeth, loved to play Hangman with seven-year-old Arthur Hardy, Jr. She’d climb into a gunny sack tied to a rope tossed over a low-hanging tree branch and he’d pull her up, screaming with excitement, then begging to come down. Her mother didn’t like the game and told her so, but Elizabeth, who would one day be my mother, was a headstrong child.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Roaring Twenties

  The curse many felt had been cast upon the county after the lynching continued to wreak havoc into the new decade. On a bright April morning in 1920, my great-uncle Dock Williams, my grandfather’s youngest and most rapscallion brother, was found in a puddle of blood, his head “beat to jelly,” alongside the bodies of two Irvin men. All of the men were believed by black folks to have been there at the tree beside the baptismal font that fateful midnight in 1912. Some descendants of former Williams slaves shook their heads and said things like “Vengeance is mine, said the Lord,” and, given the extraordinarily high number of deaths dealt out to men known or believed to have been behind those masks, perhaps they knew whereof they spoke.

  During the time I spent researching these stories, people talked about what came to be known as the Tip Top murders as if they’d happened yesterday. Much like the 1912 lynching, a black man had been executed for a white man’s crime, but this time things took a somewhat different turn. This black man, Louis “Sugar Bear” Murray, had been in the service of the Irvin men since childhood and was deeply loyal to them. On that fateful night, a fight broke out over a twenty-dollar bill in a gambling den called Tip Top, at the top of Pine Mountain. Four drunk white men started shooting and knifing and wrestling, splattering blood all over the cabin. By the end, one Irvin lay dead and another Irvin and Dock Williams lay dying. It was revealed in various ways that the white Cook ordered the black Murray to “finish him,” referring to Dock. Murray confessed to killing Dock Williams with a rock. He was sentenced to die but Dock’s wife and two of his brothers—my grandfather Will and his brother Brit, a state legislator—decided they wanted Cecil Cook, a former close friend, to pay for killing Dock. So for the first time in Harris County history, a white man was indicted on the word of a black man.

  This would not end well for Murray or the Williams family. Murray was represented by Arthur Hardy and his partner Joe Peavy, who was Cecil Cook’s brother-in-law. In Murray’s trial, his lawyers had failed to present the “ordered to kill” defense, instead claiming that Murray’s loyalty to the Irvins and a desire to protect them led him to bludgeon Williams. To the amazement of most of the courtroom and despite his promise to the prosecutor to tell the truth, once on the stand Murray refused to speak. Cecil Cook went back to his work that day a free man.

  Days later, as Murray stood on the gallows with the noose around his neck, he was confronted by Will Williams, who demanded he recount his story so he could tell it to the press waiting outside. He also demanded to know what happened to the money Dock had on him when he was killed. Murray had just spoken with Dock’s widow, Kate, and told her he had nothing against “Mr. Dock,” that he liked him, and only did what he did under orders from Cecil Cook. He also told her that five men, including his lawyers, Cook, and an Irvin brother, had told him before Cook’s trial that “a Negro’s statement wasn’t anything next to a white man’s,” and that if he remained silent they would go to the governor and get him off.

  All of this appeared on the front page of the next morning’s Columbus newspaper. Also detailed was my grandfather’s shameless attempt to pressure the wrongly convicted man to spend his last seconds on earth restating what he had already said. Perhaps it was because Williams showed Murray no remorse, perhaps because neither he nor his powerful legislator brother Brit had lifted a hand to obtain for him a new trial that he remained silent. Perhaps like Dusky Crutchfield, he’d simply had it with white folks and their schemes and was ready to be done with it all. As on the stand, he said nothing, simply gazing into the hard gray eyes of the man who would become my grandfather.

  Louis “Sugar Bear” Murray would be the last convict to die by hanging in Hamilton. He would not, however, be the last black man executed for the crime of a white man. In 1923, the Georgia legislature voted to move all criminal executions to the state farm at Milledgeville. Within five years Kate Mobley Williams would be dead and Will Williams, in the grip of alcoholism, would be a regular patient at a sanatorium in Rome, Georgia, known for shock treatments.

  Late in August 1921, just as the tension from all the trials was loosening its grip on Hamilton, yet another tragedy struck. This one involved a white man and a black woman and signaled that the 1912 lynching’s message against miscegenation had gone unheard or unheeded in the heart of the village.

  W. T. Whitehead, a bachelor, had been a close friend of Norman Hadley and shared his preference for black women. Descended from old families of large slaveholders, long known for their black or mulatto mistresses and large numbers of “outside children,” Whitehead ran a small grocery on the square. Now forty-three, he’d had several black mistresses and produced numerous children with them. Currently living with him above the store was a twenty-three-year-old black woman named Adeline Mann. The census listed her as his “cook.” The Manns were an old black Hamilton family. Her grandfather, a former slave, was a blacksmith living next door to Emma and Buddie Hadley. On the other side of the Hadley cottage was Whitehead’s grocery.

  The superintendent of the town’s new lumber mill, a man named Comer Chancellor,
was a newcomer, and while most old Hamiltonians had grown resigned to Whitehead’s lifestyle or simply learned to ignore it, Chancellor was outraged by it. Perhaps he was a Klansman; perhaps he was just inspired by the Klan’s now-regular whippings of women, black and white. One sizzling day in late August, he and some other men put Adeline Mann on the train and told her in no uncertain terms never to return. When Whitehead ordered her home and she returned, the men grabbed her again and took her out somewhere and flogged her, or so they told Whitehead, who grabbed his shotgun and headed down the block to Chancellor’s house, aiming it straight ahead as he approached. Chancellor greeted him at the door with gunfire, leaving him dead in the street. It was midnight, close to the time of the 1912 lynching.

  During this time, Douglas and Berta Hadley were living with their four young daughters close by the square. As Mitch Huling’s assistant county police chief, Doug had been among the first on the scene at the Tip Top murders. His family had been startled from sleep at the midnight murder of W. T. Whitehead, an old friend. Miss Berta was becoming more and more like his hypochondriacal mother by the day, and she and the girls were eager for new vistas, so when Mitch Huling was appointed chief of county police in Columbus and invited Douglas to be his assistant, he did not hesitate to accept. This had to seem like the chance of a lifetime to him.

  At first the twosome gained a modicum of fame by busting still after still, taking down bootleggers, including some of their own cousins. Newspapers boasted of Huling’s prowess, one calling him a “a miniature Bat Masterson with a girlish smile.” But when Huling riddled a bootlegger with bullets in his back on Broadway in the middle of the day, his heroic image darkened. As with the lynching, my grandfather was once again the man who wasn’t there. Someone suggested he was, but that claim never took hold, and though Huling was ultimately found innocent and returned to his job, he was soon asked to leave and was replaced for a short time by my grandfather.