The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Guilt and Innocence

  Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be a writer. More specifically, I wanted to write a book about a small town in the South. I believed it was meant to be, but I wasn’t sure what exactly the story would look like. Early in my writing career, I wrote an embarrassingly nostalgic piece for the Sunday magazine of the Hartford Courant about playing as a child in a jail cell in Hamilton. I knew nothing then of the tortured week that Dusky Crutchfield and her comrades had suffered there or the countless other falsely imprisoned men and women who would eke out their last days in that dark space. Later I tried my hand at a screenplay about a young girl discovering her sheriff grandfather’s Klan robes in the attic. During those years I had no reason to suspect my grandfather of anything dire. He was Daddy Doug and I had loved him. I was merely a writer dabbling in fiction.

  I became a journalist, and by the time I began this book, I had spent the past three decades writing magazine and newspaper articles about childrearing, education, labor and the women’s movement, death squads, corporate and government corruption, sexual harassment and discrimination, and medical malpractice. But the book was a whole other matter. I began my visits back to Hamilton with trepidation. All of the years I spent writing had not prepared me emotionally for this new assignment.

  Figuring no one would believe me or know about the lynching, I took copies of the newspaper articles with me as proof. I went down in 1995 fearing that elderly black folks would be scared to talk about it and that old white folks would be defiant and convinced it had been necessary. Or perhaps they would say what my mother had that day when G’mamma, from her sleigh bed, told me the story of her most unforgettable memory—“the hanging.” “Don’t believe everything she tells you. She embroiders, you know.” When I went back to Hamilton a decade later, my mother insisted it never happened. I showed her the article and she said: “Do you believe everything you read in the newspaper?” Some years later, she let herself slip a couple of times, claiming that “some men from Columbus came up to Hamilton and did that,” and, most important, revealing to me the existence of the “two-family families.”

  But the old folks who’d remained in Harris County neither denied it nor sought to shift the blame. It was as if they’d been waiting for me. Twenty-two elders, black and white, detailed the event as it had been told to them. I didn’t even have to ask about their guilt or innocence—the answer often came before anything else, at times stated matter-of-factly, at times with regret. In so many words, most of them told me that “they got the wrong folks” or that “those people had nothing to do with Norman Hadley’s murder.”

  Clyde Slayton still lived in the bare-bones cabin of his youth in Mountain Hill, close to the scene of much of the mayhem. He turned out to be a cousin on the Cash side of my family and was one of the many I call “Ancient Mariners.” Like the bearded character with the “glittering eye” of Coleridge’s poem, they told their terrible tales with a bold urgency born of the knowledge that they’d soon be gone and that these truths might serve some good in the world they were leaving behind. Indeed, many of them, including Slayton, died shortly afterward.

  Carefully removing a plug of Red Man from his jaw, Slayton placed it gingerly on the piece of cheesecloth stretched across a McDonald’s paper cup. “A white man done it,” he growled out of that fierce and forthright face, fixing me with a milky stare. “But I can’t remember his name for the life of me.”

  He combed through cobwebbed memory to no avail. “I just thought of it the other night,” he said. “Now it’s gone.” He wasn’t the sort of man to cover up for anyone and in any event was too old for such foolishness. It had been a deathbed confession, he told me. Sometime in the 1930s, but he could be wrong about that. “Everybody pretty much figured that to be the case all along,” he added, “that it was a white man who killed Norman Hadley.” He didn’t want to discuss the details. He reckoned the man was jealous. Everybody was jealous of Norman because he was so popular, he told me. I slowly ticked off a list of names, all the white folks living around there in 1912. Nope. Nope. That ain’t it, either. “Something like Sizemore,” he said, but what records exist show nothing similar to that name.

  “We had a lot of bad people around here,” Slayton kept repeating as if to make the point: what real difference does naming one of them make any more?

  Slayton was one of only two white men I met who were willing to talk about the lynching. The others either said they never heard of it or denied it had happened. He wasn’t the only person I interviewed to tell me he had just been thinking about the incident the other night. I had called no one in advance.

  C. D. Marshall, leaning on his hoe, was one of only two black people to bring up the victims’ innocence. “They hung ’em just for nothin’. They just talkin’. They done hung ’em and they wudn’t guilty. They hung a lady and they hung three mo.” He said this cleanly and matter-of-factly, gazing straight into my eyes.

  Iva Hodge, a white woman still living near the Gordon place in Mountain Hill, insisted on taking me to where the tree had stood. It was Iva’s brother, sitting atop a cotton bale on a wagon bed, whose shoulder was brushed by Dusky Crutchfield’s foot that next morning. “Papa said they arrested the wrong people,” Hodge confided. “He saw them do it and said they got the wrong people.”

  Edna Fort, still living with her sister Mary in their childhood home, both unmarried and childless, pointed toward the back window of her spacious parlor, toward the old Mobley place, where Sheriff Hadley and his family had lived at the time. She 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 a branch—it was Askew Branch on the Askew farm—to an old tree that hung out over the road and they hung them there. It was just terrible, just terrible.”

  Her sister added, “And not a one of them was guilty.” 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.” And it was Edna, a former elementary school teacher, who added for clarification, “Unnatural deaths, you understand.” I asked them for names of these men, but they declined. Two of the people I interviewed, both of them black, told me that “the woman” was pregnant. “They hung a woman and she was pregnant, they say, with a white man’s baby,” Verna Hudson told me, looking down.

  A. J. Murphy, a senior deacon at Friendship Baptist, was tending to church business at his kitchen table when I stopped by his house, just steps from the fork in the Blue Springs roads where the lynch mob made its first attempt. He graciously invited me in and told me I resembled Sheriff Hadley. Like Verna, he told me Crutchfield was pregnant by a white man and that the mob “cut the baby right out of her belly.” These were the only two with that story and I have found no news accounts to back this up, so am not able to verify it. I admit I may not be psychologically able to face this last intolerable, but possible, fact. While I have, more or less, come to terms with the rest of this Greek tragedy I found in my family tree, this possibility still stops my breath and congeals my blood. I like to think it got mixed in later, with reports that two other Georgia black women, who were lynched—Dorothy Malcolm in Walton County in 1946 and Mary Turner in Valdosta in 1918—were pregnant.

  Iva Hodge and I could not find the tree. Later I learned it had been chopped down before I was born. It dawned on me that the white women most obsessed by the lynching were Iva and my cousin Louise, each with intimate connections to several men named through the years as mob members. This was somewhat the case with G’mamma. After all those years, the lynching remained her “most unforgettable memory,” though in her version of the story, as in Louise’s, the victims were guilty.

  Later on, I tracked down Horace Gordon, Norman Hadley’s nephew. Life hadn’t been easy for Gordon. His teeth were mostly gone, and his h
and trembled as he cradled his morning bourbon. A silverfish skittered across the black and white checked linoleum in his seedy apartment. He’d worked in the mills and done construction on a big dam on the Chattahoochee. Gordon believed the lynching was wrong, he said, mainly because that “nigger woman wasn’t guilty.” “She was the one who told them who done it,” he said. “My daddy always felt bad about her.” He still believed the black men were guilty. He said his father was away in Milledgeville that day and didn’t go, but he told me of some who did. “Mr. Lum Teel told me he was in it. John Whit Hargett was in it. I think Bud Cannon was in it. Truett. Old man John Land. They was all in on it. Mostly moonshiners, just a bunch of the neighbors trying to help out.”

  Clyde Slayton said he was almost sure that Mans and Walter Gordon, Norman’s uncles, took part in the lynching. These were all Mountain Hill men. A. J. Murphy, a black man, added some Hamilton names: John Storey. Mobley. Osborn. Farley. Gordon’s list included my cousin Louise’s father, Gordon Murrah, who was the sheriff’s son-in-law. “He showed me the notches on his pistol when I was a boy, said four were for those folks.”

  I took Horace over to visit Louise, an old friend he’d not seen in years. She told the story of her mother forbidding her father to join the mob. Horace gave me a secret knowing look, but held his tongue.

  It didn’t surprise me that those who willingly admitted that the victims were all innocent—people like the Fort sisters, C. D. Marshall, and Clyde Slayton—were not connected by blood to men central to the lynching. It was those connected to the killers—like Iva Hodge, G’mamma, and Louise—who clung to the illusion of the victims’ guilt, people like Horace Gordon, who believed only “that old woman” was innocent. Another was Sambo Gordon’s grandson Jimmy Kidd, who’d been told that the blacks had a plan to kill the whites. He said he was happy we don’t live in that sort of world anymore. It was the same with Mitch Huling’s nephew Woody Huling, who expressed regret about Dusky: “She was the star [witness]. She shouldn’t have been killed.”

  My cousin Louise, who’d been so eager in the beginning of my search to learn what happened and kept telling me that “time is running out,” showed little interest or even belief when I told her of the four people’s innocence. By now she was losing her mental grip on the world and simply muttered, “Things had just got so bad. Something had to be done.”

  No one I talked to knew the victims’ names. Some called Dusky Crutchfield “the woman,” “that ol’ woman,” “the star witness,” or “the concubine.” Though nameless, she was the only one most people knew about. The men’s existence had faded with memory. No one knew that one was a preacher. No one knew where they were buried. They were taken by friends, the press reported. Nameless friends to a nameless place.

  I suspect the three buried together are in an unmarked grave a few yards from their death place, in the Friendship Baptist cemetery, where graves date back to the mid-nineteenth century and include many descendants of men and women enslaved by my family. Some still bear evidence of African customs: seashells and broken crockery.

  Les Gore, an old black man who told me he worked for one of my grandfathers and even remembered the name of his ox, said that “back then if we heard something, saw something, we just walked away.” The message black people received from the lynching was the message that was intended: don’t mess with white people. It was a message they had heard a million times, but this time it scalded, seared, and scarred. If you see something, you just walk away, don’t stop and look, don’t say nothing about it. Avert the eyes, cloud the brain, zip the lip. Natural abilities to observe, analyze, criticize, or grow were nipped in the bud. And not only in black folks, but in all of us. The one thing, the most important thing, no black person seemed to know, a thing the whites would not have wanted them to know, was that Dusky Crutchfield had refused to be intimidated.

  The “see no evil, hear no evil” injunction preached to black people was rife in my Hadley family as well. When I mentioned the lynching to my mother’s sister, Lillian, whom I called Nana, she quickly pinched two fingers together and drew them quickly across her lips, her eyes shooting daggers into my very soul. She was standing in a closet filled with old photographs as she did this.

  It wasn’t just the lynching that people refused to discuss or even remember over time. Most difficult subjects became taboo and many subjects were difficult. Some simply turned their heads whenever something unpleasant happened.

  Some of this fear doubtlessly arose from the “whuppins” they received as children. The grandfather who had never raised a voice or a hand to me was a harsh disciplinarian of his own daughters. That information slipped from my normally secretive mother’s lips once on the phone when we were talking about all the accounts of child abuse coming out in the press. She said, “I never knew about things like that except a few times when Mama couldn’t handle us and turned us over to Daddy.” She paused a moment, took a sharp breath, and said in a tight voice, “I guess it would be called child abuse now.” I could feel her pain coming through the phone lines. It was the first and only time I had heard her say anything negative about him. Some of the sisters’ fear of facing and speaking truth came from their mother’s increasing inability to cope. “Don’t tell Mamma,” I often heard them say to one another. “It would just kill her.” Long after Daddy Doug died, however, G’mamma got down to her own “nitty-gritty” one Sunday afternoon in her living room. Her daughters had been sharing affectionate memories of a wonderful father. “He wasn’t all that wonderful,” their mother said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Enslaved by History

  Throughout the 1990s and during my frequent returns to Georgia, Hamilton remained much as I remembered it as a child. While nearby Pine Mountain (formerly Chipley) modernized and flourished, drawing tourists from Callaway Gardens, Hamilton—aside from a renovated courthouse—remained a case of arrested development. The old jail still stood, as did the old hotel turned post office, now an insurance business with its iron balcony next to the courthouse and overlooking the square. A deputy sheriff showed me and my son the courtroom where the 1912 mob members were declared “unknown,” where Louis “Sugar Bear” Murray was unjustly sentenced to hang, and, with no hint of irony, called it “our To Kill a Mockingbird courtroom.” A block away, the old Mobley mansion where Buddie and Emma Hadley lived still stood. Janie Prichard’s millinery, Henry’s Confectionary, Hamilton Female College, General Elias Beall’s mercantile, and Susan Robinson’s hotel had long since burned or been replaced. In the middle of Monument Square the twenty-one-foot marble soldier, now darkened with grime, still kept a close eye on the North.

  Within the Confederate soldier’s gaze lay the former Cook’s Mercantile where Cecil Cook returned from Dock Williams’s murder to sell calico and cornmeal, and where my father believed until his death he had killed a black girl. It was now owned by my brother-in-law, who hoped in vain for a high-end restaurant rental. In the 1960s, G’mamma, who seemed to blossom in widowhood, had put her considerable dramatic skills on display when she donned period dress and bonnet and regaled visitors at the store with old-timey tales. The dark green train depot with its white trim had long ago been razed, but down Railroad Street near G’mamma and Dad Doug’s old house, elderly black women wearing cotton wraparounds and baseball caps still lived in asphalt shingle-sided shacks set high on stacks of rock, where they raked their dirt yards and tended the bright hollyhocks beside their wooden stoops.

  A British couple resided next to the old Hudson house, while a Hudson descendant practiced optometry in the old cotton warehouse. The tiny building on the square’s east side where a Williams pharmacy once flourished now sported a Christian bookstore with a tanning booth, owned by a Vietnamese woman and her African American husband, named Williams. Recently they’d offered the shop’s upper quarters as a meeting place for the local Democrat Party, which claimed only 20 percent of the county’s registered voters.

  The old black men still ga
thered around the well at the edge of the square each morning, just as they did in my childhood. And the old white men gathered at the same time directly across the street inside the drugstore to swill coffee, complain, and stare out at the old black men chatting around the well.

  It was beside the well that I found Jimmy Weaver. When I asked the men if any had known Sheriff Hadley, he jumped up quickly, looked me over, and asked, “Are you Karen?” Jimmy grew up on Dad Doug’s farm. As kids we played together, but it had been at least fifty years since we’d seen each other. Jimmy had only good things to say about Dad Doug. “He was a good man. A good man. He used to bring Bobby and Buster over to our house to supper all the time.” He insisted on taking me to visit his mother.

  Across from the well still stood the Amoco station where Mr. Shorty gave Nehis and ice cream to us children on those long-ago summer days. But sad things had happened here, in 1958, just after Dad Doug died. Shorty Grant had been bludgeoned to death in the station with a tire iron. A young black man named Albert Curry was quickly tried and convicted, and six weeks later, electrocuted. Though forty years had passed, people both black and white still wanted to talk about the wrong that was done that day. Evidence points to yet another black man having been killed for the crime of a white man. A relative of the white man, Jimmy Jordan, a justice of the peace at the time and Shorty’s son-in-law, had told folks Jordan did it. Some things, it seemed, just never settled down. My review of the trial transcript indicated this to be a case that bears reopening.

  Just down the way from Shorty’s Amoco, Rev. Alex Copeland’s old manse was now a restaurant. Not so long ago, the eighty-two-year-old had been found on his parlor floor, beaten to death with chains, my mother told me, by a motorcycle gang that was blackmailing him over his homosexuality.