The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  By now the county had become a hodgepodge of high-end developments inhabited by Columbus’s upper middle class, drawn by low taxes; unemployed rednecks living in rusty trailers surrounded by pickups propped on cinder blocks; a handful of transplanted artists, writers, and musicians; black families still living in the houses their freed ancestors built with sweat-earned cotton wages or replaced by redbrick ranch houses built in the 1940s and 1950s; retired white corporate executive couples moving from all over the country to Callaway’s idyllic new Longleaf subdivision; and fifth- and sixth-generation survivors of founding families, black and white, returning from lives elsewhere to recapture sweet childhood memories or just live simpler lives on land inherited from ancestors.

  Though the students at Harris County High no longer laid wisteria wreaths at the feet of the monument each April, the Sons of Confederate Veterans showed up from time to time to place small Confederate flags on the graves of Captain Cooper Williams and his Camp Williams comrades in Hamilton City Cemetery. Dusty and tattered, the flags remained in place each time I visited. An old, mostly black, cemetery next door had returned to nature, until a young white woman who had fought in Afghanistan discovered it and organized other veterans in a partial cleanup. A drawn-out dispute between city and county ensued as to who was responsible. In the meantime, a young member of the white Hudson family, the woman veteran, the Cataula VFW, and the black Men’s Club have joined hands to provide several cleanups and raise money for larger repairs.

  The NAACP had tried and failed to establish a Harris County branch, but the Columbus chapter held meetings there and every January a Martin Luther King Day parade passed by the Confederate memorial. The schools were better integrated than most in the country, and while students, as elsewhere, often self-segregated by race, several young black women had been named Homecoming Queen. Hamilton’s old dream of becoming an “education center” was reality with a system that was academically impressive. Countless black students from these schools had gone on to colleges and careers.

  But Edward DuBose, a member of the national NAACP board, had seen things in Harris County that weren’t immediately apparent to me. As president of the Georgia NAACP, he visited counties throughout the state, organizing chapters. “There are four counties in Georgia that have not changed that much,” he said. “All are in the Chattahoochee Valley Judicial Circuit and one is Harris.” On the surface, he mused, things can look very peaceful. But beneath the façade, he sees that “things are very tense, but you don’t experience it until an issue brings it back to life.”

  Though the county population (25,000 at the time) had not quite doubled since my grandfather’s day, the current sheriff, Mike Jolley—who remarked, on meeting me at a catfish restaurant along the Chattahoochee, “I hope you’re a conservative”—oversaw dozens of cars and deputies and a hefty annual budget. Moonshine was still being brewed in the county, but rolling meth labs claimed more of the law’s attention. At the time of this writing, the crime rate, according to a recent Columbus Ledger interview with Sheriff Jolley, is the lowest per capita in Georgia.

  During my visits I encountered some behaviors, especially from the older generation, that took me back to childhood. In Mary Fort’s parlor, as she talked about the lynching, she caught a look from sister Edna and lowered her voice. I recognized the transaction. It meant, “Quiet. A maid who might overhear is nearby.” While both black and white people spoke candidly with me about the lynching and other racial wrongs, they did so separately. A biracial conversation on these subjects—sensitively conducted and maintaining the same level of truth, if possible—could work wonders.

  Rev. O. C. Stiggers at Friendship Baptist was the only person I interviewed who asked me to stay off the subject of lynching. “Our folks are just starting to make some progress here. A lot of us are getting hired at Callaway [Gardens] and we wouldn’t want anything to hamper that,” he said, adding, “This might upset things.”

  The Columbus head of the NAACP said Stiggers told him the same thing when he asked him to start a local chapter. I’d traveled to nearby West Point to find the pastor at home with his wife. A handsome couple, they showed me into a comfortable paneled den with thick red carpeting. They were watching television. I surprised myself by breaking down in tears as I told them my story. “Our people have gotten past all that,” the pastor told me kindly. “We have forgiven and forgotten.” In my rounds, I would find some forgiveness, but not much forgetfulness. I told him that whites needed to deal with this history, but given so much of the black community’s dependence upon the goodwill of whites, and its unwillingness to upset them, I realized that much remained unchanged for them as well.

  At breakfast with an African American couple whose great-grandfathers had been among Brit Williams’s slaves, I asked whether they thought people in Hamilton would be willing to hold a memorial service for the four who were lynched. They agreed that it “needs to be done” and “would be a good thing,” but feared that black people in the area would not want to make their white neighbors mad. Not long before our breakfast, Tea Party members had demonstrated in the square, carrying placards of President Obama’s picture X’d out in red. “It gave me cold chills,” the woman recalled. “It felt like old times.”

  To southern whites and their descendants, the lesson of the lynching and the system of segregation was that when blacks and whites get together on anything other than a master-servant level, explosions were likely to occur. I heard this sort of message many times as I came of age. In 1961, I was a sophomore at the University of Georgia when Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were desegregating the school. I went with friends to meet Charlayne and we offered to walk her to class the next day. We were confronted by Ku Klux Klansmen, who were joined by Kappa Alpha fraternity boys I knew well, shouting epithets, flashing switchblades, and throwing beer cans. I remember my father’s voice over the phone that day: “Don’t get involved. You never know what will happen with these things.” His words angered me, but I paid him no mind. I now understand where that fear came from and also the way it stunted my own growth. Within weeks of my graduation from college, I married and moved to the North, only to encounter different versions of racism. There, however, it was easier to find opportunities, and the courage I needed, to advocate for racial justice.

  Still, my mother and I continued to do battle. The subject of race, I now understand, was a kind of shorthand for all our many differences. The fears that she bore for me and for herself were based on her long-buried but never-forgotten knowledge of the lynching and other racial violence at the hands of her relatives. It stemmed from her sense of my being just like my father, which I took to mean “crazy,” “dangerous,” or “trouble.” And it came from her knowledge of the several racially liberal men and women in his Williams family, especially May Brit. She knew I yearned to be a writer and that early on I admired the work of Carson McCullers, a Columbus-born novelist, whose sister-in-law was once my father’s office nurse. She admonished me when I was in high school and devouring McCullers’s books, saying, “I hope you won’t grow up to embarrass Columbus the way she did.” By this she meant showing the city’s seamier side, depicting people in their full humanity.

  This fear was often expressed in harsh bouts of anger and emerged most strongly in 1981, long after I’d grown up. During a seven-month period four years earlier, seven elderly white women, most known by my mother, were raped and strangled to death in their homes in neighborhoods near hers. She and every other white woman in Columbus lived in terror during that time. She slept in a girdle, a screwdriver in her hand, her bedroom door locked. Once or twice, her friend Jack, whom she always sent home by 10 p.m., was allowed to sleep in the guest room. In her mind, all the warnings and fears that she’d been raised with had come to pass; a black rapist was stalking her pristine neighborhood and she could be next. Only much later would a black man be convicted, but that fear had been drilled into her with the alphabet and would never be removed. It created
a thicket of emotion that I had to traverse every time I tried to have a discussion with her about race. The issue came between us repeatedly throughout my life.

  One night, many years into my adulthood, she got some kind of perverse payback when, home on Clubview Drive for a visit, I asked about the fate of the man sentenced to death for two of those crimes. “I blame you somewhat for that,” she told me, meaning the murders. Nothing had ever cut so deeply. She reminded me that a black man had knocked on our door one night when I was home from college and asked to come in and talk with us about civil rights. I had invited him in, agreed with his ideas, and encouraged his work. She’d eavesdropped in the hallway. From there, she’d made this leap. At the time this struck me as, quite simply, insane. Now, after almost two decades unearthing this history, I understand how my mother’s twisted thinking came about. I remember G’mamma’s words of long ago, when Mamma told her I liked black people, and she spat, “Won’t like ’em so much once one of ’em rapes her.” “Treat a black man like a man and you end up dead,” was the bottom line of white southerners’ teachings in my mother’s day.

  “The Stocking Strangler,” as he came to be known, was determined by a jury to be a black man named Carlton Gary. Sentenced to die in 1986, his case drags on. His original judge was John H. Land, the man who sent young Albert Curry to the electric chair and was called “the hanging judge” in a magazine long before Gary’s case. It was his decision not to pay for the lawyer Gary had chosen that set in motion a series of appeals. Land later recused himself because of prejudicial statements he made to another magazine. But the man who replaced him also ruled against paying Gary’s lawyer, a policy that has persisted as the case goes on.

  Throughout the 1990s and until very recently, the person responsible for making these and other decisions regarding Gary’s appeals was federal judge Clay Land, the great-nephew of John H. Land. Due to the groundwork of journalist David Rose and his book The Big Eddy Club, so many chinks in the case have by now been exposed that, as I write, Gary’s case is back in court. Since 2001, federal judge Clay Land made numerous decisions thwarting Gary’s efforts to obtain a new trial. One recent decision by Land, however, changed that course, giving Gary another chance to escape execution.

  John Land, a cousin of Clay Land, and the great-grandson of John H. Land, recently went public in Columbus to express remorse for his ancestors’ role in the 1912 lynching of young T. Z. McElheney and to call upon the city and county officials to do the same. Though Clay Land publicly expressed his unwillingness to take responsibility for an act that occurred more than one hundred years ago and which he had no part in, he did give an address to the local bar association on the fine civil rights work done by the barber Primus King and Dr. Thomas Brewer, the man whose assassination his great-uncle, then-solicitor general John Land, chose not to investigate.

  In 2007, I attended a large Columbus reunion of the Hudson-Williams family, descendants of my family’s slaves, and shared with them some of our ancestral history that I had unearthed—the lists of slave names, their ages, their children, their prices. I could barely choke out this last part. Deborah Dawson, the family’s genealogist, was glad to have the particular information, but for years she’d compiled books of family history which included white Williamses. “Don’t be nervous that you’ll be the only white person here,” she’d told me. “We are a rainbow family.” The room contained every shade of skin color, and everyone I spoke with was respectful of and interested in the past, but rooted firmly in the present and planning wisely toward the future.

  A few years later, in 2012, I stood in a large circle of black and white descendants of enslaved people and slave owners, some of whom had ancestors who were lynched. These were members of Coming to the Table, an organization formed by Thomas Jefferson’s black and white grandchildren, among others. We were in Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Confederacy, standing in the shadow of the largest Confederate memorial in the South. There we linked arms, spoke our harsh truths, and offered forgiveness.

  My own father, finally sober, found his way back to Harris County sometime in the early 1970s. He’d fallen far, landing in a federal drug treatment center, from which he escaped in order to give me away at my First Baptist wedding in Columbus. In a suit two sizes too large and with eyes that swam like goldfish in his emaciated face, he was a pathetic sight. Soon after that he stopped drinking. Early in his recovery, he completed a Fourth Step, “a searching and fearless moral inventory,” but hadn’t found the courage to take the next step, in which he’d admit his wrongs to another human being. With this unfinished business burning inside him, he pulled off the road near Hamilton one afternoon, walked into a farmer’s field, and asked a black man with a hoe to sit down on the ground beside him while he confessed his many sins.

  Fourteen years later, he’d return to Hamilton in a casket. He’d spent fourteen years sober, a counselor at the prestigious Hazelden Drug Treatment Center. He died, however, believing he had killed that young black woman across the street from the Hamilton square, something he confessed as his most shameful memory at his last AA meeting. From across the nation recovering alcoholics came to the Hamilton cemetery to see my father laid to rest and to testify to his contributions to their lives.

  The grip of history, as I discovered, affects people in different ways. A few blocks from the Hamilton square, an African American funeral home director, Bobby Thomas, wept as he told me about white grandfathers who would not acknowledge him and whom he was forbidden to acknowledge.

  I myself almost went down a path akin to that of my white ancestors who had rejected their own “taboo children.”

  Six years before I began the circuitous journey that took me back to Hamilton and face-to-face with the ghosts of my past, I had become the grandmother of a racially mixed child. When I first heard news of her impending birth from my son and his girlfriend, I was devastated. This was partially because I believed they were too young and immature to make good parents, but also because I did not want to face the racism of my mother and her generation still living in Georgia, and, as I would come to realize, the racism still existing within. For six long years I kept her existence a secret from my Georgia family.

  Underlying my cowardice was a deep sense of impending doom. Since much of my adult life had been devoted to interracial work, I was dumbfounded by my reaction. At the time I had never heard of Norman Hadley or Dusky Crutchfield or Bertha Lee Harrington, nothing of all the killings that came in the wake of the lynching. I hadn’t heard the story of W. T. Whitehead, the white man shot on the Hamilton square while defending his black mistress. I simply knew I was afraid for my son, his girlfriend, and their child, as well as for myself, an entirely unrealistic fear, a haunting dread that entered my heart and stayed there until the birth of this beautiful child and then a mysterious woman propelled me to go back home and find out the truth and walk a path of honesty and action.

  Perhaps that ghost woman was an inner part of myself—an older, wiser Self (called “soul projection” by some psychologists), weary with conflict over my values versus the expectations of family and history. Perhaps it was distant cousin Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, who’d lived much of her 105-year life three miles from where I now live, looking for yet another student to inspire. Perhaps it was Dusky Crutchfield, calling for her story to be told, or old Jane Moore, who saw so many of her and my great uncle’s boys ruined by a corrupt, racist community and legal system. No matter who the ghost woman was, I knew my time had come to stand up for what mattered. I now know that in order to become a loving grandmother to my granddaughter, and to break the family cycle of rejecting, even destroying, its own children, I had to make this journey. This most crucial of issues had been presented time and again to my ancestors, who had refused a humane response. Now it was my turn.

  When I first read about the lynching, I felt at one with all its players—villains, bystanders, and victims. I now know why. Through my research I learned that I share genes with
many of them. I discovered a murderous heritage, as well as a biracial heritage I had never known. As I sifted through boxes and filing cabinets, chatted with elders and trolled the Internet, I often felt as if I’d stumbled into Bluebeard’s Castle. I never dreamed there had been so much violence and tragedy in my family’s past, and yet, strangely, in making these discoveries I was finally able to acknowledge some of my forebears’ characteristics within myself, both the good and the bad.

  The “bad” includes alcoholism, emotional instability, poor parenting, unfaithful relationships, and self-condemnation. I was beset by my own demons, perhaps as a result of my father having told me that he killed that young woman, coupled with my mother telling me I was just like him and later blaming me for serial killings.

  In the distant past I knew moments of anger, jealousy, fear, and the urge for revenge; emotions so overwhelming that, in a different culture and a different era, encouraged or joined by others, may well have resulted in dire and irreversible action. Somewhere along the way, I got the idea that I had actually done something evil, or, if not, was certainly capable of it. By the same token, like the “innocent bystanders” at the lynching, I have often stood passively by as others spoke or did racial harm.

  The “good,” I am happy to add, includes the capacity for recovery and positive relationships with family and friends. As a result of this difficult journey, I have achieved a greater sense of peace and wholeness, of being at home in the world, than I have ever known.

  I now understand that the lynch mob was not made up of monsters (perhaps with the exception of one or two), but of ordinary men who had little or no awareness of the history they carried within themselves and who did a monstrous thing. Unable to deal with their own demons, they took everything out on those hapless four people who represented everything they hated in themselves. They had convinced themselves that the Negro was not fully human and, therefore, that killing him or her was not of great import. I realize the fact that they lived in a time and a place that reinforced and even encouraged these delusions made it much easier for those men to carry out the lynching.