“Highway Nineteen,” Sarah said. “The one out here that runs from Carswell to Reynoldston.”
“Robert Conley was a genius who could see the future,” I said. “Think about this. Robert Conley bought the property on both sides of the river and started a ferry, right? Where did he do it? At the shallowest part of the river. And where does the current bridge sit? Right about where the ferry was, on Conley property. He bought properties up and down on both sides of the river, along a line he imagined. He knew that one day the ferry would be replaced by a bridge built at the easiest place to build it, and damned if that's not it. Genius.”
“And most of the restaurants, service stations, bait stores, vegetable markets, and other little businesses up and down the highway are on Conley properties, too,” Sarah noted.
“Wait,” Steve interrupted. “These folks were all renters? And she shared that highway money with them? How did that work?”
“She said everybody was going to have to put up with the inconvenience of the construction. Then there was the bother of trucks rumbling past their houses, and the possibility they might lose livestock or even family pets to traffic, so she said everyone with long-term lease was entitled to a nuisance fee. She took that government largesse and turned it into the greatest windfall for common people she could. Then World War Two came along, and a whole generation went away to fight and work, and most of them never came back.”
“Oh yeah, the death of the small town in America,” Steve mused in his genuine Georgia drawl. “Y'all ever seen 'The Last Picture Show'? I think Bogdonavich pretty much sums it up.”
Sarah burst out laughing. “Young man, you are what we used to call a trip! A stone trip!” She laughed, coughed, and laughed some more. “Gentlemen, I apologize for spying on you and thinking ill of you, and I am glad to have met you. Now I really must go home and cook dinner.”
“How do you get out here?” I wondered aloud. “There are no buses or anything.”
“And who said I ride a bus? I have a car. It's parked on the other side of a house you can't see from here because of the kudzu screen.”
“But how do you drive there? I've been driving around the county, and I can't figure it out.”
“Well, go look at your maps and think about this: many of today's neglected dirt roads were once your main roads.”
That night, I got out my folder of plats and went through them like a deck of cards, making a separate stack of those owned by the Conley Land Trust. I got out my scale ruler and did some quick math. Of the twenty-five miles between Carswell and the river, Highway 19 ran through ten miles of Conley land. When the Feds decided to build a road straight from Reynoldston to Carswell, it must have been quite a windfall for the county and for those who received their nuisance fees. It was no wonder, I thought, that poor people thought of her as a saint.
Saints made me think of devils, so I went through the remainder of the folder pulling out properties owned by the Muskogee Timber Company. A little more measuring and arithmetic told me that four miles of highway ran through their land. Then something else occurred to me, and I flipped through the stack of Conley properties again, trying in my mind to place each one out in the field and to remember what it looked like, trying my best to recall how many of these land trust properties were being leased and farmed by the Muskogee Timber Company. Pretty soon my eyes were tired, and I returned all plats to their folder, keeping the Conley plats separate. I rubbed my eyes and stretched out on my bed.
I heard crying. It was soul-deep, mournful: just the bitterest female sobbing you ever heard. It communicated such pain, it elicited such pity, that I desperately wanted to turn and find whoever was crying and tell her this pain would pass, to try to console this apparently inconsolable grief. Try as I might, though, I could neither turn nor speak. I couldn't move my head left or right. I was packed tightly in something heavy, lying on my back, and as the pressure on my chest increased the sobs grew muffled. Around my face I felt a cloth bag getting heavier by degrees, each increase accompanied by a heavy wet thudding sound. Suddenly I couldn't breathe. The weight was crushing and the crying nearly impossible to hear. I struggled to turn my head to the left in an effort to get air. At last it turned, and I was face-to-face with Isaac.
“Help the boy.”
I awoke terrified. I sat up just to be sure that I could. Steve lay snoring atop his covers, lights off but with the television on, tuned to the hot rod channel. I'd awoken in time to discover the miracle paint refinishing compound of the century. I could restore the Mighty Ford to a like-new shine for only nineteen ninety-five. Had I ordered just then, I could have received a second bottle absolutely free. I thought about the paint job on Wild Bill's hot rod as I slowly drifted back to sleep.
15. The Lynching Tree
The next morning, as we drove north to resume our tree count, I sat with the stack of Conley plats in my lap, arranged according to address. We hadn't gone two miles when I saw a Conley Land Trust property planted with twenty year-old pines and no house to be seen. Farther down the road was a large property on a hill, and it too was planted in pines. Charred remains of a burned house were all that remained of any structure. On and on it went; roughly half of the Conley properties we passed were covered in pines planted six by ten feet apart. At the bottom of the Porter Creek valley, I had Steve pull into a driveway.
It was a driveway belonging to an older home with a screened-in front porch a hundred feet back from the road. Behind the house stretched acres of young pine.. Light streamed from yawning holes that once held windows, clearly indicating exactly how much of the roof had collapsed and where.
I got out of the truck and walked to the door of the porch. Dust lay across it like virgin snow, lightly crisscrossed by rodent tracks. Even the mice had abandoned this place. From the ceiling hung a battered ceiling fan with only two blades remaining out of five. The oversized bug light underneath indicated a porch often used, a cool refuge on a hot summer night from a house with no air conditioning.
“Are you kin to the Haugabrooks?” I heard an old woman ask.
I turned to face a silver-haired white woman wearing clogs, capri-length cutoffs, and a sleeveless denim shirt. Bright blue eyes shone under a wide straw hat. “Excuse me?” I said.
“The Haugabrooks. The family who lived here, are you kin to them?”
“No ma'am. I'm a surveyor working for the state. I was just looking at the house.”
“Well, that's too bad. I'm sorry to have bothered you. I was just hoping you could tell me what happened to them. They were some nice folks. They had the nicest children.”
“Where did they go?”
“They weren't sure, that's the thing. They didn't know if they were going to go live with her folks in South Carolina or try to start over somewhere else, or what.”
“Start over? What happened?”
“Oh, nothing too bad. He borrowed some money to start a business in town, but there never was enough people to keep it going. He went broke, and since he'd put up his lease as collateral--”
“He put up his lease? He had one of those long-term Conley leases?”
“He, his daddy, his granddaddy... and the bank let him use it as collateral. When he couldn't repay his loan, they took the collateral and called it even. The next thing we knew, the entire back of the property was pines. So you don't work for that bank?”
“No ma'am.”
“Because I was gonna say if you did, you had better carry a gun. Plenty of folks around here have good reason to hate those bankers. I might shoot you myself. Some folks rob you with a six-gun, and some use a fountain pen, so the song goes.”
“If it makes you feel any better, they haven't stolen it yet. Not entirely. They're just using it for now. But yes ma'am, they are trying to steal it.”
“What can we do about it?”
I shook my head. “I don't know that we can do anything,” I told her, “except get used to looking at pine trees.”
As we dr
ove away, I explained the trust to Steve and told him about Lawyer Frank without mentioning the ghost story or Frank's connection to it. I don't know why; I just didn't want to tell Steve that I was now pretty sure I was being haunted. We drove back out to the Old Home Lot and resumed our tree count. At the end of a long day, Sarah joined us. This time she brought a jug of iced tea and plastic cups.
“I figured you'd be thirsty out here. Granny said her granny told her that after the war, the local women used to take water and cornbread to the prison workers.”
“I got a whole lesson in post-war labor practices from The Turd,” I told them between sips of perfectly sweetened tea. “He was quite proud of his family's use of convict labor. He still hates Fin Conley for setting up tenant farmers on all these properties.”
“That Fin Conley was a smart man. I'll bet the Turd didn't tell you the Conleys were the first family with cotton in the ground after the war, did he? He didn't tell you about the Greene County strike, did he?”
“A strike!” Steve interjected. “Now we're talkin'! Who struck agin whom?”
“Why, the slaves of Greene County did,” she grinned. “The former slaves.”
“Say whaaaaat?” Steve's mouth dropped open.
“In 1866, the planters wanted to get back to what they knew, which was the last thing former slaves wanted. In Greene County they refused to go to work until they could get the same tenant farming agreements that Fin Conley gave his ex-slaves in Sweeney County. Planters were fit to be tied, but what could they do? Now, Fin Conley got a lot of heat for that, but in truth, he did the right thing, or the closest he could to the right thing, and that brings its own blessings.”
“Amen,” Steve nodded.
“Conley folks were the happiest, most productive people in this county since the planters got here. They built up their houses, they planted their lots, some of them started their little businesses, they went to church on Sunday, and they were decent folks. That was my grandmother, Annie Pearl. She was born and raised in that culture, by those people. But the Klan-- well, you know there are those ugly, very ugly people in the world--”
“We know all about the Klan, Ms. Sarah,” Steve said. “Go ahead with your story.”
“After the troops left, it started getting rough. They burned down some black businesses and stole some elections and threatened or killed black folks they thought were a problem. And the old Colonel and his grandson rode with them. Isn't that strange? Fin Conley was a hated man in these parts, because they said he gave black folks too much equality, but his father and his son both wore the hood. And that's just how it is down here.”
“There's good and bad in the same family,” Steve nodded. “And some folks just join up 'cause otherwise, their neighbors wouldn't trust 'em.”
“Keen observations, young man. Robert Conley, and before him, Mac Conley, organized the slave patrols around here before the war, so perhaps the Colonel felt a social obligation to take part, but that young Thornton, Fin's son... They say when he put on that hood, he was the cruelest of them all. Granny said he was only a teenager the first time he strung a man up on the Lynching Tree.”
“The Lynchin' Tree?” Steve asked.
“It's still here,” she pointed into the woods. “You'll know it. It's a big old ugly evil thing, and it's still here.”
“I think I've seen it,” I said. “Tell me about it.”
“Granny always said that what went wrong with that tree was that it was watered with blood, so over time, it grew thirsty for it. When Robert Conley first built his home here, it was a sturdy young tree with a branch right about six feet high that was just perfect for tying slaves' hands to for whipping. It got bigger and stronger, and eventually he nailed a metal ring into the tree instead of just tying their hands over a branch. Yes sir, they'd tie a man to that tree and beat him until the blood pooled at his feet.
“The first man hanged here was a slave from another county who had escaped and stolen a rifle. When the slave patrol tried taking him into custody, the man got off a shot that wounded one of the white men. They brought him up to the top of the hill and hanged him right on the main road, where everyone could see.
“Ugly as that was, it wasn't a lynching. The law said that a slave who tried to kill a white man would be hanged, and there was no point in a trial, since a slave couldn't testify against a white man, anyway.
“Then one night in October of 1879 the Klan went out riding. There was a black minister over at Mount Zion who was very active politically, getting our people registered to vote and such-- you know, just trying to get them to take part in local government. That night they kidnapped him from his little church where he slept in the sanctuary. The place was burned down, and they say seventeen year-old Thornton Conley made a big deal out of leading the procession that brought him here to string him up where everyone would see.
“Disgusting,” I said. “But I guess that's just me looking at the world from my perspective, from my period of time. What is it people always say? 'Things were different then'. ”
She was quiet a moment, then said, “People say that, and I understand what they mean, but I think it is always possible to be just and compassionate, during any period of time. But then there came the insurrection, and two more lynchings.”
“Jesus Christ!” Steve exclaimed. “Sorry Granny; sorry Jesus!” he said to the sky. “Two more lynchin's?”
“Well now, you see the quandary the Conleys had set up for themselves. The Conley tenant farmers were a talented, hardworking, God-loving bunch of people who thrived on freedom and opportunity. It didn't take long until they were a challenge, not just to the Conleys themselves, but to the whole order of things.
“What happened in 1879 didn't stop nobody, as Granny used to say. The local community continued to grow and prosper, and the Klan continued riding, burning, and killing. Black folks started carrying guns when they went out at night.
“One night in 1888, two men were accosted by a handful of Klansmen on horseback. They were armed, and they traded fire with the whites, wounding two before they disappeared into the night. By the next day, the news had spread all over the county. The whites in Carswell claimed the blacks in the north of the county were organizing an insurrection, and a committee came out to demand that Colonel Conley mobilize the local militia in response. He refused, saying the attacks were a matter for law enforcement. Randall Polk sent a telegram to the Governor in which he claimed the assailants had most likely been Conley tenants and accused the Colonel of weakness and prejudice in failing to punish the guilty. The Governor promoted him to Colonel and gave him command of the militia. They mustered in the courthouse square and camped for two nights while they waited for all their troops to assemble. They paraded once around the square before marching north.
“J.B. Lode was a local farmer and a storekeeper. He spread the word to all the local black folks that they should arm themselves against the coming violence. He sold quite a few rifles, but they say he gave away an equal number.
“Sure enough, the militia arrived, and shots were fired. A couple of white men were hit and one was killed, and that was that. I can't tell you the details of what happened then because none of our people knows except that those two men were carried to that tree and strung up. The old folks said the mob cut them up, too-- you know, mutilated them, cut off their genitals, their fingers and toes. They said the crowd fired so many rounds into their hanging bodies that they were making dead men dance.”
“And what happened to J.B. Lode?” I asked.
“Forced to leave town.”
“Why didn't they lynch him?”
“He was a white man.”
“What do you think happened to Isaac Cooper?” I asked.
“What do you think happened to him?” she replied.
Ice ran in my veins when she said it. We were looking into each others' eyes, and there was something there that made me suddenly want to tell her, to ask her what she knew, but I couldn't bring m
yself to do it.
“You don't think he jumped in the river?” I asked.
“And went where, to the beach?”
“Maybe he joined the circus, too?”
“And maybe that damned banker will join the Sierra Club, the Salvation Army, and the Nation of Islam, but I won't hold my breath until he does. It was after all that mess that Ms. Elizabeth took matters into her own hands.”
“After what?”
“After Thornton Conley was crippled, you know, and after little brother ran off. She paid a couple of men to saw off all the limbs under twenty-five feet from the ground so nobody could ever be lynched there again. From that day on, Ms. Elizabeth slowly took over running the family business, and anything her granddaddy Fin didn't teach her, she figured out for herself.”
“What a woman,” I said.
“Granny would like her,” Steve said.
The Dead Hand of Sweeney County Page 19
