in waxed paper.) And a band played bluegrass music from the wooden hut. Flag, pig, music: things from the past. The musical instruments were big, the music simple and repetitive. I was told that it was the words of the songs that mattered. The accents were not easy for me to follow; but the effect, especially from a little distance, of the unamplified music and singing in that enclosed green place was pleasant.
Our hostess said, “Indians might have lived here.”
With that idea of being in the American wilderness, I felt a chill, thinking of them in this green land with its protective slopes, its shade, and rivers. Later I learned the ground was full of flint arrowheads.
It was in this setting, with the bluegrass music coming from the wooden hut, that I heard about the religious faith and identity of the people who had come after the Indians. And I had a sense of the history here resting layer upon layer. The Indians, disappearing after centuries; the poor whites; the blacks; the war and all that had come after; and now the need everyone felt, black and white, poor and not so poor, everyone in his own way, to save his soul.
The musicians were young and friendly; there was a girl among them. When they finished they put their big instruments in their pickup truck and went away. When the sun went down there was no wind; the flag drooped. It became cold very quickly; it was still only spring.
T HE Atlanta
Constitution
’s file on the affairs of Forsyth County didn’t come as a set of date-stamped newspaper clippings, but as computer printouts. The story of the events of 1912, as researched by one of the newspaper’s writers, was terrible in every way.
The white woman who had been dragged into woods, raped, and beaten—and died two to three days later—was the nineteen-year-old daughter of a well-known farmer. A hand mirror near the scene led police to a deformed eighteen-year-old black man. He confessed, and said that other blacks were also involved. Altogether, eleven blacks were arrested as suspects. Two days after the woman’s death a crowd broke into the Forsyth County jail, shot and killed one of the suspects, beat the body with crowbars, and hung it on a telegraph pole. Three weeks later the deformed man and another black man were tried for the rape and murder and found guilty. The sister of the second man testified against him. Both men were publicly hanged a month after the trial, before a crowd of ten thousand. The few hundred blacks who lived in Forsyth were chased away.
The destroyed young woman, the deformed black, the lynching at the jail and the hanging of the mangled body, the black woman giving evidence against her brother, the public hangings (ten thousand people turning up for that, in a county that fifty years later, before the Atlanta boom, had a population of under twenty thousand)—the story is unbearable in every detail. Yet what seemed to have survived in Forsyth above everything else was the knowledge, a cause for pride to some, that no black lived there.
The man who had sought to challenge this pride was a white Californian, a karate teacher who had been living in Forsyth for five years. He called for a March of Brotherhood to mark the anniversaries of the death of Gandhi and the birth of Martin Luther King. He changed his mind after getting abusive telephone calls and threats. But the idea of the march had been taken up by another karate teacher, also white, from the next county. This was the march—about fifty people were expected to take part—that Hosea Williams had intervened in. This was the march that had been attacked by Klan groups and others, and had seeded, a week later, the big march of the twenty thousand, with the protection of three thousand National Guardsmen and state and local police officers. So that within a week what had been a brave and lonely cause had been turned by Hosea and a few others into a safe cause; and it had become safer and safer.
A radio show had
Our hostess said, “Indians might have lived here.”
With that idea of being in the American wilderness, I felt a chill, thinking of them in this green land with its protective slopes, its shade, and rivers. Later I learned the ground was full of flint arrowheads.
It was in this setting, with the bluegrass music coming from the wooden hut, that I heard about the religious faith and identity of the people who had come after the Indians. And I had a sense of the history here resting layer upon layer. The Indians, disappearing after centuries; the poor whites; the blacks; the war and all that had come after; and now the need everyone felt, black and white, poor and not so poor, everyone in his own way, to save his soul.
The musicians were young and friendly; there was a girl among them. When they finished they put their big instruments in their pickup truck and went away. When the sun went down there was no wind; the flag drooped. It became cold very quickly; it was still only spring.
T HE Atlanta
Constitution
’s file on the affairs of Forsyth County didn’t come as a set of date-stamped newspaper clippings, but as computer printouts. The story of the events of 1912, as researched by one of the newspaper’s writers, was terrible in every way.
The white woman who had been dragged into woods, raped, and beaten—and died two to three days later—was the nineteen-year-old daughter of a well-known farmer. A hand mirror near the scene led police to a deformed eighteen-year-old black man. He confessed, and said that other blacks were also involved. Altogether, eleven blacks were arrested as suspects. Two days after the woman’s death a crowd broke into the Forsyth County jail, shot and killed one of the suspects, beat the body with crowbars, and hung it on a telegraph pole. Three weeks later the deformed man and another black man were tried for the rape and murder and found guilty. The sister of the second man testified against him. Both men were publicly hanged a month after the trial, before a crowd of ten thousand. The few hundred blacks who lived in Forsyth were chased away.
The destroyed young woman, the deformed black, the lynching at the jail and the hanging of the mangled body, the black woman giving evidence against her brother, the public hangings (ten thousand people turning up for that, in a county that fifty years later, before the Atlanta boom, had a population of under twenty thousand)—the story is unbearable in every detail. Yet what seemed to have survived in Forsyth above everything else was the knowledge, a cause for pride to some, that no black lived there.
The man who had sought to challenge this pride was a white Californian, a karate teacher who had been living in Forsyth for five years. He called for a March of Brotherhood to mark the anniversaries of the death of Gandhi and the birth of Martin Luther King. He changed his mind after getting abusive telephone calls and threats. But the idea of the march had been taken up by another karate teacher, also white, from the next county. This was the march—about fifty people were expected to take part—that Hosea Williams had intervened in. This was the march that had been attacked by Klan groups and others, and had seeded, a week later, the big march of the twenty thousand, with the protection of three thousand National Guardsmen and state and local police officers. So that within a week what had been a brave and lonely cause had been turned by Hosea and a few others into a safe cause; and it had become safer and safer.
A radio show had
Similar Books
