Brambleman (14 page)
The case against Harris was eventually
dropped due to lack of evidence—a good thing for him, since his
witnesses had left town. Local legend held that he stayed on in
Forsyth for another thirty years until he died of natural causes,
but Talton found no record of him in the 1920 census and no further
mention of him beyond a notation beside his name in a 1913 docket
book:
Nol prossed
.
Late Friday morning, the troops decamped and
marched all six prisoners back to the rail station in Buford. An
eerily quiet crowd watched them pass, content to let the law take
its fatal course; the condemned men’s lawyers had announced there
would be no appeal. It was a strange procession, a four-hour slog
through the mud by a ring of soldiers a hundred yards wide at
times. They reached the depot in Buford by mid-afternoon Friday and
boarded the waiting train.
Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing continued. A
week after Dent and Oscar were convicted, an Atlanta newspaper took
note of anti-black outrages in Forsyth, reporting that “a state of
terror grips the black community.” Signs on every road leading into
Forsyth carried the community’s new motto:
Nigger, Don’t Let the
Sun Set on You in Forsyth County
. By then, five black churches
and two schools had been burned to the ground. Shots were fired
into the houses of blacks who refused to leave, as well as those of
their white allies, whose tiny numbers diminished as the horror
increased. As an unwelcome consequence, a tremendous labor shortage
developed during the crucial harvest time.
Media attention forced local whites to act
like they cared about Negroes. Resolutions passed at mass meetings
in Cumming calling for federal and state aid to suppress the
growing campaign of intimidation, arson, beatings, and nightriding.
By then, violence had spread to nearby Cherokee, Dawson, and Hall
counties. Black carpenters building a barn were forced off the job
at gunpoint in Gainesville, where warrants against their white
assailants were issued. However, in Forsyth, no whites were ever
arrested for crimes against blacks despite the massive campaign of
violence.
After the meetings, Governor Brown again
declared Forsyth County in a state of insurrection. This was
required so he could mobilize troops to escort Dent and Oscar to
the gallows. The governor did nothing to stop the whitecapping,
which by then had almost completely accomplished its purpose. Brown
advised moderate Forsyth whites who wanted to stop the lawlessness
that they were on their own and should employ private detectives if
they wanted security. None were hired.
Two companies of National Guard troops were
detailed to the death march. They quick-stepped the two prisoners
from the Tower in Atlanta to Terminal Station, leaving on Southern
Train No. 18 at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 24. After a night
march from the Buford depot, they arrived at the Cumming courthouse
at 1:30 a.m. on the day of the hangings. The press mocked Dent and
Oscar, reporting, “They marched along as gaily as if they were in a
circus parade.”
The gallows were constructed near the
courthouse in a pasture belonging to Randolph Carswell, a wealthy
doctor and son of Forsyth County’s largest antebellum slave owner.
A high wooden fence had been constructed around the scaffold to
prevent curious onlookers from witnessing the execution, in line
with the judge’s order that the hangings “shall be in private,
witnessed only by the executioner, guards, clergy, family members
of the defendants, and two physicians to certify the deaths.”
The local citizenry would have none of that,
however. As soldiers marched into town late at night, the fence was
doused with kerosene and set ablaze. By dawn, the view of the
gallows was unobstructed. At daybreak, soldiers cordoned off the
area and stood around the scaffold in a circle 200 yards across as
the crowd poured in—on foot and by automobile, horseback and
carriage. Families came with picnic lunches. According to one
report, a boy sitting on his father’s shoulders pointed at the
gallows with its twin hangman’s nooses and said, “That’s where bad
niggers go to die.”
The hills that ringed the gallows formed a
natural amphitheater, and by mid-morning, 8,000 people had
gathered. They waited eagerly and burst into loud cheers and Rebel
yells when Dent and Oscar were marched from the courthouse and led
up the steps. Sheriff Wright tied blindfolds on both of them, then
asked if they had any last words. Rankin family members were
present to hear Dent confess his crime and Oscar protest his
innocence. The nooses were slipped around their necks and
tightened. Wright stepped back. Two deputies pulled levers
simultaneously and the condemned men’s necks snapped as they
plummeted through the traps at 11:05 a.m. It was the county’s first
legal execution in fifty years. Forsyth residents went home happy,
since a public hanging was the next best thing to a lynching. The
cadavers of Dent and Oscar were sold to a medical school.
Many people thought the hangings brought this
sordid chapter of local history to a close. But it wasn’t over yet.
The day after the execution, prosecution witness Jane Oscar was
shot in the head in Atlanta’s West End, reportedly by a white man.
A few days later, a white Forsyth landowner who had spoken out
against the anti-black violence was ambushed while driving a wagon
back from Gainesville and beaten to death. Neither killing was
solved. By the time the 1912 harvest was over, virtually all blacks
had fled Forsyth County. Media coverage devolved into a spitting
contest between Atlanta and Forsyth County; each community accused
the other of being a pack of lawless racists. Carswell pointed out
that “no innocent Negro was killed in Forsyth County,” whereas in
Atlanta’s riots of 1906, white mobs had murdered scores of blacks
who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
By 1913, the true nature and scope of
Forsyth’s tragedy had become brutally clear. White women, some of
them from the finest families, were forced to do their own cooking
and cleaning.
What happened did not go completely unnoticed
at the state Capitol. Brown’s successor, John Slaton, specifically
addressed the horrors of Forsyth and other counties in his 1913
address to the General Assembly. However, there would be no legal
recourse for those who fled the violence and intimidation.
Talton argued that what happened in Forsyth
County was a microcosm of and precursor to the Great Migration.
Many Southern blacks first moved from the country to towns, then
later to the North. They were pulled toward cities like New York
and Chicago by the lure of better jobs and a better life and pushed
away from the South by enforced poverty and rampant persecution.
Eventually, Northern blacks would become an important constituency
of the urban politicians who voted to pass civil rights
legislation. Talton called this “poetic justice, though
insufficient.”
A handful of blacks stayed on in Forsyth, but
their numbers eventually dwindled to zero. By 1920, only thirty
African-Americans lived there; by 1940, only two—although Talton
had marked through this number with a pen in the manuscript. By
1980, they had officially disappeared from the county.
Meanwhile, Atlanta grew, and 38,000-acre Lake
Lanier was impounded on the Chattahoochee River in the 1950s,
submerging much of Forsyth County. Over the succeeding decades,
local land prices rose as more and more people bought homes along
its shores. Civilization’s encroachment brought sporadic acts of
violence, since succeeding generations of Forsyth County whites
remained vigilant. Black truck drivers returned to Atlanta depots
reporting they’d been fired upon while trying to make deliveries in
Cumming. Unsuspecting black families were chased away from Forsyth
County’s beaches on Lake Lanier when they came to picnic or swim.
In 1980, an urban Boy Scout troop packed up its pup tents and
rushed back to Atlanta at midnight after the young campers at Lake
Lanier were threatened by men wearing white hoods.
At the time, the brother of one of these
scouts was a student of Dr. Talton’s at Georgia State. His
unsettling tale about that nightmarish camping trip piqued the
professor’s interest. Having researched the case of Leo Frank,
Talton recalled Governor Slaton’s remarks and started working on an
article about Forsyth County’s violent past.
It turned into something more. Talton tracked
down children of black victims and interviewed them. Unfortunately,
no transcripts of the 1912 trial existed, only the damnably
inaccurate and incendiary newspaper coverage. While only one county
history had been published, Talton found a few unpublished memoirs
and letters written by black farmers who had fled. Most old-time
locals were tight-lipped, but Talton located two unapologetic white
octogenarians willing to talk.
Talton found something especially intriguing.
County records of black land holdings had been destroyed in Forsyth
County’s 1973 courthouse fire, which had been set by arsonists.
However, a radical attorney hoping to file a lawsuit on behalf of a
black landowner’s daughter had made photostats of these records in
1972. Talton tracked down the man, whose client had died. The
lawyer gave Talton the papers in hopes that the good professor
could use them to open the issue of reparations for all those who
had been dispossessed.
Talton took six years to cobble together his
account—along with the many other things he knew—and write a huge,
unwieldy manuscript. In June 1986, he finished it and sent copies
to academic publishers, then sat back and collected rejection
letters. His manuscript was, according to one editor,
“comprehensive to the point of being burdensome.” To another, it
was “incomprehensible.”
Then the tide of history seemed to shift
Talton’s way. (And this part Charlie was already familiar with,
having lived through it.) In December 1986, Dan Greene, a martial
arts instructor in Gainesville, learned of Forsyth County’s sordid
past. He contacted civil rights firebrand Redeemer Wilson, who
never backed down from a fight. “Redeemer could scare the sheet off
a Klansman,” a colleague once boasted. Greene met with Wilson to
plan a “Brotherhood Anti-Intimidation March” in honor of Georgia’s
newly enacted Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday. Soon after that,
Talton got a call. “Get you some walking shoes and march up to
Forsyth with me,” Redeemer told his old colleague from the civil
rights movement. Talton went.
And after he suffered that fatal conk on the
head, his work became an orphan, only to be adopted nearly two
decades later by a man who thought Talton’s baby was, well,
ugly.
Charlie knew it was necessary to chronicle
America’s racism at its ugliest and most absolute. And it was
impossible to ignore the grim, supernatural force shoving him
forward. After all, this was Old Testament stuff, to ignore at his
peril. People had died, boils had festered, a building had burned,
an innocent television had fried, and a tattooed girlfriend had
fled into the night. Even the old lady had been smoked, and this
was her idea. Ink had turned to blood on his contract and Charlie’s
life was forfeit upon failure. At this point, it was impossible not
to take it seriously.
Still, he didn’t know how to turn Talton’s
doorstop into a real live book. He felt overwhelmed by the
monumental …
shittiness
of the writing. Editors who rejected
Flight from Forsyth
had been too kind. Charlie lost track of
the times he’d fallen asleep reading the damned thing. There was no
coffee strong enough to keep him awake through Chapter Eight, “The
Agrarian Movement in Forsyth County and Environs.” Talton’s
environs included the England of seventeenth-century
agriculturalist Jethro Tull—with a footnote discussing the rock
band of the same name.
The book began with the Blue Ridge Mountains
breaking away from Georgia’s Piedmont, and this geologic pace
continued throughout. Chapter Forty-Eight was titled “Aftermath”;
Chapter Forty-Nine, “After the Aftermath”; then came the Epilogue
and Afterword. Charlie suspected Talton had been one of those
professors who kept right on lecturing past the bell, not caring
whether his students missed their next class.
How bad was it? Twenty chapters passed before
Martha Jean was assaulted. And there was a chapter on Leo Frank,
who, while noteworthy, didn’t belong in the book, since he never
set foot in Forsyth County and died in 1915. Furthermore, Talton’s
journal entries indicated he didn’t trust his sources. He wrote
about “a plethora of inaccuracies and contradictions” in
contemporary newspaper accounts and the many lies people swore to
be the truth. Talton’s narrative had several loose ends, along with
stuff that just didn’t make sense.
Flight from Forsyth
was
overlong, incomplete, boring, sometimes nonsensical, and perhaps
wildly inaccurate. In technical terms, a megaturd. No wonder God
had threatened to kill Charlie if he gave up, since the unlucky
editor would have seriously considered fleeing the project if he
only had to give up an eye or an ear.
But there was a good story buried in that
manuscript, running like a vein of gold through solid rock, and he
had to figure out a way to mine it.
Charlie rummaged through Talton’s file
cabinets, hoping to find a grand and unifying piece to the puzzle,
something that would help him assign a meaning to the
madness—historical and supernatural—he was now mixed up in. Besides
notes, drafts, and articles, he found a nasty letter from a Forsyth
County man, more rejection slips, Talton’s dissertation, several
audio cassettes, and a large manila envelope labeled “John Riggins,
Forsyth County 1930s” dated January 23, 1987—the day before Talton
died. Charlie had noticed Riggins’s name handwritten in red on the
manuscript’s last page. The 1930s? Charlie wasn’t going
there
, not when he already had to cut the manuscript by more
than half. He set the sealed envelope atop the file cabinet and
promptly forgot about it.
