The Best American Essays 2015 (29 page)

That luxury of honest expression, however, is not generally permitted the modern historian. And so one labors under a more painful self-control. It is taxing work to be fair to people one does not believe to be fair themselves. In indexing, though, you do not have to repress your honest reactions as you do in writing.

Here is the process by which I compiled the index. I read through each chapter, highlighting key words and concepts and names of people. After I finish the chapter, I then type in those words and names and the pages where they occur. I then read the next chapter, rinse and repeat. That means that I am constantly inserting new words and concepts into an expanding list, organized alphabetically.

So I found myself proudly writing down the name of someone I admire deeply, someone who stood up for justice and righteousness, someone who performed a daring intellectual or heroic deed. Here in a history of depravity was someone who stood for decency. Here were such august names in the history of antilynching as Jessie Daniel Ames, who as a white southern woman courageously exposed the lie that lynching was an act of chivalry, or John Jay Chapman, who in 1912 revealed the undeniable responsibility borne by all Americans in the lynching of any American, and, finally, the greatest of them all, Ida B. Wells, who incisively diagnosed and tirelessly fought lynching from the time she recognized it for the racial crime it was in 1892 until her death in 1930.

Here I also recorded the names and acronyms of important groups that demanded justice and antilynching legislation, groups famous like the NAACP and not sufficiently appreciated like the Anti-Lynching Crusaders. Here, too, were heroic individuals who were not well known. In one case there was a man whom I know only as “Reverend King,” who risked his life in facing down a mob of fifteen thousand in 1893 to try and prevent the immolation of Henry Smith. He was unsuccessful, but his courage strikes me as exemplary. I felt it an honor to record his name in the only way I knew it in my index. I do not think of this index as some kind of roll of honor, a hall of fame, or anything of the sort. But I did, for those moments when I recorded the heroes of my tale, think of it as an appropriate place for those whose names deserved recuperation, recovery, and celebration.

But because it is an index, it could not remain the place for only the heroes. A book on lynching is populated primarily with villains. I, like Macaulay, felt loathing for many a character in my studies.

The people whose presence in my book raised my ire the most, the ones who struck me as the most despicable of the lot, were those intellectuals who defended and apologized for lynching. The lynchers did what they did, and ought to be arraigned for the terrible things they did, but they enjoyed the benefit of anonymity, since they were constituted as masses and mobs, not individuals. But the apologists, those who defended past lynchings and incited future ones, were individuals, and moreover they possessed the power of press and pulpit at their disposal. When they proclaimed something, they had an audience and readership that took seriously what they wrote and said. The three for whom I had the most utter contempt, the most loathsome and detestable of a despicable lot, to employ the liberating language of Macaulay, were a newspaper editor (John Temple Graves), a novelist who was racist (Thomas Nelson Page), and a rabid racist who wrote novels (Thomas Dixon).

First, and most obviously, is the fact that they were racists—that is, they believed that someone's racial identity, bred in the blood, gave that person a particular kind of moral and intellectual grounding. It is perhaps unfair to expect them not to be racists at a time when it was intellectually acceptable to believe that race was such a determinant of ability, that the genetic properties of a person constituted his or her cultural possibilities. That position, challenged from the time it assumed a coherent form in the middle of the nineteenth century, and entirely upended by the 1920s, was called scientific racism. Of course, there were lots of people in the late nineteenth century who disputed that argument, who believed that race was no determinant of cultural, intellectual, or moral abilities. This trio, my personal axis of evil, did not.

But even more than being racists of that particular sort—scientific racists, as it were—these three were intent on promoting a harmful untruth about the specific way that race inflected morals. That argument, of course, was that men of African descent, freed from the fetters of slavery, had become insatiable rapists, and that it was this very epidemic of rape that called forth the chivalrous activity of lynchers. What is striking about this untruth is not only that it was statistically false (and they knew it to be false because they were familiar with the data published in mainstream venues). Newspapers reporting on lynchings, newspapers like the
Chicago Tribune
that began in 1882 annually tabulating lynchings by region, state, and alleged instigating crime, had shown that lynchers themselves alleged rape as the cause of lynching in a minority of cases (somewhere around 25 percent). Remember, these are allegations made by mobs intent on murder—not charges issued by legal and police forces. Yet even those frenzied mobs in their frenzied acts were more discriminating than their apologists, who argued, again and again, over and over, that lynchings were performed to punish rapes and prevent future rapes of white women. Rebecca Latimer Felton, for instance, who was a populist racist in 1899, and who became the first woman to serve in the United States Senate in 1922, had issued a proclamation claiming that if it took lynching to protect white women from rape, then let them lynch a thousand a week if necessary. Graves, Page, and Dixon never reached that apogee of rhetoric, but they shared Felton's belief and always implicitly, sometimes explicitly, urged their readers to follow Felton's exhortation.

Rather, what struck me was how convoluted their arguments had to become in order to stretch the facts to fit into their preconceived beliefs. After all, interracial rape as a crime on American soil had been pretty one-sided. Anyone even superficially familiar with the history of slavery in the Americas knows the extent to which masters consistently and with impunity raped the enslaved women on their plantations and on the plantations of their neighbors. Here, then, was a truth that these writers wanted to invert, just as the masters and their wives had inverted the truth of white masters' raping slave women to blame slave women for inciting them to it. In both cases—proslavery ideologues who constructed the model of the black slave seductresses and the prolynching apologists who created the type of the black beast rapist—these writers simply projected what whites had done onto the blacks to whom they had done it. It was not even imaginative racism. One might respect a racist diatribe that had the virtue of novelty, but this was as tawdry in its morality as it was in its unoriginality.

Here, then, was the dilemma of the indexer. It pained and angered me to record the names of white supremacists and apologists for lynching, people who justified criminal and genocidal behavior, and have them live forever next to the names of people who deserve better, people who fought against their evil or died because of it. So, while I tried to be fair and temperate in the text of the book in my assessment of people who justified lynching, people I thought deceitful and inhumane, people I frankly despised with a bottomless hatred, I found myself feeling a resurgent anger as I dutifully placed their names next to those who represented heroic resistance or inhumane suffering. I fought the temptation to make up a faux concept, a word starting with the appropriate letter, just so that I could separate the names of the admired from the loathed. Every now and then, a legitimate way of separating them came my way, and I cheered whenever an opportune concept or name in a later chapter allowed me in good faith to keep the names of the doers of good separate from and uninfected by the purveyors of evil. These were small victories, the only kind of victories there are in the life of an indexer. In the end, indexing teaches you that the alphabet is unforgiving.

3.

The other and possibly most powerful feeling that I have had throughout the indexing is profound sadness. I should mention that it was by no means only during the process of indexing this book that I have felt sad. More than a decade of reading about the cruelty, the savagery, the inhumanity of lynching had its toll, leaving me fatigued with something akin to melancholy. The research for this study frequently left me in bad humor, and even more frequently left me dejected and despondent. For reasons I will explain below, I felt this sadness most poignantly while I was compiling a list of names of places and names of people.

As I proceeded in the relatively routine task of indexing, I began at first to highlight all the names of places where the lynchings I mention in my book occurred. In the historiography of lynching, the facts that are most important, or at least the ones that get mentioned most frequently, are the names of the victims, and the site and the date of the lynching. In this sense, lynchings, like any historical event, are identified by where and when they happened. The “when” requires little commentary; it is a date, and acts like any historical date—to identify the exact moment when the event took place. The name of the place where the event took place is also pretty clear. Traditionally, those who have worked to identify lynchings have used either the names of cities, when lynchings took place in or on the outlying borders of cities, or the names of counties, when the lynchings were more rural and not in the vicinity of an identifiable urban space.

At some point in the indexing, I began to reconsider whether it made sense to index all the place-names in my book. I did not want an index that was unwieldy or disproportionate to the book. As I was deciding whether to continue highlighting and indexing city and county names, I began to think about what these place-names mean for the event with which they are associated. For the victim, it is not the place of birth or home, the usual markers for a historical personage, but only the place where his or her life ended. For those who ended that life, the place-name is home or close enough to home, and the place where they performed a murder. There is a difference, though. Unlike places where a simple murder happened, these are sites of a collective act, the action of a mob that, according to some of the most influential historians of lynching, necessarily has the support of the community behind it. These are cities or counties that countenanced what was performed on their land and what was done in their name. We don't generally think of indicting a place where a murder occurs, since a murder can occur anywhere and it is not representative of the place it happens. That is frequently a matter of accident. A lynching, though, has usually brought opprobrium on the town or county where it happened, because people believe, with some reason, that the lynching had the sanction of the mob gathered from that community to perform it.

So the name of a lynching site—Paris, Texas, in 1893, Newnan, Georgia, in 1899, Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in 1911, Marietta, Georgia, in 1915, Waco, Texas, in 1916—for some of us has come to represent something more sinister. Those are places that now become associated with what happened on that land. It would be odd to find someone of my generation who was not moved by the mention of particular places—Dachau, Hiroshima, My Lai, for example—to think of the horrors that occurred there. Those are now names that do not just connote the terrible things humans can do to each other; they are names that are now primarily indicators of horrors, and only secondarily actual places, for most of us with any kind of historical memory.

These are names that have become tainted by historical associations. In these cases, it is not just that many died at that place, but rather that there was something startling, revealing, in the ways they died. In the first case, they died in a drawn-out, extended, and systematic fashion that demonstrated what genocide was and how the whole world was implicated in it. In the second, they died in a single moment that showed what horrible technology humans could create and use against other humans. Here we saw a mass of people die in a single moment in a way that was, and should remain, inconceivable. In the last, we learned about how innocent villagers died in what we comforted ourselves by calling a “war crime” in order to avoid confronting what brutality in any war exacts on the victims and the people whom war and training and opportunity have made inhumane purveyors of violence.

I brought that sensitivity to place-names—that reflex action of investing meaning into what happened in a particular site—to my research, and researching the history of lynching has tried that sensitivity. Let me offer two personal anecdotes as examples.

One beautiful spring day, I took a break from writing the book and went for a long walk with my almost two-year-old son from our neighborhood to downtown New Haven, about a thirty-minute walk pushing the stroller. As I was waiting at an intersection, a large truck-trailer pulled up at the lights. For no reason at all, other than a compulsion I cannot easily control, I tend to read the information written on the side of truck-trailer cabs, information concerning the gross vehicle weight (GVW) or combined gross vehicle weight (CGW) of the truck and the place the truck is licensed—its home, as it were. This particular truck's home happened to be Marion, Indiana. Had it been another Indiana city, I might have mused on what kinds of commodities were traveling to or from Connecticut and Indiana. But this particular name happened to be the name of the city where a notorious 1931 lynching took place, and the subject of that very morning's writing session (index: 17, 60–94, 160). The beauty of the day, the pleasure of the walk, everything but the continued delight in being with my son, was in a moment lost and became as colorless as the black-and-white photograph of that lynching.

The second anecdote is similar. I compiled the index to my lynching book while I was on a sabbatical in the South of France (a fact that may temper a lot of what I have written). About halfway through the year, I began to make the preliminary arrangements for our return. That subject of ending a sabbatical and leaving France, with its quite different nostalgia, anger, and sadness (or should I say
nostalgie, colère, et tristesse
), belongs to a different essay. As I was exploring how to travel with the least amount of luggage, including bags freighted with heavy books, I consulted a website for a British company that specialized in transporting luggage internationally. As I was entering the information on the website to get a quote, I encountered a scrolling window with a list of American city names for me to identify the one to which I wanted my luggage shipped. The first name on that list was Abbeville, South Carolina. This city's preeminence on the scrolling list, like my index, is an accident of the alphabet. But this city, to me, represents a particular lynching, which I briefly discuss in my book (index: 47, 48–49, 55).