The Best American Essays 2015 (30 page)

A pleasant walk interrupted, a website visit stalled, by a place-name—because these names for me have a historical burden, a shadow, a taint. These are names that have lost whatever innocence they might have had prior to the date when that community lynched someone; these are names that are now largely symbolic and representative, rather than real and referential.

What lynching sites represent, for me anyway, is a place where the taking of life was insufficient, where the crime extended to the taking of dignity. When we think that a lynching in one of its most brutal manifestations, the spectacle lynching in which thousands watched and participated, involved not only murder but torture of the person before and abuse of the body after, we can appreciate that what a lynching involves is far more than just the awful taking of life. I think the most comparable cases for me are European concentration camps, and, in this country, those defiled burial grounds of oppressed people—of enslaved Americans and of Native Americans.

In all cases, what we are dealing with is desecration—as if the taking of life alone were insufficient to satisfy blood- or land lust. These are examples of punishment beyond the death, a failure to accept mortality itself as the boundary marking what can be punished or killed. These are cases where a mob wanted more than blood, more than flesh, where it wanted the spirit itself of what it cast as a demonic force, which in the end was a demonic force only of the mob itself.

Perhaps in the end, though, marking some places as especially tainted by acts that happened there, and trying to understand why some brutal acts can taint more than others, is simply a way to avoid making ourselves too vigilantly aware of the almost daily evidence of our inhumanity to each other—the legions of homeless men and women sleeping on our streets to whom we have become habituated, the inequality and poverty we hide from ourselves or have hidden from us by city planners, and the host of other daily injustices to which we have become inured or blind.

4.

These place-names also have an additional meaning for me in that each of them is particularly associated with the name of a person whose life was the emblem the mob required and took. In the examples I gave above—in Paris, Texas, Henry Smith; in Newnan, Georgia, Sam Hose (which turned out to be not his real name); in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Zachariah Walker; in Marietta, Georgia, Leo Frank; and in Waco, Texas, Jesse Washington. The thought of writing this essay came to me as I was highlighting and dutifully typing the names of lynch victims into my index. It is not the number of them that startles me, although there are many, always too many. It is the fact that they often get cited once, on one page. These are not household names, people who are known for their accomplishments in some field of endeavor, athletes, politicians, artists, or activists. These are people whose solitary importance is that they were tortured and killed in a particular way.

It struck me as unfair that these were individuals who had become defined as victims or as statistics simply because their life came to an end at the hands of a mob. I must confess that I could not rectify that injustice; indeed, I may have exacerbated it. In one particular instance, some of these victims were catalogued in my book not only because they were lynched but solely because they were lynched in a very specific way.

Here is the context. I had been arguing against several writers who denied that what happened to James Byrd, Jr., when he was dragged behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, in 1998 could be called a lynching. I took up each point these writers raised and attempted to reveal what was wrong with it. Because the specific mode of his lynching was relatively unknown—most people were hanged or burned—I provided a list of lynchings where the victims were dragged behind horse carriages and then automobiles from the 1890s to the 1940s. This list was meant to show that this particularly gruesome way of torturing and taking of life was not new and had in fact been frequently employed in the history of lynching. My point was to show those who denied he was lynched because of the way he was killed (by dragging) the history of that particular form of lynching.

That specific part of the argument took two paragraphs on one page (page 140) and consisted of listing the instances where people were dragged to death or dragged after they had been killed. It included Robert Lewis, Lee Walker, Rob Edwards, William Turner, John Carter, Willie Kirkland, Claude Neal, and Cleo Wright, who all suffered this brutal treatment in various parts of America. It also included Jesse Washington, George Johnson, and David Gregory, who had all been dragged behind vehicles in Texas specifically, as had Byrd. I felt that I had made my point that this was a practice that was both national and local. It was a compact part of the argument because it primarily required examples, and in this case examples that took the form of names that, for the most part, did not appear again in my book.

This moment in my indexing gave me pause. Here was a list of names of people who were connected only by virtue of the fact that they were all victims of a particular, and particularly heinous, kind of crime. Here, concentrated in two paragraphs and one page, were decades and decades of lives whose sole importance at this moment was the specific way their lives were taken from them. It was with sadness that I recorded their names in my index. I did not think I was recuperating them or celebrating them, as I had felt when I wrote down the names of the unknown antilynching heroes. It was merely to testify that they had existed, and that the most signal thing about their existence was how their fellow citizens had ended it. There is something unalterably depressing about reducing a life no doubt rich in ideas, emotions, connections, and actions to a statistical anecdote. And in a way all histories of lynching do just that, have to do it, yes, but do it in a way that perhaps should make us think about what it means to produce such catalogues, lists, tables, and, yes, paragraphs, that encapsulate and concentrate these names and crimes into a succinct form and with the intent of making a particular point in which these lives are only examples.

5.

What I have learned, then, as I completed the final part of my book, the index, the part with the least imaginative input, is that such lists contain a great deal of emotional energy that is probably not readily apparent to the reader. Indeed, it was quite late in the process of indexing my book that I came to the startling realization that the list I was making shared the form and some of the properties of precisely the kind of lists that I had been studying for over a decade—the lists of tables and charts made by antilynching activists and organizations to show how pervasive the crime of lynching was. My list was rudimentary and organized alphabetically, while theirs were more factually detailed and organized chronologically. But they were lists all the same, a cataloguing of the bare data of a lynching (names, places, allegations, mob sizes, modes of death) that attempted in the most succinct way to demonstrate just how widespread lynching as a practice was, and just how painfully intimate and personal was each lynching of an individual human being.

I have come, belatedly but profoundly, to gain an entirely new respect for those lists and an even deeper admiration for those earlier writers on lynching who produced them. During the past decade and a half of research I have read so many tables and charts and lists of lynchings without thinking in the least about how these items were composed, about what kind of emotional investment they express. Now that I have finally compiled my own such list, I know better, much better than I did during my research, how to look for what went into the composition of those tables and charts and indices.

I have come to love even more than I had the earliest antilynching advocates, who inaugurated the making of lists—especially the pioneering Ida B. Wells, on whom it must have exacted a great toll for her to write down just facts taken from mainstream newspapers and refrain from lamentation and declamation, even when one of the names she recorded was that of the father of her goddaughter. Likewise, I have come to appreciate just what courage was shown by the record-keepers of those later institutions and organizations who followed Wells's trailblazing efforts—Tuskegee, the NAACP, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, the Association for the Study of Lynching—all of whom published pamphlets and books with tables of information on lynchings, tabulated and detailed, with names of victims, places, dates, allegations, and particulars. I now find myself able to imagine what anguish must have gone into this painful task of reducing lives to a single event, of tabulating a national series of horrors in a succinct form that even the most mindless reader would have no trouble following.

I now know what pain might have attended the writing of each name, the weariness that might have moved the author listing each city and county and site of horror, the anger incited at each recording of the alleged crime, the size of the mob, and the mode of killing. These lists at the backs of lynching books are not just serial or alphabetical chronologies, not just data ready for plumbing and formulating into statistics. They are rife with all the humane emotions of those of us who could not express elsewhere in the book just how hard it was, just how much it hurt.

DAVID SEDARIS

FROM
The New Yorker

I
WAS AT
an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, listening as a woman named Lesley talked about her housekeeper, an immigrant to Australia who earlier that day had cleaned the bathroom countertops with a bottle of very expensive acne medication: “She's afraid of the vacuum cleaner and can't read or write a word of English, but other than that she's marvelous.”

Lesley works for a company that goes into developing countries and trains doctors to remove cataracts. “It's incredibly rewarding,” she said as our antipasto plate arrived. “These are people who've been blind for years, and suddenly, miraculously, they can see again.” She brought up a man who'd been operated on in a remote area of China. “They took off the bandages, and for the first time in two decades he saw his wife. Then he opened his mouth and said, ‘You're so . . . old.'”

Lesley pushed back her shirtsleeve, and as she reached for an olive I noticed a rubber bracelet on her left wrist. “Is that a watch?” I asked.

“No,” she told me. “It's a Fitbit. You synch it with your computer, and it tracks your physical activity.”

I leaned closer, and as she tapped the thickest part of it a number of glowing dots rose to the surface and danced back and forth. “It's like a pedometer,” she continued. “But updated, and better. The goal is to take ten thousand steps per day, and once you do, it vibrates.”

I forked some salami into my mouth. “Hard?”

“No,” she said. “It's just a tingle.”

A few weeks later I bought a Fitbit of my own and discovered what she was talking about. Ten thousand steps, I learned, amounts to a little more than four miles for someone my size—five feet five inches. It sounds like a lot, but you can cover that distance in the course of an average day without even trying, especially if you have stairs in your house, and a steady flow of people who regularly knock, wanting you to accept a package or give them directions or just listen patiently as they talk about birds, which happens from time to time when I'm home, in West Sussex, the area of England that Hugh and I live in. One April afternoon the person at my door hoped to sell me a wooden bench. It was bought, he said, for a client whose garden he was designing. “Last week she loved it, but now she's decided to go with something else.” In the bright sunlight, the fellow's hair was as orange as a Popsicle. “The company I ordered it from has a no-return policy, so I'm wondering if maybe
you
'
d
like to buy it.” He gestured toward an unmarked van idling in front of the house, and seemed angry when I told him that I wasn't interested. “You could at least take a look before making up your mind,” he said.

I closed the door a couple of inches. “That's O.K.” Then, because it's an excuse that works for just about everything, I added, “I'm American.”

“Meaning?” he said.

“We . . . stand up a lot,” I told him.

“Oldest trick in the book,” my neighbor Thelma said when I told her what had happened. “That bench was stolen from someone's garden, I guarantee it.”

This was seconded by the fellow who came to empty our septic tank. “Pikeys,” he said.

“Come again?”

“Tinkers,” he said. “Pikeys.”

“That means Gypsies,” Thelma explained, adding that the politically correct word is
travelers.

I was traveling myself when I got my Fitbit, and because the tingle feels so good, not just as a sensation but also as a mark of accomplishment, I began pacing the airport rather than doing what I normally do, which is sit in the waiting area wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what. I also started taking the stairs instead of the escalator, and avoiding the moving sidewalk.

“Every little bit helps,” my old friend Dawn, who frequently eats lunch while hula-hooping and has been known to visit her local Y three times a day, said. She had a Fitbit as well, and swore by it. Others I met weren't quite so taken. These were people who had worn one until the battery died. Then, rather than recharging it, which couldn't be simpler, they'd stuck it in a drawer, most likely with all the other devices they'd lost interest in over the years. To people like Dawn and me, people who are obsessive to begin with, the Fitbit is a digital trainer, perpetually egging us on. During the first few weeks that I had it, I'd return to my hotel at the end of the day, and when I discovered that I'd taken a total of, say, twelve thousand steps, I'd go out for another three thousand.