The Tree of Forgetfulness (22 page)

She is trying her best to make this blighted story come out right, even as she asks herself what that could possibly mean. Justice for the dead? Guilt established and exposed? Maybe she wants to piece this story back together, to make it as whole and true as it can be, because she believes that stories can act as antidotes to amnesia and complacency; that telling stories is one way to remember what we're capable of doing to one another. Maybe she wants to fit the pieces together until the look and sound and smell of this story, the shadow it throws, will be so familiar she will know it when it happens again.

And what about her place in all this? After all, she's not telling a story that happened to someone else; it's a part of her own history that she's trying to reconstruct. She doesn't want to leave herself out, or her grandfather either. She doesn't want to ignore any piece that might make the design more apparent. She never knew her grandfather; he died while her father was overseas during World War II, years before she was born. He exists for her in photographs and stories told about him by others, and the man who emerges from those pictures and stories was no bigger or more noble than any other man of his time, a time in which the freest thinkers in the state—and they were few—could
not imagine a world where white supremacy was not the letter, the spirit, and the foundation of law and custom.

She wants to say how tightly he was woven into a web of family and community loyalties. His wife's father was the coroner's physician who counted Sheriff Earl Glover's wounds and wrote Bessie Long's confession on his prescription pad and saved her life. He examined the Longs' bodies and testified before two inquests. One of the men on Leland Dawson's list of perpetrators—the Famous Seventeen—sponsored her father at his Confirmation. She wants to say that the binding energies of his time and place, the physics of family and civic and racial loyalty, would not have allowed her grandfather to stay clear of a crime in which his wife's family was so deeply immersed, so personally involved. She wants to say that he was there that night, a
prominent local businessman
who witnessed the murders, or a member of the mob that dragged the Longs from the jail and drove them to the killing field, that he added his cowardly silence to the silence that came after.

She wants to say that she has been a coward too, a lesser coward but still a coward, bound by the same loyalties. There is a family photograph of a Christmas in the 1960s: aunts, uncles, cousins, in front of the festive tree at Libba's house, and in this picture the curious grandchild stands apart from her relatives with her arms folded, looking smug and pleased with herself because she's just gotten scolded for saying “Yes, ma'am” to the maid in front of her grandmother. Because she's proud that she had recently joined the Human Relations Commission, an interracial group that meets to talk justice and equality, and has conveniently forgotten or ignored or deleted the fact that she has even more recently
resigned
from the group after her father said it would hurt his business if people found out that she belonged. If that picture were taken today, maybe she would step in closer, join her kin, all of them bound to one another by their evasions and the stories they tell in their own defense as surely as they are joined by blood and shared history.

Eighty years on, and she wants to take a last look at the design.

A glimpse: As tenants farming cotton on Harley Johnson's land, the
Longs lived one rung up the shaky ladder from sharecropper. Cotton was a brutal crop. Its roots broke down humus and stripped nutrients from the topsoil so quickly and efficiently that after only a few years, a cotton field turned into a wasteland of hard clay gullies. It was also a sickly crop, constantly threatened by the boll weevil and the firebug, by spider mites and thrips, blight and gall and powdery mildew, by stem and root rot and all sorts of leaf collapse. To farm this crop they would have furnished the labor, the work animals and their feed, the tools, seed, and a portion of the fertilizer used to make the crop, and in return they were paid for the crop, minus the house rent, minus the debts at local stores and gins and mills for supplies and services. Minus, minus, minus. Tenant farmers, black and white, often got cheated outright or so tangled in webs of credit and merchant's liens that they ended the year broke or in debt to the landlord for the next year's crop before the seed was planted.

By the standards of the time Herbert Long was a successful tenant farmer. He owned mules and plows, and he had a large family to work the crop. But people make enemies. They are careless and highhanded; they take advantage of people, or they are disliked for being meek when they should be strong or strong when they should be meek, or for no good reason. And in 1925 it could be fatal for a black man in South Carolina to better himself by climbing over a white man. To better himself at all. Just before that Saturday morning in April 1925, their landlord had taken away a mule from a white tenant and given it to the Longs; he'd rented them a few more acres of land as well. One rumor going around after the sheriff was killed was that the white tenant who'd lost his mule to the Longs had told the sheriff they were selling whiskey. Or the preacher from the church closest to their house might have informed on them, for selling to his congregation, though he denied it in a letter to the
Palmetto Leader
.

And maybe the Longs did sell whiskey as a side business. Many people did. Maybe the sheriff had been watching them. A few weeks before the fatal raid, Dempsey had been dragged out of the house and whipped by a group of unknown men for unknown reasons.

“My name is Marie Long,” Dempsey's sister testified at the coroner's inquest into Sheriff Earl Glover's murder.

I am the daughter of Herbert Long.
I am eighteen years old.
I was there last Saturday morning.
I was nursing the baby.
I did not know who was the sheriff.
I don't know how many guns were in the room.
I don't know where Bessie, Albert, or Dempsey were.
I don't know whether they came back to the house.
I don't know who shot the sheriff.
I don't know who got the gun.
I don't know where they kept the pistol.
I have seen a shotgun in the house.
I haven't ever seen that knife.
I didn't know the sheriff was dead.
No one hadn't told me anything.
I saw the pistols in their pockets, and that's the reason I ran.

“My name is Clara Long,” reads her testimony at the inquest into the sheriff's death. “I am the wife of Son. His real name is Dempsey. Son and I live with Sam. I was at home Saturday morning when the sheriff and officers came over. When they came, I was in the kitchen. I saw the car come up. I did not know who they were. I had started to cook dinner. After while I heard a noise like somebody fussing. I heard someone shoot, and I looked around, and I said death is nothing but death, then I got my baby and jumped over the wire fence. I did not know who the sheriff was. I do not know who shot first or shot last.”

It wasn't clear then; it isn't clear now; it will never be clear what happened on the day the sheriff was shot or on the night the Longs were taken from the county jail and killed. The names of the dead are the only certainties: Sheriff Earl Glover. Dempsey and Bessie and Albert Long. Mamie Long, mother to Dempsey and Bessie, aunt to Albert.
The rest is all darkness and mayhem, rancor, mystery and silence. Albert testified that when the two cars of white men pulled up in front, he and Dempsey were walking back toward the house from the field across the road. He said that Mamie Long killed the sheriff. At first Dempsey agreed, but at the trial he testified that Albert had fired the shotgun. There were rumors that Aubrey Timmerman had shot his boss because he was about to be fired, but they were squelched when Libba's father, Dr. Henderson Hastings, examined the sheriff's body and testified that the ninety-three wounds in the man's back and side had been made by a shotgun blast, and the deputies all carried pistols.

An imagined fragment: Curtis N. R. Barrett might have written down the words he'd heard the white people use to sort and rank the black people they lived among and around and, to their way of thinking, above. That sort of thing would have been interesting to him.
Negro, colored, nigra, coon, nigger
, it went, in descending order of dignity. Dr. M. M. Hampton, who ran his own private hospital, was a Negro, as were the building contractors William and Wesley Ford. The meat market proprietor John Bush was a Negro, and so was Ezra Jones, the tailor who specialized in making riding habits for the rich. There were other Negroes too: shoe repairmen and barbers, blacksmiths and wheelwrights and real estate agents.

Colored
was practically synonymous with
Negro
, but
nigra
was a tricky word, balanced between the respectability of
Negro
and
nigger
, the lowest of the low. Ladies usually said
Negro
or
colored
or
nigra. Nigger
was the word that the hard little men in overalls spat onto the street, and so did the doffers and spinners and the foremen in the mills down in Horse Creek Valley, which did not hire blacks. Lawmen used it regularly, though Barrett had heard it slip out of many a white man's mouth when he was provoked or affronted. Howard Aimar and the governor had both used the word with him, one white man to another.

Within each category there was room for further nuance.
Niggers
could be good or bad, depending on the trouble they caused. On Saturday nights
bad niggers
got drunk and cut one another with knives and broken bottles in the juke joints that lined the alley behind Laurens
Street. They carried themselves with belligerent dignity and wouldn't doff their hats. And once you were a
nigger
, Barrett would surely have noted, you'd best beware. But what he never got used to was how easy it was to be consigned to that category, even if you'd been
colored
or
nigra
or
Negro
before. Albert, Dempsey, and Bessie Long had each fallen from
Negro
to
bad nigger
to the clearing in the pines where they died.

More fragments: Soon after the Long murders, a photograph of a woman appeared in the
New York News
under the caption “Bessie Long, Martyr of Aiken Mob.” It shows a matronly woman with a broad mild face. A schoolteacher, you might guess. It's hard to imagine that the woman in the photograph could have wrenched a deputy's gun from his hand or torn a chunk of flesh out of Aubrey Timmerman's arm with her teeth.

In November 1926 Clara Long wrote a letter to Leland Dawson from 1537 Park Ave., in Philadelphia. “Lawyer N. R. Latham asked me to send you my peoples picture who were murdered at Aiken on the 8th of October, but I am sorry to say that I am unable to find any. My husband Dempsey Long, his sister Bessie Long and his first cousin Albert Long, all three were murdered and I would like to hear from you please.”

The 1930 census lists no Longs in Aiken County, but eighty years on, the house is still there, a small, dark-red, wooden house near the Coleman Thankful Baptist Church on the east side of SC Highway 39 outside Monetta. The unmarked common grave where Bessie, Albert, and Dempsey Long are buried is somewhere nearby. The memory is still there in the mind of a distant relative whose grandmother told him the story of the Long killings. She talked about it all the time, he said. How they dragged them out of jail like dead mules. When he drives past the house, he remembers that story, and remembering it sometimes keeps him quiet when a man insults him.

The outrage is still there too; it smolders in the dozens of letters that Leland Dawson wrote to judges and lawyers, senators and ministers. It blazes in his letter to the editor of the DeLand, Florida
News
. “You ask, ‘Who is to blame?' for the brutal murder of a woman and two men, one of whom had been found not guilty by the presiding judge. You
further insinuate that the mob and the local sheriff were better judges of the issue of guilt or innocence than the Supreme Court of the State. You directly pose the question whether sheriffs ought to be asked to risk their lives ‘in the interest of a man they know to be a criminal,' although the State declares him innocent of any crime. Your editorial is a perfect example of the state of mind which moves us to keep up the pressure for a federal law to deal with these outrages which continue to be defended and justified by editors such as yourself who pay lip service to law enforcement.”

A silence, a gap, an imagined glimpse: Minnie Settles would have had her own opinion about what had happened at the Long place on that April morning. It wasn't right to kill the sheriff; killing was an abomination, a foul sin. But what was to be done, she asked herself, when two cars full of white men pull up in front of your house and the men jump out and come running, and you see the pistols in their pockets but not one of them is wearing a uniform?

She might have snatched up an ax like Mamie Long did and taken a swing at one of them, might then have ended up shot dead and sprawled across the woodpile like Mamie Long. She might have gone crazy like Bessie and lunged at a man, tried to knock him down, take his gun, bite a chunk out of his arm, fight for her life. Fight back, and you're already dead; you might as well go out fighting.

On the October Sunday after the Longs were killed, she fastened her large black hat in front of the mirror beside her front door, while Zeke paced the floor and told her what was happening all over town. White men were going door to door, telling the white people that the colored people had guns and knives hidden in their houses. Sheriff's deputies were stopping colored people on the street, asking where they'd been and where they were going. Zeke had been stopped himself a few times. It was best to stay inside.

“No ignorant cracker is going to keep me from going to church,” she said. “You'd do well to come with me.”