Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (33 page)

WALK FROM BELL’S
statue to the corner of Main Street and Tribble Gap Road, and you will find signs of the county’s newfound wealth everywhere: a towering new courthouse, the glass facade of a new county jail, and gleaming branches of major banks. But nothing will point you to the spot where the corpse of Rob Edwards hung from a telephone pole all through the afternoon of September 10th, 1912. Nowhere is there a photograph of those same streets filled with government troops, sent to stop the mobs of Forsyth and to quell its recurring “state of insurrection.”

Turn west and head out Kelly Mill Road, and you’ll come to the beautifully restored home of Dr. Ansel Strickland, which now houses the offices of the Cumming–Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce. Walk inside and you will be greeted by the firm handshake and winning smile of Randall Touissant, vice president of economic development, a young African American man who spreads the gospel of Forsyth’s pro-business environment around the globe.

Walk south from Strickland’s place, past the public housing project at Social Circle and down a grassy ridge, and you will come to an undeveloped lot, its concrete sidewalks and curb cuts prepared and ready for new construction. Gaze up at the green hills rising on three sides, and you might realize where you stand: at the center of the “natural amphitheater” where carpenters once built and then burned Judge Newt Morris’s famous fence. It was to those same hillsides that five thousand people brought their blankets and children and spent the morning of October 25th, 1912, celebrating the double hanging of two black teenagers. Drive out Browns Bridge Road to Pleasant Grove Church in Oscarville, and you will find the only visible reminder of 1912 in the entire county: the headstone of Bud and Azzie Crow’s oldest daughter, Mae.

If history is written by the victors, a hundred years after the expulsions the victorious white people of Forsyth have successfully written the racial cleansing completely out of mind. And where anyone familiar with the crimes of 1912 might expect to find signs of reflection, apology, even truth and reconciliation, there is only a deafening silence. Now that they have joined the brave new world of Atlanta, and been rewarded with a level of wealth their dirt-farming, hog-killing, mule-driving ancestors could never have imagined, it’s clear that most natives of Forsyth would prefer to leave this whole tale of murder, lynching, theft, and terror scattered in the state’s dusty archives or safely hidden in plain sight—in places whose significance is known only to the dwindling handful of people who still remember the stories they once heard at some old timer’s feet.

INSTEAD, YOU MIGHT
head south to Atlanta, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthplace on Auburn Avenue, and wait for someone to buzz you into the King Center archives. Fill out a slip requesting the “Forsyth County Box,” and you’ll find inside it a stack of dusty
old cassette tapes, with names scrawled in pencil on their white labels: “Carl Dickerson,” “John Byrd Terry,” “Annie Lee Blake.”

If you ask to listen to them, a librarian will lead you to a room with a table, a chair, and an old-fashioned tape player. Lean your ear down next to its little silver speaker, and even over the hum of the air-conditioning and the distant drone of a copier, you will hear the faint, frail voices of people who were very old when they were interviewed in the spring of 1987 but only little children in the fall of 1912. Lean down closer, and through the static they will speak of mule carts loaded in the dark, and threadbare quilts thrown over their heads, and the creak of wooden wagon wheels bumping over rocks and muddy ruts, on those dark nights and purple, predawn mornings when their families left Forsyth forever.

KATHLEEN HUTCHINS ANDERSON
was eight years old the night her grandmother Catherine Black showed up in Buford, just across the Chattahoochee from Forsyth. A lifetime later, Anderson recalled the shock of seeing her father’s mother, always so stoic, suddenly burst into their house in tears.

George and Catherine Black had been born “in slavery times,” Anderson remembered, and were almost disbelieving the day in 1911 when their son Alonzo bought them a house and a plot of land out near Sawnee Mountain, not far from their friends Joseph and Eliza Kellogg. There, for the first time in their lives, the Blacks owned a modest cabin, along with thirteen acres of farmland, a horse, and a mule.

This allowed the couple to carve out of the red Georgia clay the kind of quiet, simple life that, according to their granddaughter, was a godsend to two former slaves. Having been the property of white men for much of their lives, they wanted nothing in old age but to be left in peace: to grow the food they ate, pump water from their own well, and do exactly as they pleased. “They were just so
happy to own a house—being enslaved and not having anything . . . they hadn’t even had shoes . . . and then having a home—they was just tickled to death,” Anderson said. “They had four or five rooms [and] my daddy used to carry us over there on Saturday nights. We’d spend the night with our grandparents. . . . He would put us in the wagon and take us over there—and [I’d] sleep at the foot of their bed.”

When an interviewer asked about the night her grandmother fled the terror in Cumming, Anderson said, “When she came to our house it was dusk,” and

I just remember her coming in crying, you know. Mama hugged her and all. . . . They sent us children into the other room, and they sat down and talked. [My grandmother] kept saying she was so hurt. They had to run and leave everything . . . had to leave their home. They had never owned nothing before. I don’t think she ever got over what happened . . . I just know she cried. It hurt her so bad.

When eight-year-old Kathleen crept in from another room and climbed into her grandmother’s lap, her father tried to shoo her away, saying Grandma was too tired. But what, Kathleen Anderson remembered asking, about the dolly she’d left at Grandma’s house?

Catherine Black—who had survived slavery, and Jim Crow, and now a visit from the torch-wielding night riders of Forsyth—turned her granddaughter to face her and said she was sorry but “a pack of wild dogs got into the house” and tore that doll up. “I’m going to buy you a new one,” she said, wiping tears from the girl’s brown cheeks. “I’ll buy you a new one just as soon as we get back.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T
his book would not exist without a kind but determined push from Natasha Trethewey, who challenged me, more than a decade ago, to tell this story. Having grappled with America’s racial history so often in her work, Natasha turned to me during a cab ride in New York City and asked why it was that she, a southern woman of color, wrote about “blackness,” yet I, a white man from one of the most racist places in the country, never said a word about “whiteness.” “Why,” Natasha asked, “do you think you’re not
involved
?” I am ashamed to recall how I defended my silence. And I am proud to say that her question helped me begin this project.

I knew it would take time to unearth some of my home’s buried past, and I had a fundamental problem to overcome: I live in Brooklyn, and everything I wanted to discover, everything I needed to know, was nearly a thousand miles south. To find my way back—and to get closer to the archives, libraries, courthouses, and family stories in which traces of pre-expulsion Forsyth were still preserved—I depended on the generosity of friends old and new. Drew University granted me a sabbatical leave, without which I could never have made vital research trips to Georgia. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided an Arts and the Common Good Grant that helped
pay for plane tickets, rental cars, and nights in the hotels of Morrow, Athens, Gainesville, Buford, and Cumming.

As I tried to tame a growing and often overwhelming collection of newspaper articles, letters, military reports, taped interviews, maps, photographs, trial dockets, and census records, I was lucky to have two experienced and generous mentors. Don Fehr, my agent and friend, has been behind this book from the beginning, and I could never have written it without his encouragement and good counsel. Ted Genoways showed me the way forward, as he has so many times—especially through the example of his superb work as a journalist. I am forever grateful for his friendship.

WHEN I STARTED
digging in the courthouses, libraries, and archives of Georgia, I realized that there was another problem that had no easy solution. In 1912, Forsyth had its share of educated black preachers, schoolteachers, and property owners—people like Levi Greenlee, Grant Smith, and Joseph Kellogg. But a majority of the county’s African American citizens were sharecroppers and field hands, like Buck Daniel and Byrd Oliver, who never owned an acre, signed a deed, or paid a dollar in property tax. This meant that, almost by definition, the victims of Forsyth’s racial cleansing were woefully underrepresented in the surviving records, and many left no written trace at all. As the voices of the dead rose all around me, the ones I most desperately wanted to hear were also the faintest and most difficult to make out.

The descendants of the 1912 refugees helped fill in many gaps, and over the past four years I’ve been fortunate to spend many hours talking and corresponding with the great-grandchildren, grandchildren, and (in a few cases) children of the African American families forced out of Forsyth. I am especially grateful to Deidre Brown-Stewart and Charles Grogan; George and Rudy Rucker; Rojene Bailey; Charles Morrow; Geraldine Cheeks Stephens and
Mabel Lee Sutton; Erma Brooks; Seth Squires; Linda Carruth; and Bonnie Rateree.

More than any other descendant, I spoke with Anthony Neal, who told me about his ancestors Joseph and Eliza Kellogg. Even four generations later, Tony was proud of the monumental effort it had taken for his great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother to rise from slavery and become the owners of more than two hundred acres in Forsyth. It was Joseph and Eliza who first established the Kellogg Family Reunion—a gathering that began in 1916 and has continued uninterrupted ever since. It still brings the wide branches of the Kellogg family tree back together once a year, for an event that alternates between Atlanta and Chicago—between those who stayed and those who rode the rails north out of Georgia. The bonds have remained strong even across all that distance, according to Tony, because his ancestors wanted it that way. After losing all they had, he said, family meant everything to Joseph and Eliza Kellogg.

THE GAINESVILLE–HALL COUNTY
Black History Society also welcomed me into their annual meeting in 2014. That night, Barbara Borders Brooks became my friend, mentor, and guide to the black community of Gainesville. Together, we drove all over Hall County seeking the scattered diaspora of Forsyth. Most of the descendants Barbara and I visited were too young to have lived through the expulsions themselves, but they did their best to answer my questions, dug fading photographs out of their closets, and put me in contact with wide networks of kin. Sometimes, someone would even lean back, close his or her eyes, and summon up out of the darkness the oldest, most nearly forgotten stories about Forsyth.

In July of 2015, I finally located Oscar Daniel’s niece Mattie, who I was amazed to find in a nursing home on the outskirts of Gainesville. After I’d spent a day knocking on doors and chasing one false lead after another, my pulse quickened when I was led
into her room. “I came to ask about your family,” I said, approaching Mattie’s hospital bed, the manila folder under my arm stuffed with family trees, newspaper clippings, and long lists of questions. “Family? I ain’t got no family,” said Mattie—a dark-skinned, gray-haired woman of eighty-two. She cut her eyes at me, then turned back toward a TV, tuned to
Wheel of Fortune
. After half an hour of my coaxing her toward some memory of Oscar and Ernest, Buck and Catie, or any of her relatives who’d once lived in Forsyth, Mattie dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

Only when I went back the next morning—this time carrying, as a kind of peace offering, a little vase of flowers—did Mattie finally open up to me, though not about Forsyth, or her father, Cicero, or the Uncle Oscar who’d died twenty years before she was born, in 1932. Instead, Mattie talked about the one subject that made her face soften and brighten. When I asked if she knew the name Jane Daniel, Mattie looked up from the TV. “Aunt
Janie
,” she said. “You talkin’ about Janie Butler.”

In my research, Jane’s trail had gone completely cold after she was released from the Fulton Tower in October of 1912, and despite months of searching, I hadn’t been able to find her anywhere: not in Gainesville or Atlanta, not in Memphis or Chicago or New York. Now, in one sentence, Mattie solved the riddle. “Janie married a man name of Butler. Will Butler. I took the train to Detroit, stayed with them one time. Went to school for a year.”

As I scribbled and turned the pages of my notebook, I could only hope that the archives would confirm Mattie’s story, which they did: Jane and her new husband, Will, joined the Great Migration in the 1920s, and once they were settled, Jane told her brother Cicero to send his daughter Mattie north. When I asked about that 1945 journey—when Mattie was thirteen and stepped off a train car into the great churning city of Detroit—she turned and looked straight at me. “I loved it,” she said. “I loved it up there.”

MY TRIPS TO
Georgia were often dizzying, with a morning spent among African American descendants of the Forsyth refugees followed by an afternoon sitting in Cumming, talking with descendants of white Forsyth. Among the latter group, I am especially grateful to Lorene Veal, who vividly recalled the Oscarville of her girlhood and set me straight on the vast and ever-branching Crow family tree. Henry D. Berry shared stories his mother, Ruth Jordan, had told him about 1912, and he and his daughter Susan Berry Roberts talked with me about George and Mattie Jordan’s attempts to help their black neighbors. Jane Stone Hernandez told me all about Isabella Harris; John Salter and Connie Pendley welcomed me into the Historical Society of Forsyth County; and Kathleen Thompson of the
Pickens County Progress
helped me trace refugees who found safety working for the Georgia Marble Company. Above all, thanks to Debbie Vermaat, who answered my endless questions with generosity and grace. As the grandniece of Mae Crow, Debbie has a unique relationship to this story, and I am deeply grateful for her unflinching honesty.