Day 58. April 27, 1862.
58
I don’t believe you can get away with it….
April Sunday 27
A very fine morning and the sun has risen bright and the day was very fine. LG baker out of Co D died today. He had the fever and has been unwell for some time. The day is very pleasant and I hope we will have good weather for some time
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 54
“7a.m. 46; 2p.m. 60; 9p.m. 39. White frost.”
A Confederate Girl’s Diary Sarah Morgan Dawson P. 20-21
(Writing from Baton Rouge April 27, 1862)
“What a day! Last night came a dispatch that New Orleans was under British protection, and could not be bombarded; consequently, the enemy’s gunboats would probably be here this morning, such few as had succeeded in passing the Forts; from nine to fifteen, it was said. And the Forts, they said, had not surrendered. I went to church; but I grew very anxious before it was over, feeling that I was needed at home. When I returned, I found Lilly wild with excitement, picking up hastily whatever came to hand, preparing for instant flight, she knew not where. The Yankees were in sight; the town was to be burned; we were to run to the woods, etc. If the house had to be burned, I had to make up my mind to run, too. So my treasure-bag tied around my waist as a bustle, a sack with a few necessary articles hanging on my arm, some quite few unnecessary ones, too, as I had not the heart to leave the old and new prayer books father had given me, and Miriam’s, too, — pistol and carving-knife ready, I stood awaiting the exodus. I heaped on the bed the treasures I wanted to burn, matches lying ready to fire the whole at the last minute. I may say here that, when all was over, I found I had omitted many things from the holocaust. This very diary was not included. It would have afforded vast amusement to the Yankees. There may be occasion to burn them, and the house also. People fortunately changed their minds about the auto-da-fe’ just then; and the Yankees have not yet arrived, at sundown. So, when the excitement calmed down, poor Lilly tumbled in bed in a high fever in consequence of terror and exertion.”
Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northrup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1851, and Rescued in 1853 Solomon Northrup (b. 1808) P. 166-169
“An ordinary day’s work is two hundred pounds. A slave who is accustomed to picking, is punished, if he or she brings in a less quantity than that. There is a great difference among them as regards this kind of labor. Some of them seem to have a natural knack, or quickness, which enables them to pick with great celerity, and with both hands, while others, with whatever practice or industry, are utterly unable to come up to the ordinary standard. Such hands are taken from the cotton field and employed in other business.
Each one is tasked, therefore, according to his picking abilities, none, however, to come short of two hundred weight.
The cotton grows from five to seven feet high, each stalk having a great many branches, shooting out in all directions, and lapping each other above the water furrow.
There are few sights more pleasant to the eye, than a wide cotton field, when it is in the bloom. It presents an appearance of purity, like an immaculate expanse of light, new-fallen snow.
The hands are required to be in the cotton field as soon as it is light in the morning, and, with the exception of ten or fifteen minutes, which is given them at noon to swallow their allowance of cold bacon, they are not permitted to be a moment idle until it is too dark to see, and when the moon is full, they often times labor till the middle of the night. They do not dare to stop even at dinner time, nor return to the quarters, however late it be, until the order to halt is given by the driver.
The day’s work over in the field, the baskets are “toted,” or in other words, carried to the gin-house where the cotton is weighed. No matter how fatigued and weary he may be–no matter how much he longs for sleep and rest–a slave never approaches the gin-house with his basket of cotton but with fear. If it falls short in weight–if he has not performed the full task appointed him, he knows that he must suffer. And if he has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, in all probability his master will measure the next day’s task accordingly. So, whether he has too little or too much, his approach to the gin-house is always with fear and trembling. Most frequently they have too little, and therefore it is they are not anxious to leave the field. After weighing, follow the whippings; and then the baskets are carried to the cotton house, and their contents stored away like hay, all hands being sent in to tramp it down. If the cotton is not dry, instead of taking it to the gin-house at once, it is laid upon platforms, two feet high, and some three times as wide, covered with boards or plank, with narrow walks running between them.
This done, the labor of the day is not yet ended, by any means. Each one must then attend to his respective chores. One feeds the mules, another the swine–another cuts the wood, and so forth; besides, the packing is all done by candle light. Finally, at a late hour, they reach the quarters, sleepy and overcome with the long day’s toil. Then a fire must be kindled in the cabin, the corn ground in the small hand-mill, and supper, and dinner for the next day in the field, prepared. All that is allowed them is corn and bacon, which is given out at the corncrib and smoke-house every Sunday morning. Each one receives, as his weekly allowance, three and a half pounds of bacon, and corn enough to make a peck of meal. That is all–no tea, coffee, sugar, and with the exception of a very scanty sprinkling now and then, no salt.
P. 171
A hour before day light the horn is blown. Then the slaves arouse, prepare their breakfast, fill a gourd with water, in another deposit their dinner of cold bacon and corn flake, and hurry to the field again. It is an offence invariably followed by a flogging, to be found at the quarters after daybreak. Then the fears and labors of another day begin; and until its close there is no such thing as rest. He fears he will be caught lagging through the day; he fears to approach the gin-house with his basket-load of cotton at night; he fears, when he lies down, that he will oversleep himself in the morning. Such is a true, faithful, unexaggerated picture and description of the slave’s daily life, during the time of cotton-picking, on the shores of Bayou Boeuf.
P. 179-180
It was rarely that a day passed by without one or more whippings. This occurred at the time the cotton was weighed. The delinquent, whose weight had fallen short, was taken out, stripped, made to lie upon the ground, face downwards, when he received a punishment proportioned to his offense. It is the literal, unvarnished truth, that the crack of the lash, and the shrieking of the slaves, can be heard from dark till bedtime, on Epps’ plantation, any day almost during the entire period of the cotton-picking season.
The number of lashes is graduated according to the nature of the case. Twenty-five are deemed a mere brush, inflicted, for instance, when a dry leaf or piece of boll is found in the cotton, or when a branch is broken in the field; fifty is the ordinary penalty following all delinquencies of the next higher grade; one hundred is called severe: it is the punishment inflicted for the serious offence of standing idle in the field; from one hundred and fifty to two hundred is bestowed upon him who quarrels with his cabin-mates, and five hundred, well laid on, besides the mangling of the dogs, perhaps, is certain to consign the poor, unpitied runaway to weeks of pain and agony.”
Note: It happened on one of them zip-a-dee-doo-dah-zip-a-dee-ay days.
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 366-367
Note: Wilson discussing Hinton Helper’s highly influential book The Impending Crisis, published in by a NY press in 1857:
“The Impending Crisis is even today to some extent a usefully informative book. It includes a comprehensive chapter on anti-slavery opinion in the South from Washington, Jefferson and Madison to the author’s contemporaries; and a good part of it consists of statistical tables which show, as Olmsted had done, that the slave-owning states of the South had long ago lost their old position and fallen behind the North, as the result of a system which exhausted the soil and reduced the value of property in a reckless and unnecessary way and which, depending as it did on workers who had no interest in efficiency or diligence, could never compete with free labor. It is not at all true, says Helper– that– as George Fitzhugh had tried to believe when he made his expedition to New Haven– “agriculture is not one of the leading and lucrative pursuits of the free states, that the soil there is an uninterrupted barren waste, and that our Northern brethren, having the advantage in nothing except wealth, population, inland and foreign commerce, manufactures, mechanisms, inventions, literature, the arts and sciences, and their concomitant branches of profitable industry,– miserable objects of charity– are dependent on us for the necessaries of life.” As for the treatment of the virgin forests: “the difference is simply this: At the North everything is turned to advantage. When a tree is cut down, the main body is sold or used for lumber, railing or paling, the stump for matches and shoepegs, the knees for shipbuilding, and the branches for fuel. At the South everything is either neglected or mismanaged. Whole forests are felled by the ruthless hand of slavery, the trees are cut into logs, rolled into heaps, covered with the limbs and brush, and then burned on the identical soil that gave them birth. The land itself next falls prey to the fell destroyer, and that which was once a beautiful, fertile and luxuriant woodland, is soon despoiled of all its treasuresh, and converted into an eye-offending desert.” As for the mineralological resources of the South– in contrast to “the gold and quicksilver of California, the iron and coal of Pennsylvania, the copper of Michigan, the lead of Illinois” and “the salt of New-York”– they have hardly been touched or explored. “The marble and freestone quarries of New England” alone are, “incredible as it may seem . . . far more important sources of revenue than all the subterranean deposits in the slave States.” For no one in those states really wants to work. The “freemen regard labor as disgraceful” while the “slaves shrink from it as a burden tyrannically imposed upon them,” so “half a million of your population can feel no sympathy with the society in the prosperity of which they are forbidden to participate, and no attachment to a government at whose hands they receive nothing but injustice.” He dwells much, like Fitzhugh, on the desirability of developing Southern industries and cities. People say that “Cotton is king,” but its products are all manufactured by New England and Old England. “It is carried in their ships, spun in their factories, woven in their looms, insured in their offices, returned again in their own vessels, and with double freight and cost of manufacturing added, purchased by the South at a high premium. Of all the parties engaged or interested in its transportation and manufacture, the South is the only one that does not make a profit. Nor does she, as a general thing, make a profit by producing it.’”
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide Carol Anderson P. 43
“In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, white Southerners had saturated the old Confederacy in black blood. By 1920, in fact, there had been more than a thousand lynchings per decade; and in the rebel South, almost 90 percent of those killed were African Americans. Five states—Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and Louisiana—accounted for more than half of all lynchings in the nation. One of the most macabre formats for the murders was a spectacle lynching, which advertised the killing of a black person and provided special promotional trains to bring the audience, including women and children, to the slaughter. These gruesome events were standard family entertainment; severed body parts became souvenirs and decorations hung proudly in homes.”
Note: Lynching souvenirs. This would be body parts in jars too.
Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns John Avlon, Jesse Angelo, Errol Louis P. 252-254
“A Fine Lesson for the Whole Nation.”
Heywood Broun—New York World-Telegram—11/28/1933
“Comment on the San Jose lynching* constitutes an obligatory column.
In the beginning it seemed to me as if this thing were so monstrously and obviously evil that it would be enough to say calmly and simply, “Here is one more sadistic orgy carried on by a psychopathic mob under the patronage of the moronic governor of a backward state.”
To my amazement I found not only condonation but actual praise for the lynchers in no less than three New York newspapers. I read of “the vigilantes” and “the pioneer spirit” and so on.
Let us examine the evidence to see if there is any reason at all to ascribe the deed to the full-flowered resentment of an aroused public spirit.
Here is the story of the lynching as told by an eighteen-year-old ranch boy who asserted that he was leader of the movement:
“I was the first one of the gang to break into the jail. I decided to organize a ‘necktie’ party. Mostly I went to the speakeasies and rounded up the gang there. That is why so many of the mob were drunk. The word got spread around that it was going to be a Santa Clara University student lynching. But I’m not a Santa Clara student. I didn’t go to college. I knew Brooke Hart* by sight, but never had spoken to him. I thought that his terrible murder should be avenged. I found that several hundred others thought the same thing.”
In other words, a farm boy who came into town for a spree managed to hit upon a drunken crowd which was willing to defend the American home and its institutions for the fun of it.
Governor Rolph has called it “a fine lesson to the whole nation.” And a New York newspaper says in its leading editorial, “Nobody that we’ve heard of or talked to appears to disagree with the mob or disapprove of what Governor Rolph said.”
Alright; talk to me. Or better still read these selections from a United Press dispatch:
“Thurmond was unconscious, and probably dead, when the noose was placed around his neck. He had been beaten and kicked senseless. A boy, not more than sixteen, climbed to the top of a shed and shouted in a shrill voice, ‘Come on, fellows!’ He was the leader the mob had been waiting for. A new cry went up, ‘Let’s burn ’em!’ Thurmond’s body was cut down. It was drenched with gasoline. A match was touched to it, but only his torn clothing burned.”
Governor James Rolph, Jr., has been quoted as saying that he would like to turn over all jail inmates serving sentences for kidnapping into the custody of “those fine, patriotic San Jose citizens, who know how to handle such a situation.”
“Thousands of men, women and children looking on in carnival spirit cheered with a lustiness which could be heard for blocks.”
“Both were dragged across the park, their bruised and torn bodies leaving trails of blood.”
And so the fine old pioneer spirit of California, under the leadership of that fine old nature lover, Jim Rolph, has ended in kidnapping in the great commonwealth of California. And what has it left in its wake? It has left an obscene, depraved and vile memory in the minds of thousands who stood about and sheered lustily.
“Some of the children were babies in their mothers’ arms.”
If it were possible to carry on a case history of every person in the mob who beat and kicked and hanged and burned two human beings I will make the prophecy that out of this heritage will come crimes and cruelties which are unnumbered. The price is too high.
Every mother and father of a son wants to have him protected against the danger of kidnapping. But how would you like it if it were your sixteen-year-old boy who climbed to the top of a shed and shouted in a shrill voice, “Come on, fellows!”?
Governor James Rolph, Jr., has said with audacious arrogance, “If anyone is arrested for the good job I’ll pardon them all.”
It does not lie within the power of the governor of California to pardon the men and boys and women and children who cried out, “Let’s burn ’em!” For them there is no pardon this side of the Judgment Seat. To your knees, Governor, and pray that you and your commonwealth may be washed clean of this bath of bestiality into which a whole community has plunged.
You, James Rolph, Jr., stand naked in the eyes of the world. “I’ll pardon them all,” you say. Is this to be the measure of justice in California? Men with blood and burnt flesh on their hands are to be set free. Mooney must remain in jail. Freedom for the guilty. Punishment for the innocent.
Governor, very frankly, I don’t believe you can get away with it. There must be somewhere some power which just won’t stand for it.’”
*Brooke Hart (1911-1933), White, was the son of a department store owner in San Jose. “His kidnapping and murder were reported throughout the United States. The subsequent lunching of his alleged murderers, Thomas Harold Thurmond and John M. Holmes, sparked widespread political debate. Scores of reporters, photographers, and newsreel camera operators, along with an estimated 3,000 to 10,000 men, women, and children, were witness to it. When newspapers published photos, identifiable faces were deliberately smudged so that they remained anonymous; the following Monday, local newspapers published 1.2 million copies, twice the normal daily production. Harold Fitzgerald described the scene in an Oakland Tribune article: “A concerted pull – and the white, blood-streaked body of the second of Brooke Hart’s murderers swayed in a grisly rhythm in the light of a rising half-moon. A roar, mingled with women’s screams, rolled across the park… [Afterward,] The crowd began pouring out of the park. Some did serpentine dances in the streets…. Snatches of song came from here and there in the multitude.” Royce Brier, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, would later go on to win the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Reporting for his account of the lynching. According to the prize citation, Brier worked for 16 hours along with several assistants mingling with the lynch mob and telephoning running updates from a garage across the street from the jail before composing the story in three hours starting at 12:30 a.m. On the morning of November 27th. Eventually, seven people were arrested for the lynchings, but none were convicted. California did not specifically define lynching as a crime…. ….despite literally thousands of witnesses, scores of reporters, and hundreds of photographs, the grand jury found that no witnesses could identify anyone from the lynching, so no charges were filed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt also condemned the lynching as “collective murder” in a nationwide radio address.
A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America Jacqueline Jones P. 195
“The torture of black men and women had become public spectacles attended by crowds of white parents and children, farmers and businessmen. The newspaper alerted its readers so that they could plan to attend and witness the horror: “Prospects Good for a Lynching, And the Indications are that when it Comes it Will be by Wholesale; Five Negro Men and Two Women.’”
Black Reconstruction in America W.E.B. DuBois P. 555
“The method of force which hides itself in secrecy is a method as old as humanity. The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night. The method has certain advantages. It uses Fear to cast out Fear; it dares things at which open method hesitates; it may with a certain impunity attack the high and the low; it need hesitate at no outrage of maiming or murder; it shields itself in the mob mind and then throws over all a veil of darkness which becomes glamor. It attracts people who otherwise could not be reached. It harnesses the mob.”
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide Carol Anderson P. 40
(May 1918 mob that, over five days, executed at least 11 black men, and one woman)
“They dragged Mary to a tree, stripped her, tied her ankles together, and strung her upside down. The men ran to their cars, brought back gasoline, and began “to roast her alive.” Then they saw her naked, eight-month-pregnant stomach convulsing. That only sent the mob, made up of several of Hampton Smith’s brothers, as well as a clerk in the post office, an auditor for Standard Oil, a furniture salesman, and several farmers, into a deeper frenzy, as one man took out his knife and sliced away at her charred flesh until the baby, now ripped out of the womb, fell to the ground and gave two cries. Someone in the lynch party then stepped forward and smashed the child’s head into the red Georgia dirt with the heel of his boot.’”
Note: Black women would sometimes kill their children, & or themselves, rather than live enslaved. One example: Margaret Garner was a Mulatto woman who used a butcher knife to kill her two year old daughter rather than let her go into slavery. The trial after was somehow held up while White men debated whether she should be tried as “property” or as an actual human being. Later, a steamboat wreck that she & another daughter were on sunk; she said she was glad her daughter drowned.
Note: America, sweet America
You know, God done shed his grace on thee
Note: 1/28/20 The Tennessee Legislature meets and debates removing a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sons of Confederate Veterans “State Commander” James Patterson tells the all-White committee as he stands at the podium that Antifa will win if they remove it. Rep. Jason Hodges asks the room, “How many people can you massacre and still be honored? What’s a good number to still be honored by the state of Tennessee?” Meantime, on the floor the SCV debates with Rick Staples, a descendant of slaves (running for city council) Reminder: Forrest was the Grand Wizard of the KKK, and his likeness is in the State Capitol Building. Shelby Foote accused the Memphis NAACP of racism when the group called for removal of the Forrest monument in the city, saying, “The day that Black people admire Forrest as much as I do is the day when they will be free and equal, for they will have gotten prejudice out of their minds as we whites are trying to get it out of ours.” Speaking of removing Forrest, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, in September, 2021, will dig him & his wifey up & reinter them, holding a whole visitation & memorial service, I shit you not. Now at Elm Springs, TN. until the next generations get some fancy ideas of their own. At that property in Elm Springs is a shiny new $6 million National Confederate Museum. This was their second rising out of the ground. The first was in 1904, when he & his wife were placed under, yes, a bronze statue of him atop a horse. They’ll move the statue back up over them. To watch footage of old men donning white gloves gripping flags of hate whilst singing off-key to about how they wish they were in Dixie, plus old White women looking solemn, dressed in black garb funerary hoop skirts, veils & all, all in a hushed silence, clutching a single red rose each, see, naturally, YouTube. Comments turned off. Another dimension.
LISTEN: https://thememorypalace.us/notes-on-an-imagined-plaque/
The Daily News-Journal (Murfreesboro, TN) March 4, 1979 P. 30
Takes blame in burnings
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UPI) –
“The state leader of a Ku Klux Klan splinter group Thursday took credit for a series of cross burnings earlier this month and said more would be burned if “black protests continue.”
T.J. Wiley, who identified himself as the Tennessee grand dragon of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, said his group burned the crosses.
“We’re not going to have them out protesting, without us also protesting,” he said.
Wiley said the cross burnings were in response to the television series, “Roots: the Next Generation,” which was aired on ABC and to black protests at the capitol.
A group of blacks met with Gov. Lamar Alexander last week to discuss minority needs and sought removal of a bust from the capitol of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a co-founder of the Klan.
Another group of blacks tried to meet with Nashville Mayor Richard Fulton this week but he was unavailable.
“A burning cross is a symbol of protest on our behalf. We may have more if this continues. We may move on statues of some of their leaders,” Wiley said.”
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 108
“April 27, 1862: During night session of cabinet Sec. Stanton and Gen. Wadsworth accuse Gen. McClellan of failing to protect Washington.”
Note: “Without Sanctuary” is a website & book of historic lynching photographs. The Equal Justice Initiative announced in 2015 that minimum 4,400 lynchings occurred between 1877-1950, then in 2020 added another 2000 to that toll in the 12 years of Reconstruction. There was ritualistic judicial cover. And “Sundown Towns” were places where a 6th Commandment exemption existed. According to James W. Loewen, in Utah, those towns were Bingham, Blanding, Bluffdale, Brigham City (no surprise), Carbon, Corinne, Eagle Mountain, General, Murray, Price. Price is the only confirmed sunset in the list, which is where, in 1925, 800-4000 men, women, & children watched Robert Marshall get hung twice from a Cottonwood tree while the Sheriff stood there powerless. Photos went for 25 cents. Every last one of the 124 witnesses saw who the 11 were who lynched Robert refused to testify before the Grand Jury. A 1998 “Day of Reconciliation” happened in Price when a headstone was placed over Robert’s unmarked grave. On it are the words, “A victim of intolerance. May God forgive.”
Note: James Baldwin: “They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power.” As late as the 1970s, a sign in Jonesboro, Ill. was stuck at the side of Route 127: “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You.” In places like Darrien, Ct. and La Jolla, Ca.: ”JAPS DONT LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE. Keep moving. This is rose hill.” And just about anywhere: “NO dogs, negros, mexicans. Colored served in rear.” Meantime, names shot out on signs, parts of wounded letters of steel fallen: Emmett Till, his sign marking where they found him got shot out to where they had to redesign his memorial to make it bulletproof last year. Same with Louisiana: Fred Hampton’s tombstone the site of local law enforcement shoot-outs an annual tradition to chip it with 9mm rounds. His name now richocheted-out; in many places it vanishes altogether. COINTELPRO still at it. Georgia’s Nigger Creek changed to Runaway Negro Creek then Habersham Creek now Freedom Creek by the United States Board on Geographic Names in 2019. Sometimes we become what we were, finally.
But the worst blow for the Confederacy since Vicksburg comes in the 2020 uprising: NASCAR prohibits all Rebel flag displays at events and on properties. “They’ll have to come and get it” fans were saying. That can be arranged, easily, with officers like you find anywhere in America who riot themselves, who the National Guard gets sent in.
Those word-by-word choices of White America, a mass white apparition, as if someone just brushed up past you on the road, at the school, in the town square, Whites, they seem to come from nowhere & at no measurable point in time, just a constant presence standing on guard at your every move, eyeing you walking through Target, through the world after. The security guard, the sawn-off-blank-monitoring-you-look, the surveillance cameras, the Can I see your receipt. They’ll use anything. Anything. It never is what it is, is it. It does not present itself by its own name. It doesn’t have to. Everyone knows what it is. African-Americans, even if free-born, had to prove they weren’t property, just like now, prove not dangerous even if just stepping onto an elevator, oh ad nauseam today, tomorrow, always. The mask. The double-time, double-quick, double-code, the “Not for us” from left to right, top to bottom, to where it becomes We don’t want it anyway. It’s something you carry in your blood & you must carry it in all situations because what passes through the hands here only takes an instant to become deadly. Not the back of your hand if you’re White, not the back of your hand you don’t need to know it, that hypervigilance, the double-consciousness in all situations. How’s this look to them. To your survival you won’t need to know how stop & frisk in NYC is a race tax, that it’s actually stop & fondle (Eric Garner: “digging his finger in my rectum in the middle of the street”). They go into your underwear. They go all the way & the story’s the same one as it keeps coming back for you, a Hello Kitty hooded figure, Easter bunny fat tail at the bottom, the eyes red jeweled plastic beads. An adult-sized neo-Confederate flag onesie all so surreal. An evil like that never really dies, it just circles earth touching down continent to continent, refueling molecules, the same old song too low to hear the words to that has been lowering then relifting like a tornado for centuries. A tornado all the way. It’s there in the pick-up bumper sticker, the old laws transcribed to DWB, the Harvard professor taken to the ground in front of his very home.
Lives at stake in a dead pitch night free fall waiting as they listen to the ground for the whiteness on the bad-lit horizon when the sun lowers itself down off the sky but then that light shines in your face out of nowhere. Whether it will rumble tonight, the front door off its hinges, triple checking the 2×4 that blocks the door, considering if it will hold tight against a ram coming through, the pointy long-toed cowboy boots & the boat-tipping 30 gall hats when they get back to state-sanctioned & directed terror in the backwoods, the high Sheriff out to pick the bones, giving White citizens law enforcement duties, the local gendarmes, the ‘citizens’ hiding in bedsheets wholly loosed by the 1870s (when the Lost Cause, like a seed that cracks open, the Lost Cause when it lyses, out-flanks the North’s interpretative control until nearly the turn of the century after the next century after the war ends– 1999– for a White to be given the death penalty in Texas for lynching a Black man, yet his killer allowed to live for two decades after conviction), along with the locals out here catching flies on the tip of their tongues, waiting for night to come, the white- robed horses & a story for later, yee haw. Jolting awake, up in a cold sweat, on the verge, always that verge, night terrors from the Night Riders starting at sundown. The sun’s shadow cast in the opposite direction for the next 10 hours.
See: https://www.blackpast.org/special-features/lynchings-united-states-1865
The Knights of White Camilia, the League of Pale Faces, the KKK could all kill consequence-free because Black people weren’t White property after the war. Congress overrode Johnson when he tried to say the South was reconstructed enough. Now former Confederate leaders are reinstated, how one fish parasite destroys the tongue of its victims then settles itself in the tongue’s place. A strain similar to what had once existed, & now the tail passed over where the eye’d been, slave auctions that took place on Wall Street where water futures are now traded when Detroit goes years without potables.
.
.
he had the fever….
This is who these savages are.
And case after case of getting them from the dead:
The day before the execution of one of the three men who dragged James Byrd Jr., behind a pickup to his death, “As far as any regrets, no, I have no regrets. No, I’d do it all over again, to tell you the truth.” That same day a Colin Kaepernick doll hanging by the neck spotted chained to a truck’s trailer hitch, the picture taken at a San Jose Safeway gas station. Democrats ran ads saying the war’s aim was to mix races: miscegenation, a new word, & made up like any other, an actual the word for degrees of melanin like it’s a cross-species infection, something about having all the wrong bloodlines, mangled strands of DNA and nothing but a shell casing left behind. Some lowborn White but still White so not that, whatever that is perceived to be.
Black bodies are the effigies & scapegoats in the ongoing contestation over the nature of actual reality for those who think their Lost Cause inviolate, their heritage not hate; they have to stick to the same story, right? Blood inheritance, ancestral creed, tribal instinct, salvaged pieces of the fallen one. And it developed that the facts, they must not supervene upon the feelings. Instead of which, they’d claim nothing. Nothing but a 2nd place participation trophy, a postcard passed state to state via the U.S. Postal Service of a lynch mob methodically posing for the camera in a rabies bloodwind. Congress tried & failed 200 times since 1882 to make lynching a federal hate crime (Rand Paul the current blocker of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act). 99% of all lynchers escaped all sanction on both state & local levels. Officials looked the other way about the 4,742 humans’ (1882-1968) elasticity of the neck, hyperextension the medical term for a hangman’s fracture where the head is bent so far backward it separates the neck from the spine.
It doesn’t get more deliberate than a hanging. Weigh the body & measure the length of rope. In the lynching postcards common in the South 60 years ago, the postcards sold & passed through mail, postcards with sound out mouths grinning languidly; the rope used in the crime stays around the neck in the pictures. They squeeze into the photos right after, stooped shoulder to shoulder, arm leaned on a shoulder of someone else pointing a loaded shotgun at the camera, grinning with the darkness of this old secret passed generation to generation, reptilian wonder. The larvae metamorphose into miniature versions of their adult form, paw prints and the drag marks of a kill.
You see such men with such looks to their faces, that something lacking in their faces we see to be so different from what’s in ours. Or not. And it’s something to the women’s eyes, the arches, the manicuredness of them that gets across surprise in a contained way, a way where if you look at her face you can’t be quite sure if she knew, if she ever saw his face as it bloated.
And if not the rope, metamorphose it to hypercriminilization, the widescale, wholesale representation of criminality, ongoingly, throughout four centuries. All the cherished narratives that individualize White crime while generalizing Black. Your family member’s face thrown across the networks. The business of image control where the White was a troubled young man, but the Black a bad seed from birth and the picture shown taken in a dark-lit room, the worst the media could locate. Not the prom picture. Not the one with the tie. Certainly not the one where he smiles. Time to trot out that misdemeanor, that pack of cigarettes stolen at 16.
They’re gonna get you one way or the other. By the holes in the mask they will remind you. Instead of being masks are revelations. You never know what the Whites are thinking, how they do that eerie metamorphosis into something opposite, werewolfian, white shiny smile by day, the snout a growl at night. The lunge. How it can all come apart at any second.
The police tape stretches across America.
Oh Say Does That Star Spangled Banner Yet Wave?
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