This 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.
I also owe a debt to several researchers who came before me. Troy Dempsey shared his own work on the expulsions and became a trusted friend; Elliot Jaspin’s writing about the seizure of black-owned land was a great help; and Marco Williams’s film Banished inspired me to reach out to more descendants. More than anyone else, the late Don Shadburn was my guide to “old Forsyth,” and he taught me a lot about the white community of the early and mid-twentieth century. Don and I danced a delicate dance, as I probed for documents and information that I was certain he possessed but that he had sometimes discretely, unilaterally decided to keep out of the public eye. Whenever I was in Cumming, we had lunch at Steven’s Country Kitchen, and he usually arrived with an armload of maps, photographs, and crumbling old ledgers—some of which looked like they belonged in a museum, not in the trunk of Don’s car. He was always collegial and generous, and we formed an unexpected friendship around our shared—and very different—obsessions with the history of home. Don never once let me pick up the check.
My mother and father, Bill and Nan Phillips, deserve special thanks. Raised in the Alabama of Jim Clark, Bull Connor, and George Wallace, they rebelled against segregation in the 1950s and ’60s, and they paid a price for that in their own families. Their bravery has been an inspiration all my life.
Thanks are due to many other friends who listened at one point or another. Some of them may not remember how much they helped, but I do: Mary Anne Andrei, Joelle Biele, Will Cox, Matt Donovan, Jesse Dukes, Merrell Feitell, Serge Filanovsky, David Gessner, Jennifer Grotz, Renee Morris Hand, Rachel and Jeff Hayden, Chester Johnson, Neil Levi, Joe Murphy, Tom Platoni, James and Paula Phillips, Hirsh Sawhney, Delphine Schrank, Tom Sleigh, and Patrick and Lisa Whelchel. Deep gratitude to Tiphanie Yanique and Moses Djeli for their generosity and invaluable insights.
Alane Salierno Mason is a brilliant editor, and it has been a joy and an education to be one of her writers. To paraphrase Wallace Stegner: Oh, how beautiful a thing it is to work with those who know their job! I am grateful to all of her colleagues at Norton, and especially to Marie Pantojan for her tireless help. Thanks also to Bonnie Thompson, my wonderful copy-editor, for improving this book in so many ways.
This project began with my awe and wonder at a photograph of the Forsyth prisoners, and my spirits lifted each time I found a new image. I wish there were more pictures of the African American community of Forsyth, but just as most field laborers left no more than an X beside their names, the poor people of the county rarely found themselves in front of a camera. In my search for whatever scraps of imagery remain, I was lucky to correspond with many photographers and collectors, and I am deeply grateful to Joe Tomasovsky, Molly Read Woo, James Michael, Bob Ramsak, Jeff Slate, Ben Chapnick on behalf of Charles Moore, and Spider Martin. Thanks to Gary Doster for his vintage postcards of Cumming, and to Melissa Montero at the Associated Press.
I didn’t know John Witherspoon back when we both lived in Georgia, but he also stumbled into that Ku Klux Klan celebration in January of 1987—when I was a junior in high school and he was a young Atlantan with a VHS recorder. It was surreal to watch his footage together thirty years later, and to realize that we might have been standing shoulder to shoulder when Frank Shirley picked up a microphone and screamed out over the Cumming square, “White Power!” Thanks to John and his videos for confirming so many of my memories of that day.
My research would not have been possible without the help of the expert archivists and librarians who so quietly and nobly preserve the past for all of us. Thanks especially to Stephen Engerrand and Allison Hudgins at the Georgia Archives; Nathan Jordan at the National Archives in Morrow; Cynthia Lewis at the King Center Archives; Jada Harris at the Atlanta History Center; Chuck Barber of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library; the Georgia Newspaper Project at the University of Georgia; the University of North Georgia Library; the New York Public Library; the Rose Library at Drew University; the Pratt Institute Library; and New York University’s Bobst Library. Thanks to John Guillory and Ernest Gilman of the NYU English Department for teaching me what to do once those fading relics were placed in my hands.
Finally, Ellen Brazier, Sid Phillips, and Cam Phillips gave more hope, encouragement, and patience to this project than anyone. To the three who matter most: love, love, love. Love beyond words.