ASHRAF H. A. RUSHDY

Reflections on Indexing My Lynching Book

FROM Michigan Quarterly Review

 

I AM NOW indexing the second and final volume of my lynching trilogy.

If you are indexing your own book, you might at some point, like me, be resigned to the fact that you are going to keep your day job. Your book is not going to make a lot of money. The kind of book that is lucrative is either not going to need an index or will have one done by a professional indexer.

You have a lot of time to have thoughts like that when you are indexing your own book, since it is not particularly mindful work. Most of my thoughts, fortunately, have not been so mordant, or so obviously envious of others. I would say that they have fallen into three large categories—nostalgia, anger, and sadness.

 

1.

 

My first response has been a particular kind of nostalgia—a mixture of joy, resignation, longing. Indexing, after all, is probably the last time an author will read the book through in its entirety. We might look up particular things for future reference, to pillage our own earlier research, but most authors I know are not going to pick up and read a book on which they have been working for a number of years. It is with mixed feelings that one recognizes that here is a book that one will not read again. I remember reading a beautiful short essay, by Jorge Luis Borges, I think, in which the blind author lovingly runs his fingers over his books and nostalgically reflects on never again reading each specific volume in his library. The experience of reading for one last time a book I have read in so many different forms during the fourteen years I have been working on it is not nearly so grandiose. Writing this book cost me much, but it did not cost me my sight or sense of proportion.

It is not just a relief to know that the task is completed, that the research and writing are at an end—although there is that. There is a curious sense of reversal in indexing. You can see the logic of the composition of your book backward, as it were. As I develop a list of particular words and page numbers, I see where I made specific choices, the places I developed key connections, when I made revisions that put this section here and not there. I see, then, through the selection of key terms and page numbers, just where the book took the particular shape it ended up taking. And I remember where I might have written a specific passage, or how a set of ideas came to occupy the same page or the same series of pages. To a reader, the index is a way of navigating the book from the back. To an author, an index reveals just how this book came to be the one it is.

That nostalgia made up of remembering and relief at finishing is likely a common one for academic authors of all books. The other two feelings that I have felt pervasively as I compile this index are more personal and specific.

 

2.

 

One is a long pent-up anger that is the result of a persistent and undue restraint. As someone trying to produce a historical study of a horrible and cruel practice, I wanted to make sure that I examined the phenomenon with as much detachment as I could muster. I don’t mind reading something that is polemical or indignant, dripping with righteous antipathy for injustice, but I did not believe that the study I was writing in the historical mode and moment in which I was writing it could assume that tone or stance, or that it would be the most productive way to understand what lynching means in America. I had to be measured and temperate in my assessment of what people who performed inhumane things believed themselves to be doing.

I envy and admire those historians of an earlier age who could express their opprobrium without restraint. It would be wonderful to be able to say of some people who appear in my work, as Thomas Babington Macaulay said in one of his historical essays on the English Revolution, for example, that of Archbishop Laud “we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than, for any other character in our history” (Macaulay, “Hallam”). Or as he said of Bertrand Barère in an essay on the French Revolution: “Barère approached nearer than any person mentioned in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to the idea of consummate and universal depravity” (Macaulay, “Barère”).

That luxury of honest expression, however, is not generally permitted the modern historian. And so one labors under a more painful self-control. It is taxing work to be fair to people one does not believe to be fair themselves. In indexing, though, you do not have to repress your honest reactions as you do in writing.

Here is the process by which I compiled the index. I read through each chapter, highlighting key words and concepts and names of people. After I finish the chapter, I then type in those words and names and the pages where they occur. I then read the next chapter, rinse and repeat. That means that I am constantly inserting new words and concepts into an expanding list, organized alphabetically.

So I found myself proudly writing down the name of someone I admire deeply, someone who stood up for justice and righteousness, someone who performed a daring intellectual or heroic deed. Here in a history of depravity was someone who stood for decency. Here were such august names in the history of antilynching as Jessie Daniel Ames, who as a white southern woman courageously exposed the lie that lynching was an act of chivalry, or John Jay Chapman, who in 1912 revealed the undeniable responsibility borne by all Americans in the lynching of any American, and, finally, the greatest of them all, Ida B. Wells, who incisively diagnosed and tirelessly fought lynching from the time she recognized it for the racial crime it was in 1892 until her death in 1930.

Here I also recorded the names and acronyms of important groups that demanded justice and antilynching legislation, groups famous like the NAACP and not sufficiently appreciated like the Anti-Lynching Crusaders. Here, too, were heroic individuals who were not well known. In one case there was a man whom I know only as “Reverend King,” who risked his life in facing down a mob of fifteen thousand in 1893 to try and prevent the immolation of Henry Smith. He was unsuccessful, but his courage strikes me as exemplary. I felt it an honor to record his name in the only way I knew it in my index. I do not think of this index as some kind of roll of honor, a hall of fame, or anything of the sort. But I did, for those moments when I recorded the heroes of my tale, think of it as an appropriate place for those whose names deserved recuperation, recovery, and celebration.

But because it is an index, it could not remain the place for only the heroes. A book on lynching is populated primarily with villains. I, like Macaulay, felt loathing for many a character in my studies.

The people whose presence in my book raised my ire the most, the ones who struck me as the most despicable of the lot, were those intellectuals who defended and apologized for lynching. The lynchers did what they did, and ought to be arraigned for the terrible things they did, but they enjoyed the benefit of anonymity, since they were constituted as masses and mobs, not individuals. But the apologists, those who defended past lynchings and incited future ones, were individuals, and moreover they possessed the power of press and pulpit at their disposal. When they proclaimed something, they had an audience and readership that took seriously what they wrote and said. The three for whom I had the most utter contempt, the most loathsome and detestable of a despicable lot, to employ the liberating language of Macaulay, were a newspaper editor (John Temple Graves), a novelist who was racist (Thomas Nelson Page), and a rabid racist who wrote novels (Thomas Dixon).

First, and most obviously, is the fact that they were racists—that is, they believed that someone’s racial identity, bred in the blood, gave that person a particular kind of moral and intellectual grounding. It is perhaps unfair to expect them not to be racists at a time when it was intellectually acceptable to believe that race was such a determinant of ability, that the genetic properties of a person constituted his or her cultural possibilities. That position, challenged from the time it assumed a coherent form in the middle of the nineteenth century, and entirely upended by the 1920s, was called scientific racism. Of course, there were lots of people in the late nineteenth century who disputed that argument, who believed that race was no determinant of cultural, intellectual, or moral abilities. This trio, my personal axis of evil, did not.

But even more than being racists of that particular sort—scientific racists, as it were—these three were intent on promoting a harmful untruth about the specific way that race inflected morals. That argument, of course, was that men of African descent, freed from the fetters of slavery, had become insatiable rapists, and that it was this very epidemic of rape that called forth the chivalrous activity of lynchers. What is striking about this untruth is not only that it was statistically false (and they knew it to be false because they were familiar with the data published in mainstream venues). Newspapers reporting on lynchings, newspapers like the Chicago Tribune that began in 1882 annually tabulating lynchings by region, state, and alleged instigating crime, had shown that lynchers themselves alleged rape as the cause of lynching in a minority of cases (somewhere around 25 percent). Remember, these are allegations made by mobs intent on murder—not charges issued by legal and police forces. Yet even those frenzied mobs in their frenzied acts were more discriminating than their apologists, who argued, again and again, over and over, that lynchings were performed to punish rapes and prevent future rapes of white women. Rebecca Latimer Felton, for instance, who was a populist racist in 1899, and who became the first woman to serve in the United States Senate in 1922, had issued a proclamation claiming that if it took lynching to protect white women from rape, then let them lynch a thousand a week if necessary. Graves, Page, and Dixon never reached that apogee of rhetoric, but they shared Felton’s belief and always implicitly, sometimes explicitly, urged their readers to follow Felton’s exhortation.

Rather, what struck me was how convoluted their arguments had to become in order to stretch the facts to fit into their preconceived beliefs. After all, interracial rape as a crime on American soil had been pretty one-sided. Anyone even superficially familiar with the history of slavery in the Americas knows the extent to which masters consistently and with impunity raped the enslaved women on their plantations and on the plantations of their neighbors. Here, then, was a truth that these writers wanted to invert, just as the masters and their wives had inverted the truth of white masters’ raping slave women to blame slave women for inciting them to it. In both cases—proslavery ideologues who constructed the model of the black slave seductresses and the prolynching apologists who created the type of the black beast rapist—these writers simply projected what whites had done onto the blacks to whom they had done it. It was not even imaginative racism. One might respect a racist diatribe that had the virtue of novelty, but this was as tawdry in its morality as it was in its unoriginality.

Here, then, was the dilemma of the indexer. It pained and angered me to record the names of white supremacists and apologists for lynching, people who justified criminal and genocidal behavior, and have them live forever next to the names of people who deserve better, people who fought against their evil or died because of it. So, while I tried to be fair and temperate in the text of the book in my assessment of people who justified lynching, people I thought deceitful and inhumane, people I frankly despised with a bottomless hatred, I found myself feeling a resurgent anger as I dutifully placed their names next to those who represented heroic resistance or inhumane suffering. I fought the temptation to make up a faux concept, a word starting with the appropriate letter, just so that I could separate the names of the admired from the loathed. Every now and then, a legitimate way of separating them came my way, and I cheered whenever an opportune concept or name in a later chapter allowed me in good faith to keep the names of the doers of good separate from and uninfected by the purveyors of evil. These were small victories, the only kind of victories there are in the life of an indexer. In the end, indexing teaches you that the alphabet is unforgiving.

 

3.

 

The other and possibly most powerful feeling that I have had throughout the indexing is profound sadness. I should mention that it was by no means only during the process of indexing this book that I have felt sad. More than a decade of reading about the cruelty, the savagery, the inhumanity of lynching had its toll, leaving me fatigued with something akin to melancholy. The research for this study frequently left me in bad humor, and even more frequently left me dejected and despondent. For reasons I will explain below, I felt this sadness most poignantly while I was compiling a list of names of places and names of people.

As I proceeded in the relatively routine task of indexing, I began at first to highlight all the names of places where the lynchings I mention in my book occurred. In the historiography of lynching, the facts that are most important, or at least the ones that get mentioned most frequently, are the names of the victims, and the site and the date of the lynching. In this sense, lynchings, like any historical event, are identified by where and when they happened. The “when” requires little commentary; it is a date, and acts like any historical date—to identify the exact moment when the event took place. The name of the place where the event took place is also pretty clear. Traditionally, those who have worked to identify lynchings have used either the names of cities, when lynchings took place in or on the outlying borders of cities, or the names of counties, when the lynchings were more rural and not in the vicinity of an identifiable urban space.

At some point in the indexing, I began to reconsider whether it made sense to index all the place-names in my book. I did not want an index that was unwieldy or disproportionate to the book. As I was deciding whether to continue highlighting and indexing city and county names, I began to think about what these place-names mean for the event with which they are associated. For the victim, it is not the place of birth or home, the usual markers for a historical personage, but only the place where his or her life ended. For those who ended that life, the place-name is home or close enough to home, and the place where they performed a murder. There is a difference, though. Unlike places where a simple murder happened, these are sites of a collective act, the action of a mob that, according to some of the most influential historians of lynching, necessarily has the support of the community behind it. These are cities or counties that countenanced what was performed on their land and what was done in their name. We don’t generally think of indicting a place where a murder occurs, since a murder can occur anywhere and it is not representative of the place it happens. That is frequently a matter of accident. A lynching, though, has usually brought opprobrium on the town or county where it happened, because people believe, with some reason, that the lynching had the sanction of the mob gathered from that community to perform it.

So the name of a lynching site—Paris, Texas, in 1893, Newnan, Georgia, in 1899, Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in 1911, Marietta, Georgia, in 1915, Waco, Texas, in 1916—for some of us has come to represent something more sinister. Those are places that now become associated with what happened on that land. It would be odd to find someone of my generation who was not moved by the mention of particular places—Dachau, Hiroshima, My Lai, for example—to think of the horrors that occurred there. Those are now names that do not just connote the terrible things humans can do to each other; they are names that are now primarily indicators of horrors, and only secondarily actual places, for most of us with any kind of historical memory.

These are names that have become tainted by historical associations. In these cases, it is not just that many died at that place, but rather that there was something startling, revealing, in the ways they died. In the first case, they died in a drawn-out, extended, and systematic fashion that demonstrated what genocide was and how the whole world was implicated in it. In the second, they died in a single moment that showed what horrible technology humans could create and use against other humans. Here we saw a mass of people die in a single moment in a way that was, and should remain, inconceivable. In the last, we learned about how innocent villagers died in what we comforted ourselves by calling a “war crime” in order to avoid confronting what brutality in any war exacts on the victims and the people whom war and training and opportunity have made inhumane purveyors of violence.

I brought that sensitivity to place-names—that reflex action of investing meaning into what happened in a particular site—to my research, and researching the history of lynching has tried that sensitivity. Let me offer two personal anecdotes as examples.

One beautiful spring day, I took a break from writing the book and went for a long walk with my almost two-year-old son from our neighborhood to downtown New Haven, about a thirty-minute walk pushing the stroller. As I was waiting at an intersection, a large truck-trailer pulled up at the lights. For no reason at all, other than a compulsion I cannot easily control, I tend to read the information written on the side of truck-trailer cabs, information concerning the gross vehicle weight (GVW) or combined gross vehicle weight (CGW) of the truck and the place the truck is licensed—its home, as it were. This particular truck’s home happened to be Marion, Indiana. Had it been another Indiana city, I might have mused on what kinds of commodities were traveling to or from Connecticut and Indiana. But this particular name happened to be the name of the city where a notorious 1931 lynching took place, and the subject of that very morning’s writing session (index: 17, 60–94, 160). The beauty of the day, the pleasure of the walk, everything but the continued delight in being with my son, was in a moment lost and became as colorless as the black-and-white photograph of that lynching.

The second anecdote is similar. I compiled the index to my lynching book while I was on a sabbatical in the South of France (a fact that may temper a lot of what I have written). About halfway through the year, I began to make the preliminary arrangements for our return. That subject of ending a sabbatical and leaving France, with its quite different nostalgia, anger, and sadness (or should I say nostalgie, colère, et tristesse), belongs to a different essay. As I was exploring how to travel with the least amount of luggage, including bags freighted with heavy books, I consulted a website for a British company that specialized in transporting luggage internationally. As I was entering the information on the website to get a quote, I encountered a scrolling window with a list of American city names for me to identify the one to which I wanted my luggage shipped. The first name on that list was Abbeville, South Carolina. This city’s preeminence on the scrolling list, like my index, is an accident of the alphabet. But this city, to me, represents a particular lynching, which I briefly discuss in my book (index: 47, 48–49, 55).

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.