Brambleman (12 page)

Later that afternoon, Charlie took the kids
to a nearby park, returning just before dusk. When he walked in the
door and saw the black marks on the wall behind the new plasma
screen TV Kathleen had bought on New Year’s Day, he realized he
needed to clean up the evidence of divine rebooting before his wife
arrived. He scrubbed off the last soot marks just before Susan
pulled into the driveway and parked behind the van.

When Kathleen answered the door, Charlie
could see that Susan was quite pleased, perhaps even smugly so, to
see how old his employer was. Beck interrupted introductions to
announce: “Daddy lives with rats. And not the pretty kind either,
like in Mrs. Coppins’ classroom.”

A look of alarm crossed Susan’s face.

“There might be a mouse in the house,”
Charlie admitted.

“It was a rat,” Beck insisted. “Big big.”

Susan shuddered and said, “I’ve got to see
this place for myself.” First, Charlie showed her his new office.
(He’d pulled down Momo’s picture since he couldn’t stand to look at
the ugly bastard.) Susan gave a cursory glance at page 758 of the
manuscript but said nothing. Then again, he’d told her nothing
about the book, not even its title. (She hadn’t asked about it,
either.) When they went downstairs, she laughed, unwilling or
unable to conceal her scorn. “You weren’t kidding. It
is
a
dungeon. How can you live here?”

“Beats the alternative.”

“What does that mean?”

“The street.”

Susan rolled her eyes. “You think
that’s
the alternative? You’re crazy.”

“It smells bad, too,” Ben said, standing
behind Charlie, holding his nose. “I think there are monsters here.
They stink with all their might.”

“They’re rats, stinky rats!” Beck shouted
down from the kitchen, not daring to venture closer.

Susan groaned in distaste and tromped back
upstairs. “You’re going to have to get rid of the rats before the
kids come over here again,” she called out from the top step. “If
ever.”

He frowned. “Don’t worry. I’ll put out
traps.”

Shortly after that, Susan bundled up the kids
and everyone said goodbye. Charlie stood on the porch and watched
the Camry disappear.

“You have a beautiful family,” Kathleen said
when he came back inside. “I hope everything works out. There are
too many divorces these days. ’Til death do you part. That’s the
way to do it.”

“We’ll see,” said Charlie, feeling
downhearted. It was difficult and terrible to see his family drive
away. After being with them constantly for their entire lives, he
realized he might not be emotionally equipped to handle his
children’s constant departures. But what choice was there? He had
to do what he had to do.

He returned to the manuscript and spent
several hours banging his head against the wall of the past, which
beat the hell out of thinking about the present. That night, he
finished copying the entire book to his hard drive. By then, his
brain had turned to mush. He stumbled downstairs, kicked off his
shoes, turned off the dangling bulb, and slipped into his sleeping
bag. He heard a squeak and made a mental note:
Buy traps in the
morning
.

When Charlie finished reading Talton’s
1,087-page manuscript, he knew more than anyone else alive about
what had happened in Forsyth County nearly a century ago. The
nugget of Dr. Talton’s
magnum opus
was buried deep inside
myriad observations and countless facts, starting with the
weathering of the Blue Ridge Mountains, winding along the Trail of
Tears, and ending at a hateful, crudely lettered sign at the county
line.

The incident that originally sparked
Forsyth’s madness was an event of questionable authenticity: an
alleged “outrage” against a white woman near Deep Creek, five miles
north of Cumming, the county seat. On the night of Thursday,
September 5, 1912, the unnamed victim (first identified as a
farmer’s wife, then as a young woman living with her mother) awoke
to find a black man in her bed, so the story went. “Imagine her
surprise!” Talton wrote. “Like
Casablanca
’s gendarme, she
was shocked, SHOCKED, at this occurrence!” More likely, the
professor suggested, she was caught in bed with a black man and
cried
Rape
! to save her honor, which, to white folks, was
infinitely more precious than a black man’s life, especially in
Georgia, the state responsible for half the nation’s lynchings that
year.

The man and his rumored accomplice (whose
existence was debatable) were frightened by the woman’s screams and
ran off. Almost immediately, posses formed and combed the area for
suspects. While Talton’s account was prosaic, Charlie’s
espresso-fueled reading allowed him to see vigilantes whipping
galloping horses through the night, accompanied by silent-movie
chase music.

Meanwhile, a man variously identified as the
victim’s father or husband rode into the sleepy town of Cumming,
population 813, and tried to stir up a mob, failing only because
there was no suspect. Lynching prospects improved the next day
after two black men were arrested. One, a field hand named Ronnie
Harris, immediately confessed, according to the nearby Gainesville
newspaper. Such “confessions” often came after torture, beatings,
and threats of lynching coupled with a lack of legal representation
for the accused. Then again, the newspaper could have fabricated
the claim. Nothing increased circulation like the terror
threat/morality play of black-on-white rape, not to mention the
resultant mob activity. “In 1912 Georgia,” Talton noted, “black
suspects were lucky if they were considered innocent until proven
arrested.”

While Harris was presumed guilty, he had
supporters among Forsyth’s 1,159 blacks—ten percent of the county’s
population. At noon on Saturday, September 7, a stocky, bald black
Baptist preacher named Lincoln Roberts stood in the dusty street
outside the courthouse where Harris was jailed. Roberts, born
shortly after the Civil War, had lived in Forsyth County all his
life and claimed to know the parties involved, none of whom were
Ronnie Harris. Declaring that the prisoner had been unjustly
accused, Roberts called for Harris’s release. A crowd of black
workers, sharecroppers, and farmers gathered around him. There was
no rape or attempted rape, Roberts stated, but simply consensual
sex. “The woman’s affection for her black paramour was so great she
refused to name the man who slipped from her bed and out the
window!” Roberts shouted.

The white press would later denounce and
condense his speech, stating, “The insolent Negro made remarks
about the woman’s character.” Claiming that a white woman would
willingly have anything to do with a black man carried the death
penalty by mob back then, of course, so Roberts’s “insolence” was
cut short when a dozen whites broke through the crowd and roughly
seized him. Several drew pistols and pointed them at his head. He
was forced to kneel. A man uncoiled a horsewhip and laid into the
preacher, lashing through his coat and cutting strips of flesh.
Roberts tried to run, but he was clubbed with a pistol butt and
knocked down in the dirt. The whipping continued, along with
beating and kicking.

Eventually, Sheriff J.A. Wright and deputies
emerged from the courthouse to arrest the half-dead Roberts. As
they dragged off the preacher, a growing white mob called for his
lynching. Wright would later explain that he’d arrested Roberts to
save him. It’s worth noting that none of Roberts’s assailants were
charged in the assault. “A white man’s right to beat a nigger is
the cornerstone of Georgia law,” State Sen. Preston Standers
proclaimed in 1910, and nothing had changed in the two years
since.

The preacher’s arrest did not calm things
down. In the collective white mind, a black conspiracy to commit
outrages against white women grew and festered. Four other blacks
were arrested on the rather vague charge of “suspicion,” also a
lynching offense, though one that was used mainly to fill county
chain gangs for road work. (The state’s infamous convict-lease
system had been abolished in 1908.) Word of Roberts’s beating
spread, angering local blacks who believed he had been attacked for
telling an unpleasant truth. Apparently,
everyone
knew this
woman.

By this time, Atlanta papers were covering
the story, adding fuel to the fire—as they did in 1906, when false
reports of black-on-white crime helped spark the Atlanta Riot.
Whites responded by threatening mass lynchings. Rebecca Felton, a
populist race-baiter, summed up white feelings succinctly when she
said, “If it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession
from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a
week.”

While reports of black insurrection turned
out to be false, feverish whites made good on their threat to form
mobs. Word of Harris’s confession brought armed whites cascading
from the hills. By Saturday afternoon, hundreds surrounded the
courthouse. As a barrel-chested, red-headed farmer in work clothes
waved a hangman’s noose in the air, the crowd called for Wright to
deliver Roberts and Harris to “justice”—meaning them, of course.
The sheriff refused; the mob tested his mettle. A hundred men
rushed the building. Wright fired a single warning shot. The crowd
fell back after this massive display of firepower but didn’t
disperse. A chant arose: “Burn ’er down! Burn ’er down!” In a
footnote, Talton wrote: “Courthouse arson is a proud Forsyth County
tradition.”

Following a series of frantic phone calls
between the mayor of Cumming, Sheriff Wright, and Gov. Joseph M.
Brown in Atlanta, martial law was declared in Forsyth. Brown, the
son of Georgia’s Civil War governor (and who would later
participate in the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank), ordered militia
units from Marietta and Gainesville to quell the riots that
threatened to tear apart the rural county. Thirty heavily armed
troops from Gainesville were quickly dispatched to Cumming,
arriving late Saturday afternoon. That night, under tight security,
the sheriff moved Roberts and Harris—“the cause of all this
trouble,” according to the
Atlanta Citizen
—to the Marietta
jail in Cobb County, thirty miles away.

Wright hoped his actions would defuse
tensions, but outrage among poor whites kept growing, fueled by
long-standing antagonisms toward blacks. Not surprisingly, there
was a run on rifles and ammunition at Whitsitt’s General Store.
Heavily armed whites milled about Cumming looking for insolent
Negroes and breaking the windows of black-owned houses, since home
ownership was the surest sign of uppityness. Sensing trouble
settling over the town like an oppressive fog, black families
packed their belongings into horse- and mule-drawn wagons. The most
prescient of them were halfway to Gainesville or Atlanta by Sunday
morning, when newspapers published stories reporting that Negroes
were plotting to blow up Cumming with dynamite in retaliation for
the attack on Roberts.

In Cumming, as cocks crowed and cattle lowed
in pastures, armed whites who’d slept in wagon beds with rifles
woke with empty whiskey bottles beside them and faced the ugly
truth of a new day: There was no one to lynch and only church to
attend. For the moment, all was quiet. But that wouldn’t last.
“Violence begets violence,” Talton wrote, “and the mob’s darkest
desires and prayers to an angry God would soon be answered.”

Around ten o’clock Sunday morning,
nineteen-year-old Martha Jean Rankin skipped off the front porch of
her father’s home in Oscarville in north Forsyth. A pretty girl
with long brown hair, she wore a lacy white dress as she hiked past
a fenced field of tall, ripening corn on her way to her aunt’s
house, where her two little sisters had spent the night. She was
supposed to take them to church, but before she reached her
destination, she ran into Bernie Dent, an employee of a neighboring
farm. She knew Dent slightly, though she would not likely have
wanted to stop and chat. He was black, scrawny, deformed, and
walked with a limp. “There are no photos extant of Dent,” Talton
wrote, “but newspapers called him ‘a barefoot, country Negro,’ as
well as ‘brutish, low-browed, and apelike.’”

By all accounts, he attacked her. She tried
to fight him off. He dragged her off the path into the woods, where
he grabbed a rock and struck her repeatedly on the head with it.
Then he raped her and left her for dead. Later that day, he told
some friends what he’d done and asked them to help get rid of the
body. After dark, he returned to the crime scene with his
half-brother, Thomas Oscar, Thomas’s sister Jane, and a friend
named Ted Galent. They found Martha Jean still alive, lying in a
pool of her own blood. As Jane held a torch aloft, Oscar and Dent
took turns raping Martha Jean. When they finished, they left her
there, apparently having forgotten the original purpose of their
trip.

After a night of frantic searching, Martha
Jean’s distraught father found her clinging to life Monday morning.
He swept her up in his arms and stumbled back to his house. Two
local doctors were summoned to her bedside, but it was too late.
She was in an irreversible coma, though that evening’s Gainesville
newspaper reported she had named her attackers and would recover.
(This was most likely a calculated piece of misinformation intended
to help force a confession.)

When Martha Jean died late Monday afternoon,
Dent was already in custody. A hand mirror at the crime scene was
traced through a local store after a clerk recalled selling one
like it on Saturday to Dent. Threatened with lynching if he did not
confess, the slow-witted man quickly admitted to the crime. He was
taken to Cumming, then whisked to the larger town of Gainesville
before angry whites could re-form a mob to overwhelm the small
company of troops ringing the courthouse.