Now when I ponder the silences, the voices that are not heard, the voices of those wounded and/or oppressed individuals who do not speak or write, I contemplate the acts of persecution, torture--the terrorism that breaks spirits, that makes creativity impossible. (hooks 7-8)
it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive(Lorde, lines 42-43)
THE STORY OF MARY TURNER, KILLED IN ONE OF THE MOST BRUTAL ACTS OF mob violence on record, maps the boundaries of what can, and cannot, be said about lynching. Nineteen years old and eight months pregnant, Turner died during a May 1918 rampage that followed a white farmer's murder in Brooks County, Georgia, and claimed the lives of at least eleven African Americans. A mob went after Turner because she threatened to press charges against the men who lynched her husband Hayes. Before a crowd of several hundred, the same men hanged her upside down, shot her, set her on fire, then removed her fetus and crushed it beneath their boots. One newspaper justified the mob's actions by saying that "the people in their indignant mood took exceptions to her remarks as well as her attitude" ("Her Talk Enraged Them" 2). Writing a few years later, an editor from another paper described her as a "she bear" who deserved to be lynched because she "flew into such a rage and uttered such vile curses upon the women of Brooks County" ("Justice" 2). After permanently silencing Turner for speaking out, the well-connected mob members began broader efforts at damage control. They threatened the lives and families of anyone who tried to cooperate with Walter White's late June investigation for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). By the year's end, all attempts to prosecute failed, even though state and national officials had a list of ringleaders' names. (1) At some point, relevant issues of the Valdosta Times (now the Valdosta Daily Times), the largest of the local papers, disappeared in a mysterious fire. Enforcing a code of silence did not prove too difficult in an area eager to distance itself from a horrific act that many community members found unspeakable. Even today, finding local information about the 1918 lynchings is next to impossible. White residents, even celebrated community historians, claim no knowledge at all. A limited oral history exists among black residents, but few who know the story will talk about it. As one journalist said off record, "it's not the kind of thing you tell the children." His words echo Toni Morrison's in Beloved: "This is not a story to pass on" (275). (2)
The story did get passed on, however--well beyond the local area. News of what happened in Brooks County circulated quickly along national and international wires, prompting an outcry from the black press and civic groups. Organizations from the Anti-Lynching Crusaders to the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) cited Turner's story in their antilynching pamphlets and other materials. (3) The NAACP used Walter White's findings to persuade President Woodrow Wilson and Georgia's Governor Hugh M. Dorsey to make statements against mob violence. (4) White's published version of his investigative report--"The Work of a Mob," later revised for Rope and Faggot: A Biography of fudge Lynch--remains a key historical document. Turner's story also inspired a host of creative responses: Meta Warrick Fuller's sculpture, In Memory of Mary Turner: As a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence (1919); Angelina Weld Grimke's short story, "Goldie" (1920); Carrie Williams Clifford's poem, "Little Mother," from her collection The Widening Light (1922); Anne Spencer's poem, "White Things" (1923); and the "Kabnis" section of lean Toomer's modernist classic, Cane (1923). The notoriety of Turner's lynching has never waned completely. References continue to appear in creative works by Freida High Tesfagiorgis, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, and Kara Walker, in Internet discussion groups, and on YouTube. (5) A graphic, and powerfully contextualized, public commemoration can be found in Baltimore, Maryland's Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Although Turner's story elicits a visceral response, it has compelled artists and activists over the years for reasons that go beyond its gruesome details. During the 1920s, the story offered an effective tool for countering traditional justifications of lynching. What happened in Brooks County had less to do with white men punishing black men for raping white women than it did with using terrorist tactics to keep black populations under control. More recent audiences, in turn, have found Turner's story to be a painful reminder of the violence committed against African Americans, women in particular, that too long remained a hidden transcript of national history.
On the surface, the story offers a simple equation between silence and voice: locals shut up and outsiders spoke out. But that equation becomes more complex when one examines the creative response to Turner's death. Artists and writers found that Turner's disruption of the conventional lynching narrative also undermined their own attempts to shape and make meaning from her tragic story. The mob murder of a pregnant woman and her near-term fetus lay beyond language, beyond sense. Jean Toomer dramatizes the difficulties of imaginatively rendering this story through his character Kabnis. After hearing the tale of Mame Lamkins, a pregnant woman lynched for defending her husband, Kabnis finds that her image overwhelms his ability to write poetry. He describes his aborted artistic vision using terms that recall the grisly violence committed against Mary Turner: "Th form thats burned int my soul," he says, "is some twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare, and it wont stay unless I feed it. An it lives on words. Not beautiful words. God Almighty no. Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words" (111). Kabnis has trouble finding the right words, especially the right artistic language, to articulate his experience. The opposite was true for Kabnis's creator Toomer. Cane testifies to the triumphs, as well as the failures, of human spirit that Toomer found when he traveled to Jim Crow Georgia in 1921. The book's poems and sketches record an abiding beauty that Kabnis found impossible to reconcile with the crushing ugliness--the "hog pens and chicken yards," "dirty red mud," "stinking outhouses," "lynchers and business men"--that he saw around him (85). Toomer succeeds where his character fails, but "Kabnis," Canals final section, is not necessarily meant to record that victory. It documents instead how hard the artist must fight to find a voice adequate for overcoming the silencing power of oppressive violence.
Kabnis's fictional struggle was a very real one for the women who responded imaginatively to Turner's lynching in the 1920s. Turner's death offered Fuller, Grimke, Clifford, and Spencer a powerful lesson about what happens to black women who talk back, one they could not dismiss no matter how hard they tried. While these women used Turner's story as a vehicle for speaking out against lynching, their works also reveal anxieties they had about the act of speaking out. In Clifford's "Little Mother" and Spencer's "White Things," a silence prevails that is uncharacteristic of these normally forthright authors. Clifford's little mother can only tremble helplessly as she awaits her fate. In Spencer's poem, even God himself has no answer to the mob's destructive violence and blasphemous oaths. Fuller and Grimke, also close friends and correspondents, offer moving, detailed archival evidence of their struggles in addition to conflicted texts. (6) Fuller never completed the sculpture that she subtitled "a silent protest," and Grimke rewrote her own story compulsively trying to figure out what to say about talking back. Although scholars of mob violence are well versed in Mary Turner's story and familiar with the response that it generated, little analysis of the creative works exists. (7) The oversight is significant. Turner is most often invoked to signal the depths of horror and injustice, but her story has a second part: namely, a long trajectory of resistance that extends from her initial act of protest, through the resulting antilynching activism, to the art and literature that continue to bear witness to America's history of racial and sexual violence. This difference in emphasis--whether one focuses on incident or response--tends to be a disciplinary issue. Historians and social scientists want to know how a particular case sheds light upon the larger phenomenon of lynching. Scholars of art and literature, as Jacqueline Goldsby points out, do not separate phenomenon from discourse, the "what is known" from the "how one knows it" (8). (8) Moreover, Goldsby continues, the various attempts to render an incident open up new ways of knowing "that conventional histories might not allow or encourage" (34). The activist and creative responses to Mary Turner's lynching, especially those of black women, reveals a complicated relationship to resistance. Following Goldsby's lead, I ask what texts like Fuller's and Grimke's can teach that the historical accounts cannot.
Conventional wisdom on black women's antilynching activism suggests that women had more leeway for speaking out than men--a statement that is true only to a certain extent. Fitzhugh Brundage, in "The Roar on the Other Side of Silence," says that while black women often paid a price for speaking out, whites were more willing to tolerate "blatant protests by black women that would have drawn very severe penalties had they been made by black men" (280). Drawing upon the work of Brundage and others, Adam Gussow shows how blues women could express their anger more directly than blues men could. Specifically citing Mamie Smith's "Shoot Myself a Cop," Gussow states, "sentiments that might have struck contemporary white listeners as insurrectionary if recorded by a black man could be dismissed as allowable hysteria coming from a black woman," especially one whose brain is addled, as it is in this song, by drugs (164). While I do not necessarily disagree with Brundage and Gussow, I point out that black women's protests, especially in their cultural productions, could be problematic. Their responses, as I argue below, were highly mediated by issues of race, class, and gender. Mamie Smith, because of her gender and perceived lower class status, could be passed off as an hysteric and thus have more leeway for expressing anger and pain than a man, or elite women like Fuller and Grimke, would. Conversely, Mary Turner's story shows that a woman's hysteria posed a threat to white patriarchal order that could be contained in very violent ways. Creative women like Fuller and Grimke had very clear parameters, both internal and external, dictating what they could and could not say. Their works offer rich insights into the possibilities and limits of black women's creative response to racist violence, especially when that violence was turned against women themselves. In their imaginative renderings of Turner's lynching, these pioneering artists encountered a trail they found difficult, if not impossible, to blaze. The path they chose not to take led to graphic details about Turner's death. The one that tripped them up led to her anger and defiance. (9)
Fuller's painted plaster tribute to Turner stands fifteen inches high, twenty including a base that contains the inscription In Memory of Mary Turner: As A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence. Atop the base stands a woman looking down toward her right and cradling a baby in a sling draped around her left shoulder. The woman focuses on a group of men surrounded by flames and reaching toward her with claw-like hands. Her body turns away from the men and shields the baby from their grasp. The piece's angles and lines work together to form a curling motion--as if the mother and child rise up like smoke from the flames below them--with the folds of her skirt mirroring the tongues of flames. This mirroring effect operates in other parts of the piece too. One mob member's face parallels the woman's. His, like the other men's, resembles the mask of tragedy with its open mouth and hollow eyes. Hers bears little expression, but her baby is swaddled into a tear-drop shape. That tear-drop shape runs parallel to a mob member's arm which curves around into a fist. Like many works of antilynching art and literature, this one reverses the rhetorical grounding of pro-lynching arguments, portraying whites as evil savages that prey upon innocent blacks. Fuller's formal structure reflects that theme, clearly establishing a dichotomy of good and evil through the use of parallel planes. The piece evokes bittersweet emotions. Triumph offsets the anger and sadness called forth by its violence and effectively placed teardrop. The mother and child rise beyond the mob's grasp, and she moves from flame to smoke in a kind of apotheosis. Fuller's Mary Turner alludes to Christ's ascension to Heaven after his resurrection and signifies as well upon her subject matter's name. Christ's mother Mary had her own ascension, referred to in some religious traditions as her "Assumption," entering Heaven in body and soul after her death.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Fuller's response to Turner is path breaking, powerful, and conflicted. Phyllis Jackson notes that the piece "stands as the earliest sculptural statement by an African American to specifically address the savagery of lynch mobs" (36). Fuller's may even be the earliest work of visual art to depict a lynching at all, political cartoons aside. In Memory of Mary Turner was also somewhat of an anomaly for Fuller herself. Although the artist had earned a reputation in Paris as "the delicate sculptor of horrors" (Kerr 128), with works such as Secret Sorrow (1901, also known as Man Eating His Heart Out) and The Wretched (1902), her treatments of human suffering tended to be more symbolic than representational. Despite a comment that she made to Grimke, "It is not impossible to preach a sermon in a block of granite or a cauldron of bronze" (Letter to Grimke, 31 May 1917), Fuller saw herself primarily as an artist, not a social activist. The politically charged work that she did produce--her Negro Tableaux for the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial, The Spirit of Emancipation (1913), and her signature piece, Ethiopia Awakening (1921)--focuses on racial uplift rather than protest. (10) Her Memory of Mary Turner tries to do it all. The piece deals with a very real incident that evokes very raw emotions. Its aims are rhetorical, to revise lynching's conventional iconography with a reminder that women and children could be lynched, and allegorical, to transform an image of violent death into one of spiritual transcendence and salvation (Apel 152), but these goals seem at odds with one another. Like other works of antilynching art that use the trope of the Black Christ, Fuller's Memory of Mary Turner redeems a bit of humanity for the otherwise abject victim, but that religious imagery can also be problematic. As Ojana Whitted asks in reference to Countee Cullen's poem "The Black Christ": "Exactly what kind of redemption will be championed through the Christian martyrdom of a black lynched body and the unmerited suffering of blacks left behind?" (379). Fuller's Turner is triumphant, but only through death, not through her act of resistance--suggesting that black victims of white mobs have no redress in this world and instead must wait for justice in the next.
Fuller's title for her work hints toward tensions that were personal as well as thematic. In Memory of Mary Turner: As A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence alludes to the NAACP's Silent Protest Parade, which took place the year before Turner's lynching and achieved its power through an effective use of silence (Kerr 250-51). Participants marched to the muffled beat of a drum, not speaking themselves but carrying signs that told of brutal facts about lynching. Fuller's piece was silent in a different way, however. She worked on the Memory of Mary Turner in 1918 and 1919, and possibly again in 1931, but never cast her plaster model and rarely, if ever, had it shown. Her reasons for doing so remain unclear. The little statue meant a lot to Fuller. When her health was failing in the early 1960s, she made sure that it would be cared for after her death. (11) She was able, nearly fifty years after the fact, to recall White's description of Turner's death in "The Work of a Mob" with almost perfect detail. But as she wrote in a 1964 letter to Sylvia Dannett, who was working on a biographical sketch of the artist at the time, she never thought that her Mary Turner would be well received. Fuller feared that it might be too controversial even for sympathetic Northerners and fare worse in the Southern states that needed its message most. Another biographer, Judith Kerr, suggests that Fuller's husband Solomon may also have had some input into his wife's decision. After Meta had completed a World War I-themed work called Peace Halting the Ruthlessness of War, Kerr states, Solomon "discouraged her from creating grotesque-looking sculpture. He believed that the sight of such nightmarish work would be harmful psychologically to [their] children" (251). Although Fuller's tribute to Turner was not grotesque in appearance, the subject matter certainly was--and may indeed have been too much for Solomon and the children, not to mention Fuller herself.
From reading Kerr's biography, one senses that Meta's work in general, not just this specific piece, created tension in the Fuller household. Solomon often complained throughout their marriage that she spent too much time on her sculpture, but Meta, in turn, often complained about him. One diary entry offers a diatribe against men and housework: "Why did God in his wisdom give us work to do to keep us out of mischief and then Man come along ... and invent other work to do that would cause us to neglect God's work?" (Kerr 223-24). Like thematic conflicts in Fuller's Mary Turner piece, her personal conflicts were rooted in a religious point of view. The problem was that Fuller saw her artistic calling and her domestic role as God's work, but she had trouble finding time to do both. In a 25 May 1917 letter to Grimke, she describes childbearing in spiritual terms: "many times I have looked at him [Perry, her youngest child] and whispered that motherhood was God--in me." A week later she complained about the many obstacles that kept her from her studio: "the obstacles are not however the dear little children--I would not have any one think I held them as anything but a joy despite their mischief. I mean poor facilities and being unable to find a competent person to look after housework" (Letter to Grimke, 31 May 1917). In the years prior to writing this letter, Fuller's struggles to balance art and family had reached a head. She married Solomon in 1909, and over the next seven years gave birth to three children. Throughout much of this time she did not sculpt at a11, the drudgery of housekeeping and child rearing compounding a depression that began when a 1910 warehouse tire destroyed many of her tools and early sculptures. At the time of Mary Turner's lynching, Fuller had been sculpting again sporadically for a few years, and she was on the verge of doing the best work of her career. The story of a pregnant woman killed for transgressing race and gender boundaries no doubt touched an artist who was breaking new ground both personally and professionally, and whose feelings about motherhood were both vexed and potent. Small wonder that Fuller's tribute to Turner took the form of a woman transcending the forces that attempted to pull her down. Small wonder, too, that her tribute proved difficult to complete.
Angelina Weld Grimke was pushing her artistic limits at the same time as her friend Meta Warrick Fuller. Since her birth in 1880, Grimke had seemed destined for a life of political activism. Her family members included the famous abolitionist sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke (the latter was the poet's namesake); activists and writers Francis and Charlotte Forten Grimke; and Archibald Grimke (the poet's father), a diplomat, lawyer, and president of Washington, D.C.'s branch of the NAACP. Angelina had been writing since she was quite young and would go on to publish in some of the most important African American literary anthologies of the twentieth century. She was known for the natural imagery found in her occasional pieces, philosophical speculations, and love lyrics, but during the late 1910s and early 1920s she produced a number of works very different from that poetry in genre and theme, and much closer in line with her activist heritage. Grimke's drama and fiction from these years focused primarily on lynching. In 1916, she distinguished herself with the production of Rachel, described in its playbill as "the first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relative to the lamentable condition of millions of colored citizens in this free Republic." The play was both an early contribution to an African American theater of protest and a new direction for antilynching literature. Rachel dealt specifically with the effects of mob violence on black families, a perspective unusual for its time but one that other women writers would tuna to with increasing frequency in the 1920s. (12) Grimke pursued this topic in several different works, including "Goldie," the short story "The Closing Door" (1919), and unpublished pieces of fiction and drama.
Her lynching work immediately came under tire for its views of motherhood. Like Fuller, Grimke had strong, although very different, sentiments about domesticity. In her early twenties, she renounced childbearing, marriage, and love entirely, for reasons that remain ambiguous. Her decision may have been connected to the vexed relationship she had with her own parents, to the failure of a particular romantic relationship, or to her struggles with a desire for women that she could not express publicly. (13) Grimke's character Rachel also chooses never to have children, but for very clear reasons. After learning that her father and brother had been lynched, Rachel refuses to provide more fodder for the mob. The character's decision to forego marriage and children led some of Grimke's contemporaries to charge her with advocating racial suicide. This viewpoint was reinforced by her subsequent publication of "The Closing Door" in the Margaret Sanger-backed journal, Birth Control Review. In "The Closing Door," the protagonist, Agnes, goes one tragic step further than Rachel, smothering her newborn baby after hearing about her brother's lynching down South. Grimke countered these accusations in an article published in the Competitor explaining that her intention was quite different from what others perceived. Her audience, she said, consisted of white women, not black ones, and her goal was to encourage them to join the fight against lynching:
If anything can make all women sisters under their skins, it is motherhood. If, then, all the white women of this country could see, feel, understand just what effect their prejudice and the prejudice of their fathers, brothers, husbands, sons were having on the souls of colored mothers everywhere, and upon the mothers that are to be, a great power to effect public opinion would be set free and the battle would be half won. ("Rachel: The Hay of the Month" 414) To achieve her goal, Grimke refocused the traditional lynching narrative away from black male savages who rape innocent white ladies toward the families--drawn from what she called "the best type of colored people" (415)--left behind when their male loved ones are unjustly accused of rape and then killed. (14)
Grimke's story "Goldie," also published in the Birth Control Review, refocused her own narrative away from potential race suicide onto lynching as genocide. "Goldie" approaches the topic differently from Grimke's other lynching stories in several ways. Like Rachel and Agnes, Goldie eagerly looks forward to having children. Rather than forego motherhood because someone she loves is lynched, Goldie falls victim to lynching herself, along with her husband and her nearly full term fetus. This story also considers the impact of racist violence upon a whole community, not just within one family. Goldie's death takes place against a climate of fear following another lynching in a nearby county. As her brother Victor travels to Goldie's house, having received her urgent letter asking for help, he recalls an earlier letter describing the small Southern settlement's mood. The mob, Goldie wrote, had "threatened, terrorized, cowed all the colored people in the locality." Victor knows how easy it is to keep a population submissive. "There was absolutely no law, as he knew, to protect a colored man," he says, which is why he had left his home for the North years earlier (296). Goldie's lynching transforms these silences into action--a departure not only for the characters but also for the story's author. Grimke's earlier work on the subject dealt with characters who internalize their anger after encounters with violence. The last scene of Rachel finds its formerly vivacious heroine babbling and sobbing from emotional paralysis. Agnes, from "The Closing Door," retreats into a "stony stillness" that culminates in the killing of her own child (278). In "Goldie," resistance takes place on multiple levels. Goldie and her family die because her husband Cy defends her from the amorous advances of a local white man named Lafe Coleman. After Victor discovers the massacred family, he literally takes justice into his own hands by strangling Lafe. Victor learns Lafe's whereabouts from a woman named Aunt Phoebe, who speaks up when other black townspeople will not. Aunt Phoebe, a former slave whose husband and children were sold away from her, bears "the unforgetting heart" and, with the lynching of Goldie and the girl's family, she has finally had enough (304).
As with Fuller's In Memory of Mary Turner, however, Grimke's portrayal of resistance is problematic. Rhetorically, the story succeeds to a certain extent. "Goldie" inverts the lynching narrative to remind readers that black women find themselves beset by white men more often than black men menace white women. Goldie and her family, too, are among the "best type of colored people"--simple, honest, hardworking country folk, not the stereotypical "savages" that mob violence supposedly punished. Mob members ate this story's real savages, led by Lafe Coleman, whose stringy colorless hair, fishy grey eyes, disagreeable smell, and rotting tooth stumps clearly mark him as a white trash fiend. And Victor's act of revenge, while not legal, is certainly an understandable form of justice. What reasonable person would not be similarly motivated by the sight of "two terribly mutilated swinging bodies" and "a tiny unborn child, its head crushed in by a deliberate heel" (302). Although Victor pays for his actions, dying "as the other two had died, upon another tree" (305), his response remains in keeping with the sentiments expressed in other antilynching literature of the time. Claude McKay's celebrated sonnet of defiance, "If We Must Die" (1919), sums up reactions of men like Victor in its final couplet: "Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!" (lines 13-14). Grimke's similarly radical response, however, gets caught up in semantic confusion. Her story closes with a coda describing a mysterious road which runs through a "Creaking Forest," so named because each of its trees has at one time "borne upon it boughs a creaking victim." A "strange spell" holds the forest's violence in abeyance, but the spell threatens to break at any time--and the sea of trees "will move, rush, hurl itself heaving and swiftly together from the two sides of the road, engulfing, grinding, crushing and blotting out all in its way" (306). Grimke's allusion is to the Red Sea, which God parted in order for Moses and the Israelites to cross safely in their flight from Egyptian bondage and then closed just in time to drown the pursuing Egyptians, and the reference seems to indicate that God, like Aunt Phoebe, will only put up with racist violence for so long before reaching a breaking point. The problem is that Grimke's trees do not pulse with the anger of "the unforgetting heart"; instead, they are "made up of aH the evil in all the hearts of all the mobs that have done to death their creaking victims" (305). They form a "sea of evil," not a sea of justice, with Grimke's language indicating that they could justas easily crush more Goldies and Victors than Lafe Colemans. It is unclear whether this story's ending signals defiance or hopelessness in the face of continued lynchings.
A key to the story's complicated expression of resistance lies in the history of its composition. For almost two years, Grimke took her Turner material through several very different versions--"The Waitin'," "Blackness," and, finally, "Goldie"--each with multiple drafts, leading some critics to describe her work as obsessive. Claudia Tate explains that the Turner lynching "so severely affected Grimke that not only did she rewrite that story over and over again, but the activity of rewriting it seems to have been more important to her than her desire to see it in print or performed" (218). Tate is partially fight. Grimke was strangely fixated on her Turner stories, but she also tried to publish at least some of her work. Letters to editors included with her submissions portray her as someone determined to see that Turner's story got told. Attached to a copy of "Blackness" that she sent to The Atlantic Monthly is an undated note that describes the lynching in detail and chastises the magazine for writing about brutality in other countries without condemning equivalent horrors in the US:
The ... lynching upon which I based my story happened in the civilized U.S.A. in the 20th Century. Was this woman, I wonder, lynched for the "usual crime?" "Can These Things Be?" [the title of the magazine article that Grimke responded to]. Even the Turks have been astounded at the brutality and the ruthlessness of the lynching in this country. Where are these lynchings leading the U.S.A.? In what will they end? (Herron 417-18)
The letters that Grimke wrote to Birth Control Review in conjunction with "Goldie" do not survive, but a response from editor Mary Knoblauch acknowledges that she does indeed "know the horrible story of Mary Tumer. Of all the crimes with which our history is blackened, it is the most. I don't see how, as a nation, we can ever live it down" (Letter to Grimke, 13 October 1920). In another letter, Knoblauch tells Grimke that the Review's staff found "Goldie" to be so "gripping" and "powerful" that they rebuilt their November and December issues around it, running the story in two parts (Letter to Grimke, 4 October 1920). In finding a powerful voice for Mary Turner, however, Grimke had also taken that voice away. As she moved from "The Waitin'," through "Blackness," and then to "Goldie," Grimke whittled her female character down from one that was not only gripping but also exceptional for the fiction of her day.
"The Waitin'," the ur-text of "Goldie," focuses on Mary Green, a mother-to-be who begins the story as a Virgin Mary figure but becomes more like Yahweh after her husband Luke is lynched. (15) The story begins as Luke goes off to work and Mary goes about her domestic chores, which Grimke describes in ritualistic, sacred terms. Mary keeps her soon-to-be-born baby's clothes in a chest, referred to as a shrine, that she approaches only after donning a clean white apron. Prayerfully removing and caressing each garment, she reaches a place of transcendence: "A stillness wonderful and white came to her there, touched her, enclosed her, folded her about. Perhaps she talked with God. Who knows? The annunciation comes to dark mothers-to-be as well as light" (14). After Luke is lynched later that day for striking his white employer Mr. Smith, who had insulted Mary's honor, this "virgin" mother becomes a changed woman. Unlike Rachel and Agnes, who turn their anger inward, Mary clearly directs hers outward at the appropriate target, Mr. Smith. And unlike the Mary of this story's first part, this one is no passive recipient of annunciation. She is instead an active vehicle for divine judgment and wrath. Mary confronts Mr. Smith with his crime, fixing him with menacing eyes and a pointed finger, and commanding him to listen to all she has to say. Grimke describes the scene using the language of rebellion as well as religion:
There was a dignity upon her, a power that was no gainsaying, a beauty that was terrifying. She had stepped, as it were, out of her despised, downtrodden race, cowed into a seeming submission by years upon years of agonizing fears, terrible sufferings, revolting horrifying atrocities. She had stepped out of herself as well, out of the little, insignificant, unprotected Mary Green. All was sloughed off. The shining of the Old Testament God was on her. She was the flaming sword--justice incarnate, terrible, and implacable. And Mr. Smith knew it. (37)
The new Mary Green, transformed into "the flaming sword" of justice, cuts down Mr. Smith with both her words and her hands. First she enumerates his crimes, then curses him, and finally gives him a taste of his fate. For the rest of his days, no matter what he does, Mary says, he will hear the continuous "creakin', creakin', creakin' ob a rope" (38). Just when Mr. Smith thinks she is through speaking and moves as if to attack her, Mary springs upon him and strangles him, forcing him backward through her house, to the front of the cabin, and shaking him violently before throwing him down the steps. When you hear it, now you can feel it too, she tells him after he gets his bearings.
Grimke keeps to her source material in having Mary brutally lynched for threatening a representative of her town's white male power structure, but not before the author had created a black female character who was rare for the fiction of her day. (16) Rather than continue along this vein, however, Grimke shelved the piece and moved on to another. The character that eventually emerges in "Goldie" is not just different from Mary Green, she is innocent and sweet to the point of being puerile. Where Mary's domesticity is portrayed as a religious calling, Goldie's is the dream of a romantic, slightly foolish girl. Victor recalls his sister's desire for a "cunning ... little home" in the "prezact" middle of a clearing, filled with "kittens and puppies and little fluffy chickens and ducks and little birds in [her] trees" (288-90). The word "little," which Goldie uses to describe almost everything she loves in life, also offers a point of comparison between her and the physically imposing Mary Green. This diminution is carried even further by Victor's memory of Goldie as more puppy than sister. She is the "little, loyal, big-hearted Goldie" whose hands are described more than once as "little gold paws" (284-87). Although this characterization of Goldie seems deliberately calculated to create a sentimental tone that makes her lynching seem even more striking and tragic, by the time the maternal figure travels from the initial draft of "The Waitin'" to the published story, "Goldie," she has lost all sense of voice. Mary forces Mr. Smith to listen while she documents his guilt step by step, but Goldie speaks only through the memory of her older brother and never for herself. When she is lynched, it is not later, after she protests her husband's death, but alongside him, after he defends her from Lafe Coleman's advances. Goldie does at least mark an advance over the female victim of "Blackness" (the second of Grimke's three completed attempts at the Turner material). That character never speaks, even through memory. But in terms of male protagonists, "Goldie" again retreats from a more powerful start. In "Blackness," Grimke develops a new character that becomes the prototype for Victor. Unlike Victor, however, the unnamed hero of "Blackness" murders the man responsible for lynching a woman he loves, escapes successful]y, and is never heard from again.
Grimke's advances and retreats in these stories were typical of her work, although there is no critical consensus for viewing them. David A. Hedrich Hirsch and Erika Miller find "Blackness" and "Goldie" to be in keeping with an outspoken antilynching agenda that Grimke began to articulate in Rachel. According to Hirsch, "'Blackness' seeks to substantiate and give voice to African Americans silenced by the historical narratives of a dominant discourse" (459), and Miller finds "Goldie" to be "even bolder in its revolutionary assertions by portending a black uprising against lynching" (96). Both Gloria Hull and Carolivia Herron, conversely, fit "Blackness" and "Goldie" into a larger trajectory of self-censorship that they find in Grimke's work. Hull's defining study of Grimke reveals an author who never could say what she really wanted to say. In particular, Grimke masked her feelings for women in her published poems, while her drafts and unpublished pieces remain much more open about the objects of her desire. Herron finds a similarity between the author's poems on love and those on race, in that she tamed her more radical thoughts for publication. In one example, she compares an unpublished draft of a poem that makes a definitive statement--"Beware When He Awakes"--to the version that appeared in print, which moves to the suppositional, and strangely ungrammatical, "Beware Lest He Awakes" (a line that is not a typographical error, for it gets repeated several times). Here, as in "Goldie," Grimke falls into tortured syntax when speaking openly of resistance. When she was not editing her language, she was toning down her characters. Herron argues that the author transformed the successfully vengeful protagonist of "Blackness" into Victor, who gets revenge but is hardly victorious, because the largely white readership of journals such as Birth Control Review would find the latter character more palatable. The Review's staff was able to wax sentimental over the deaths of innocent black people but not quite ready to cheer on an active, even deadly, black defiance.
It was one thing to use Mary Turner's story as antilynching rhetoric, but turning it into art was quite another. Turner's story offered activists multiple possibilities for countering pro-lynching narratives. A black woman was brutally killed, not for committing the "usual crime" but for seeking to punish the men who lynched her husband. Mob members, with considerable glee, had removed and crushed her eight-month fetus. A community, then a state, and even the nation did nothing to punish her murderers. Few incidents so clearly demonstrate the shortcomings of American notions about justice. Laying bare the facts of this case allowed groups like the NAACP, the CIC, and the Anti-Lynching Crusaders to make a strategic strike in what James Weldon Johnson called the battle to save "black America's body and white America's soul" (White, Rope and Faggot 33). Working with this difficult material was no doubt an emotional struggle for activists as well as artists. The former, however, did not confront the same kinds of imaginative stretches as the latter did. Activists used the Turner material as a means of shocking their audiences into action. Their investigative reports, magazine articles, and pamphlets tell the story in a relatively straightforward, sickeningly frank way to help them accomplish the job they set out to do. When the Anti-Lynching Crusaders wanted to raise a dollar each from a million women to help support passage of the 1922 Dyer Bill (which would have made lynching a federal crime), they needed to demonstrate that mob violence was not just a man's problem. Consider some facts, their fundraising brochure implores, as it turns to a fist of incidents in which women were lynched. Mary Turner is their first, attention-getting example. When writing to Woodrow Wilson, John Shillady highlights, through Turner, the vicious nature of lynching as he moves through a list of eleven reasons why the President should speak to the problem. Turner's story easily lent itself to these types of antilynching activism, but shaping it into metaphor proved difficult for artists. The story not only disrupted the conventional narratives and images that supported lynching, it also fell outside most forms of representation that were available at the time. Antilynching artists, black women especially, found that Turner's story pressed the limits of meaning. Meta Warrick Fuller was building her reputation as the premier sculptor of racial uplift when she began In Memory of Mary Turner. The piece challenged the ability to transform tragedy into transcendence that she had demonstrated in previous works. Angelina Weld Grimke was taking lynching protest literature in new directions when she stalled on the path that would lead to "Goldie," in which she could not articulate publicly the voice of defiance she let loose in private.
Both women's problems with their Turner projects were in some ways personal. The story of a pregnant woman killed for talking back both compelled them to create and exposed the fault fines of conflicts they felt as artists and women. Their problems were also symptomatic of their larger cultural milieu. Multiple scholars of women's history and language have demonstrated that the struggle between silence and voice was a defining characteristic for the women of Fuller and Grimke's generation. Like men who operated under the shadow of the "black beast rapist," whose invocation was a ready invitation to form a lynch mob, black women faced pervasive stereotypes about their aggressive sexuality that white men used to justify rape and abuse. As a weapon against physical and sexual violence, black women developed what Darlene Clark Hine calls a "culture of dissemblance," which allowed them to give "the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors" (912). Simply put, black women hid their true emotions in order to make their persons invisible. Women like Scarlett O'Hara's Mammy, who sugar-coated everything--including their anger--with a happy-go-lucky smile, could operate with relative social freedom. Women like Mary Turner, who did not, could pay a deadly price. In contrast to Turner, women of Fuller and Grimke's economic and social status also had the values of middle-class respectability at their disposal. Building upon Hine's work, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has explored the ways in which the "politics of respectability" offered women "an oppositional space in which to protest vigorously social injustice" (186-87). Both Fuller and Grimke worked within that space when casting their responses to Turner's lynching. Grimke situated Goldie, as she did similar characters, among "the best type of colored people," in order to show just how far mob law actually reached. She likewise relied upon images of motherhood to create what Higginbotham calls a "bridge discourse," like the politics of respectability, to mediate "relations between black and white reformers" (197). Fuller was no different. Her Mary Turner is no "she bear" but a carefully coiffed, modestly dressed, and very tender mother.
The oppositional space of respectability, however, could also imprison. Describing the tools that nineteenth-century writers used to speak out against injustice (and, coincidentally, drawing several examples from the work of Grimke's great-aunts, Sarah and Angelina), Linda Grasso explains that neither black nor white women could rely upon the same rhetoric of righteous anger that white men relied on, because women's anger was perceived as a social threat. Women, "supposedly the custodians of peace, love, and family harmony," had to assume a less aggressive stance: writing in genteel, female-gendered styles, and "figuring themselves as instruments of divine justice, human enforcers of God's righteousness" (42-43). Conditions for women artists had begun to improve by the 1920s, but Fuller and Grimke faced a set of issues not too far removed from those of their foremothers. Hazel Carby describes how writers of the woman's era increasingly saw their art as inseparable from the act of speaking truth to power. But, as Carby also notes, one does not have to look much further than Ida B. Wells to see how black women "who refused to adopt the 'ladylike' attitudes of compromise and silence" could be marginalized (109). Defiance deflected through righteousness is a primary strategy for Grimke and Fuller. In Grimke's stories, both Mary Green and Aunt Phoebe ate angry, but their anger also manifests itself as something divinely inspired. Mary Green sloughs off her former self to become "the flaming sword" of "justice incarnate," and Aunt Phoebe, too, is a vehicle for God's revenge: Goldie refers to the cataracts on Phoebe's eyes as "blue crowns," placed there as a sign that "she is of God's elect," a force that motivates her as much as the "unforgetting heart" (304). Fuller similarly portrayed Turner's confrontation with the mob as a battle between good and evil: the mother and child rise to Heaven while mob members sink into the fiery pits of Hell. These women's "righteous discontent," to borrow Higginbotham's term, was effective on one level. Lynching defenders considered themselves agents of the people, but antilynching activists and artists upped the ante by casting themselves as agents of God and mob victims as His sacrificial lambs. On another level, however, righteous discontent may have been the only permissible substitute for more overt expressions of human anger. Fuller and Grimke could tell Mary Turner's story only by taking her voice away, eliding her defiance in favor of her potential use as sentimental icon. They would have had a difficult time gaining sympathy for their subject if they portrayed her as a poor black woman out of control with rage, uttering vile curses upon the women in her county and threatening to press charges against the men. As middle-class black women artists in the early twentieth century, Fuller and Grimke had to distance themselves from Turner's anger and from their own emotional response.
To return to a question raised earlier, Fuller's and Grimke's works ask scholars of mob violence to consider the narratives and images that were available for framing stories like Turner's in the early twentieth century. If Goldsby's observation is true--that one cannot understand the phenomenon of lynching apart from the discourse--then one must consider how prevailing rhetorical and aesthetic norms determine any given representation and how, in turn, prevailing notions of race, class, and gender determine appropriate modes of expression. The ambivalence about speaking out that Fuller and Grimke display in their Turner responses marks them as transitional figures caught up in shifting ideas about gender, at a time when women had access to more avenues of expression but still faced old proscriptions about doing so. They were similarly caught between shifting ideas of art, with one foot in an older, more genteel, tradition and another trying to break new ground. Because Jean Toomer traveled in modernist circles that valued reflexivity, fragmentation, and the grotesque, he was able to use Turner as a vehicle for considering whether beauty can survive in an ugly world and to discuss Kabnis's artistic struggle in terms of "split-gut" words. If Fuller and Grimke had responded to Turner a decade later, their works might have drawn from the social realism that characterized the NAACP's 1935 exhibition, Ah Art Commentary on LyNching, or the fiction of Richard Wright. If they had created their works in the wake of a 1970s feminist and post-structuralist analysis, they would have used Mary Turner's story to "break the silence" about violence against women while at the same time recognizing the inadequacy of language to fully recover her history. Instead, Fuller and Grimke worked at a time when artists in general, and women in particular, were renegotiating what their forms could and could not do and which subjects were and were not taboo. Mary Turner's story, and the struggle that artists had with rendering it, teaches us that what can, or cannot, be said about lynching is always problematic, always contingent, always mediated through something else. (17)
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--. "The Roar on the Other Side of Silence." Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South. Ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. 271-91.
Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Clifford, Carrie Williams. "Little Mother." The Widening Light. 1922. The Writings of Carrie Williams Clifford and Carrie Law Morgan Figgs. Ed. P. Jane Splawn. New York: G.K. Hall, 1997. 57-58.
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Dorsey, Hugh M. A Statement from Governor Hugh M. Dorsey as to the Negro in Georgia. Atlanta: n.p., 1921.
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Fuller, Meta Warrick. In Memory of Mary Turner: As a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence. Museum of African American History, Boston, MA.
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--. Letter to Hannah Moriarta. 21 Jan. 1931. Harmon Foundation Papers. Box 45.
--. Letter to Sylvia Dannett. 10 Apr. 1964. Fuller Papers. Folder 23.
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--. Papers. Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. New York, NY.
Grasso, Linda. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002.
Goldsby, Jaequeline. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.
Grimke, Angelina Weld. "The Closing Door." Herron 252-81.
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JULIE BUCKNER ARMSTRONG
University of South Florida St. Petersburg
(1) Detailed information about the Brooks County lynchings and Walter White's subsequent investigation can be found in the NAACP Papers located at the Library of Congress and on microfilm. See Part 7: Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955, Group 1, Boxes C-353 and C-355. See especially White's "Memorandum for Governor Dorsey." White also published an account of his investigative strategies in Brooks County under the title "I Investigate Lynchings." White's NAACP supervisor at the time, James Weldon Johnson, also discusses the organization's failed prosecution attempts in his autobiography, Along This Way (333-34).
(2) I did most of the local research on this topic while working as an Assistant Professor of English at Valdosta State University, about twenty miles from where Turner was lynched. Between 1998 and 2000, I visited historical museums and public libraries in both Brooks and Lowndes Counties (Lowndes is Brooks's eastern neighbor, where spillover violence occurred in 1918), spoke to elderly residents with knowledge of local history, and occasionally knocked on doors in the areas where lynchings occurred. Most residents--but certainly not everyone I spoke to--gave me friendly encouragement, yet only a handful said they had heard the story. I did find newspaper reports available in the Brooks County Public Library, but strangely enough, the microfilm machine broke down when I tried to read them. Luckily, the University of Georgia Library's amazing collection, the Georgia Newspaper Project, had everything I needed except the missing copies of Valdosta's paper.
(3) The NAACP Papers and the Tuskegee Institute News Clippings File contain a raft of articles on Mary Turner from across the country and a few from abroad. See also the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, "A Million Women United to Stop Lynching," and the CIC, "Mob Murder in America: A Challenge to Every American Citizen" (one of several, similar CIC pamphlets on the subject).
(4) Although he did not address Brooks County specifically, Wilson issued a public condemnation of lynching in July 1918. The NAACP's efforts to persuade Wilson to make his statement operated on several levels. The organization's secretary, John Shillady, wrote to thirty to forty individual branches, asking their secretaries to write--and to encourage others to write--letters to the president (Letter to Archibald Grimke). Shillady's own letter to Wilson had a copy of White's report attached. Georgia's Governor Dorsey did not make any immediate response to Brooks County or mob violence, but he did investigate general conditions for African Americans in his state, publishing his findings in a 1921 pamphlet, A Statement from Governor Hugh M. Dorsey as to the Negro in Georgia. Dorsey scholar Robert Thurston argues that the pamphlet was a direct result of White's memorandum to the governor about the Brooks County lynchings.
(5) Tesfagiorgis's painting Hidden Memories remains in the artist's possession but is discussed in Henkes 113. Jeffers's poem, "dirty south moon," directly engages Turner's lynching. An earlier short story by Jeffers, "If You Get There Before I Do," mentions the incident within a larger constellation of stories about the past that drive her narrator to a suicide attempt. One of Kara Walker's notebooks from 1997, displayed and published as Do You lake Creme in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk?, contains several relevant images: a male "cracker" crushing a baby's head under his boot, a pregnant woman strung up as a pinata, and another exploding with a baby failing out (Kara Walker 214, 227, 257).
(6) Clifford's papers have not been collected for public access. When this paper was written, Spencer's were in the process of being moved from the Ann Spencer House and Garden in Lynchburg, Virginia, to the University of Virginia's Alderman Library for cataloguing. See Works Cited for locations of Fulhr's and Grimke's papers.
(7) Historians point to the 1918 incident as a touchstone for understanding mob violence. In Lynching in the New South, Fitzhugh Brundage says that the lynchings "provided an extraordinary example of wanton slaughter" (35) and contributed to Brooks County's reputation as "the most mob-prone county in both the region and the state--and possibly even the South" (119). Leon Litwack writes that Turner's death was so brutal it "exceeded the most vivid of imaginations" (288). Philip Dray remarks that it "introduced a new low in the level of degradation associated with lynching" (246). Crystal Feimster is one of few historians to mention the creative response, but her remarks are limited to Fuller and Grimke (226). Scholars of art and literature, conversely, focus on Turner's lynching for what it reveals about a particular text in question. For brief discussion, see Apel 152, Perkins and Stephens 16, and Rice's introductions to Grimke, Spencer, and White in her anthology of antilynching literature. Toomer's use of the Turner story has been covered in detail by Mary Battenfeld, Susan Edmunds, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr, Jeff Webb, and especially Barbara Foley. Grimke's work has been covered to some extent (Herron 19-20, Hirsch 466-73, Hull 130-32, Miller 88-96, and Tate 216-20).
(8) The difference in emphasis is not always a disciplinary issue, however. In addition to drawing from Goldsby, my thinking about discourse has also been influenced by the work of Christopher Waldrep, who expertly examines the history of lynching rhetoric, and Jonathan Markovitz, who demonstrates how lynching representations inform both past and current understanding of race.
(9) I do not discuss in detail these artists' decisions about incorporating graphic details into their work, because that issue has received sufficient attention from literary scholars. In Exorcising Blackness, Trudier Harris outlines how lynching has been represented in literary texts from the late nineteenth century to the present, concluding that male writers are much more apt to focus on physical descriptions of the lynched black body, castration providing a primary metaphor of economic and social restriction. Women writers tend to focus more on characters' emotional responses rather than social issues when writing about lynching. "Black women writers," she adds, "have been more willing to let some portions of their history be," namely blatant displays of violence (192). Harris provides ample evidence that the lynched black body is primarily a feature of the male, rather than the female, gaze. Taking up where Harris leaves off, and drawing upon resources recovered by Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens in Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, Koritha Mitchell argues that women writers redirect that gaze in order to highlight the effects of mob violence upon the families left in its wake. She contends that women writers refocused the history of lynching through the lens of the family rather than the body. Still, castration operates as metaphor. In the plays of women writers, Mitchell writes, "the victim's home is a lynched body. When a father, brother, or son is tom from the family, the household is castrated and its head removed" (216). Fuller and Grimke were similarly more interested in plumbing the emotions that lynching called forth than in representing the act itself. Yet they found some of those emotions, namely anger and defiance, harder to express.
(10) For discussion of Fuller's work of racial uplift, see Brundage, "Meta Warrick Fuller's 1907 'Negro Tableaux,'" Ater, and Kerr 165-83, 195-200, 258-64.
(11) Kerr (251-54) notes that Fuller worked on the statue in the months following the lynching and then stopped, probably at her husband Solomon's insistence. However, in a letter to Hannah Moriarta of Harmon Foundation, where Fuller had a show in 1931, the artist refers to her Mary Turner piece as recently finished. She also says that she is shipping it for the show, but no records indicate that she actually did or that it wound up on display. A document dated 29 January 1967 (Fuller Papers, Box 1, Folder 27) states that she gave the sculpture to Bruce A. Getchell and Alfred C. Perry, with the understanding that the two men would have it cast and given as a gift to the American Museum of Negro History (later the Museum of African American History) in Boston, MA. The sculpture is housed there today, in storage and uncast.
(12) The play's program also lists as its producers the NAACP's Washington D.C. branch Drama Committee, which included Carrie Williams Clifford (author of the Turner response, "Little Mother"), Arma Julia Cooper, and Alain Locke. On Grimke as foremother of antilynching drama, see Perkins and Stephens 24. Authors to continue along Grimke's line include her friends Mary Powell Burrill (Aftermath, 1919) and Georgia Douglas Johnson, one of the most prolific antilynching playwrights (A Sunday Morning in the South, 1925; Sale, c.1929; and Blue-Eyed Black Boy, c. 1930).
(13) In a diary entry dated 6 September 1903, Grimke states, "I shall never know what it means to be a mother, for I shall never marry. I am through with love and the like forever" (Hull 124). Hull assembles considerable textual and biographical evidence of Grimke's closeted desires (139-45), and also argues that the author's "almost incestuous" (149) relationship with her overbearing father prevented her from any healthy relationship, whether homosexual or heterosexual. Herron, in her introduction to Grimke's Selected Works, also discusses the author's repressed sexuality and her relationship with her mother, who left the family when Grimke was a child and, after a few years, never saw her daughter again.
(14) On the controversy surrounding Rachel, see Herron 17-18, Hull 117-124, Miller 59-61, and Tate 210-215. Miller's chapter on Grimke offers a particularly detailed and insightful discussion of the author's relationship to the Birth Control Review and of the journal's relationship to the eugenics movement.
(15) Page numbers refer to the handwritten manuscript version of "The Waitin'," found in Box 38-12, Folder 210 of Grimke's papers. Folder 215 contains a typed copy that is only partially complete.
(16) Other female characters do fight back, sometimes--but not always--in more indirect ways. Asha Kanwar's anthology, The Unforgetting Heart, contains several examples readily available in published form for contemporary audiences. Adeline F. Ries's "Mammy: A Story" (originally published in Crisis) concerns a woman who kills her white master's grandchild after her own child is sold and dies. Ruth D. Todd's "The Octoroon's Revenge" (originally in Colored American Magazine) has as its stated theme the old cliche, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." By contrast Victoria Earle Matthews's "Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life" (the title story of her collection) stops short of outright revenge. Aunt Lindy's spirit is willing, but she calls upon God to stay her hand. Zora Neale Hurston's female characters, created nearly a decade after Grimke's, are also famously defiant. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie reverses the power dynamics between her and Jody by jokingly calling him out in front of his friends. In "Sweat," Delia listens, but does not intervene, as her abusive husband Sykes dies from a rattlesnake bite. Still, Hurston's women stop short of direct verbal or physical violence.
(17) This essay is indebted to a number of readers who helped make it better: the editors of this special issue of Mississippi Quarterly, who saw promise at the core of what was a rambling, and sometimes pretentious, earlier draft; Adam Gussow who, with grace and patience, helped me excise a particularly bone-headed observation; Noel Polk, who gave the essay an excellent line-edit at the end; and, finally, to Thomas Hallock, a continuous font of encouragement and editorial wisdom. Additional thanks go to Dora Apel, who helped me contextualize the place of Fuller's work in antilynching art. Research support for this essay was provided by a 2002 University of South Florida New Investigator Grant. Writing support was provided by the University of Mississippi's William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, where I worked as Scholar-in-Residence during the 2005-06 academic year, and by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, where I held a 2006 Summer Fellowship. For their help with archival materials, I would also like to thank Joellen ElBashir at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Chandra Harrington and Amber Meisenzahl at Boston's Museum of African American History, and Diana Lachantenere at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation.
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