Lynching Intro...
I stole this from the intro to a paper I wrote this semester...the photo is what it's based on (Marion, Indiana, 1930)
Marion and Memory
It’s not the bodies you see first, anyway. Or if you do, they’re like signposts pointing down. Straight, linear, inanimate, robbed of motion, they lead the eye downward like a finely-tailored pinstripe. Down from solid oak and knotted hemp, from stilled flesh above to orgiastic frenzy below. The crowd, frozen in time but ripe with potential, and not a one of them just a witness, every one Agency made flesh. All but the corpses: for them the time for doing is done.
You pick out faces, and you’re not alone. We all do that sort of thing. Maybe it’s the loving couple on the left, him clutching at her, her clutching the shred of burned clothing, both of them holding trophies. If you look very carefully at that guy, you can see in his eyes that he knows he’s going to get laid. There is something there in that smirk that says he is quite pleased his second date with Little Miss Central Indiana just happened to coincide with a lynching.
And isn’t she just the belle of the ball? The only one in the center not in white (save for the creepy old lady directly beneath the legs of the lynched Tom Shipp), there is a suggestive sinuousness to her, her arm bent back, her fingers arched, as if drawn by the presence of her soon-to-be lover’s hand. She challenges the viewer, a merry mischief in her eyes. Together the two of them reek of senior year in High School, of awkward sex beneath the bleachers, and the decades of loveless marriage to follow. They’re so ordinary it hurts.
Or maybe it’s the popeyed, Hitleresque fellow, pointing at the dangling body of Abe Smith. The one who, in a framed copy of this photographic keepsake, preserved along with a hank of kinky hair, is identified as “Bo,” as in “Bo pointn to his niga.” [1] Unlike the young couple, there’s menace from this one, the sort of vicious feral fury you get from a cornered badger. His pointing, upraised arm speaks to different audiences at once: look, it says to one, this could be you; see, it says to another, we protect our own here. Bo doesn’t need to distinguish between the two; they know who they are.
These three are the most apparent, but they’re not the only ones; the crowd presents a tableau of prosaic monstrosity. The inhabitants of a slightly rumpled, horribly twisted Rockwellian universe, where Judge Lynch has usurped the pulpit, supplanted the carnival barker, and the scent of popcorn has been replaced by the bitter tang of scorched clothing and roasted flesh. And yet the members of that Indiana crowd display no more shame than if they were milling outside the freak show or the evangelist’s tent. They repulse and fascinate; blood and shards of glass on the rain-slick highway of our souls.
And you’ve spent ten minutes studying them, each and every one of them, before you realize that you haven’t done more than spare a glance at the bodies. Here, already transitioning from mob to crowd, are the perpetrators of a tremendous injustice, caught in the moment of ultimate satiety, and we can not look away. It scandalizes us that they are so Middle America, that they will go home that night to normal lives with normal families, and that they will kiss their children good night with the stink of the pyre still on their clothes. Better for us if they crawled into some crypt and pulled moldy soil over their heads, only to emerge again at some far-off date, when the conditions are just right, but these are our grocery clerk, our milkman, our postman, our mechanic. Their kids play Little League with the neighbor boy, and you all go to the same barber every other Saturday morning.
And you realize at last the most horrific truth of all, that it is not just their guilt, but yours, shared across the gulf of years, inescapable as long as the potential for this very crime still exists.
[1] Although this particular copy of the photo, which mistakenly places the lynching in Joplin, Mo., three years after the fact, leaves us a bit skeptical of “Bo’s” true name, we’ll let it stand. James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave, 2001), fig 16.