History Comes ‘Round Midnight

In the beginning, the history wanted me more than I wanted the history. It came for me as a brown grandchild kept secret from her racist great grandmother, as nightmares that sent me screaming through the house, as a near midnight ghost at the end of my bed.  

Go home. Find out what happened, said the ghost, a dead black woman. And so I did, again and again, over heartbreaking decades.

In the undertow of emotion, my basic reporting skills faded. It fell to nature, to dreams, fiction, animals, elders to serve as guides. Ancient mariners, toothless and blind, anxious to unburden, caught my eye as I roamed country roads. Most would turn out to be kinfolk or kinfolk of former slaves of kinfolk or both. Each held precious, trembling pieces of my puzzle.

I was there to learn of a lynching, but first I learned of liaisons. I knew only that four people were murdered, that the sheriff, my great-grandfather, had on orders of the mob fled in advance and that my grandfather, his deputy, oversaw it all.  I wanted to believe the newspaper stories I had unearthed — a dispute over rents – but was open to anything other than what my cells already knew. 

As a child I saw patterns. I believe God made two of each person, I told my mother. One white. One black. Don’t talk crazy, she replied.

The toothless Black woman told of white “bachelors” who frequented black women’s cabins, first in the yard, then on the porch, then inside. She named names, told me which white man fathered which black children. Named her own third great grandfather, the one whose name she bore, an ancestor of my own. 

Black people know a lot about us, I told my mother, the sheriff’s daughter, during a visit. I don’t want to know what they know, she replied.

I searched for a cemetery hidden deep in a forest. On the verge of defeat, I braked as a stag deer suddenly bounded over my car. There before me lay the red clay path.  At the cemetery, red thistle flowers beckoned me to the tombstone of a third great uncle, James B. Moore, cracked open wide enough to enter or exit. The pieces were coming together.

In the courthouse I reach for a heavy burgundy ledger which tumbles off the shelf untouched and lands open to a page titled Certificate of Indenture by James B. Moore 1868.

The document tells a long-secret story of this farmer and his former slave indenturing her seven mulatto children promising to educate, discipline, clothe, feed, and provide them a decent future.  These words leap off the page: as a father would… 

I am riveted to those words.

Only then do I recollect the name of one of the four people – a woman, three men — hanged high and shot to ribbons ‘round midnight on Jan. 22, 1912, beside Friendship Baptist: John Moore, barely an adult. 

From the courthouse window I spotted the Confederate statue on the Square, facing North, rifle at the ready, erected not simply to honor the fallen, but to glorify white supremacy, which had suffered severely in those post-war years as miscegenation flourished and populist, bi-racial politics threatened and the Confederates refused to acknowledge loss.

“It will remind our men to remember plantation manners,” wrote the local editor. One year later, four innocent black people who had opposed those plantation manners for how they savaged black people were dangling from a tree.   

Slowly I came to understand that this midnight massacre, so carefully concealed within my family, was not only about my family but about the American family.  

In coming years, I would, like the ledger, fall off my shelf, open to the right page.  Like the deer, I would startle drivers into seeing the path, and like the red thistle beckon the blind to the open tomb. The book I would write and the DNA I would cast into the world would over time bring many in my castaway family together.  

Just before Christmas 2019, five cousins, three Black, two White, all Moores, gathered at Friendship Baptist to collect soil we imagine holds memory and hope.

We carried the soil to Montgomery, Alabama, poured it into four jars inscribed John Moore, Loduska Crutchfield, Gene Harrington, Rev. Burrell Hardaway, then joined the jars with thousands more at the Peace & Justice Memorial to proclaim a long-hidden truth and to become a beacon of hope for a beleaguered nation.

EJI with Bryan Stevenson

Click here to listen to Karen and Jackie Jordan Irvine on RaceNYT: A Lynching’s Legacy.

Karen Branan is the author of “The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, A Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth” (Simon & Schuster 2016) and a veteran investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker. Her work has appeared in Life, Mother Jones, Ms., The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, as well as on PBS stations, CBS, CBC, BBC, CNN, and others. Learn more about Karen here.