The Specter of Lynching

E. Simms Campbell's I Passed Along This Way
for An Art Commentary on Lynching

Jenny Woodley, in Art for Equality: The NAACP's Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights, talks about how the NAACP used literature, drama, visual arts, and other cultural forms to combat racism and to counter white views of African Americans. Part of her discussion involves the organization's fight against lynching during the first part of the twentieth century. She discusses the use of drama, such as Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel (1916), Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Mine Eyes Have Seen (1918), and Georgia Douglas Johnson's A Sunday Morning in the South (1925). Woodley concludes her chapter on the NAACP's cultural response to lynching with a discussion of the 1935 art exhibition An Art Commentary on Lynching. The exhibition and writing worked to counteract the dominant white lynch narrative by providing a voice, name, face, and life to the victim. While reading this chapter, I could not help but think about Gaines and other African American authors. This post will not be an in depth discussion of lynching and mob violence in Gaines' work or other authors; however, it will provide an overview and some insight into instances of mob violence in some of Gaines' novels.

Gaines has said "[a] lynch mob is a lynch mob--you don't have to wear a sheet or live in East Texas or Mississippi or Louisiana or Alabama--you can live in New York, you can be in police blues, or you can be a gang of kids and have someone accidentally go into the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time" (Saeta and Skinner 250). Gaines' description here can be seen in Catherine Carmier when Jackson informs Madame Bayonne that the North is nothing like he expected it to be. "There's no truth," he tells her, "They don't come dressed in sheets with ropes. But there's no truth" in the stories people have told him about the North (81). One needs to only think about Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, Richard Wright's Native Son, Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go,  Jess Mowry's Way Past Cool, or countless other novels. In much of Gaines' work, the lynching or mob violence does not include a rope and fire or even the act being performed in the present. Usually, the act is retold as a past experience or as something being read in a paper or overheard. This diminishes the spectacle of the act and adds feeling and sympathy for those who have lived through it.  

Coming across a hunter on her way to Ohio with Ned, Miss Jane begins to talk with him about the death of Big Laura and other hardships the travelers have endured. The hunter, then tells Ned and Miss Jane about a lynching victim he saw.

I told the hunter about the Secesh who had killed Ned's mama and the other people. He told me he had seen some of the Secesh handywork, too. Earlier that same day he had cut a man down and buried him that the Secesh had hung. After hanging him they had gashed out his entrails. (46)

After the hunter tells Miss Jane about the man, she asks why the "Secesh" had hung the man. The hunter simply replies, "Lesson to other niggers" (47). This scene takes up no more than one quarter of a page within the novel, but it paints a disturbing picture of a African American man, after the Civil War, being cut down from a tree as his entrails gather on the ground.This act adheres to the image of a lynching as someone being strung up to a tree and hung. However, later in the novel, two other instances of what we could call lynchings occur. These are Ned's and Jimmy's assassinations. Both die because they are making the whites scared, not because they will violate white women, but because they will ignite a fire within the African American community. We hear about these events secondhand, and we see how Miss Jane and the community react to each of them.    

Gaines does not pepper his works with images of lynchings. Instead, he subtly places them in the background. Another example occurs in In My Father's House when Phillip talks about reading a newspaper article about "a black boy" frozen in a ditch with  no papers on him.While it is not a mob lynching as the one described in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, it is a mysterious death of a young African American male that could have been caused by mob violence. This specter of mob violence permeates the novel. When Phillip picks up Billy and talks with him later in the novel, Billy comments on the act of lynching, saying, "Even when they lynch a nigger they have to burn him too" (168). Again, these images appear in the background. The foreground centers on the relationship between Phillip and his son as well as with the rest of the community.

While A Gathering of Old Men takes place under the fear of a lynch mob riding towards Marshall Plantation, it does not occur. Again, instances of mob violence against African Americans occur in the novel, but they appear in the form of retellings, an oral experience that works to reconstruct the act by naming the victims who may have been unnamed in the act of the lynching itself and its reports and by providing the story of the experience. Gable tells the story of his sixteen year old son who died in the electric chair "on the word of a poor white trash" who claimed the boy raped her, even though everyone knew her reputation with black and white men alike (101). At the execution, the officials informed Gable that the family could take the boy after he died, retrieving his body  at the back door. The chair failed to work, and the officials had to call in a chair from Baton Rouge. After the boy's death, Gable says that "them white folks walked out of that room like they was leaving a card game. They wasn't even talking about it. It wasn't worth talking about" (102).The death of Gable's son can be seen as a type of lynching because it contains the whites' fears of African American men violating white women and the use of mob violence to help protect the sanctity of white womanhood.

If interested in looking at some of the plays mentioned above, go check out Black Theatre USA vol. 1.  To see other responses to lynching, look at Ida B. Wells' work. For stories on lynching, look at Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, Ralph Ellison's "A Party Down at the Square," and James Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man," "Sonny's Blues," and Blues for Mister Charlie. The image to the right is Reginald Marsh's This Is Her First Lynching which appeared at the 1935 An Art Commentary on Lynching. I placed it here because it reminds me of Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man" which is a story about a young white boy's first lynching. There are other works that could be mentioned, but these were some of the first that came to mind when I read Woodley's chapter on the NAACP's cultural response to lynching. The video  below is Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit."

This post could go on and on, eventually getting away from me. So, instead of allowing it to do that, let's carry on this discussion in the comments.

Gaines, Ernest J. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Bantam Books, 1972. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. Catherine Carmier. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. In My Father's House. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. A Gathering of Old Men. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Print.
Saeta, Elsa and Izora Skinner. "Interview with Ernest Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 241-252. Print.