Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body

5. Housing the Memory of Racial Violence: The Black Body as a Souvenir, Museum, and Living Remain

chapter five Housing the Memory of Racial Violence: The Black Body as Souvenir, Museum, and Living Remain People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. —James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village On 2 April 1899, approximately two thousand white men, women, and children participated, as both witnesses and active agents, in the murder of Sam Hose in Newman, Georgia. Sam Hose was burned alive. In the ‹nal moments of his life, the assembled crowd descended upon his body and collected various parts of it as souvenirs. The Spring‹eld (Massachusetts) Republican recounted the scene of Hose’s dismemberment in the following manner: Before the torch was applied to the pyre, the negro was deprived of his ears, ‹ngers and genital parts of his body. He pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on, but stood the ordeal of ‹re with surprising fortitude. Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits, and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was torn up and disposed of as “‘souvenirs.”’ The negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver. Those unable to obtain ghastly relics direct paid their more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bones went for 25 cents, and a bit of liver crisply cooked sold for 10 cents.1 Seven months later in December 1899, the New York World, in an article entitled “Roasted Alive,” reported on the similar fate of Richard Coleman in Maysville, Kentucky, before a crowd of “thousands of men and hundreds of 167 women and children.” The article noted that “long after most of the mob went away little children from six to ten years of age carried dried grass and kindling wood and kept the ‹re burning all during the afternoon.”2 It also revealed that “relic-hunters visited the scene and carried away pieces of ›esh and the negro’s teeth. Others got pieces of ‹ngers and toes and proudly exhibit the ghastly souvenirs to-night.”3 In a 27 February 1901 Chicago Record article on the hanging and burning of George Ward before a crowd of four thousand people in Terre Haute, Indiana, the newspaper gave the following account of the scene of Ward’s murder: When the crowd neared the ‹re tired of renewing it after two hours, it was seen that the victim’s feet were not burned. Someone called an offer of a dollar for one of the toes and a boy quickly took out his knife and cut off a toe. The offer was followed by others, and the horrible traf‹c was continued, youths holding up toes and asking for bids.4 Sam Hose, Richard Coleman, and George Ward are three of the more than three thousand black men, women, and children who were lynched across the United States between 1880 and 1930. My investment in the lynching tragedy does not center itself on the horrifying numbers of black men, women, and children who were forcibly taken from their homes (or from jail cells), paraded throughout town, and executed before a mass mob.5 Nor does my interest rest in the allegations and charges used to justify these assaults— from stories of sexual assaults on white women to violations of minor laws and ordinances (such as vagrancy or trespassing). Nor am I interested in reading lynching in terms of a prescripted performance or ritualistic practice . These areas have been addressed, in books and articles, to the point of near-exhaustion in the areas of African American studies, English, history, sociology, and performance studies. What captures my attention is something that appears within the majority of these disciplines but has received scant attention in each: the dismemberment of the black body for souvenirs following the lynching event. I am interested in this feature, in large part, because I am haunted by the image of white hands, variably male or female, adult or child, holding aloft a slice of Sam Hose’s crisped liver, Richard Coleman ’s burned ›esh, or George Ward’s toe. As a means of working through my own complicated relationship with this image while simultaneously spotlighting an often-neglected area of lynching scholarship, I here focus upon 168 embodying black experience the black body as a target of racial violence and read its experiences as encapsulated within lynching souvenirs...