Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America

First Loop: A Pail of Flour - Tuscaloosa, June–August 1933

FIRST LOOP A PAIL OF FLOUR Tuscaloosa, June–August 1933 I asked the Lord to bring me back to Tuscaloosa. Vaudine Maddox walked with a pail of flour. The early morning sun crept through the trees as the twenty-one-year-old white girl shuffled along the clay road in Big Sandy, twelve miles outside of Tuscaloosa. Situated an hour south of Birmingham and on the border of the Alabama Black Belt, 1930s Tuscaloosa, as described by author Philip Beidler , was a “sleepy, middle-sized city distinguished mainly by the dual presences of the state university and the state hospital for the insane.” Clarence Cason, a native Alabamian and the head of the university’s journalism department from 1928 to 1935, noted the city’s “serene and comfortable beauty,” calling it the type of place “where one may look forward with happiness to spending the rest of his days.” His contemporary , Carl Carmer—a Northerner who accepted a position in the university’s English department in 1927—offered a similar assessment, acknowledgingTuscaloosa’s“picturesquequality,”describingafternoons spent on the golf course and evenings “alive with small impromptu parties.” He also noted the town’s oppressive heat, how “swimming parties on the Black Warrior River [were] frequent”—a momentary respite for citizens to stave off the swelter. 14 FIRST LOOP The weather on Monday, June 12, 1933, was no exception. The day startedoffcool,thoughbynoon,temperaturesreachedastiflingninety-one degrees, sending Alabamians sprawling beneath the shade trees. Vaudine was the oldest of four siblings. After her mother’s death nine years prior, she took charge of the house and began caring for her brothers and sisters, as well as her father and twenty-five-year-old cousin. All seven shared a run-down, two-room shack on the outskirts of a plantation. Though the Maddox family was white, they were poor, and so lived in a predominantly black community. Across the woods from her family’s shack lived an elderly white couple whom Vaudine assisted with odd jobs, tasks their brittle bodies could no longer perform. As Vaudine and her neighbors discovered, when supplies ran low, it was easier to share from their own reserves than make the dust-filled trip into town. And so, that morning, Vaudine woke early, slipping into the pantry to fill a pail of flour for her neighbors. They never received it. t The day after Vaudine’s murder, the Tuscaloosa News reported, “Tentative theories in the inquiry indicate clearly that someone ‘friendly’ to the Maddox girl either actually committed the crime or possesses guilty knowledge in connection with it. A small pail of flour which the girl had been carrying to the neighbor’s house was found beside a tree trunk at the side of the road.” The sheriff’s department concluded that the untouched pail pointed to the possibility that Vaudine had placed it down of her own accord while taking a seat on a log alongside an acquaintance—proof enough for Tuscaloosa Sheriff R. L. Fayette Shamblin that Vaudine knew her murderer. "
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 Monday and Tuesday passed with no sign of Vaudine, though her father didn’t appear overly concerned, assuming she’d “just gone off with somebody.” But by midafternoon on Wednesday, June 14, Vaudine’s youngersisters,GladysandAudis,provedtheirfatherwrong—stumbling across their eldest sister’s bloodied body in a ravine a quarter mile from their shack. Vultures circled overhead, small animals gathering around the three-day-old corpse in the woods. The sheriff’s department was contacted, though before facts were in place, rumors of a young white girl’s rape and murder caused the citizens’ blood to boil. Vaudine’s body was taken to the coroner for further study, though the late stages of decomposition made securing additional information difficult. Still, facts began emerging, most importantly, the discovery of the murder weapon: two bloodstained rocks. The officers crouched over the rocks in the Big Sandy wilderness, shifting the focus of their investigation from how she was murdered to why. But Sheriff Shamblin had another question as well: Had Vaudine Maddox been raped prior to her death? Shamblin anxiously awaited the coroner’s results, though after a thorough examination, the coroner offered more questions than answers , citing that the body’s three days in the woods made any signs of rape impossible to determine with certainty. t On the morning of the murder, a witness stated that an eighteenyear -old black man...