What Virtue There Is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose

CHAPTER NINE: Sex, Fingers, Toes

170 Chapter Nine Sex, Fingers, Toes In its May 12 edition, the Newnan Herald and Advertiser proudly published a poem titled “Sam Holt.” Holt was, the poem declared, “The monster fiend of all the fiends / That ever cursed the earth.” It further proclaimed, ’Twas but right that he should die With lurid fire to light the same. ’Twill teach these brute beasts to know That vengeance dire will quickly come; God’s righteous wrath is never slow To avenge the Christian home. And so ’twill be till cause shall cease To blight with crime our Southern land. The poem, signed with the appellation “Justice,” ended with the assurance that God had “ordained” Sam Hose’s death.1 Two months later, C. D. Smith from Atlanta wrote a second poem to honor Newnan for its actions. The town quickly adopted the poem, and it later appeared prominently in Coweta County Chronicles, the official history of the region published in 1928. Newnan Enthroned as a Queen, robed in Her beauty Fair as the fairest Gem in her Crown Faithful to God, to home and to duty His blessings forever rest on this town. Her sons and her daughters, brave-hearted and kind With hands ever open to Charity’s call Peerless in beauty, in culture refined Though others may boast, She’s Queen over all. Sex, Fingers,Toes 171 Then onward and upward blest be thy name For all that is great noble and grand As lasting as time immortal her fame The brightest and best in a Heaven blest land.2 The Sam Hose “affair” was not directly mentioned in the poem, but its unstated presence was clear to the Herald and Advertiser’s readers. They had been absolved . Although occasional references to the lynching would continue to appear , most notably in the newspaper squabble between Newnan and Griffin, most people seemed willing to put this event to rest. When Mary G. Jones and Lily Reynolds edited and compiled Coweta County Chronicles, covering the county’s one-hundred-year history, from the time of “the Indians from Whom the Land was Acquired” to the present day, they made but brief mention of Hose. Newnan was given undeserved and undesired nation-wide publicity when a mob brought Sam Hose, caught at Griffin, Georgia, after one of the most fiendish and horrifying crimes at Palmetto in the annals of the State, to one of her suburbs and burned him.3 The event was neatly if awkwardly described, packaged into some forty words that deflected guilt from Newnan and onto Griffin, Palmetto, and the entire inquisitive nation. A later history of Newnan failed to mention the lynching at all. This was partly out of respect for the Cranford family, which was prominent in the community , but also out of a greater sense of propriety and the belief that, as the Macon Telegraph had noted immediately after the burning, “traces of the tragedy might be demoralizing.”4 Nevertheless, the ghost of Sam Hose could not be so easily exorcised, and the lynching had unexpected consequences in private lives. W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, identified Sam Hose’s torture-death as the event that, as Du Bois put it, “pulled me off my feet,” and determined him to take on his lifelong fight against racial injustice. As he put it in one speech: A poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose, had killed his landlord in a wage dispute. He could not be found for days; then at last a new cry was raised that he had raped the landlord’s wife. It was obviously and clearly a trumped-up charge to arouse the worst passions of the countryside, and the mob roared. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to The Constitution, carrying in my pocket a letter of introduction which I had to Joel Chandler Harris. I did not get there. On the way the news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store on Mitchell Street. I turned back to the university. I suddenly saw that complete scientific detachment in the midst of such a South was impossible.5 172 Chapter Nine Du Bois was, of course, correct. How could anyone be detached under these circumstances? The horror of Sam...