When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

To Make Them Stand in Fear

111© David Bradley To Make Them Stand in Fear David Bradley Once upon a time I made good money during what was then called Black History Month. Each February, I could be found on several college campuses—usually lily-white ones—leading class discussions, delivering a reading of my fiction, or lecturing on some black historical topic. The beginning of the end of this came in 1987, at a generic university that I call Charolais State at Goodplacetoraisekids City. There, in an undergraduate literature seminar, I described an incident that had taken place in 1934, near a town called Greenwood, Florida. A black man named Claude Neal was accused of raping and killing a white woman, Lola Cannidy. The sheriff arrested Neal and hid him in a jail on the other side of the state line; however, some Greenwood Good Ole Boys, who called themselves the Committee of Six, penetrated this ruse, went over in the wee hours of the morning, persuaded the jailer to release Neal to them, took him back to Florida, and hid him in a swamp. 112 D av i d B r a d l e y At noon the Committee made an announcement, broadcast on local radio, that at sundown, Neal would be taken to the Cannidy farm, where Lola’s father would castrate him. Then he would be escorted to the pig pen where Lola’s body had been found and killed. The announcement concluded—and I quote—“All white folks are invited to the party.” Soon white folks did start arriving at the Cannidy farm, equipped with picnic hampers, guns, and moonshine liquor. Eventually, eight thousand gathered—men, women, children, babes-in-arms. Some, impatient, went to Neal’s cabin and burned it. Others were content lighting bonfires. A state senator tried to distract them with a speech, to no avail. Meanwhile, back at the swamp, the Committee of Six, learning that these rednecks were liquored-up and riled, feared their agenda would produce a frenzy and somebody might get hurt. So they decided to torture Neal in private, and just kill him in public. So they beat Claude Neal and branded him. They cut his testicles off and made him eat them. They cut his penis off and made him eat that. Then they put a noose around his neck and asked him if he wanted to confess. When he declined, they threw the rope end over a tree limb and slowly hauled him up until strangulation produced unconsciousness. Then they revived him and asked again. Eventually he confessed. He also died. This left the Committee with a problem. They’d invited folks to a lynching. When their guests learned they’d had all the fun themselves, they’d be lucky if they didn’t end up standing—or hanging—in for Neal. But the Committee had an idea. They tied Neal’s body to the back bumper of a car and drove slowly past the Cannidy farm, letting the body flop around, in an imitation of life. They planned to cut the rope and speed away before the mob discovered the guest of honor had departed prematurely. Unfortunately, the mob saw them coming. Fortunately , one of Lola’s female relations ran out of the kitchen with a butcher knife and stabbed the body through the heart; the mob thought she’d spoiled the entertainment. T o M a k e T h e m S ta n d i n F e a r 113 Nobody could really blame her, so the mob took their disappointment out on the body. They kicked it and spit on it and said all manner of evil against it. They couldn’t urinate or defecate on it, there being ladies present, but they shot it fifty times, and ran over it six times with cars. After that the Committee took charge of the body, hauled it to the county seat, and hung it from a lamppost in the courthouse square. Everybody was satisfied except old man Cannidy, who said the Committee “done him wrong” by not letting him do the castrating. I’d told that story many times during many Black History Months, as a dramatic introduction to an important, albeit undramatic, argument : that, though in the past, methodological and personal biases of American historians had conspired to both conceal critical truths and prevent their later discovery using traditional historical methods, it...