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1 Introduction On the night of April 12, 1899, Mattie Cranford, the young wife of a Coweta County, Georgia, farmer, stumbled through the dark to the nearby home of her father-in-law, her four children in tow. At the gate to the yard, she cried for help and then collapsed. When she was revived, she told Grippia Cranford a horrifying tale: his son was dead, brained from behind by an ax-wielding black laborer known locally as Sam Holt or Hose.1 Hose had also hurt two of the children, one so grievously that the infant boy was disfigured and his condition critical. At some point she also claimed that Hose had raped her on the bloody dining-room floor, in the presence of the children, next to the body of her dying husband. After rushing to his son’s home, the elder Cranford reported finding Alfred’s corpse as Mattie had described, his head split open and his blood and brains spewed on the table, in the food, and across the floor. Within hours, hounds were on the trail of the killer, and for the next ten days the state of Georgia was captivated by the search, the details of which were related by local and national newspapers. Many predicted that the monster Hose, when caught, would be burned at the stake, a punishment befitting the enormity of his crimes. The governor of Georgia, the leading state newspaper , and other local groups offered rewards for his capture. After Sam Hose was finally found, over a hundred miles away, his captors crudely disguised him in an attempt to transport the prisoner secretly by train to Atlanta, where they would receive the rewards. However, at Griffin, Georgia, the train was met by a large gathering of armed citizens who searched the train and seized the suspect. Selected representatives of the city then escorted the chained Hose on a special express train to Newnan, the county seat of Coweta, located some fifteen miles from the Cranford plantation . A large crowd now awaited the train’s arrival at the Newnan 2 Introduction depot. There, in the early afternoon of Sunday, April 23, Hose was first turned over to the town’s sheriff and escorted to the city jail, but then, once the quasilegal formalities had been met, was once again taken by a mob now composed of people from both Newnan and Griffin. Efforts to control the crowd failed, and after a ritualistic procession through the streets of Newnan, the growing throng marched Sam Hose into a field on the outskirts of town and there mocked and mutilated him before chaining him to a tree, stacking wood at his feet, soaking him in kerosene, and setting him afire. For an agonizing time he writhed miserably in the flames while the crowd cheered his desperate contortions. A local photographer recorded his last moments. Members of the horde then dismembered what remained of his cooked corpse for souvenirs, pieces of which still circulated in the region as late as the 1970s. I came to the story of Sam Hose’s killing and the events that surrounded it by way of fiction, and the more I learned of it, the more like fiction it read. In my research on the southern writer Erskine Caldwell’s campaign against lynching in his stories and reporting of the 1930s, I had found references to Hose’s public execution in the Old Troutman Field, in the vicinity of Caldwell’s birthplace of White Oak. Caldwell was born in 1903; his father, Ira Sylvester Caldwell, had come to the rural west Georgia community as preacher for the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in 1901. Although Erskine Caldwell lived in this area for only a few years before his father again moved the family, I wondered to what degree this horrific act of racial violence might have stoked his outrage and influenced his work. It now seems trite to say that as I delved deeper into the newspaper accounts of Sam Hose’s lynching, I often could not believe what I was reading, but such was the case. Indeed, the primary (white) narratives often employed such melodramatic and sensationalistic style and projected such an unapologetic bias and assumption of guilt that any modern reader would certainly question the veracity of the events described in these contemporary reports. They read today as myth making of the most insidious kind, one that antagonizes prejudices and exploits fears...

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