Blood at the Root: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus

CONCLUSION: Vacant Lots: Public Memory and the Practice of Forgetting

CONCLUSION Vacant Lots Public Memory and the Practice of Forgetting For Jonathan But where does the outside commence? This question is the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 8 What the Map Conceals (Greenville, South Carolina) Willie Earle, 1947 The Pickens County Museum—formerly the Pickens County Jail—is constructed from red brick and copper, design features once associated with the bureaucratic and functional. Thirty years since the election of Ronald Reagan and his libertarian ethics of care began the inexorable decline of small-town life—with occasional flashes of gentrification for those lucky enough to live in proximity to major cities—its red-on-copper exterior lends the building the look of expensively refurbished condominiums. Metal awnings and a glassand -concrete extension unsettle the seamlessness of its Victorian architecture. Through the double doors and to the left an exhibit begins on the antiquities of the county, once part of John C. Calhoun’s upcountry South Carolina holdings. As an eighth grader, I, like every Sandlapper, took a class on the state’s history. Beginning with a unit called “South Carolina Before Man,” we learned that the Pleistocene Coast of the state once reached Columbia, its geographical center and current capital. Encouraged to gasp with wonder at the possibilities of those prehistoric days at the beach, we nonetheless never learned about lynching. My teacher, Rosemary Wise, was 145 146 Blood at the Root younger than either of my nonnative Southern parents, but had mysteriously been part of a small contingent that integrated Seneca High School, where I later spent four years of more quotidian difficulties.1 The museum, located fifteen miles from where I grew up in Oconee County, makes no attempt to correct this omission in the official record of the state’s history. When Clemson University, funded by the Morrill Land Grant Act, was founded in 1889—the surrounding county was still the frontier, far from the imperial splendor of Charleston, the tat and trash of Myrtle Beach, or the gridded streets of Columbia, burnt by retreating Confederates in 1865, but still swearing that Sherman did it. Emerging from so recent a frontier past, the history of the area has been shaped by the relentless media friendliness of Clemson University, an institution that aestheticizes its profound conservatism with two distinct symbols—Bowman Field, where military decoration abounds but contemporary political protest was until recently forbidden by university policy, and Tillman Hall, named for Pitchfork Ben Tillman, nineteenth century governor and subsequent senator from the state, who often boasted that he would lynch members of the race that must “remain subordinate or be exterminated” (Kantrowitz 2000, 258). The museum, located in the Pickens County seat, seven miles from the university, makes no mention of lynching. Indeed, why should it, when there’s so much space to dedicate to Ben Robertson, an obscure memoirist who authored Red Hills and Cotton (1983), the cornerstone of the local canon? Yet, with the frontier of the recent past came so-called “frontier justice,” executions and trials strangely divorced from state sovereignty and juridical authority. Perpendicular to the museum’s front desk, where volunteer docents sell crystals and postcards, the jailhouse’s original cell is intact. Inside is a mannequin clad in iconic black-and-white stripes. Above him dangles a noose. Killer of two men, tool of local authority, the noose was the central prop at the county’s legal executions in the the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, it artfully covers a sepia photograph of the execution of Haas Butler in 1900, leaving his suffering to the imagination. Despite the exposed viscera of the visual display, the accompanying text is remarkable mostly for its chastity. The perpetrator, it says, killed a farmer named James Hendricks and forced his wife to “spend the night and make his dinner.” Rape requires euphemism, but state-sanctioned murder dangles shamelessly from the ceiling. I visited the museum on August 4, 2008 and found the curator less than forthcoming about violence than the bare, dangling noose would suggest . On February 17, 1947, Willie Earle, accused of assaulting Thomas W. 147 Conclusion Brown, a cab driver who had stopped in Greenville to pick up a fare bound for Pickens, was kidnapped from the cell by a mob that formed a caravan for the seventeen-mile one-way trip. Jailor J. E. Gilstrap released Earle without a struggle...