Lynching Photographs: A Collector's Reflection
James Allen T his is my best recollection of the first time I saw an image of a so-called lynching. It was difficult, even when confronted with the evidence, to acknowledge a behavior as equally beastly as it was human. Though I was in my twenties, there was not much I could bring to the moment.I had no context in which to place the murder; yet, I had no doubt who the murderers were. 1 looked Jack (the reseller who had the image) up last year, and found him still alive. I talked with him about his experiences growing up in Newton County, Georgia. He stated that he had never been witness to acts of racial violence, but that when a black man "turned up missing," it was understood that he had crossed a white person. The same expression is employed by blacks, as in the example, "Uncle Arthur, Mama's brother? He just turned up missing." I have seen the first image anew, many times. I was twenty years and more removed from that small farmhouse missing most of its parts but the deep corners where a granny or child could hide and a dog trot that broke it in two —two mildewed lungs. The farm house clung to a cut in the road, and if that tortured road had a name or a number, I never knew it. At times I circled around the courthouse, looking futilely for its genesis. The road left out of Covington with a spider web of others through pillared mansions encaustic with paint and pickets of waxed camellias grown high as Tom Watson on the capital house lawn. Sutured open along a curved flank of the farmhouse road were the horseshoe drives of the brick children of the mansions, high fronted and plantation themed, the likes of country clubs and fiat houses. Fittingly, behind, and at a distance from the brick children of the mansions were the sparser treed, subdivided hardware men, teachers, civil servants, and defeated farmers. Whatever miniscule sliver of the Covington pie the city black folks had, it wasn't on the farmhouse road. The blacktop cleared the retread shops and the sandy used-car lots; picked up speed at the county line, where the municipality had stuck a frivolous sign, City Limit, as if the city and county had never met, or fraternized. The county opened up in rural pinks and greens, and long, soothing hills that the road skirted respectfully. Maintaining one of the hills was an odd plantation home, disassembling and sodden, still clinging to an erect chimney. When the mile-markers gave out, and not much more, there you would have found the place, and the Digbys too. Unremarkable in its decline, some common gruel of acceptable events had driven the farmhouse to a mournful state: pinned to the edge of a road that had gored its cedars and smothered its roses in their bed. Jack Digby was handy to a point, and had replaced the front door to the dogtrot and chiseled in a Carpenter lock, and the door to the back steps too. Jack was many years late leaving home, and could wear the same pants as when he quit school. I never knew him to drive. Timid, he seldom spoke, "Ask mamma." Mother and son were an attractive couple (as antique resellers go) for their gentle manners and access to local estates. Mrs. Digby's eyes never rose above mid-tide and her words dropped out the sides of her mouth leaden with common courtesy and worry.