by Karen Branan
Shivering inside his wool pea jacket, Hadley laid both whip and epithets upon the back of his mule Jake as he wrestled the buggy through the sucking mud a short distance to the forlorn shack of thirty-eight-year-old Loduska (“Dusky”) Crutchfield, who with her husband, Jim, was, like Moore, a renter on the Gordon’s plantation. If any of the legal preliminaries had been followed, they’d have been authorized by the local justice of the peace, George Washington Gordon, Jr., Norman’s uncle. Later the sheriff would tell reporters the suspects were taken in for questioning, and never throughout the entire ordeal would he use the word arrest. Possibly he consoled Dusky by telling her it was for her own protection; she was a witness, not a suspect. “The star witness” would quickly become her label, one that would stick into the twenty-first century. Later they would say she had agreed to name names.
Whatever Buddie Hadley said to Dusky Crutchfield, she got up on the seat of the buggy with him, a man she’d known since childhood and likely trusted, and together they went over and picked up another black farmer named Gene Harrington, a forty-year-old sharecropper and married father of one, on the farm of a first cousin of the sheriff. Harrington’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Bertha Lee, was a stunning girl who’d attracted the attention of some of the neighborhood’s white men, including Norman Hadley, and it was being whispered about that the father had a role in the murder.
Except for Gene Harrington, who’d long ago been arrested by federal officers for moonshining but was quickly set free, none of the suspects, witnesses, or whatever Buddie was then calling them had ever before committed a crime, nor spent a night in jail, nor even been suspected of anything. Harrington was a church trustee; Moore and Crutchfield attended the same church he did. Jim Crutchfield, who brewed mash with the Gordons, had recently spent a year for that in the Atlanta jail. He, like Harrington, was a church trustee. His wife’s record remained, until this day, entirely clean. They all had long enjoyed the protection of their white neighbors, moonshine partners, and employers. The time, however, that Jim Crutchfield spent in jail in Atlanta had signaled to some that this long-held arrangement was falling apart.
Hadley nudged the weary Jake slowly up Blue Springs Road toward town. He had to be wary. I do not know if he bound their hands with rope. I do not know what he told them, if anything. Perhaps he told them, as black men and women often were told in these situations, that they were being taken in for their own safety, that their names were out there. Someone had said something and someone else something else and soon it was believed that these three had something to do with it or knew who did.
All the sheriff had was hearsay. No weapon. No confession. At the moment, the woman seated beside him, his “star witness,” was his best hope.
At the fork where the Blue Springs Road met the Lower Blue Springs Road, a short way from the jail, near Hamilton square, he encountered a masked posse on horseback. By the tilt of a hat, the crook of a nose, the rasp of a voice, he’d have known them all.
“Buddie, you better turn them niggers over to us now,” one of the men said.
Blue eyes boring straight into those of the man in charge, Buddie stated that he loved his nephew as much or more than any among them, but that justice would be carried out in a courtroom. He’d be down in Columbus in the morning, he assured them, asking Judge Gilbert for a special trial. The men would just have to trust him and should do so, for they had known him all his life and many shared his blood. For some reason, the mob moved aside. Perhaps they’d accomplished their purposes for the time: sent a message to the three Negroes that they had better cooperate (meaning “confess”) or else, and thus made the sheriff’s job a little easier. It would not be the first time a lynch mob had done only that, ensuring a conviction whether people were guilty or not. Or perhaps they did it to get a speedy trial. The only way one would be granted was if there was a compelling reason to believe a lynching was imminent. Or maybe they knew already a lynching was going to take place, but by letting Buddie Hadley look like a hero at this juncture, his reputation would be less harmed by a lynching. Hadley had only just made it through a special election. The real one was just around the corner.
Now Buddie Hadley sat in the freezing sleet, the new high sheriff, a country bumpkin who’d just moved his family into a mansion, rattling into town with a buggy full of his own family’s dirty laundry, with a promise to face the fancy-pants judge the next day in his sumptuous Columbus chambers to convince the judge he had enough of a case to warrant the calling of a special trial.
No record exists of his wife Emma’s reaction, or that of his grown sons and daughters, whether they knew of reasons for Norman’s murder beyond the official “dispute over rents,” though half a brain would tell them Gene Harrington was not a renter, so questions would have been asked. No one would be happy about the prospect of Norman’s peccadilloes being paraded before town gossips and, possibly, northern reporters. Ida Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. DuBois, and the newly organized National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were known to send investigators or reporters who’d later make grisly hay of southern lynchings, even naming names. And that Ray Stannard Baker fellow of the American Magazine, who had so recently exposed the white South’s hypocrisy in the matter of miscegeny, would be more than merely interested.
Buddie would have to be particularly protective of his fragile wife. When she was ten, her older brother fired a bullet into their father’s head, killing him instantly. “The apple of discord,” as newspapers would describe it, was a new stepmother’s quarrels with Emma’s older sisters, and the father’s attempt to remove the sisters from the house. Though papers at the time opined that the young man should surely suffer severe penalties for so gruesome a crime, he was never even arrested, and had soon thereafter married Buddie Hadley’s sister. The sisters he had defended, elderly and never married, now lived with Buddie and Emma, and none, including Emma, had ever gotten over that tragic event.
With only days on the job, the new sheriff had his back to the wall. All he could do was board that train in the morning and convince Judge Stirling Price Gilbert that there was good reason to call a special court and that he had enough evidence to convict either or both of the men he had in his buggy.
With the aid of jailer Zeke Robinson, a nervous young man with a new wife and baby, Buddie Hadley locked the three into the jail’s only two cells—cages, really—cold and filthy and built entirely of steel and stone. Then he dragged his rail-thin, bone-tired body home for supper, acutely aware that from alleys and shop fronts, the sidewalk benches and the shadows of the Confederate soldier, eyes were on the jailhouse door. And those eyes would be there until his promise to them was fulfilled. Those eyes were multiplied by the eyes of countless villagers, both anxious and curious as to what the new sheriff was going to do with his strange predicament.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Negro Desperadoes
The day that I discovered the lynching at the Library of Congress, I learned that one of the victims was named Moore. I knew at the time that my mother’s Hadley grandmother had been a Moore, but I didn’t make the connection until much later.
More than two years into my research, in April 1995, I decided for no particular reason to return to the Moore family cemetery, but when driving there I couldn’t find the turnoff. I’d passed it several times and was about to give up when a large buck leaped across the hood of my car and brought me to an abrupt stop, at the exact spot I was looking for. The last time I was there, with my elderly cousin Louise, she’d pointed out James B. Moore’s stone because of its interesting inscription. This time I was dumbstruck to see the stone cracked open so wide I could peer into the murky depths of his grave.
Several hours later I found myself in the clerk of court’s office. An ancient maroon leather ledger I’d pulled from a shelf inexplicably flopped open to a page that revealed not just any connection between black Moores and my mother’s Moores, but a kinship connection. There, dated September 31, 1868, was an
Indenture of Servitude between James B. Moore and his former slave Jane in which he agreed to care for her seven children, in exchange for their free labor until each was twenty-one. A check of federal censuses and other sources would later confirm that Johnie Moore was a member of my mulatto Moore family. I realized that all Moores, the “black” and the “white,” had lived there where I’d “met” James B. I remembered the blood-red thistles that dotted that fenced-in plot, the well-kept grave of the former slave Cheney, unfaded plastic flowers placed atop the stone, and a strange unmarked grave next to James B.’s of large rough stones. Could that be Jane? I asked myself.
I sat in the Library of Congress weeks later and wrote in my journal: “How deeply imprinted upon our nerves is this ability to deny a child of our blood because some of that blood came from the ‘wrong race?’ I look at those black men and women all around me here and I wonder: ‘Are you my cousin, half brother, or what?’ ”
Johnie Moore was, at twenty-one, the youngest of the three people the sheriff ushered into cold cells that January night. Although Moore had never been to jail, he’d heard plenty of grisly details from and about his notorious first cousins. “Negro desperadoes,” the Atlanta Constitution called them. By now two of Jane Moore’s four sons by James B. Moore had been murdered and Milford and Louis had been in serious prisons, not just this tin can of a lockup in Hamilton; site of so many escapes, it was a laughingstock throughout the state. Between them they’d served in Atlanta’s infamous Fulton Tower, on chain gangs, at the state farm, and in the depths of the dreaded mines. Since boyhood, Johnie Moore had known the torments of hell that awaited him if he took the path of these relatives, so he’d stayed in school until he was fourteen, far longer than most white boys in the district, stuck to farming, avoided the moonshine trade and kept his nose clean, married young, lived next door to his mother, lost his wife, grieved, then found a new love, to whom he was now engaged. That’s how he now happened to be sitting on cold stone that night of January 16, 1912. Word had spread fast the morning after Norman’s murder, and since it was all in the family, so to speak, he’d been among the first to hear. If he’d wanted to run, he hadn’t. That would have made him look guilty. He wouldn’t have wanted that.
Johnie Moore was first cousin twice removed to a bevy of mixed-race Moore men who were blood kin to the sheriff. This connection to the white Hadley-Moore family came about during slavery. Buddie Hadley’s great-uncle James B. Moore, a pig farmer and moonshine man, and his childless wife had one slave. Her name was Jane. By the time Jane was twenty-four and emancipation was at hand, she had six racially mixed children under the age of eight. They were Alfred, Milford, Louis, Susan, Genie, and Sogue. At war’s end, she signed herself over to James B. as his indentured servant for life, and in 1868 she put her mark beside his on a paper granting him the children’s care and services until each reached his or her majority. Moore, for his part, vowed to feed, clothe, educate, discipline, and govern them with humanity “as a father would.”
Whether it was a familial attachment to Moore or sheer desperation wrought by those postwar years (sights of single mothers and their starving children thrown together in beggars’ camps throughout the county) that drove Jane to sign away her children’s labor for so many years, it turned out to be a wise decision: two years later the fifty-five-year-old Moore was felled by a heart attack, and Jane and her children inherited eighty acres of good farmland from his estate. Moore’s wife quickly relocated to a mostly white section and hired as her servant a young white man.
Johnie Moore was the grandson of Jane’s sister, who’d been enslaved by Buddie Hadley’s grandfather, Thomas Moore. Through the years, the mulatto Moores stuck together, remaining close to their white cousins and working with them in the family moonshine business. Jane’s eldest sons, Alf and his brother Sog, were arrested several times in the late 1890s, as were Norman Hadley’s uncles Sambo and Mans Gordon, though never for shooting firearms at federal officers, as these last two were.
Johnie Moore was the only man in his beleaguered family not stained by crime, whether as perpetrator or victim. He had every reason to believe he was playing the game correctly and, indeed, his upright life had won him the hand of a beautiful fourteen-year-old by the name of Bertha Lee, the only child of the man who now sat next to him shivering in the Hamilton jail, brought in for questioning in the murder of Norman Hadley.
Gene Harrington was a tenant on the land of one of Norman Hadley’s uncles. Gene was an honest, hardworking man devoted to his family. Like Harrington, the mulatto Moore men had, for a time, led lives primarily free of courts and jails. Until the turn of the twentieth century, they’d flourished, perhaps a little too much for some tastes in the tightly entwined Mountain Hill community. Slowly there had developed a love-hate relationship toward them, among both blacks and whites. Over the past decade their criminal activity had become a problem for the several sheriffs of the extended Hadley family. These included Buddie’s older brother Joe and Norman’s uncle, Mitch Huling.
The love part of the relationship included some quiet socializing, financial and legal help, and sometimes lighter sentences; the hate part involved an increasing discomfort with criminal behavior bolstered by a growing ostracism by whites of other whites who consorted with blacks, even their own kin, causing many to push these family members aside. Given all this, Johnie Moore would have reason for both hope and fear at this crucial moment in his young life.
By 1900, the infant whom Jane Moore had cradled in her arms that day when she signed the apprenticeship papers had become a handsome, high-stepping man of thirty-one and was, of all her many sons, Jane’s highest hope and dearest heart. Both literally and figuratively, Sog Moore was in high cotton. As the new millennium endured its first summer, the hottest in many years and verging on drought, Sog sat on what, for a Harris County black man, was a fortune.
On a hot day in August, Sog was shot dead in the doorway of Browns Chapel Church by an angry husband whose wife he’d just taken for a buggy ride.
Short months later Jane Moore watched one son kill another at a family Christmas celebration. Buddie Hadley’s older brother, Joe, had just been elected sheriff. One of his first duties would be to arrest and help prosecute Jane’s son Louis for the murder of her son Alf.
Court days in Hamilton always attracted a giddy crowd. With no theater, movie house, or even bars at this point, in a land in love with drama, court trials had long been a favorite form of entertainment. The better known the defendant or his victim, the larger the crowd.
Some of the townspeople liked “Negro trials” because of the glimpse they provided into an alien lifestyle that most white women, at least, could only fantasize about. In this case there was not only the black-white kinship issue, rarely discussed but widely known, but also titillating details, divulged under examination involving the “concubines” Juliet Baker and Emma Jane Bryant and their promiscuous living arrangements with the Moore brothers, good-looking, well-spoken men some white women could not help but notice.
Louis denied all guilt, but while he described events leading up to the shootings, observers could not but have noted, and perhaps been amused by the fact, that the racially mixed Louis spoke a finer English and displayed a keener wit than either white witness against him. That may or may not have figured into why the jury came to a guilty decision within thirty minutes; and it may or may not have figured into why, seven years later, the entire jury, the prosecutor, and the sheriff would sign petitions to the governor begging for his release and admitting they had been wrong.
Before Jane Moore had time to digest the murders of two sons and the imprisonment of another in one short year, her second-eldest and sweetest son, Milford, was brought before the bench in Columbus, where he lived. Milford had shot and killed his best friend, Coon Narramore, in a fight over Milford’s longtime girlfriend, Pallie. Once again the fight that killed a Moore-related man was over a woman. This time, however, there was a fundamental difference:
Coon was a white man. Making matters even more unusual, Milford was distraught over his death and many white men would take sides with the black Milford. Adding to the intrigue of the case was the fact that Coon Narramore was a cousin of the Hadley-Moore clan, making him a cousin as well of Milford Moore.
In those first desperate hours in jail, it may have occurred to young Johnie that a certain powerful white family named Hargett might be his only hope, for it was Hargett lawyers who’d stepped in to handle Sog’s estate, to defend Milford in court, and to get Louis out of prison.
Within three days after Sog’s killing, Laney C. Hargett, one of the most prominent men in the county, petitioned Judge Cooper Williams to name him administrator of Sog’s “considerable estate,” worth around eight hundred dollars, a figure that would eventually swell to one thousand. Hargetts were the biggest frogs in that small pond called Mountain Hill and, as in my own family, their members ranged from lawbreakers to lawmakers, some of them both.
Laney’s brother Flynn was the longtime secretary of the state senate, an influential and lucrative post if you played it right. He would remain there for many more years, pulling strings for friends, relatives, and himself in arranging pardons for prisoners both black and white.
Some Hargetts were feared and respected for their political power; others, especially the younger generation, for their tempers and trigger fingers. Some men in my family were said to carry Winchesters at all times in case they ran into a Hargett.
In his petition to handle Sog’s estate, Laney C. Hargett had explained that “great loss and injury may happen” otherwise, referring to Sog’s “estimable estate.” Quickly, Sog’s horses and mules and sows and barrows, his plows and mills and tools and dishes, and even his fiddle and silver watch were put up for sale; neighbors far and wide, black and white came to share in the spoils. His estranged wife received a share and his hundred acres was registered to his young daughter. The rest Hargett claimed for himself and others. The daughter’s hundred acres was occupied by Flynn Hargett’s son Fletcher and would eventually belong entirely to white Hargetts.