Fire in a Canebrake by Laura Wexler

Author:Laura Wexler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER TWELVE

On the afternoon of September 7, a procession of nearly fifty cars passed through downtown Monroe, traveled six miles east on the Atlanta–Athens highway, and turned onto the Mountain Lodge Road. The drivers followed the road past cotton fields, past the path that led to Mt. Enon Church, and past the little white house on the Fanny Wright place where the white man had been found hanging eight months before. At the fork, they took the road leading down to the river, parked, and walked along the old wagon trail to reach the killing place—just like the souvenir collectors who’d hurried to the Moore’s Ford Bridge on the morning after the lynching. But, unlike the souvenir collectors, these people were black.

They were attendees at the Negro Baptist Convention in Atlanta, and they’d left the city en masse earlier that day to make the roughly fifty-mile journey to the scene of the crime. For more than a month, they’d heard about the lynching on the radio and read about it in newspapers. Now they gathered before the pine trees whose trunks were scarred by the bullets that had killed the victims. The trees had since been inscribed with four crude crosses, though whether they’d been carved in memory of the victims or as a sign of the Ku Klux Klan, no one knew. For several hours that afternoon, the sound of singing and praying traveled along the Apalachee River. Just before dark it ceased, and the procession of cars traveled up from the river and back to the highway to return to Atlanta. Though the Walton Tribune reported the Baptists were “quiet and orderly” during their time in the county, at least one white citizen in Monroe suspected they’d had guns hidden in the trunks of their cars.

By the time of the Baptists’ visit, much of the cotton in the fields of Walton and Oconee counties had opened, and one week later, nearly every rural school had closed, signaling the height of the picking season. Harvest season was always an anxious time—so much depended on a good crop—but that September tensions ran particularly high. Heavy rain in the spring had delayed planting, while a dearth of rain in the early summer had produced meager cotton bolls, many of which had been destroyed by an unusually high weevil infestation. The bolls that were spared by the weevil had opened prematurely, thanks to the searing heat of July and August. That a farmer from Blasingame took the first bale of cotton to a local gin as early as August 22 was seen as a bad omen. Some farmers predicted only a half crop of cotton, maybe less.

And though September’s cotton prices were at an almost unprecedented high (39¢ per pound), farmers worried the high prices wouldn’t last through the harvest. Their worries turned out to be justified; in October, the price of cotton would plummet to 29¢ per pound, resulting in a loss of roughly $50 per bale. And despite the fact

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