Executioners' Songs (Page 2)

After stripping Hose of his clothes and chaining him to a tree, the self-appointed executioners stacked kerosene-soaked wood high around him. Before saturating Hose with oil and applying the torch, they cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals, and skinned his face. While some in the crowd plunged knives into the victim's flesh, others watched "with unfeigning satisfaction" the contortions of Sam Hose's body as the flames rose, distorting his features, causing his eyes to bulge out of their sockets, and rupturing his veins. The only sound that came from the victim's lips, even as his blood sizzled in the fire, were, "Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus." Before Hose's body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into several pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over these souvenirs.
      --Leon F. Litwack, "Hellhounds,"
        from Without Sanctuary

"A monster in human form" was the name given Sam Hose, a black Georgian, by white Georgians when 2,000 of them--some delivered from Atlanta by excursion train--lynched him on April 23, 1899. If the circumstances of Hose's execution did not set the prototype for lynching--that was accomplished almost immediately after the Civil War--they surely weren't unique. Most all the executions documented in James Allen's collection of lynching photographs, 1870-1960, involved African-American men (often those who had disdained subservience, achieved a level of prosperity); accusations of crimes against whites (particularly white women); absence of any trial or legal proceeding; torture; gleeful witness by a horde of white men, women and children; souveniring; memorialization in the form of postcards (the source of most of the collected photos); after-the-fact assertions of white righteousness ("The people of Georgia are...the descendants of ancestors who have been trained in America for 150 years," an Atlanta newspaper commented after Hose was sacrificed; "They are a people intensely religious, homeloving and just. There is among them no foreign or lawless element"); and the unconcealed aim of social regulation through terror. (For the most part, the few white victims represented here were also lynched as a warning, to cattle rustlers, strikebreakers, immigrants, uninvited homesteaders.)

Senators, district attorneys, sheriffs, judges, governors, authorities at every level, participated in, sometimes led, these autos-da-fé. Where mob "rowdyism" offended their sensibilities, the gentility would organize "orderly" lynchings--"good lynchings" they were called, conducted without fire or the scramble for body parts, but rather in the "most approved and up-to-date fashion." Between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 people, three-quarters of them African-American, were lynched. More than 90 percent of those executions occurred in the South, and Without Sanctuary reproduces images of sixty-seven of them, sometimes involving multiple victims, sometimes shown from a variety of angles, more than once, long shot and close-up.

* * *

It might be that the stuff of life, as Adorno suggests, can be seen only in fragments, that there is no final synthesis, that such a "whole" as might exist can be understood only from that which is partial, unfinished--the shards of experience, first one, then another, and another...

So, too, perhaps, with the stuff of death. Both Condemned and Without Sanctuary are creatures of the archive, but only one recognizes that death's power--and particularly the power of the state or its surrogates to confer death--lies in the memory of the living.

In Condemned, the successive live faces of men and women sentenced to die, a DA's synopsis of a crime, a warrant of execution, a hand grasping the hair of a man in a straitjacket too crazy to cooperate with death-house admittance procedures, fingerprints, letters home, letters from home denied delivery, letters begging for reprieve, telegrams, rules, surveillance reports, a lone report of final resistance, a prisoner's diagram of a prison guard's key, all the mundane bits and pieces of life on death row follow one after the next, like footfalls on a stone floor leading closer to the electric chair--click-clack, click-clack.

Despite the impact of its initial images, and especially of the story of Sam Hose, which opens Leon Litwack's historical essay, Without Sanctuary has none of that force. It is concerned with memory only in the most vulgar sense. How many suspended lifeless bodies can you bear? How many gruesome stories? How many castrated men, blood running down their legs, lower bodies primly covered with makeshift skirts, will it take to shock? How many faces forgotten or even unnoticed for the horror to their bodies? How many lynchers without histories? How many victims whose only history begins and ends with the tale of their execution? How many of the 4,000 limited-edition casebound copies will so many black bodies sell? How many will it take to forget?

Intentionally or not, the book served as a kind of catalogue to an extremely popular exhibition of Allen's collection in New York City recently [see "Diary of a Mad Law Professor," February 14]. One of the functions of catalogues, of course, is to reproduce in exalted form the objects or "works" whose real-life manifestation might be far less visually commanding--here, the works being mainly small postcards, weathered with years and handling, some copyrighted by the photographer either in scrawl or fine type, some with faded tourist greetings ("Well John--this is a picture taken of a great day we had in Dallas March 3.... I was very much in the bunch. You can see the negro hanging on a telephone pole"), but none, in their original state, beautifully printed on heavy paper on a scale befitting a $60 book.

In so mannered a form, the challenge to consciousness raised by the solitary, unhurried act of sifting through an archive is lost, and, transmuted into art, the brittle relics of what one black observer of the time called "folk pornography" remain only that. By the end of the book, one has been inoculated against suffering.

If this posed merely an aesthetic problem--or, better, a problem of spectacularizing what is already too much a spectacle--one could leave it at that. But history is not something over there, separable by its simplest component parts, complete in the past tense except insofar as it can prompt the empty vow "Never Again."

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