During a blustery autumn storm, the tailwinds of a hurricane, the wind whipped through the woodshed and stirred up some of the papers, littering them around the property. Each day we would pluck a few — a strange harvest of stories. Opinion columns about communists clinging to the blueberry bushes; by the smokehouse, a story of a man dying because a segregated hospital refused him treatment; in the kale I found the price of cotton: 36 cents per 1-inch middling. I would nibble on these stories, roll them over in my mind, then bury their empty husks beneath a pile of oak leaves.
Then a keeper appeared to Michael in the grass between the old well and the pecan tree. The front page of the Athens Banner-Herald from May 16, 1947 read, "State Seeks Death Sentence For All 31 Lynchers." He lifted the dampened page and laid it to dry on the dining room table. The article gave graphic details and ample evidence, including confessions and incriminating accusations from the taxicab drivers who killed Willie Earle to avenge the fatal stabbing of a cab driver named Thomas Brown. Arrested, then almost immediately kidnapped from jail, Earle had no opportunity to stand trial - his guilt or innocence never proven. The cab drivers behavior followed a recognizable ritual of extrajudicial killing that terrorized African American communities throughout the South from the 1870s through the 1940s. When the paper dried out, I tucked it away on the bookshelf. I thought about rifling through the stack for the follow-up paper, or I could have done a quick internet search to know what date the trial ended and the dismal outcome. Instead, I set the incomplete story on the shelf for another day.
I told myself to look up Willie Earle’s story, but the holidays were upon us — I let the details of his murder and the fate of his killers fall to the wayside. Though I have been researching this area's violent history, it takes an emotional toll to read these tragic stories — a toll I was not yet ready to pay. I try to pace my consumption of tragic news, a privilege but also a form of soul preservation. But then, the rest of Earle’s story blew into our front yard one balmy Saturday in January.