Brambleman Read online

  “Did you pray for that?”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Did you put a curse on your daughter’s attorney?”

  She eyed him like he was crazy. “Why would you say such a horrible thing? I never hurt anyone.”

  He saw that her hands were trembling. “Sorry,” he said. “My bad.”

  Figuring an ascetic doesn’t take holidays, Charlie started working on the manuscript.

  A while later, Kathleen walked into the study and said, “Angela called. She’s been under the weather. She’s feeling better now, but she wants company. A friend of hers died. Could you drive me over?”

  “Sure.”

  “What a run of bad luck she’s been having. I can’t believe her girlfriend dumped her when she got sick. That’s horrible, don’t you think?”

  Charlie bit his lip. “I suppose.”

  “I do so much for Angela,” Kathleen mumbled as she left.

  “To Angela, you mean.”

  Kathleen came back. “What did you just say?”

  “Nothing.”

  * * *

  Kathleen emerged from Angela’s house after staying thirty minutes. Charlie jumped out and opened the car door for her, shooting her a questioning look. “Well?”

  “Her attorney died,” Kathleen said. “She doesn’t know if she’s going to get another one. She said she’ll see how this goes. I think it helped that you brought me to see her. I told her it was your idea. I figured you need her good will more than I do. I’m her mother. Nothing either she or I can do about that now.”

  “True. But what about Angela’s … condition?”

  “It’s clearing up, whatever it was. Bad acne, I think. Probably brought on by self-induced stress. She gets all worked up over things. Who knows?” Kathleen shook her head at the mysteries of life. “Oh, by the way. I think my TV is on the fritz.”

  “I checked. It’s dead. Lightning hit it.”

  “Oh, dear. Maybe I should get another one. Could you help me get one and set it up?”

  “In time for football? You bet.”

  * * *

  Friday morning, Charlie drove to Thornbriar and made coffee, relieved to see that Evangeline wasn’t there and his favorite blue cup was. Susan entered the kitchen dressed in a dark gray suit and found a cup already prepared the way she liked it, with milk and Equal. “I’ve only got a minute,” she said, glancing at her watch, then taking a sip. “So what are your plans for today?”

  “I’m taking the kids to Kathleen’s.”

  “Really?”

  “We talked about this. You said you’d pick them up.”

  “Oh. Is that today? So I get to meet the mystery woman. Is she as old as you say?”

  “Older.”

  “I guess I’ll see for myself soon enough.”

  “I guess you will.”

  She took a long gulp of coffee. “Well, time to go.”

  Susan hugged the kids and gave Charlie a limp-wristed wave on her way out the door.

  “We’re having a tea party!” Charlie announced as the garage door rattled closed.

  “Like Alice in Wonderland?” Beck asked.

  “Along the same lines,” Charlie said, blinking rapidly. “But better.”

  On their roundabout way to Bayard Terrace, they dropped by the library and checked out picture books, then stopped at a market to pick up snacks and items on Kathleen’s grocery list.

  Thrilled to have company, Kathleen gushed over the children when they arrived. She insisted on reimbursing Charlie for the groceries and went to get her checkbook, then returned to the kitchen with a troubled look on her face. “Oh my. I spent three hundred dollars on flowers. In the middle of winter? How is that possible?”

  “Let me see.” Charlie looked at the entry and laughed. “Hyacinth is a person.”

  “Is she a friend?”

  “You paid her not to be.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Never mind, then.”

  He showed the kids his living quarters after their loud, insistent pleas began to bother their hostess. This worried Charlie, since an unnerved Kathleen could be a smiteful Kathleen.

  “You’re right. This is a dungeon,” Ben marveled as they creaked down the steps.

  “I see a rat!” Beck shrieked and ran upstairs. Ben, jealous of her discovery, kept exploring.

  “Don’t go into any dark corners or reach under anything,” Charlie commanded.

  “All the corners are dark. And the bathroom is icky.”

  “I know,” Charlie said, stretching the word. “I shower at the Y.”

  After a lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches, Beck sat with Kathleen on the sofa and looked through old photo albums and scrapbooks while Ben played with Legos at the dining room table. Charlie seized the chance to work on the book. When he heard sobbing, he came out of the study and saw Kathleen weeping, with Beck’s arms wrapped around her. The scrapbook was open to pictures of Gary as a little boy, and Beck was assuring her that her son was in heaven.

  “I don’t know about that,” Kathleen said, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex.

  “Sure he is,” Beck said. “He didn’t kill anyone, did he?”

  “He was a soldier.”

  After a thoughtful pause, Beck said, “That’s what soldiers do, so it’s not so bad.”

  “He didn’t want to be a soldier. He wanted to build things.”

  “That might help.”

  Kathleen pulled herself together, and after a while she declared it was time for the party. Beck dressed up in a borrowed red shawl, floppy hat, and loads of beaded necklaces. Kathleen wore her blue dress. Ben and Charlie came as they were. Ben didn’t like tea, so he got cocoa. When she heard he was getting cocoa, Beck insisted on tea and cocoa. Kathleen fixed both drinks. The kids found her shortbread cookies acceptable, though Ben asked if they could have chocolate chip cookies next time. Kathleen sniffed at the idea, saying, “Those aren’t cultured and refined enough.”

  “Sure they are,” Ben said. “They’ve got chips.”

  Kathleen squinted at the boy in disapproval. “Don’t contradict me, young man.”

  Charlie steered the conversation away from the dispute, fearing that if she started smiting the children, he’d have to go woodsman on her ass. Some tea party that would be. Fortunately, the moment passed without further incident, and the controversy over cookies ended with no fatalities to report.

  Later that afternoon, Charlie took the kids to a nearby park, returning just before dusk. When he walked in the door and saw the black marks on the wall behind the new plasma screen TV Kathleen had bought on New Year’s Day, he realized he needed to clean up the evidence of divine rebooting before his wife arrived. He scrubbed off the last soot marks just before Susan pulled into the driveway and parked behind the van.

  When Kathleen answered the door, Charlie could see that Susan was quite pleased, perhaps even smugly so, to see how old his employer was. Beck interrupted introductions to announce: “Daddy lives with rats. And not the pretty kind either, like in Mrs. Coppins’ classroom.”

  A look of alarm crossed Susan’s face.

  “There might be a mouse in the house,” Charlie admitted.

  “It was a rat,” Beck insisted. “Big big.”

  Susan shuddered and said, “I’ve got to see this place for myself.” First, Charlie showed her his new office. (He’d pulled down Momo’s picture since he couldn’t stand to look at the ugly bastard.) Susan gave a cursory glance at page 758 of the manuscript but said nothing. Then again, he’d told her nothing about the book, not even its title. (She hadn’t asked about it, either.) When they went downstairs, she laughed, unwilling or unable to conceal her scorn. “You weren’t kidding. It is a dungeon. How can you live here?”

  “Beats the alternative.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The street.”

  Susan rolled her eyes. “You think that’s the alternative? You
’re crazy.”

  “It smells bad, too,” Ben said, standing behind Charlie, holding his nose. “I think there are monsters here. They stink with all their might.”

  “They’re rats, stinky rats!” Beck shouted down from the kitchen, not daring to venture closer.

  Susan groaned in distaste and tromped back upstairs. “You’re going to have to get rid of the rats before the kids come over here again,” she called out from the top step. “If ever.”

  He frowned. “Don’t worry. I’ll put out traps.”

  Shortly after that, Susan bundled up the kids and everyone said goodbye. Charlie stood on the porch and watched the Camry disappear.

  “You have a beautiful family,” Kathleen said when he came back inside. “I hope everything works out. There are too many divorces these days. ’Til death do you part. That’s the way to do it.”

  “We’ll see,” said Charlie, feeling downhearted. It was difficult and terrible to see his family drive away. After being with them constantly for their entire lives, he realized he might not be emotionally equipped to handle his children’s constant departures. But what choice was there? He had to do what he had to do.

  He returned to the manuscript and spent several hours banging his head against the wall of the past, which beat the hell out of thinking about the present. That night, he finished copying the entire book to his hard drive. By then, his brain had turned to mush. He stumbled downstairs, kicked off his shoes, turned off the dangling bulb, and slipped into his sleeping bag. He heard a squeak and made a mental note: Buy traps in the morning.

  Chapter Five

  When Charlie finished reading Talton’s 1,087-page manuscript, he knew more than anyone else alive about what had happened in Forsyth County nearly a century ago. The nugget of Dr. Talton’s magnum opus was buried deep inside myriad observations and countless facts, starting with the weathering of the Blue Ridge Mountains, winding along the Trail of Tears, and ending at a hateful, crudely lettered sign at the county line.

  The incident that originally sparked Forsyth’s madness was an event of questionable authenticity: an alleged “outrage” against a white woman near Deep Creek, five miles north of Cumming, the county seat. On the night of Thursday, September 5, 1912, the unnamed victim (first identified as a farmer’s wife, then as a young woman living with her mother) awoke to find a black man in her bed, so the story went. “Imagine her surprise!” Talton wrote. “Like Casablanca’s gendarme, she was shocked, SHOCKED, at this occurrence!” More likely, the professor suggested, she was caught in bed with a black man and cried Rape! to save her honor, which, to white folks, was infinitely more precious than a black man’s life, especially in Georgia, the state responsible for half the nation’s lynchings that year.

  The man and his rumored accomplice (whose existence was debatable) were frightened by the woman’s screams and ran off. Almost immediately, posses formed and combed the area for suspects. While Talton’s account was prosaic, Charlie’s espresso-fueled reading allowed him to see vigilantes whipping galloping horses through the night, accompanied by silent-movie chase music.

  Meanwhile, a man variously identified as the victim’s father or husband rode into the sleepy town of Cumming, population 813, and tried to stir up a mob, failing only because there was no suspect. Lynching prospects improved the next day after two black men were arrested. One, a field hand named Ronnie Harris, immediately confessed, according to the nearby Gainesville newspaper. Such “confessions” often came after torture, beatings, and threats of lynching coupled with a lack of legal representation for the accused. Then again, the newspaper could have fabricated the claim. Nothing increased circulation like the terror threat/morality play of black-on-white rape, not to mention the resultant mob activity. “In 1912 Georgia,” Talton noted, “black suspects were lucky if they were considered innocent until proven arrested.”

  While Harris was presumed guilty, he had supporters among Forsyth’s 1,159 blacks—ten percent of the county’s population. At noon on Saturday, September 7, a stocky, bald black Baptist preacher named Lincoln Roberts stood in the dusty street outside the courthouse where Harris was jailed. Roberts, born shortly after the Civil War, had lived in Forsyth County all his life and claimed to know the parties involved, none of whom were Ronnie Harris. Declaring that the prisoner had been unjustly accused, Roberts called for Harris’s release. A crowd of black workers, sharecroppers, and farmers gathered around him. There was no rape or attempted rape, Roberts stated, but simply consensual sex. “The woman’s affection for her black paramour was so great she refused to name the man who slipped from her bed and out the window!” Roberts shouted.

  The white press would later denounce and condense his speech, stating, “The insolent Negro made remarks about the woman’s character.” Claiming that a white woman would willingly have anything to do with a black man carried the death penalty by mob back then, of course, so Roberts’s “insolence” was cut short when a dozen whites broke through the crowd and roughly seized him. Several drew pistols and pointed them at his head. He was forced to kneel. A man uncoiled a horsewhip and laid into the preacher, lashing through his coat and cutting strips of flesh. Roberts tried to run, but he was clubbed with a pistol butt and knocked down in the dirt. The whipping continued, along with beating and kicking.

  Eventually, Sheriff J.A. Wright and deputies emerged from the courthouse to arrest the half-dead Roberts. As they dragged off the preacher, a growing white mob called for his lynching. Wright would later explain that he’d arrested Roberts to save him. It’s worth noting that none of Roberts’s assailants were charged in the assault. “A white man’s right to beat a nigger is the cornerstone of Georgia law,” State Sen. Preston Standers proclaimed in 1910, and nothing had changed in the two years since.

  The preacher’s arrest did not calm things down. In the collective white mind, a black conspiracy to commit outrages against white women grew and festered. Four other blacks were arrested on the rather vague charge of “suspicion,” also a lynching offense, though one that was used mainly to fill county chain gangs for road work. (The state’s infamous convict-lease system had been abolished in 1908.) Word of Roberts’s beating spread, angering local blacks who believed he had been attacked for telling an unpleasant truth. Apparently, everyone knew this woman.

  By this time, Atlanta papers were covering the story, adding fuel to the fire—as they did in 1906, when false reports of black-on-white crime helped spark the Atlanta Riot. Whites responded by threatening mass lynchings. Rebecca Felton, a populist race-baiter, summed up white feelings succinctly when she said, “If it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week.”

  While reports of black insurrection turned out to be false, feverish whites made good on their threat to form mobs. Word of Harris’s confession brought armed whites cascading from the hills. By Saturday afternoon, hundreds surrounded the courthouse. As a barrel-chested, red-headed farmer in work clothes waved a hangman’s noose in the air, the crowd called for Wright to deliver Roberts and Harris to “justice”—meaning them, of course. The sheriff refused; the mob tested his mettle. A hundred men rushed the building. Wright fired a single warning shot. The crowd fell back after this massive display of firepower but didn’t disperse. A chant arose: “Burn ’er down! Burn ’er down!” In a footnote, Talton wrote: “Courthouse arson is a proud Forsyth County tradition.”

  Following a series of frantic phone calls between the mayor of Cumming, Sheriff Wright, and Gov. Joseph M. Brown in Atlanta, martial law was declared in Forsyth. Brown, the son of Georgia’s Civil War governor (and who would later participate in the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank), ordered militia units from Marietta and Gainesville to quell the riots that threatened to tear apart the rural county. Thirty heavily armed troops from Gainesville were quickly dispatched to Cumming, arriving late Saturday afternoon. That night, under tight security, the sheriff moved Roberts and Harris—“the cause of all t
his trouble,” according to the Atlanta Citizen—to the Marietta jail in Cobb County, thirty miles away.

  Wright hoped his actions would defuse tensions, but outrage among poor whites kept growing, fueled by long-standing antagonisms toward blacks. Not surprisingly, there was a run on rifles and ammunition at Whitsitt’s General Store. Heavily armed whites milled about Cumming looking for insolent Negroes and breaking the windows of black-owned houses, since home ownership was the surest sign of uppityness. Sensing trouble settling over the town like an oppressive fog, black families packed their belongings into horse- and mule-drawn wagons. The most prescient of them were halfway to Gainesville or Atlanta by Sunday morning, when newspapers published stories reporting that Negroes were plotting to blow up Cumming with dynamite in retaliation for the attack on Roberts.

  In Cumming, as cocks crowed and cattle lowed in pastures, armed whites who’d slept in wagon beds with rifles woke with empty whiskey bottles beside them and faced the ugly truth of a new day: There was no one to lynch and only church to attend. For the moment, all was quiet. But that wouldn’t last. “Violence begets violence,” Talton wrote, “and the mob’s darkest desires and prayers to an angry God would soon be answered.”

  Around ten o’clock Sunday morning, nineteen-year-old Martha Jean Rankin skipped off the front porch of her father’s home in Oscarville in north Forsyth. A pretty girl with long brown hair, she wore a lacy white dress as she hiked past a fenced field of tall, ripening corn on her way to her aunt’s house, where her two little sisters had spent the night. She was supposed to take them to church, but before she reached her destination, she ran into Bernie Dent, an employee of a neighboring farm. She knew Dent slightly, though she would not likely have wanted to stop and chat. He was black, scrawny, deformed, and walked with a limp. “There are no photos extant of Dent,” Talton wrote, “but newspapers called him ‘a barefoot, country Negro,’ as well as ‘brutish, low-browed, and apelike.’”