"In the land of cotton": economics and violence in Jean Toomer's 'Cane.'

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Barbara Foley

The Mary Turner case pales in notoriety, however, beside the other historical case of racial violence invoked in "Kabnis" - namely, the multiple killings that took place on the Jasper County "Death Farm" about thirty miles from Sparta only a few months before Toomer's visit. In February, 1921, a series of bodies of drowned black men - most of them chained together in pairs and weighted down with bags of rocks - were found in the Yellow, Alcovy, and South Rivers. The corpses were eventually identified as those of former workers on the Monticello farm of John S. Williams, where federal investigators had recently begun an investigation into debt peonage (Daniel 110-31; Atlanta Constitution 14 Mar.-15 Apr. 1921). Williams denied involvement in the killings, but his black foreman Clyde Manning confessed to having carried out the murders under orders from Williams, who feared that the men would reveal their conditions of imprisonment and brute servitude. The first killings, Manning testified, took place on the Williams farm: "Another one of Mr. Williams' trusty negroes put in a little work - he killed one suspicious negro by braining him with an ax. . . . I knocked four negroes in the head with an ax [in] one week and buried them in the pasture back of Mr. Williams' house." Then a group of men was drowned in nearby rivers:

"I don't know how many negroes there are in the river, but I helped Mr. Williams drown six. . . . We took the other five to the river at night, after getting them out of their houses, and chained 'em down with rocks and threw 'em in.

"Yes, sir, they all cried and begged - and some of 'em asked to be knocked in the head before being thrown in, but Mr. Johnny wouldn't do it and wouldn't let me do it. We just threw 'em off and rode on back to the plantation."

One man was loaded down with rocks but allowed to drown himself: "Harry Price, he got out," Manning testified in the trial, "and says, 'Don't throw me over, I'll get over,' and he says, 'Lord have mercy,' and he went over" (Atlanta Constitution 7 Apr. 1921: 2).(8)

Although it was blacked out in the Sparta Ishmaelite, the Williams "Death Farm" case created a local sensation. Hundreds watched the sheriff and his deputies drag the Alcovy River for bodies and, a month later, crowded the Covington courtroom in Newton County where Williams was tried for murder. (The trial was moved to Newton County because several government officials in Jasper County, including Sheriff Harvey Persons and Doyle Campbell, Solicitor of the Ocmulgee Circuit, were themselves under investigation for practicing debt peonage [Daniel 122-23].) The case also attracted national attention. The NAACP, busy with the Dyer Bill, did not dispatch an investigator, but its Secretary, James Weldon Johnson, sent a telegram to Georgia Governor Hugh Dorsey urging him to "use every effort to bring to justice the murderers of eleven negroes in Jasper County, Georgia, because they threatened to reveal peonage conditions in that county . . . and [bring] into light this vicious system of exploitation and debt slavery, which is so prevalent in other parts of Georgia as well" (Atlanta Constitution 29 Mar. 1921: 2). The black and liberal-to-left press (Nation, New Republic, Crusader, Messenger, Crisis) held the incident up as an indictment of Southern neo-slavery. The mainstream press took note: The Literary Digest, a summary organ of nationwide press coverage, commented on reports from eleven newspapers around the country - from Nebraska to New York - expressing various degrees of shock and outrage (16 Apr. 1921: 13-14). Even Southern white newspapers that had blacked out the Williams case as news felt compelled to comment editorially upon the sentences after the fact (e.g., "Let Justice Be Done").(9)