All Our Buried Corpses
/By Jamie Hare
Salem, Massachusetts
“All your buried corpses are starting to speak…”
— “I Am Not Your Negro,” 1963, James Baldwin
My relationship with the South has always been complicated. In Atlanta, I grew up on Gone With the Wind and rum cake from Mrs. S. R. Dull’s Southern Cooking. Mrs. Dull was a distant cousin on the Stanley side of my family, and her recipes were at every holiday meal. My family spent summers on Jekyll Island, just off the Georgia coast, with requisite trips to the Buccaneer Supper Club on the mainland in Darien. I attended the University of Georgia, joined a sorority, and can whip up a mean bowl of shrimp and grits to serve at Christmas.
Yet as I grew into my 20s, the South — with its stagnant attitudes toward women, the subtle racism in the “city too busy to hate,” and its antiquated disposition regarding any kind of change — became startlingly apparent. All of a sudden I was arguing with my father about politics and walking out of our family church when the pastor said AIDS was punishment for being gay.
And then, at one Thanksgiving dinner, as I was discussing the school where I worked, my grandfather, Papa Hodges, roared at me for helping “ni****s,” because they had murdered our family in Statesboro.
There was an awkward silence, and then one of my aunts made small talk and the moment passed. I attempted to discuss this with both of my parents later that night but got nowhere.
This was not unusual. My parents did not discuss “family matters” and were masters of evasion in terms of discussing my mother’s alcoholism, the cousin committed to Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, the aunt suffering domestic violence, the bottles of Elavil or Prozac found in medicine cabinets, or answers to why we never went to Statesboro, where my father’s family still lived. The code of honor born of small towns and agrarian communities, which both my parents were from, ensured silence.
This historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown describes “Southern honor,” in his 1982 book of the same name, as the method used by Southern white men to maintain their long-established social hierarchy — and their families’ place in that hierarchy — by silencing shame and conforming to community norms. Anything outside of those community norms or that could bring embarrassment to the family was not to be discussed, ever.
Years later, I finally found the story of those family murders my grandfather talked about — and along with it, a call to action.
“To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative, but that it is also impossibly present.”
—”Southern Landscape,” 2013, Sally Mann
In the early 20th century, my great-great-uncle Henry Hodges had been a “three-plow” farmer on land in the Colfax community, west of Statesboro. His father, Asbury Wesley Hodges, had been killed in the Civil War’s Battle of Atlanta. Henry’s mother, Ruth, had gone looking for the body in DeKalb County but to no avail. She had to return home as Confederate forces were evacuating the town, blowing up ammunition dumps and supplies. She had four children, including my great-grandfather James Wesley, and great-great uncle, Henry Raiford, for whom my father and brother are named.
According to newspaper accounts, Henry Hodges lived with his third wife, Claudia, and three children, Harmon (2 years old), Talmadge (6 months old), and a daughter from his second marriage, Kittie, who was 9. Talk around town was that Claudia Hodges had just come into money from her family and it was hidden somewhere on the Hodges farm.
In his book, The Hodges Family Murders and the Lynching of Paul Reed and Will Cato, Dr. Charlton Moseley writes, spelling the youngest child’s name differently, “It was established that little Kitty told the wife of Cato or Reed (some confusion as to which) about the money while the black woman was doing the washing for her mother.” Paul Reed and Will Cato were African American tenant farmers who worked the land near the Hodges’ farm. The Southern farming system had grown on the backs of slaves, and when slavery was abolished, many slaves became “tenant farmers,” or sharecroppers, still indentured to the land to provid shelter and food for their families.
On the night of July 28, 1904, neighbors discovered the Hodges farmhouse on fire. Men flocked to the fire to discover the farmhouse had been burned in its entirety and the family could not be located. The next morning, puddles of clotted blood were found near the cane patch, and as the embers cooled, the bodies of Henry Hodges, his wife, and his three children were found. A countywide search for the perpetrators began in earnest.
Cato and Reed were arrested several days later. A shoe belonging to Cato had been found at the scene, some blood had been located in and around the tenants’ shacks, and Harriet Reed had confessed — under duress — that her husband and WIll Cato had been involved.
Because of the ensuing mobs and clamoring for blood, Cato and Reed were taken to Savannah and placed under guard of the Savannah Militia. But telegrams from other counties volunteering aid in lynching the pair arrived daily, and finally, on August 15, 1904, the men were sent back to Statesboro and the trial began. The men were immediately convicted. The Savannah Militia attempted to protect Cato and Reed, but a noisy mob was gathering in the courthouse square. When the mob discovered that the weapons of the Militia contained blanks, a melee broke out. The Rev. Harmon Hodges, brother of my great-great uncle Henry Raiford, pleaded for mercy for Cato and Reed.
A member of the mob shouted in response, “We don’t want religion, we want blood.” The mob cut the telephone and telegraph lines, then burst through the courthouse to the second floor, where they found Cato and Reed. The mob threw ropes around their necks and dragged down the stairs.
The mob put Cato and Reed in a wagon and hauled them down Main Street, as women handed out jars of kerosene — to “help with the burning,” according to a Aug 1 1904 quote in the Savannah Morning News. They tied them to a tree in a thicket near Nick Foss’s cotton gin. White men and women heaped firewood at their feet of Cato and Reed and poured oil and kerosene over their heads.
At 3:14 pm, the match was struck, and the men burned. Afterward, local white children sold the bones from Cato’s and Reed’s bodies, and newspapers sold postcards as commemoratives.
It is estimated up to 200 people participated in the lynch mob. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, this is one of 4,400 documented lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1877 and 1950.
“No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
— “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” 1928, Zora Neale Hurston
After the initial shock settled and I understood why we never went to Statesboro, I decided this would not further alienate me from the South. No. This would bring me back to the South. I got in touch with my father’s second cousin, whom I had never met. I flew to Atlanta, rented a car and drove to Statesboro to meet my family. I was driven to the site of the Hodges’ farm and the site of the lynchings. I walked down the street where Cato and Reed had been dragged. And this weighed heavy on my heart.
Bryan Stevenson and his Legacy Memorial Museum in Montgomery, AL were featured on “60 Minutes” not long after my quest to Bulloch County. Stevenson equates lynching with racial terrorism. He says, “We cannot heal the deep wounds inflicted during the era of racial terrorism until we tell the truth about it…” And he is right, there can be no healing, no reconciliation unless the truth is told.
I was never told the truth. My brother, named for this great-great uncle, was never told this story. The mission of the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, founded by Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, is to tell the truth about the thousands of African Americans lynched, to address the legacy of lynchings in the communities where they happened, and to fight racial injustice.
A reckoning is a settling of accounts. To settle this account in my own family, I had to write this story. It had to be told. Understanding must be reached, and the fight must continue. The South is not finished with me, and I am not finished with the South.
Jamie Hare lives in Salem, Massachusetts, with her husband and three cats. Born and raised in Decatur, Georgia, she attended the University of Georgia and Georgia State University. She has worked as an educator for 25 years and loves football, writing, books and getting meat-and-three at random, hole-in-the-wall joints in Georgia.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was published with an image, now removed, of one of the photo postcards of the lynching that were sold in Savannah in the days following it. As editor-in-chief, I made the decision to run the image because I believed its inclusion would make this essay’s act of reconciliation more powerful. But I was blind to the repercussion of the continued traumatization such a photograph could cause. I thank the people of color in The Bitter Southerner Family who brought this to my attention — and to the many other members who weighed in on the topic. After listening to them and talking to them on the day of publication, I decided to remove the photo, but to use this editor’s note to acknowledge and apologize to anyone who found viewing it traumatic. The work of reconciliation in the South is hard, and I thank our readers for helping us learn more every day about how our stories should play a part. (Also, this piece corrects a previously incorrect reference to the Equal Justice Initiative.) — Chuck Reece