The Devil Went Down to Georgia

Fredonia Woolf went on the rare road trip this past weekend. I try not to leave the swamp, much less the state, but my friend The Women’s Studies Professor did something too painfully strange to be believed, so I tagged along. Each year since 2006, the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials (GABEO for short) has hosted a reenactment of the 1946 lynchings at Moore’s Ford Bridge, near Monroe, a small town in between Atlanta and Athens.

Seriously. Black people pretend to be the four victims: Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and George and Mae Murray Dorsey. White people pretend to be the mob members. Spectators gather at the bridge to watch the Malcolms and Dorseys get pulled from a car, dragged to the riverside, shot multiple times, and then worse: a mob member cuts open Dorothy Malcolm’s pregnant belly and pulls out her seven month fetus (in this case, a black baby doll).

The point is to mourn communally and to call for justice. No one was ever prosecuted, despite an FBI investigation. A $35,000 reward remains active for information that will lead to arrest and conviction of the killers. The reenactment is filmed and posted on YouTube (search for “Massacre at Moore’s Ford”) to assist in the effort.

The reenactment, the only one of its kind in the country, is controversial. The Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, an interracial group that was instrumental in starting the dialogue about the case, plays no official role even though some of its members take part individually. Other members find the reenactment distasteful. Many local whites wonder why anyone wants to bring up a history that they think is better off buried in the first place. Laura Wexler’s book about the lynchings, Fire in a Canebreak, says the part about Dorothy Malcolm being pregnant is not true. The Professor thinks that the memory of what happened at Moore’s Ford might have gotten folded into the memory of another terrible story, the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant when she was killed near Valdosta.

The people in South Georgia still don’t talk about what happened in 1918. Most of them probably don’t even know, even though somewhere between eleven and eighteen African Americans died including Mary Turner. The Professor says that the incident shows up in all kinds of art and literature, and even folks in Brooks and Lowndes remember it in weird ways. A few years back, some boys painted a bunch of Barbie dolls back and hung them from nooses in the trees at a local high school. And almost stranger than that, as The Professor and I drove up I-75, she pointed out to me a billboard at the very spot where Mary Turner was lynched and her fetus was ripped out. It was one of those right-to-life affairs picturing a giant baby in the womb. “Heartbeat Begins at 18 Days,” it said. Kind of made we want to get up there with a can of spray paint and add, “And Ends at 8 Months.”

The people in North Georgia had the decency to put up a historical marker. Even if some people don’t agree with the reenactment, it beats the ways that memories eek their way out circuitously the way they do in South Georgia. Juvenile delinquents lynching Barbie! What will they think of next! Memory always finds a way out, especially bad memory, so my vote goes with the folks who find a way to acknowledge it.

It’s like evil spirits. You can pretend they don’t exist until one gets into your house. But by then you’re cooked. The furniture’s all tumbled up, drawers pulled out of chests, plates broken, flour and corn meal strewn all over the kitchen, pets cowering out back with their tails between their hind legs. Better off to just go ahead and put up some bottle trees by your doors to catch the spirits before they get in. That bottle tree says, “Hello, Evil Spirit, I know you exist, but this is as far as you can go. You have to stay in this blue bottle here and not go into my house.” And that is actually a good thing, because evil spirits prefer blue bottles to your house. That’s why they mess up your house when they get inside – it’s not a blue bottle.

All this talk of blue brings me back to Blue Spring. My weird rash still has not completely healed. Some wounds, I think, never do. But I’m getting away from my point – or am I? Georgia has certainly not cornered the market on stories of racial violence. And in Florida’s book of myths where certain names do not appear, what evil spirits are not getting acknowledged? The Professor tells me that only Rosewood has an organized group devoted to remembering lynching in Florida, even though the state ranked seventh in the nation in total numbers.

We can choose to be like the folks in North Georgia, or we can choose to be like the folks in South Georgia. The question is, do we want to acknowledge the devil’s presence up front or just wait for him to catch us unaware? As for me, I’m making some bottle trees.