Introduction

Summary

This introductory chapter examines the study of lynching through the lens of material culture with particular attention to landscapes of memory. It both introduces the narrative of the lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer in Concord, North Carolina in 1898 and uses interdiscplinary theories drawn from African American studies, American studies, cultural history, and cultural geography to advance new methodologies for the study of racial violence.

Joe Kizer and Tom Johnson were lynched on May 29, 1898. To the extent that we know anything definitive about the event, it is through the fragmentary and circumstantial accounts of the people who murdered them, and those who sympathized with this mob. The same absence masks our understanding of their lives. As is the case with so many other racial terror lynchings, historical evidence offers us only passing insight. Through the lens of history, we can understand how they came to be accused, murdered, and transformed into cautionary tales against Black criminality. Through the auspices of historical scholarship, we might begin to regard them as victims of a profoundly unjust system that reached its nadir at this liminal moment between the end of slavery and the full-scale implementation of Jim Crow apartheid. Both offer us incomplete narratives.

Still, the outline of their story, or at least its ending, is a familiar one. Johnson and Kizer were Black men, working as laborers and living around Concord, North Carolina. Later accounts would hint that the men were lawless, former convicts or at least dishonest. But prior to 1898, they were absent from the official records not just of arrest but of habitation or employment.¹ This is hardly unexpected: Ordinary Black folks rarely bore either attention or held official interest without some suspicion of wrongdoing. As a category, Johnson, Kizer, and countless other Black people might be often remarked upon, but as individuals they undoubtedly attracted only passing interest from official chroniclers of their day. Perhaps they eluded much of this attention by design, or maybe it was solely the product of official disinterest. But as with so many other victims of lynching, white scrutiny eventually bore down upon them. That attention came to them by force late in the afternoon of May 29. Thirteen-year-old Emma Hartsell was discovered by her parents when they returned from church. She had been sexually assaulted and murdered.

With characteristic speed, Kizer and Johnson were accused. In the late afternoon, Joe Kizer was apparently headed to town to report the crime. This caused his employer to become suspicious, uncertain of how he came to possess knowledge of the incident. The employer held Kizer and summoned the police.² Tom Johnson was detained by a mob of citizens around the same time, though the undoubtedly paltry evidence that justified his capture with went unreported. The twin posses that helped capture both of them followed the men into town and remained outside the jail, “a howling mob” for the next several hours.³ Sometime between their arrival at the jail around 8:00, and a bit before 10:00 p.m., the mob found their way into the prison.⁴ As was commonplace in lynchings, newspaper reports stressed the resistance of the police and jailers, even reporting the minor injuries that they suffered in their would-be defense. Using hammer and chisel, the mob broke eight locks, tied ropes around the men’s necks, and proceeded out of town.⁵

Joining in the mob were at least two doctors, a minister, and a reporter who documented each step in forensic detail. Once the mob was out of the town proper, they turned by Cold Water Lutheran Church and sought out “a spot suitable for hanging.”⁶ Their site turned out to be a medium-sized dogwood, a curious choice in a forested area dotted with older growth and populated mostly with larger species of tree. The men were both hanged on the same tree at 10:44 p.m. The two attending doctors pronounced them dead ten minutes later.⁷

Hewing closely to the rituals of lynching, the mob “riddled” the men’s bodies with bullets. Those present in the mob, by some calculations up to 2,000 people, had first share of the lynching souvenirs. They took scraps of clothing from the bodies of the men, stripped a cap from Kizer’s head, cut pieces from Johnson’s brand new suspenders. Other mobs came the next day to share in the ongoing spectacle. They took more keepsakes from Kizer’s and Johnson’s bodies, stripped branches from the tree, used their penknives to cut off pieces of rope. The dead men were left hanging for a full day before, by routine, the Cabarrus County coroner pronounced them dead from the hands of unknown persons and ordered them buried. No kin or friends came forward to claim the bodies. Joe Kizer and Tom Johnson were buried by two other Black men pressed into service from the chain gang. Charles Barnhart and Ed Williams were the last human hands to touch the two, whether out of obligation or impulse to help them to a final resting place. The men were buried at the county home with no permanent markers on their graves.⁸

But Kizer and Johnson, or at least the popular perceptions created around them, were not yet forgotten. Over the coming months, minor details of their deaths showed up in newspapers state wide. Often these were notes about another souvenir of their lynching being found, or a retrospective judgment about their character and criminality. In short order, the specifics of their lynching were translated into symbols of a larger white supremacist repudiation of Black life. Again, familiar.

In November, Emma Hartsell’s father wrote a short letter linking their lynching to the cause of white supremacy and the repudiation of Fusion politics. As increasingly more symbolic cultural forms, the imagined figures of Kizer and Johnson showed up in songs and stories, serving as periodic invocations of white nostalgia. Undoubtedly too these memories were invoked on the other side of the color line. There Johnson and Kizer might have served as warning signs and reminders of the brutal savagery underneath the surface of the more quotidian racism of the later Jim Crow years. The stories and objects from their lynching remained a part of everyday life for the better part of a century, even if the men themselves were mostly forgotten.

The result of this speculation was a fragmentary narrative. What we know about Kizer and Johnson comes largely through the lens of their lynching, and from written records that trafficked in stereotype and innuendo. As with the majority of the thousands of victims of racial terror, we know little more than their names and supposed crimes. For many others, we have even less information. The work of historians and sociologists in the past twenty-five years has given us an abstract portrait of both lynching victims and mob members. This has been one way to address the paucity of evidence and the lack of surety: to reconstruct a collective identity through the pieces of evidence that we do have.⁹

Still, these are portrayals and interpretations marked largely by absence. At the center of such reconstructions is the gaping hole of the particular, the lack of specificity that in some ways reifies the obliterating violences done by the practice of lynching. Scholars have been far too fixed on interpretation and comprehension of events that were, if not singular, marked by their own neatly formulaic narratives in the form of a structuring violence. Lynchings were and are meant as events that create their own context and build their own historicity. To think that we can begin to comprehend them through narrative, even counternarrative, is to accept both their obliterative logic and their own creation of an historical context. Lynchings were never self-contained events – but they aspired to be. Part of the violence of a lynching was epistemic. Its ritual pageantry, routinized narratives, and other ties to the logics of white supremacy made each lynching a paradoxical event at once particular and part of a larger framework. In turn, these logics inform both the very information that scholars have access to and the means by which we shape our narratives. We have to resist these contemporaneous efforts at record keeping and historical creation and look at lynchings in light of the larger conceptual, material worlds from which they sprang.

I propose that we seek to understand lynching through a praxis of fragmentation. In Gruesome Looking Objects, I consider the things associated with the lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer and the stories attached to them. These objects and object narratives offer multiple, sometimes conflicting ways of understanding lynching both in their contemporaneous context and in the wake of memory during the many years afterward. This is an approach rooted in the methodologies of material culture, a close study of objects extant and destroyed, real and imagined. This method is both a narrative and a material fragmentation: the remains of things and of stories that were constructed as complete explanations of the lynching. In Gruesome Looking Objects, I will examine objects and object narratives not as a means of pulling together a comprehensible whole out of a fragmented past, but in order to mark particular moments of emphasis. In part, this is reflective of the constellations of meanings that form around objects. As I discuss later in this Introduction, objects cycle in and out of both our notice and their own meaning. But this is also a gesture to resist the narrative wholeness of the lynching and to reflect on the absence of humanity at its core.

Assembling a Fragmented Narrative

The previous pages outlined the conventional narrative of the lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer. I use the label “conventional” in two particular senses. It is conventional both in the immediate context of the history of this lynching, and in the context of lynchings more generally. This particular narrative was assembled primarily from dozens of newspaper accounts. These many individual scraps of information though are in reality rearticulations of three major narratives whose details and claims emerged in the immediate aftermath of the lynching. Oral narratives based largely on rumor, innuendo, and stereotype were transformed into fact through their reproduction into print. With each reprinting, they further reified the assumptions of the original articles, and helped make a fixed narrative of the lynching that remained in effect for a century. In this sense, there has been a conventionalized narrative of the lynching that helped dictate local and regional understanding of the events for more than one hundred years. I seek to undermine those conventions by pointing to their origins and dissemination as part of the larger cultural logic of lynching.¹⁰

By conventional, I also refer to broader conventions of reporting and other narrative retellings of lynching events. The outline of Johnson and Kizer’s lynching followed a familiar pattern, both in the way events unfolded and in the way the lynching was talked, written, and thought about. From the initial and grisly reports of a white girl’s assault and murder through the abduction, capture, hanging, and ritual defilement of the men’s bodies, mob members and readers alike could follow a familiar pattern. As with other lynchings, they made sense of Johnson and Kizer’s murders from their cultural knowledge of the existing conventions of crime, punishment, and race that constituted the usual facts of lynching. For all the local particularities of this or any other lynching, it was through this reciprocal process that lynchings were made comprehensible.

This had significant implications for the material culture of Kizer and Johnson’s lynching particularly in the years after its commission. White people understood the lynching through the frame of their own experience, one largely mediated by the objects related to it. Johnson and Kizer became mere Black victims, ciphers through which the ordinary processes of the lynching could be projected. Objects came into particular focus during this process of sensemaking. Material forms of information established the conventional narratives of the lynching. In newspaper articles, letters, published circulars, handbills, and other forms of public communication, these conventions circulated throughout North Carolina and well beyond, adding to the accumulated epistemological frameworks of white supremacy reinforced by racial violence.

People also kept more direct remainders of participation in the lynching. Souvenirs and relics allowed them to place themselves squarely at the lynching, either in memory or in imagination. The retellings that these objects enabled allowed their possessors to center themselves as the subjects of the lynching narrative. Their tales of daring acquisition or routine purchase enforced their role not just as spectators, but as participants. And what I call objects of imagination and memory, ordinary objects transformed into conceptualizing things, allowed people to continue remaking the lynching’s legacy. Broader than just objects of memory, these conceptual things normalized the lynching by embedding its meaning in everyday objects. A ballad written, sung, and eventually recorded made the lynching of Kizer and Johnson into a tale of heroism and evil. Mediated through a familiar form and melody, it helped preserve those heroic actions and mythic qualities as a marker of southern authenticity. Tools repurposed from the routines of everyday life and labor were likewise reimagined into avenging weapons. These most quotidian things became mythic symbols in the outsized narratives of the lynching over time.

Throughout Gruesome Looking Objects, I turn to each of these categories of object, seeking to unravel one fragment after another of the otherwise neatly woven narrative of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer’s lynching. In a sense, the remainder of this book is an unraveling. The metaphor of textile and production is particularly fitting here. A finished shirt or quilt offers a cohesive whole. But if we pick at the seams, pop the stitches, pull apart the layers, we can see the pieces out of which it is composed. There is an obvious analogy here to the work of historical production. It is less that the appearance of the neat whole is a falsity, and more that the illusion of completeness conceals other ways of understanding. This is why I invoke fragments not solely as parts of a larger whole, but as things themselves.

Fragment as Method

It is always the case that our understanding of the past rests in the fragments of testimony that we can uncover about it. For scholars of material culture, this is particularly true. The basis of our field has been the assumption that objects can reveal pasts otherwise untold. We turn to objects to interpret the lives of people who lived before literacy as we now understand it, who existed without the benefit of means to communicate about their own lives, or who otherwise remain silent in the annals of what we confidently call the historical record. Enslaved people, women, the working classes, all come to be understood in part through the material remains they left behind, the enduring detritus of everyday life.¹¹

I hold less faith in objects. This is not because they are a less comprehensive source than written records. Material culture carries different omissions and requires different approaches than the textual sources that are the conventionally assumed basis of historical understanding. My distrust is a distrust of the possibility of our knowing with any degree of certitude about the past, and about the inadequacies of narrative to make the past comprehensible. In this book, then, I use an approach to materiality – the objects themselves and their array of cultural explanations and understandings – as a way to tentatively approach the past.¹² This reconstructed materiality is useful in that objects do not just give us evidence of how the world was, but serve too as reminders of how people wanted or imagined the world to be. People did things with words, but they made them with objects.¹³

Objects, and the framework of materiality by which we understand them, are always unstable. This is because they do not remain in one place or in the hands of one person, but have multiple meanings as they are imagined, created, inherited, donated, destroyed. The classical approach to this problem in material culture studies was formulated by Igor Kopytoff, who conceptualized the lifecycles of commodities. His “Cultural Biography of Things” regarded materiality as processual, a constant making and unmaking of objects in the marketplace of commodities. This Marxian formulation is comprehensive, though it fails to account for the object’s tendency to exceed its designed intention and accrue other meanings.¹⁴ To rethink again the lifecycles of objects is to consider what happens to them as their purpose exceeds the memory of those who created and possessed them. Even the most ordinary objects are palimpsests that retain some trace of each of their prior meanings, and each of their prior owners or users.¹⁵ This is particularly the case with the fraught objects associated with lynchings. Some are so evidently associated with the event that it is impossible for them to lose the original force of their meaning. Visual remainders of racial violence – postcards and photographs – are the most obvious example of this enduring materiality. I am concerned here with more ordinary things, those objects that could pass into the everyday and the mundane, that could become objects of both memory and forgetting.

For this, we have to turn to an approach rooted in the fragmented and incomplete. Among any number of other possible organizing metaphors, this one stands out for its ability to express the condition both of many objects themselves, and of the narratives attached to them. My dual concern here then for both object and object narratives is best expressed in the material fragments of things and the snatches of story that attach to them. By advancing this notion of the fragmentary and fragmented as an approach to history, I am consciously invoking the silences inherent in the production of the past. Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us that history has a material basis, but it is the selection, preservation, archiving, and retrieval of the archived object that create History. Narratives accrue at each of these points, making the unitary narrative of the historian simply another among the accreted fragments of comprehensibility.¹⁶ That makes the process of writing the past seem impossible or pointless, a position I have surely inhabited at times during the writing of this book. But in the later chapters of Silencing the Past, Trouillot offers us a way forward. He writes of the three overlapping Sans Soucis, unpacking their various iterations and the meanings that they lent to each other. In this he conceptualizes history as always a product of the moment in which it is written. As creators of the past, we are its contemporaries. Or, as William Faulkner has it, “the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”¹⁷

Following Trouillot, then, we might conceptualize the distinctions between memory and history as a continuum for envisioning the past. American historical scholarship of the past two decades has complicated those boundaries with complex studies of historical memory.¹⁸ I only diverge from that body of work in insisting that we go back to Trouillot’s refusal of the distinctions between history and memory. I prefer instead to see the entanglements of history and memory as part of the production of a complicated, unresolved, and incomplete past always in the process of becoming. Particularly useful in this regard are Saidiya Hartman’s meditations on the work we can do with “the scraps of the archive,” the small pieces of the past preserved largely by accident. Her notion of critical fabulation is one that shows us how to enliven these fragments, to work at the intersections of fiction and history that are always, as Trouillot reminds us, transgressable boundaries.¹⁹

But Hartman also cautions us against uncritically giving voice to the specters of history without considering the ramifications of the past in the present. Her own approach has been to resist the re-creation of the horrors of the past to instead find the sublimated pleasure amid history’s erasures. And other scholarship on the archive reminds us that its depths often hold not just sublimated voices, but the sublimated horrors of trauma.²⁰ When we write about lynching, even more than other historical subjects, we reify the subject position of those who were able to tell stories and form histories. In the case of lynching, it is the lynch mob whose most detailed justifications are embedded in the objects and object narratives produced around a lynching.²¹ We can push against these origins and read sources against the grain, but I have more in mind here the approach of Ann Laura Stoler who reads “along the archival grain.”²² This approach treats the accumulation of historical objects as a process that offers insight into the structuring logics of a system. Stoler unpacks colonial formations; I will look at the various systems of white supremacy that arose to justify lynching.²³

Accordingly, Gruesome Looking Objects seeks to examine the conditions of the creation and circulation of objects. Through considering objects related to the lynching of Kizer and Johnson, I hope to reconstruct the constellations of meaning around objects used in the imagination, commission, preservation, and overall comprehension of their lynching. In this approach, I embrace the incomplete view that such fragments might give us. Each of the chapters in this book is centered on one object that was used in the commission, circulation, or memory of the lynching. This necessarily implies an expanded temporal and geographic frame of lynching that moves our understanding of the event itself beyond the few minutes or hours of torture and death and toward a more systematic comprehension of the act of lynching.²⁴ Lynching was only the most spectacular expression of a pervasive white supremacist culture always poised to erupt into violence. This book views the lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer within that expanded frame in both time and space. Objects help us bridge that gap. While their meaning, and even their physical form, might change over time, they have an enduring presence. Each object biography in this book then is an attempt to capture the portrait of an evolving thing, anchored always in the structuring violence from which it arose.

Varieties of Objects

The following chapters outline this fragmented and fractured history of the lynching of Joe Kizer and Tom Johnson. In a series of object biographies, I seek at once to undermine the conventional narrative of lynching and to look at the ways it was represented and understood in the worlds of its creation. This work is divided into three sections. Each is based on particular categories of object, rather than strict chronology. This reflects both the evolutions and overlaps in meaning inherent in each of these objects, as well as their continued circulation, inheritance, and repurposing over time and across space.

The first section consists of studies of what I call “circulating objects.” Here I attend to conventional historical sources through a material culture lens. I first look at the production and circulation of newspaper articles in greater depth in Chapter 1, appropriately named “The Article.” This chapter puts the material production of lynching narratives into the contexts of both newsprint and changing notions of regional and national space. Chapter 2, “The Letter,” picks up this topic, looking in more depth at the public texts written through the landscape of North Carolina in 1898. Using a public letter signed by Emma Hartsell’s father, I conceptualize the larger visual and print cultures that helped people to envision and implement spatial white supremacy.

The following two chapters examine the making of souvenirs and mementos. They focus on the ways in which souvenirs from the lynching of Johnson and Kizer were transformed into symbols and talismans of community memory. Chapters 3 and 4 look at “The Clothes” of Johnson and Kizer and “The Tree” from which they were hanged. Chapter 3 details the frenzy to look for and collect scraps of the men’s clothing. As one of the most tangible and direct remnants of the lynching, clothing offered a ready aid to memory. As a substitute for the bodies of the two men, it served as a talisman and gruesome fetish object through which collectors could project their fantasies about the bodies of Black men. In both of these purposes, it was a reliquary object, a remainder and reminder of death and the body. Chapter 4 focuses on the pieces of the dogwood tree preserved by local collectors, and places them within the souvenir culture of the era. This new commercialism saw deeply embedded symbols like the dogwood, long a marker of religious belief, white supremacy, and folk wisdom, turned into regional keepsakes. The long-term uses of the dogwood tree that Johnson and Kizer were lynched on illustrate this passage from reliquary to souvenir collecting cultures, and the commercialization of racial violence.

But the things of the lynching were never merely items on a shelf. In the evolving definitions of Johnson’s and Kizer’s murders, people used objects to conceptualize, imagine, and remember their meanings. The objects at the center of Chapter 5, “The Hammer and Chisel,” were used by the mob to pry open the jail cell of Johnson and Kizer. Their forcible entry to the men’s cell took advantage of their familiarity with commonplace tools of everyday life, and at the same time exposed the tensions behind the changing meaning of work in their community. Nearly simultaneous with this lynching was the opening of the South’s first African American owned and operated textile mill. Warren C. Coleman’s Concord mill marked a break in a county that had been staunchly agricultural for the previous two centuries and exposed pervasive fears at the prospect of Black equality through the auspices of industrial labor. This chapter focuses on these tools as objects of work that invoked this newly imagined rift at the intersections of race, class, and labor. Those currents of thought are evoked again in Chapter 6, “The Song.” This chapter centers on a lynching ballad written in the wake of Kizer’s and Johnson’s murders and recorded as part of the 1960s folk revival. The single of this song (“The Death of Emma Hartsell”) again reimagined the lynching, this time as a marker of personal and regional authenticity for its young, revivalist audience. Paradoxically, as the song’s material and performative contexts expanded, they served only to fix an increasingly restricted version of the lynching and its meaning to white audiences, who continued to revel in the materialized emotions of the ballad while ignoring its role in the promotion of racial violence.

I conclude the book by again broadening the lens of inquiry to “Archival Remains” of lynching objects. After following the material and conceptual circulations of these objects for well over a century, I look at their translation into objects of history within archival and museum collections. This final chapter regards these newly institutionalized forms of material knowledge and holds in tension the necessity to document and contextualize the histories of racist violence and the potential that this new placement only serves to recast and legitimate a century’s worth of prurient interest into academic inquiry.

I conclude then with a look into the present, and by extension the future. Historical practice is a reminder of the enduring presence of the material worlds I have begun to outline here. One of the main points of this Introduction has been the omnipresence of the material past in our experience of the present. History allows for influence but also continuity. We are contemporaries of the past in both our constant creation of it, and our seeming inability to escape its re-creation. This fact has been made all too clear during the process of my writing this book. The grisly visuals of public spectacle murders of Black people remain omnipresent. Another version of the conventions of narrative that I discussed earlier has been replayed in recent years. One spectacle killing bleeds into another, their details collapsing, and our attention and energy waning when confronted with not just an individual death, but an overwhelming system of deaths. Activists remind us to resist that obliteration with their insistence on a memorial and historical practice of profound power: the articulation of names. Spoken aloud and in common names become almost material, collective evocations of a presence in the face of an absence. And there are other material expressions not just of mourning but of history making: the painting of murals, the pulling down of racist statues. When we enter the names of some of these victims into the historical record – Tom Johnson, Joe Kizer, but also Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Aubrey, George Floyd, and so, so many others – we are beginning the painful process of writing a more complete past for a different future. Slowly, we are beginning to unmake the world made by lynching.