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Episode 409: Chain Smoking Book Projects with Earl Swift
620 Plays1 year ago
Earl Swift is the best-selling author of Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America's Second Slavery (Mariner Books).
In this episode we talk about how Earl strings together book projects and what this story from more than 100 years ago still says about today.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Social: @creativenonfiction podcast on IG and Threads
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Monetization and Services Discussion
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, but listen, seeing efforts, I'm not one to run ads on this show, not really. I try to only do them for cross-promotional purposes to kind of grow the pie. No taxes involved there, I dig that. My fear for the IRS is real, man.
00:00:16
Speaker
This show takes a lot of time and part of what keeps the lights on is if you consider hiring me to edit your work or book proposal, an essay, well maybe even a book. My pricing is such that clients often pay me more when it's all said and done. A generous editor helps you see what you can't see. Email me and we can start a dialogue.
Patreon and Book Proposal Highlights
00:00:36
Speaker
There's also patreon.com slash cnfpod and
00:00:40
Speaker
You know what I do that's super cool and you get a really cool discount is depending on your tier I offer some pretty cool one-on-one FaceTime. Sometimes a lot of FaceTime. It's a stupid bonkers idea. You'll help keep the podcast lights on but the upper tiers also get time to maybe talk things out.
00:01:00
Speaker
I recently gave away my six-figure earning book proposal to every tier.
Cultural Research and Writing Challenges
00:01:06
Speaker
And it seems people have been pretty stoked about that. People like free stuff. Surprise, surprise. What I lack in kind of cultural background, I've tried to make up for with sheer effort in digging out the details.
Introduction to Earl Swift and His Work
00:01:31
Speaker
Oh hey seeing efforts, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to primarily badass writers about the art and craft to telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara and would you prefer I invite guest or interviewers on the show that that way they can do the thing where they're like they do on fresh air where it's like so-and-so is filling in for so-and-so is filling in for Terry Gross. Earl Swift is our guest for episode 409. He's the author of
00:01:57
Speaker
More books than you have fingers, I think, including The Big Roads, Chesapeake Requiem, Across the Airless Wilds, and his most recent book, Hell Put to Shame, the 1921 murder farm massacre and the horror of America's second slavery. It's published by Mariner Books. And just when you think this country couldn't find a way to let you down, well, just give it more time.
00:02:23
Speaker
In the spirit of David Gran's Killers of the Flower Moon, Earl found a troubling story in its wicked cruelty of a farmer, John S. Williams, who murdered 11 black laborers rather than face charges for peonage. Earl expands on what peonage is in the book as well as in our conversation, so I'll leave it at that. This book got me thinking about the hidden histories of
00:02:51
Speaker
this country, atrocities and tragedies buried by the past, and it's the serendipity of finding reference to these stories. I call it a research bycatch that people like Earl can then expand and illuminate. Like, man, what a book. I mean, I think Laura Hillenbrand, like she was researching Seabiscuit and came across Louis Zamparini, and Earl was researching something else, and he came across reference to what would become Hell Put to
Developing Book Ideas and Financial Challenges
00:03:18
Speaker
Shame.
00:03:18
Speaker
took him some 17 years of off and on research and the timing and confluence of all that material finally accreted into what we can only dub a masterpiece. Show notes to this episode and more at BrendanOmario.com where you can also sign up to the monthly rage. I think it's the algorithm newsletter, a short riff, some book recommendations, a few links. It literally goes up to 11. Writing prompt, happy hour with a date included.
00:03:49
Speaker
First of the month, no spam. So far as I can tell, you can't beat it. I hope that you got all kinds of jacked up for this chat. Earl's third trip to the podcast, hard as that is to believe. Stay tuned for today's parting shot. But in the meantime, let's welcome Earl back to the show with a roof.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, what I love and kind of admire about what you've been able to do over the last several years of your journalistic career is how you've been able to really like chain-smoke, like book to book. You're able to light the ember of a next book usually.
00:04:41
Speaker
I don't know when, you know, when you light the next cigarette, so to speak. But I love that love that element of you being able to to do that. And I wonder, like, what's the you know, for you, how are you able to keep enough ideas in the in the hopper and certainly ideas against sustained narrative so that you can adequately go from book to book every, you know, two to four years or so?
00:05:11
Speaker
Well, I mean, I'm motivated by a pretty elemental need. I like to eat. And I'm operating without a net. I don't have an academic appointment. I don't have an independent source of income besides my writing. And so I have to keep the fire stoked.
00:05:35
Speaker
And so over, you know, like you do working for a newspaper, so as a feature writer, you know, you acquire ideas at various points and or tips, you know, you'll run into a reference of something and while you're doing something completely unrelated and you file it away. And I've been awfully lucky that some of the things I've filed away have
00:06:02
Speaker
Proved to be even more interesting, you know, as I've dug into them than I initially thought and And i've been able to do the reporting piece me at least the initial reporting enough reporting that I could write a book proposal, for instance
00:06:15
Speaker
while I've been working on other stuff. Ideally, there's an overlap so that you're getting paid for the end of the cycle on one book while you're also getting paid for the start of a news cycle with another. It doesn't always work out that neatly. There are moments of financial terror that I think anybody who gets all of their income from writing will testify to.
00:06:43
Speaker
Ideally, that's what you want to do. You want to stagger your work on overlapping projects so that you never have too big a gap in what checks you can expect. When do you start the clock, let's say, on the next project and start the reporting necessary to start formulating a proposal?
00:07:10
Speaker
Well, it varies from book to book. You know, some of them I haven't. Some of them have been proposed to me. Two books, the two
Peonage and Historical Context
00:07:18
Speaker
that are probably the closest to straight history before this one, which was a history of the American highway system, the big roads that came out in 2011. And then my book about the lunar rover and the last three Apollo missions across the airless wilds, which came out in 2021.
00:07:34
Speaker
They were proposed by my editors, the first at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the second at Harper Collins. And so those are kind of odd ducks, you know, that I did not, I began the process of reporting those after they had pitched the ideas to me. The others, you know, they begin as kind of just embryonic nosing around studies just to see if there's something there.
00:08:05
Speaker
You know, usually I'm not going to mess with something like that while I'm deep in the writing of a book. So, you know, you get to a point in the writing when you've turned in your first draft and I always try to turn in a second or third draft by my deadline. But you've turned in an early draft and you have a week or so, maybe two.
00:08:27
Speaker
before you're going to get back any sort of detailed response from that first draft. And you need to buy yourself time to stay away from that draft so that when you return to it, you can do so with fresh and cold eyes. And it's in that little area, that little block of time that I often am able to drop into a potential subject
00:08:52
Speaker
look around a bit, do some initial reporting, start the process. In some cases, those initial inquiries have been slow to gel. Another book might come and go before I find that there's enough there to really pursue or decide that there's not enough there to pursue at all. In the case of this book,
00:09:19
Speaker
I stumbled on it while I was working on my fourth book on The Big Roads in about 2007 and made several swipes at it in the years that followed, tried to put together book proposals for it two or three times, and just found that I didn't have enough critical mass there to tell the story yet. For a dozen years, I did
00:09:47
Speaker
I did small kind of small scale reporting on it and just kind of gathered material. And so a lot of my books have long gestation period. This one is especially so close to 17 years from the time I discovered that the story existed to the point that the book came out.
00:10:10
Speaker
when you when you talk about the the critical mass where you know that they're okay there is enough narrative there is enough material here to sustain you know a you know a hundred thousand plus word narrative uh what for this one what was the maybe the thing that really cracked it open for you like oh now now now it's there well that this book took a uh
00:10:36
Speaker
It morphed over time in terms of its focus. Initially, when I stumbled across the first story that I'd ever read about the murder farm case, it was in a March 1921 issue of the New York Times that I was reading on microfilm in the library at Old Dominion University.
00:10:59
Speaker
And I immediately, once I followed several days of this story through the microfilm, I realized, holy smokes, this is a crazy historical event that I know nothing about. And it seems to have had some long-lasting reverberations. And I'm completely unaware of it. So I pursued just doing, telling the story of
00:11:28
Speaker
of the murders itself as a true crime narrative and found that very dissatisfying just as a story, you know, it just seemed pretty one dimensional. It really didn't get, you know, if you look at it just as a true crime story, you don't come away with a good sense of its context, where it fits into history, why it was significant historically. You need to go quite a bit deeper and broader
00:11:59
Speaker
to get that stuff. And so then I became
00:12:04
Speaker
really fascinated by Hugh Dorsey who's one of the main characters in the story with the governor of Georgia at the time. He had done this kind of unseen 180 degree turn in his worldview while he was governor. He was elected with the help of white supremacists, the early organizers of the second generation, second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan and the teens. And he did this slow turn
00:12:34
Speaker
Unseen by the people who had elected him During his two two-year terms in office And emerged as one of the most racially progressive southern governors of his of his time and I was just intrigued that somebody Steeped in The old style southern democrat kind of upbringing and values would make this turn it just uh
00:13:03
Speaker
It was unthinkable for the period. But what I found was that Hugh Dorsey by himself didn't make a particularly compelling narrative because he left nothing in terms of papers, in terms of anything.
00:13:20
Speaker
that gave us insight into how his mind worked and what he was thinking when he made this dramatic metamorphosis. And so I realized there just wasn't enough there to tell the story that way. So then I came back to the crime itself and still had difficulty figuring out how to put it into context until I realized that the leadership of the NAACP
00:13:50
Speaker
played a pretty prominent role in taking what would have been a local case in Georgia and turning it into a national cause. And once I realized that James Weldon Johnson and Walter White had a piece of the action, then I realized, okay, I can tell the story of the crime and put it in its proper context and use Hugh Dorsey as a prominent player, you know, get into the mystery of why he made this, this turn. I can do all of it.
00:14:19
Speaker
and come up with a pretty complete picture, not only of a crime, but of the America in which it occurred. What struck me about the book as well in a book like Killers or the Flower Moon as well, which the two stories, they strike me as almost kind of like cousins in a lot of ways. These are these hidden histories that are barely a hundred years old and we have no idea they exist.
00:14:47
Speaker
I imagine that as you were studying this and researching this, that you were just hit over the head with a sledgehammer, like, oh my God, here this thing was, and how is it that I've never heard of this thing? And then ultimately, that you're the one who gets to really uncover it and bring it to light. Well, I felt that on a daily basis pretty much. An hourly basis at times.
00:15:17
Speaker
When I initially ran across the stories on microfilm, it was while I was looking for a brief that I knew was buried deep in the bowels of an issue of the New York Times in March of 1921. I didn't know what day it appeared, but I knew that there was a brief in there somewhere that announced that Congress had passed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921. I wanted to illustrate in my highways book how overlooked that really significant piece of
00:15:46
Speaker
legislation, probably the most important highway law that's ever been passed in the country, how overlooked it was at the time. And so I wanted to be able to quote this little three line brief. And so I'm just flipping through the paper, you know, microphone page after microphone page, and the stories kept on grabbing my eye on the front pages of these successive days, the New York Times, talking about this
00:16:13
Speaker
mass murder in rural Georgia and something called peonage. I had never seen the word before, didn't know what it meant. In part to find out what it meant, I kept reading these stories and pretty soon lost all interest in the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 because these stories took me down a rabbit hole that I had no idea existed.
00:16:37
Speaker
I had a vague sense that there was a racial strife in the years following World War I. I knew that there had been a series of white on black race riots in a number of cities, not just in the South, but throughout the United States. I didn't have a sense of the overall picture at all.
00:17:00
Speaker
certainly had never heard of peonage. Had no clue that a form of slavery endured for three generations past Appomattox. It was unthinkable to me because I learned, like everybody else learned, that slavery ended with the Civil War. What this showed me was that, no, it didn't. It changed shape a bit. It went a little underground, but it was alive and well and thriving.
00:17:28
Speaker
you know, 60 years later, and it was flabbergasting. I was stunned by it and horrified, you know, and deeply disappointed.
Media Exposure and Racial Violence
00:17:39
Speaker
But it also convinced me there was a hell of a story there to tell, and that surely other people would react the same way I had, that they were equally as in the dark about this pretty important but virtually unknown chapter of American history.
00:17:57
Speaker
So when you stumbled across this in the microfilm, what were these crimes and what did it say? Well, the microfilm stories, they began when there was an investigation afoot in Jasper and Newton counties about 40 miles southeast of Atlanta and continued through a trial that resulted. And the gist of the story they told was that
00:18:23
Speaker
In February of 1921, earlier than that, in January of 1921, a black man wandered into the offices of the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI in downtown Atlanta and reported that for much of the past year, he'd been kept a prisoner on a plantation in Jasper County near the town of Monticello, and that he had been beaten
00:18:53
Speaker
He had been threatened with death. He had been locked up at night. And he had wound up in this situation because he had been bailed out of jail by the plantation owner, a white man named John S. Williams. And as the federal agents listened to this man, Gus Chapman, tell his story, they realized
00:19:13
Speaker
Gus Chapman's a peon. He's been held in peonage, which is debt slavery. As it happened, within a few weeks, a second man escaped peon, made his way into Atlanta to the Bureau of Investigation, met with the same two agents, and now with a critical mass of testimony that something that peonage was taking place
00:19:38
Speaker
on this plantation, the agents decided to go down there and have a look. Now, P&H was against federal law, had been against federal law since 1867. But there was a shadow economy that employed it throughout the American South, stretching into the first half of the 20th century. The agents go down there.
00:20:03
Speaker
to Jasper County and they meet with John S Williams on his plantation and he insists that any, anybody who's working for him is happy to be there, they're there of their own accord, nobody's locked up at night, certainly no one's ever beaten or threatened with death.
00:20:20
Speaker
And he shows them around and introduces them to three of his grown sons who help him manage the farm. And the agents leave pretty convinced that peonage is in fact being practiced on the Williams property. They see some physical evidence that suggests that it's taking place. They speak to a number of the black laborers on the property, all of whom are too terrified to speak, and obviously so.
00:20:50
Speaker
But the agents realize that there's little they can do about it in the present because they're going to need a lot of testimony. They're going to need some really solid grounds to go after Williams. He's rich. He's the owner of a big piece of property, reportedly the biggest property owner in Jasper County. He's got friends in high places in the county. He's cousin to the sheriff. He's done business with the local prosecutor.
00:21:18
Speaker
The agents realize that to put together a peonage case, they're going to need to get much of his workforce off of the plantation, away from Williams, where they can talk freely with the agents and tell them exactly what's going on without fear of retribution. So they leave. The agents leave. Williams panics. He is convinced that they're going to be back. They're going to cease his property. They'll likely put him and his three sons in jail.
00:21:48
Speaker
So he decides the best thing to do is to get rid of the evidence that he's been involved in a peonage. And so he embarks on a plan to do just that, to get rid of the evidence in the form of 11 men whom he has bailed out of local jails and come to work for him and that he's held prisoner since. So that's the story that I saw spelled out more or less in these
00:22:18
Speaker
microfilm dispatches in the New York Times, and they were riveting. Every day's story peeled back the onion an additional layer until the full horror of what had happened was obvious.
00:22:33
Speaker
For those who aren't familiar, and you would, of course, once you read the book, maybe you can explain the mechanics and the fundamentals of peonage and how that came to be this second very undercover slavery. Sure. Well, of course, after the Civil War, the 13th Amendment was passed, which outlawed slavery except as punishment for crimes for which the person was convicted.
00:23:01
Speaker
There was no enforcement mechanism in the in the amendment, though. And so it while it outlawed slavery, it didn't do a good job of of actually making sure that it stayed outlawed. So what you saw develop in the south before and after reconstruction was a series of interlocking laws, state laws that made it a crime for a black man
00:23:30
Speaker
to be unemployed, to leave his employer pretty much without permission, certainly if he owed any money or labor to that employer. It also criminalized stuff like vagrancy to a degree that a black man could be arrested pretty much any time for any reason throughout the South. What you saw with peonage, it took a number of forms. Now, the form that we talked about in the book,
00:23:58
Speaker
that is the centerpiece kind of this case, is you as a young black man, you get picked up for vagrancy. You happen to be stopped by the police when you have no money in your pocket, and that's a crime. And you're dragged before the court, you're convicted as a matter of course, you're hit with a fine, say $5, that is well beyond your means to pay. And so in lieu of the fine, you're looking at time on the chain gang.
00:24:27
Speaker
And you're in jail pondering this fate when in walks a farmer who says, hey, I'll tell you what, I'll pay your fine. And you can come work for me. You'll work for me until your debt to society is paid off. To the prisoner, this looks like a pretty attractive deal. For one thing, he's going to be doing work that he's already been doing for most of his adult life.
00:24:51
Speaker
Second, the depredations of the chain gang are well known to everybody. And surely life on a plantation is going to be better than that. So often is not.
00:25:02
Speaker
that this young prisoner goes home with his seeming benefactor only to find when he gets there that in addition to a fine to work off, he also has the cost of his board, his clothing, all manner of little fees to pay off, and pretty soon winds up in deeper debt than he's ever been, and with no prospect of ever paying it off. And these black codes, the laws that were developed
00:25:30
Speaker
after reconstruction, make it a crime for him to leave until he's paid off that debt. So the law is on the side of the farmer, not the victim of peonage. So that's one form of peonage. The much more common but more difficult to see, subtler version of peonage was
00:25:52
Speaker
kind of baked into the share cropping system. If you as a, again, you're a black man, a sharecropper, that means that you don't own your own land, you work a landlord's land, a piece of it. And your rent is a portion, usually about half, of the proceeds of the crops that you raise. So that's how you, that's how you pay for, that's how you earn your keep. If it works the way it's supposed to,
00:26:23
Speaker
You and the landlord, he supplies you with the seed and the land on which to raise this crop. You raise the crop, you split it with him. You either give him all the crop and he gives you half the proceeds or you give him half your crop and you earn enough to keep doing it or to pick up and move. The way it all too often worked was that that landlord did not operate on the up and up. He jacked up the, he reduced
00:26:52
Speaker
to a tiny fraction of reality that take for the crop that you raised. So you were earning pennies on the dollar from what you should have been. Plus, you have to survive as the sharecropper all year long until harvest before you get paid.
00:27:09
Speaker
The way this sharecropping usually worked is that your landlord would provide you with food and with supplies as needed throughout the year to get you to harvest time, and then you'd pay him off with a piece of the earnings. Again, the way it usually all too often worked was that the landlord would slash the, or I'm sorry, jack up the prices of the provisions that he was supplying you with.
00:27:34
Speaker
So you're getting hit both ways. You're earning less money than you should, and you're paying a lot more money than you ought to. And you wind up in the year in debt. You're in the red. You have to stay another year to earn enough to pay off that debt. What really happens, of course, is that you accrue more debt over the course of the succeeding year. And so you get into a deeper, deeper, deeper hole that you can never dig yourself out of.
00:28:06
Speaker
And so often, the black sharecroppers are more than likely illiterate. And then if they were to even call out their white partner in this, that in and of itself is a crime. And it could just be quite literally life threatening to call into question the white counterpart, who's not a counterpart. But yeah, it's the past.
00:28:35
Speaker
You can question the boss's math. That gets you killed. And you're just not an equal partner in this at all. There's never, and you're right, you know, 99 times out of 100 sharecroppers.
00:28:54
Speaker
is not able to read the contract that he signs with the boss to enter into the arrangement to begin with. And so he has to take the boss's word as to what it says. So even before he moves on to the property, he's operating at a really severe disadvantage.
00:29:12
Speaker
Yeah, and there are crimes ancillary to the central 11, but the violence and the way in which these men and in some cases women are brutally tortured and murdered, it turned my stomach to read it. And I imagine for you two, you're reading reports or records of this.
00:29:38
Speaker
I don't know. What's the sense you get when you probably just have to step back from the microfilm reader or whatever and be like, oh my God, the brutality and just the disposal of people. It must have been nauseating. It was nauseating for me reading it. Yeah.
Clyde Manning's Role and Trial Challenges
00:29:58
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's really what
00:30:02
Speaker
you know, brought this to public attention. It was not sadly unusual for black bodies to turn up in rural Georgia. That happened all too regularly. What set this apart, what made this a story in the newspapers, which what created pressure to find out who was responsible was that you had a number of young men who had been killed, and particularly gruesome and
00:30:32
Speaker
unnecessarily cruel ways. You know, you had initially three bodies turned up. This whole case came to public light when three bodies turned up in a couple of small rivers in Newton County, Georgia, 40 miles east and southeast of Atlanta. Two of them were bound to each other and with wire and with chain and then were roped to a 100 pound bag of rocks.
00:30:59
Speaker
and they had been thrown off a bridge alive, it was pretty clear, into shallow water in a drought, unable to free themselves from this weight. About a mile away, mile and a quarter away in another river, a third body turned up within a few days. And similarly, this young man had been bound with wire and chain and roped to another bag of rocks. And so it was the
00:31:30
Speaker
the method of the murders involved. The deaths stood out just for the means that the killer had used, rather than for the deaths themselves. The local newspapers, or the local paper in Covington, the county seat of Newton County, put together a story about it, talking about the gruesome signs in these two rivers, and that story was picked up by the Atlanta Constitution.
00:32:00
Speaker
And it wound up on the desk of a couple of federal agents who had been out to Jasper and Newton counties just a few weeks before.
00:32:09
Speaker
And the hero of the book is Clyde Manning, who courageously comes forth under the guise of protection from the agents to be the whistleblower, essentially, on the Williams farm. Just talk a little bit about him and his central role in the story, too.
00:32:34
Speaker
McLeod Manning was a young black man, 26 years old, when the story begins, who had lived on the Williams plantation for half of his life, since he was 13. The Williamses employed two classes of black labor. They had a couple of families, extended families, the Freeman's and the Manning's, who lived on the plantation, who had lived there for quite some time.
00:33:01
Speaker
and whom were all intermarried with each other and cousins to each other. It was pretty much one big family. Then to augment their labor, Williams would go to local jails and bail out prisoners and bring them back as peons and hold them prisoner. Very different existences for these two classes of labor. But still, you've got John S. Williams as your boss and that's no picnic in the best of days.
00:33:31
Speaker
And Clyde Manning, as a member of one of these families, worked for straight wages for Williams. He was not a peon. He was Williams's field boss on the 325-acre Williams home place. And he was the boss's eyes and ears, the enforcer of discipline, and his kind of right-hand man, his gopher. And when Williams decided that he would be better off
00:34:01
Speaker
facing, potentially facing murder charges before a jury of his Jasper County neighbors, rather than face federal charges for peonage in front of a jury he didn't know, he recruited Claude Manning as his assistant in the killing and did so by assuring that Manning, that if he didn't help him, Manning would be among the first to go.
00:34:31
Speaker
Manning Manning is a kind of a he's he's a troubling hero. He's you know, the tough thing about Manning's predicament is that he was doomed no matter what he did. You know, if he stood up to Williams then and said, no, I'm not going to help you kill all these guys. Well, then he's dead. If on the other hand, he does help Williams kill him, well, now he's killing his friends on behalf of somebody he knows to be evil.
00:35:00
Speaker
The law basically says, yes, you can kill to prevent your own death, but you can't kill an innocent third party to do it. You've got to kill the person who's threatening you. And that was unthinkable. There was no way that as inculcated in the racial politics of the day, there was no way that Clyde Manning would have raised a hand to Williams himself. But what did make him heroic was that he then
00:35:31
Speaker
confessed all without leaving any detail out. He shared with the federal agents and with local law enforcement exactly what had happened and provided an almost cinematic account of the killings and became the state's chief witness against John S. Williams.
00:35:54
Speaker
Yeah, he like through the first quarter of the book, you know, you get a sense of what just the the beat by beat nature of those of those murders. And then, you know, through the rest of the book, it's like, OK, it's it plays out. It plays out as a courtroom drama. And it was the reconstructing of that posed its own set of challenges for you. It sure did. And the goal was to
00:36:24
Speaker
unveil the crime and the realization of exactly what all this meant in the book, much as it was experienced by the federal agents back in 1921.
00:36:41
Speaker
They got a pretty good sense of what crime had occurred when they talked cloud banning initially. But it wasn't until you get to court and you start getting multiple witnesses talking about their view of the case from different angles that you really see the texture of the whole thing come into sharp relief, that they're able to take it down to an almost subatomic kind of detail. And that's where things get really interesting, I think.
00:37:11
Speaker
It was challenging because Newton County where the first trial occurred, the first Williams trial, misplaced the transcript of the trial at some point 30 some odd years ago. That looked like it was going to be a hurdle that would be difficult to surmount. But luckily, the Newton County court clerk prepared what was called a brief of evidence.
00:37:39
Speaker
as the case was appealed. Williams took his appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court does not want to go wading through a couple hundred pages of transcripts. So the court clerk takes all of the testimony and removes the questions. So all the witness testimony remains in the brief of evidence. But the questions posed to the witnesses by the lawyers is removed. And so you wind up with this narrative from each witness
00:38:08
Speaker
With that, you know, uninterrupted by questioning. And so what what I had to do was to go through that and extrapolate the questions from the answers and was able to do a pretty
00:38:23
Speaker
pretty well, without too much difficulty in most places. There are some stretches where I did not feel confident doing it, and I paraphrased instead. But in most cases, you can see immediately what the question was. And you can't do it maybe well enough to
00:38:45
Speaker
offer up an exact quote from the lawyer doing the questioning, but you can certainly provide the gist of what was asked and punctuate it in the text in such a way that the reader is alerted to the fact that this is an approximation. That's what the absence of that transcript required me to do, but it turned out not to be the hurdle that I thought it would be.
00:39:11
Speaker
And in reading it to just given the nature of the time and the fact that they that Williams was tried in front of a jury of his peers right from his home county basically the central tension of that whole thing is like he's
00:39:26
Speaker
Gonna get away with it. There's no way they're gonna convict him no matter how guilty he is and so you're reading it just like it is is are they going to a Quit acquit this man for all these atrocities or or or does he get his come up into and then what's gonna happen with with Manning given his complicity in this so that you're reading it and it's incredibly gripping because you're just You're unsure which way you know the
00:39:54
Speaker
The pendulum's gonna swing in this case. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's hope so. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's, uh, be pretty...
00:40:04
Speaker
Pretty anticlimactic if you knew how it was going to turn out before you started, but it's – yeah, and that kept the national press at the edge of its seat throughout this trial. I mean, the trial lasted five days, the first trial. There were three trials total. And this was news in the times of London. This was news from Boston to Honolulu, every newspaper in the country.
00:40:28
Speaker
pretty much covered this. Now, there were exceptions. There were some who made a point of not covering it, never even mentioning it. But in the main, this was front page fare wherever you were. And no one knew how it was going to turn out. Generally speaking, a white man was accused of a crime by a black person in Georgia in 1921, and that crime
00:40:55
Speaker
featured victims who were black. That white man was going to walk. I mean, it was a foregone conclusion. The jury was going to be all white. Of course, you had to vote to serve in a jury and black people weren't allowed to vote in Georgia in 1921. So that settled that. Chances are, you know, that John S. Williams is going to be tried by farmers like himself because they constituted the vast majority of citizenry in Jasper and Newton counties. And there's no way
00:41:25
Speaker
that a white jury was going to convict a white defendant on the testimony of black witnesses. It just did not happen. Didn't happen often. The thing about this trial was that it is each witness testified the depravity of what Williams had done became so clear that there really became, it reached this point where I think there was widespread public doubt as to how it would turn out. How could a white jury
00:41:55
Speaker
look the other way when it's this horrific. That became really interesting, the tension that lay right there in that question. It kept people following every turn of the trial. This was hot stuff.
00:42:15
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a moment, too, when, you know, after Williams' trial, then, you know, Manning, of course, has to be put on trial. And there's a Constitution editorial that says something to the effect that, you know, to him, meaning Manning, you know, human life is essentially too cheap. He is too inured to human butchery to be a safe member of society. And then you say, but no one had suggested as much about Williams, you know, so they still
00:42:43
Speaker
They still saddled Manning with this animalistic butchery, but even though Williams was the mastermind, they couldn't go so far as to lay that claim on him.
00:43:02
Speaker
boy that the Manning prosecutions are so deeply frustrated. For one thing, it's very interesting because the state used Manning as its chief witness in prosecuting Williams and then turned around
00:43:18
Speaker
And despite the fact that they presented Manning as a wholly believable source, as a credible witness, as somebody who had no skin in the game himself, who had no reason to participate in these murders, except out of fear for his own life, when it came time to put him on trial, they took a completely different approach. And they presented Clyde Manning as a very different individual.
00:43:47
Speaker
So it's just you can almost sense Manning's frustration in suddenly realizing that his supposed allies in the first trial have flipped on him and he's being made out to be the, you know, a villain in the second.
00:44:06
Speaker
you know, throughout the book too, just the idea of lynching and lynch mobs too. And the fact that, and you even make mention of Ahmaud Arbery, and you know, while that wasn't a hanging, it certainly was a lynching of sorts. And this just happens a few years ago, and of all places, Georgia. And it's like, wow, it's kind of, it's still in the bloodstream for some, for some sex of the populace.
Modern Relevance of Racial Themes
00:44:37
Speaker
Yeah. Well, there's a passage at the beginning of the book that talks about how we're not as smart as we think we are. That's one of the lessons of this whole sorry affair. And I think that holds true. We're not nearly as civilized as we make ourselves out to be. We've got a lot to learn yet. And we prove that. We demonstrate that all too often.
00:45:05
Speaker
You know, this is a pretty modern case in a lot of ways. It does seem to really reverberate into the future where this took place a little more than a hundred years ago, but it does feel sadly kind of of the time at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, there's enough here
00:45:31
Speaker
that strikes the readers familiar.
00:45:37
Speaker
that you don't get the sense that you're reading a piece of history. It seems like something that could have happened last week, sadly. Yeah, and I think, you know, we kind of mentioned earlier in the conversation too about Killers with the Flower Moon. They do seem like kind of like cousin stories in a lot of ways. And even in the writing of it too, whereas the, you know, Gran at the end kind of
00:46:03
Speaker
up puts himself onto the scene and brings it into the present you know you do something very similar at the very end as well where you kinda I kinda genealogically you'll find the descendants of as best you can of the principal players and bring it into the present as well and as I imagine that had its own it was its own heavy lift to revisit this in the current day
00:46:29
Speaker
Well, it was really difficult to track down with the sentence, I can tell you that. Not so much for Giannis Williams, because they were pretty, you know, white people of the 1920s were pretty well documented through the census and whatnot, through property records. But black people in the 1920s, especially in the South,
00:46:54
Speaker
were intentionally elusive. They made it their business to avoid official notice as a habit in many cases. And that complicated the search for the descendants of the victims and direct witnesses to this story quite a bit. I was able to do it with census records
00:47:21
Speaker
and with city directories, mostly. Real basic analog reportorial tools that enabled me to follow some of the workers on the farm through the decades after the trials, and also newspaper records. By the time a lot of them died, black people were being
00:47:52
Speaker
eulogized in obituaries in big city newspapers, something that hadn't started happening in the 1920s. That came along quite a bit later. But I was able to, through these obituaries, kind of backtrack in some cases and reach descendants, the children of the people who had lived through this and their grandchildren and whatnot.
Balancing Authenticity with Sensitivity
00:48:19
Speaker
On the Williams side, it was pretty straightforward. I knew he had 12 kids. I was able to find out what had happened to them pretty easily. And another part that was of note that you make an effort to bring up in the notes is the challenge of not sanitizing the language of the day and specifically the N word.
00:48:42
Speaker
And that that must have been I imagine you had conversations with, you know, your trusted editor on this, too. But, you know, maybe walk us through the your headspace as you were like wrestling with how best to to reflect the language of the times. Well, you know, I agonized over this. This was one of those frequent topics of conversation that
00:49:11
Speaker
that I had not only with my editor, Peter Hubbard, but with my friends, with my first readers on the story. We debated whether to use the N word at all. And eventually I came to the conclusion after a lot of soul searching that I could not tell a story of racial violence. And Jim Crow injustice, injustice for that matter.
00:49:38
Speaker
and sanitize, you know, whitewash the language that was used by the people involved. And what's shocking about the use of the N-word here, at least what shocked me, wasn't that it appeared in conversation. It's that it appeared, you know, it made its presence felt in open court.
00:50:00
Speaker
You had officers of the court using the N-word as casually as if they were discussing the weather. I had a physical reaction to it when I came across it in the record. It's beyond shocking. It's deeply troubling when you run into it. I just thought, there's no way I can omit this and be true to
00:50:29
Speaker
true to what actually happened. I've reduced it significantly as often as the word appears in the text now. It's a small fraction of the frequency with which it occurred initially when I was writing drafts. I trimmed it.
00:50:49
Speaker
out whenever possible. It appears now only in passages where I think it's essential to understanding the passage, but even so, it's going to make some readers deeply uncomfortable.
00:51:05
Speaker
I regret that on the one hand, but on the other hand, I think it's necessary. It wasn't one of those deals too where you solicited sensitivity readers in some instances to make sure it's coming across the way it's supposed to and it doesn't fall on the ear wrong, so to speak.
00:51:24
Speaker
Tried to, I've got a very, a couple of dear friends who serve as my first readers. One of them, the book's dedicated to Laura Le Fay, and she's got a great sense, not only for that sort of thing, whether the pitch is right, but she's just a genius with the language and also forces me to defend
00:51:53
Speaker
My views, my arguments throughout a story just really holds my feet to the fire in general. And so I've come to trust her sensibility quite a bit. And she and my other first reader, Mark Mobley, really were a great help in trying to work out, OK, how much of the n-word is too much? Do we definitely need it right here? Is this essential? That sort of thing.
00:52:23
Speaker
And just try to check me on my default assumptions about life in America, which I have.
Commitment to Historical Accuracy
00:52:34
Speaker
I probably have a rosier view, a more optimistic view of life in America than I ought to, that it deserves. But that's the way I'm built.
00:52:50
Speaker
It was good to have someone reading over my shoulder and just giving me a slap when I needed it.
00:53:00
Speaker
I don't know, it's so well done and like you're able to, the way that we were able to, you know, paste the book and just, you know, bring it in just and reconstruct everything. It feels very much alive and it's such a great testament to your skill as a writer and a reporter to bring the story to light. It was truly a pleasure to read.
00:53:24
Speaker
Well, thank you so much. And, you know, it's it's not an easy it's not an easy story. It's you know, this. This is not a beach read, but it's I hope to have done it justice. You know, it's I'm a white guy in his 60s who was raised in the suburbs. You know, in some ways, I'm the least likely narrator for a story like this.
00:53:54
Speaker
But I do hope I've done it justice. What I lack in kind of cultural background I've tried to make up for with sheer effort in digging out the details.
Williams' Cruelty and Downfall
00:54:08
Speaker
I think that in the case of this story, this was that rare episode in early 20th century Jim Crow America where everybody pretty much came to the same conclusion.
00:54:23
Speaker
You know, I mean, there were not everybody maybe, but I mean, the vast majority of Americans, I think, and that included Georgians as well, found themselves on the same side of a question. Just because the details here, the methodology that John S. Williams had used was so unbelievable, just beyond the pale. You know, he
00:54:50
Speaker
he made an enemy of the world for himself. And that's kind of reassuring. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, the way he just disposed of his labors like vermin and cruel. The base cruelty of it was astounding and just
00:55:16
Speaker
The one of the things that of course that one of the big questions that emerges a hundred years later and that is never You know answered to my satisfaction at least in the record is Why would a guy if you if you decide if you make this almost? Unbelievable decision that you're better off facing 11 counts of murder than a couple of counts of peonage peonage which had a maximum of
00:55:45
Speaker
a penalty of $5,000 fine, five years in prison or both, but which hardly anybody ever got the book thrown at them for. If you do that calculation and you decide you're better off with the murders, why on earth wouldn't you
00:56:04
Speaker
put together those murders in such a way that you wouldn't be discovered. You know, that some quiet out of the way, low key way, like if you happen to own 1,100 acres of land, killing them on your property and burying them there. John S. Williams would never have been found out had he done that. But instead, he made a point of being as cruel as he possibly could be. He wanted to instill terror
00:56:32
Speaker
in these these peons last few moments in life and so he takes six of them and he drives the miles off the property to these bridges over three local rivers ties them up makes a show of tying them up in the car while they're on the way and then and then throws them alive into the water well why do that why you know
00:56:58
Speaker
And just the wickedness of it is difficult to get your head around. It's wicked to the point that it worked against. Yeah. You know, it's spitefully wicked and it led to us being caught.
Conclusion: Celebrating Hidden Histories
00:57:21
Speaker
Because the thing is, he would have gotten away with this. These guys would have been missed by no one. They were all from out of town, all from the big city. None of their relatives knew where they were even. But that spring, the rivers were running low and the bodies started to pop up.
00:57:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's brutal and so brilliantly conveyed in the story. I'm glad there are people like you finding these hidden histories and bringing them to light because you and David Grant and countless others who are doing these kind of deep dives into history to make a
00:58:01
Speaker
Yeah, open our eyes to these things and to tell these stories of people who need their stories told. So it's just so masterfully done. I'm so great that you brought it to light and that we were able to talk about it today, Earl. Well, Brendan, I really appreciate you and your questions. It's always fun talking with you.
Reflecting on Creative Endeavors
00:58:24
Speaker
So thanks to Earl, and thanks to you for hanging out here for another week, another interview.
00:58:32
Speaker
I'm not what you would call a quality hang. I'm not what you call traditionally handsome. So I appreciate those who make it this far. And according to Spotify analytics, it's a disturbingly low percentage. Buried treasure, right? Right. By the time you hear this, I will have had my first conversation with my big book editor post submitting first draft of the prefontaine book. I don't know what to expect.
00:59:02
Speaker
Yeah, maybe in a moment when I've hit that sweet spot of a caffeine-induced serotonin high, I say to myself, maybe he'll say no notes, Brendan. Good work. Can't wait to work with you again if we're so lucky.
00:59:16
Speaker
But the more rational part of me knows that I miss the mark. The mark has been missed and maybe this is normal. Maybe lots of biographers take a few drafts to really distill what the thing is ultimately about and how best to strengthen those scenes, maybe with some shading here and there. I haven't looked at the book in close to two weeks, which feels like the right amount of time to let my eyes cool down. I'm not looking forward to reading it again. I'm sick of it.
00:59:44
Speaker
I am, I am truly sick of it, but I need to make this great. It has to be great for mere survival so I can do it again, so I can give away my next proposal to the Patreon crew. In the meantime, I've been cleaning up some transcripts. I never got to during the initial writing.
01:00:05
Speaker
I've been saving a couple hundred more articles on the next book I'd like to write that hasn't been turning up much by way of story arc yet, but I just need to be patient and keep following the breadcrumbs. There's another sports writer that I think might be on the same trail I'm on, and if he and I are tied going into the pitch phase of this whole thing,
01:00:29
Speaker
They will definitely take him over me. He's a more bankable resource, and make no mistake, you and your book are a product. And how can they make money off of you?
01:00:44
Speaker
Maybe the prefontaine book will make some money or maybe break even. If so, that'll help my chances. Otherwise, I might be washed up. It's a lonely racket. You think your agent might be a sounding board, but if they can't make money off you, you're wasting their time. So, you know, calls or emails tend to go unanswered. I think that's normal, at least in my experience. Your editor probably has a dozen authors. He's trying to usher across the line. You don't want to sound needy.
01:01:14
Speaker
You read comments on your manuscript that might seem like compliments, but they're actually denigrations, and you're supposed to somehow get work done in the face of so many factors telling you to quit. Your writer friends are all mired in their own shit. Talking to your partner or spouse is, well, ill-advised.
01:01:38
Speaker
The thing is, everyone is knee deep, if not higher, in their own bullshit. So what can you do? Who can you talk to? Who gives you the juice? How do you find people who nourish you? I mean, I have a couple, but I only call them maybe once every six months, because as you can tell, I'm a bit of a drip.
01:01:58
Speaker
Yeah, maybe the best place to turn to is books or dog. Maybe not even the dog. Maybe movies, a podcast, a trusted voice, ha ha. We're born alone, we die alone, we write alone. Go make someone's day. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:02:35
Speaker
you