Edgar Awards Countdown: Hell Put to Shame
the one about a mass murderer and the peonage system in 1920s Georgia
In the weeks leading up to the Edgar Awards ceremony, I’ll be reading and and reviewing the six books nominated for the “Fact Crime” category. This is the fifth installment: you can read about highway serial killers here, the cold case murder of an Atlanta socialite here, the intersection of dynamite, anarchists, and the surveillance state here, and a suspicious death in Amish country here. The awards will be announced April 30th!
One of the elements of the last book I reviewed that gave me pause was that it contained zero (0) pages of notes. Even though the author was revisiting his own earlier book, I wondered if there wasn’t some research that could have (should have?) been done to develop and substantiate his impressions. To give you a sense of how different Earl Swift’s approach is in Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery,1 his notes run to 104 pages.
The word that I would use to describe Swift’s style in chronicling the trial of John Williams, a wealthy plantation owner, for the callous and depraved murders of eleven Black men who had been “working for him” on his farm, using their unpaid labor to pay off court debts, is *granular*. He is a proponent of the “context is for kings” style of historical true crime storytelling, including details as small as the price of cotton in 1921 and as comprehensive as pages of court transcripts to connect the two terms of his subtitle: Williams felt emboldened to order and participate in the murder of eleven men over a period of several weeks because he considered himself above the law. And he was almost proven right.
Before reading Swift’s study, I could not have defined “peonage” with any confidence, but it is crucial for understanding the way that racial politics developed from Reconstruction to Jim Crow in the South with the unfortunate help of the Thirteenth Amendment.2 As Swift explains,
A man, usually Black, would be arrested for a trifling or trumped-up offense. . . . Conviction was pretty much automatic, and almost always carried a fine and fees beyond his means. A third party would then step forward to pay the fine in return for the prisoner’s labor until his debt was repaid. If, before he settled his account, he was prevented from leaving, that prisoner was a peon, trapped in what amounted to debt slavery. . . . His working and living conditions were often hellish. And if he tried to run, he’d be hunted down like an animal.
The eleven men Williams ordered brutally murdered and dumped in the rivers surrounding his property found themselves trapped in this brutal system. And for you close readers out there, you might notice that the verb “ordered” has been used twice to describe his role in the killings. That’s because he compelled another peon on his farm, Clyde Manning, to shoot or beat to death the men, and weight their bodies for dumping or inter them in shallow graves. Manning, after securing protection from federal agents investigating Williams, revealed the grisly details in interviews and in court. The question of whether a jury in 1920s Georgia would convict a white man based on the testimony of a Black man provides the book with drama and poignancy.
As close as Swift drills down into the details of the Williams investigation and trial, he also zooms out, to look at the larger national forces that were implicated in and shaping the case. Incredibly, the governor of Georgia at the time of the trial, who pushed forcefully for Williams’s conviction and delivered a now-famous address on arguing for the rights of Black Georgians, was the same Hugh Dorsey who prosecuted Leo Frank in the infamously antisemitic Mary Phagan murder trial. Swift follows his role in the case, along with the burgeoning NAACP under executive secretary James Weldon Johnson.
I can’t say that Hell Put to Shame is as compelling a read on the prose level as fellow nominee The Infernal Machine, but I think the demands the book makes of the reader are warranted. We should slow down and think about this trial, these people, and these systems, and reflect on how far we’ve managed to come in reforming the institutions that failed Williams’s victims, if in fact we’ve come very far at all. As Swift notes, the beauty of the Georgia countryside
seems too tranquil a setting for the lessons it offers. That the past lurks close. That we haven’t learned as much as we think we have. That maybe we never do.
On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being me ordering a pineapple, olive, and jalapeño pizza and eating the entire thing myself whilst watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy and 10 being me as Starscream in the 1986 Transformers film having attempted to crown myself leader of the Decepticons only to have my coronation interrupted by Megatron reborn as Galvatron,
how annoyed will I be if Hell Put to Shame wins the Edgar? 2
For those of you following along at home, Hell Put to Shame is tied for second with The Amish Wife in the nail-biter race for longest subtitle at 12 words. That is, if you count “1921” as a word.