Vol. 13 No. 4 (April 2003)

A MURDER IN VIRGINIA: SOUTHERN JUSTICE ON TRIAL by Suzanne Lebsock. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. 384 pp. Cloth $25.95. ISBN 0-393-04201-4.

Reviewed by James C. Foster, Oregon State University—Cascades. James.foster@osucascades.edu

Had someone told you that in June of 1895, a black man and three black women stood accused of axe-murdering a white woman in rural Lunenburg County, Virginia—the notorious “Old Free State” where citizens “were hot for secession” (p. 185) in January 1861, four months before the Old Dominion left the Union—how would you have predicted the end of the story? Prior to having been engrossed by Suzanne Lebsock’s A MURDER IN VIRGINIA: SOUTHERN JUSTICE ON TRIAL, I likely would have jumped to the conclusion that the four were “a gone case” (p. 200), as was said of Solomon Marable, the accused black man. Not so. History resists reduction.

History also can be full of revelations. In the hands of a master, legal history reshapes one’s understanding and enriches terms, such as Jim Crow, that one has come to invoke over time as though the social realities such terms represent were obvious. Suzanne Lebsock is an adroit, honored historian. She is professor of History at the University of Washington, where she teaches graduate courses about women and gender, nineteenth century U.S. social history, and history of the American South. She published A SHARE OF HONOUR: VIRGINIA WOMEN, 1600-1945 in 1984, VIRGINIA WOMEN: THE FIRST TWO HUNDRED YEARS (with Anne F. Scott) in 1986, and VISIBLE WOMEN: NEW ESSAYS ON AMERICAN ACTIVISM (co-edited with Nancy A. Hewitt) in 1993. Lebsock’s 1984 THE FREE WOMEN OF PETERSBURG: STATUS AND CULTURE IN A SOUTHERN TOWN, 1784-1860 won the Bancroft Prize in 1985. The conception, research and writing of A MURDER IN VIRGINIA were underwritten by Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.

Her skill as an historian has several aspects. First, she spins an engrossing whodunit. At one level, A MURDER IN VIRGINIA poses the question: Who killed Lucy Pollard? As in an Agatha Christie story, there is no lack of suspects. (Hint: follow the money.) But Lebsock is a perceptive social historian, sensitive to the ways in which legal, gender, and race relations are played out through contingent, contextualized, social interactions. Her treatment of Lucy Pollard’s brutal demise and its astonishing aftermath reminds me more of a Margaret Atwood tale—say ALIAS GRACE, a compelling dissection of a notorious mid-nineteenth century Canadian murder case. Atwood draws her readers into the life experiences of Grace Marks, asking them to peel back the multiple layers of Marks’ immigrant journey from Ireland to Canada, her fall from being Thomas Kinnear’s maid to being accused of murdering him and his housekeeper/mistress, her crossing from lunatic asylum patient to prison inmate.  Throughout, readers sort out the characters’ relations along fault lines of gender and class. Likewise, Lebsock invites readers into the lives of Mary Abernathy, Mary Barnes, Pokey Barnes, and the benighted William Henry (“Solomon”) Barnes—the four accused—and situates them amidst compelling circumstances “that defied prediction” (p. 14).

A flavor:

The murder of Lucy Pollard was a story with one grisly beginning and dozens of endings. Except for Solomon Marable and Edward Pollard [Lucy Pollard’s husband], all the many players went on with their lives, scattering like Lucy’s [auctioned] pots and pans to their separate destinies. Yet in ways barely visible to them at the time, they remained characters in a common large story—not a murder mystery this time but a sad coming-of-age story for Virginia (p. 297).

It’s not often that I recommend a book that comes across my professional radar screen to my partner as a good read. I gave A MURDER IN VIRGINIA to Mindy. 

Second, Lebsock is an evocative set designer. She not only brings her characters to life (and death), she also recreates the period during which their drama was played out. Her ability to call forth flesh and blood humans, strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, is complemented by the descriptive palette she employs to set various scenes. (Lebsock’s is decidedly not a tale told by an idiot.) In this regard, her talent reminds me of Charles Frazier’s meticulous calling forth the hard and brutalizing, beautiful and transcendent, backdrop against which Inman and Ada’s respective journeys are played out in COLD MOUNTAIN, his Civil War story set in the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains. Frazier paints lyrical and awful pictures for readers. So does Lebsock.

Another sample:

In fiction, courtroom scenes typically build to a climax, the truth bursting out in some last-minute bombshell. In real cases, however, testimony tends to end in a completely different way, the evidence shredding into separate, fine strands, like fringe on a garment. Late on cloudy afternoon Mary Abernathy’s lawyers called their final witnesses. From each they wanted a strand or two, something a juror might grasp and hold on to until he found himself in a state of reasonable doubt (p. 229).

Third, Lebsock is a scrupulous investigator. She pieced together the remarkable story she tells from exhaustive searches of county records, archival materials, newspaper accounts, and personal visits—including one to the still standing Pollard homestead to test one theory of Lucy Pollard’s slaying—a test that required playing the role of Lucy’s corpse by lying in the grass, which resulted in becoming infested with wood ticks. At the conclusion of her acknowledgements, Lebsock says she has “immeasurable debts to the people whose lives are at the center of this book, and she hopes that she has “begun to repay them by telling their stories as best I know how” (pp. 337-38). Her meticulous research enables her to do great justice to the lives of her characters. Lebsock also sheds new light on race and gender relations at a time when Reconstruction was being overtaken by Jim Crow in Virginia. Further, she details the ways in which legal relations were constituted by improbable interactions among not only judges, juries, and lawyers, but politicians, reporters, citizens, clerics, and militiamen. The script dictated that the four blacks would be lynched (p. 40). Lebscock reports the surprising news that they weren’t.

Real-life heroes abound in A MURDER IN VIRGINIA. Illiterate, yet cunning, Pokey Barnes—one of the accused, daughter of Mary Barnes, also accused—represented herself effectively, albeit unsuccessfully, at her original trial. Virginia Governor Charles Triplett “Trip” O’Ferrall opted three times for the rule of law over the practice of lynching, first dispatching two white infantry units from Richmond to the Lunenburg Courthouse to protect the four defendants during their trials, then following their initial convictions, moving them under armed guard the sixty-five miles back to Richmond, and stunningly, refusing to surrender three of the four prisoners to the Lunenburg County Sheriff when they were ordered back to Southside Virginia for a nunc pro tunc hearing (it should have been conducted earlier). John Mitchell, Jr., editor of the weekly Richmond Planet and originally attracted to the case as a journalist, became the champion of the three women’s innocence. Mitchell recruited two elite Richmond attorneys, George Douglas Wise and Henry Wood Flournoy, both Confederate veterans, to pursue the defendants’ appeals. Richmond public school teacher Rosa Dixon Bowser spear-headed founding the Richmond Women’s League (part of the rise of black clubwomen rallying to Ida B. Wells’ call), and organized as The League’s first cause raising $500 to underwrite appealing the defendants’ convictions.

Perhaps Lebsock’s most notable contribution is how she captures the fullness of history with all its paradoxical twist and turns. This passage, for instance:

And what of Mary Abernathy and Mary Barnes? They are harder to see; even when the press was most intensely interested in their case, the accused women often faded from view. This had everything to do with the fact that men did all the writing; not surprisingly, the men tended to think the Lunenburg story was about them. Much of the time, of course, the story was about men; it could hardly have been otherwise when women were systematically excluded from the legal system, from government, from the militia and the newspaper business. And thank goodness for the men’s involvement. Had men like Mitchell and O’Ferrall not stood boldly for justice and due process, Mary Abernathy and Pokey Barnes would surely have hanged (pp. 304-305).

And, another example, a page later:

. . . Think of the hours before Lucy Pollard’s death, before anyone knew it would not be an ordinary day. Mary Abernathy chatted with the Pollards about ridding cabbages of bugs; Pokey Barnes was in and out of two white families’ houses (and up and down another white family’s tree); Mary Barnes and Ellen Gayle planned a three-way transaction with Lucy Pollard involving two chickens, two pounds of beef, and a quarter of a dollar. The substance of these encounters was highly variable and did not always imply that blacks had to do the bidding of whites. It was the farm wife’s duty, for example, to provide the midday meal to any hands working on her place. The last meal Lucy Pollard cooked she served first to her husband . . . then to Mary Barnes.

This was not the whole story, of course. Forms of address made it clear that blacks were to defer to whites, and younger people to their elders. . . . Moreover, within hours of Lucy’s death it became clear that casual conversation could be displaced almost instantly by suspicion and the threat of lethal violence. But the countryside probably provided a fuller range of interracial interaction than Richmond, where segregation grew more pronounced by the day (p. 306).

While reading Lebsock’s book, I kept imagining a course on post-Civil War Race Relations and Legal Relations that I want to teach. A more descriptive class title would be, “race and remembrance” (p. 325)/”ferment and improvisation” (p. 332). A MURDER IN VIRGINIA would be the point of departure. Two other texts I’d like to use are historian Richard F. Hamm’s forthcoming MURDER, HONOR AND LAW: FOUR VIRGINIA HOMICIDES FROM RECONSTRUCTION TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION and RACE, LAW, & CULTURE: REFLECTIONS ON BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION.  To complement these readings, I’d show four videos: “Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice,” “The Road to Brown: The Untold Story of the Man who Killed Jim Crow,” “The Murder of Emmett Till,” and “Two Towns of Jasper.” On the syllabus, I’d feature this eloquent statement from Lebsock’s Afterword:

One way white supremacy was established and maintained was by erasing the memory of a powerful and responsible black citizenry, excising the memory of whites and blacks working together on more or less equal terms. These erasures, conscious or not, had the effect of making white supremacy seem natural, inevitable, rock solid by virtue of having been in place forever. The effect also was to make it more difficult for dissenters to imagine alternatives (p. 331).

REFERENCES:

Atwood, Margaret. 1996. ALIAS GRACE. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Dow, Whitney and Marcus Williams. 2002. “Two Towns of Jasper.” San Francisco, CA: Independent Television Service & New York, NY: National Black Programming Consortium.

Frazier, Charles. 1997. COLD MOUNTAIN. New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Greaves, William. 1989. “Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice.” New York, NY: William Greaves Productions.

Hamm, Richard F. 2003. MURDER, HONOR AND LAW: FOUR VIRGINIA HOMICIDES FROM RECONSTRUCTION TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.

Hewitt, Nancy A., and Suzanne Lebsock (eds.). 1993.  VISIBLE WOMEN: NEW ESSAYS ON AMERICAN ACTIVISM.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Kulish, Mykola. 1989. “The Road to Brown: The Untold Story of the Man who Killed Jim Crow.” San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel.

Lebsock, Suzanne. 1984. A SHARE OF HONOUR: VIRGINIA WOMEN, 1600-1945.  Richmond: Virginia Women's Cultural History Project.

Lebsock, Suzanne. 1984. THE FREE WOMEN OF PETERSBURG: STATUS AND CULTURE IN A SOUTHERN TOWN, 1784-1860.  New York: W. W. Norton.

 Nelson, Stanley. 2003. “The Murder of Emmett Till.” New York, NY: Firelight Media.

Sarat, Austin, ed. 1997. RACE, LAW, & CULTURE: REFLECTIONS OF BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Scott, Anne Firor, and Suzanne Lebsock. 1986. VIRGINIA WOMEN: THE FIRST TWO HUNDRED YEARS. Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

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Copyright 2003 by the author, James C. Foster.