Gussie and Emma arrived shortly after the sheriff left. They came across the yard and up the back steps unseen by the gang heading towards town. They burst into the kitchen where the family had gathered, startling them as they tried to examine Beauty’s injuries.
Both women were dressed in light cotton house dresses and scuffs, and were shaking from the cold. Emma, crying, held out a trembling hand to her sister-in-law as Sarah hurried across the kitchen to her.
“Aaron, they took him,” Gussie cried.
“Where is he? What happened to him?” Emma sobbed, collapsing to the floor on one knee as Sarah came to her.
Rose and Sarah helped the women to sit at the table, rubbing their cold hands. Sarah sent Marlene running up the stairs for blankets and sweaters. The two women, crying and shaking, described how the mob had broken into their home, dragging Aaron out of bed and beating him. At one point the men had hung him, but let him down when he said he’d talk. Then they had chained him behind a car and dragged him away.
“I told them he was sick, sick in bed. He’s been sick, worse after last night and staying out so late. I told them, ’He didn’t do anything, he didn’t do anything’, but they took him out and threw a rope over the magnolia out front.” Emma, hands shaking, covered her eyes and sobbed.
“Then they dragged him off, chained him to the car and drove off. Two of them stayed and tried to get us to tell them where the man was who came to the house, but neither of us knew what they were talking about. They kept asking and asking. One of them hit Little Mama here,” Gussie said, gesturing to the red mark on Emma’s face.
“Did you see him? Do you know what they’ve done with him?” Emma asked. “Is he dead, Sarah? Just tell me, is he dead and if he is, where’d they leave him?” Emma’s eyes were filled with tears as she spoke. “I just want to take care of him, don’t want to leave him- leave him out there-”
“No, Honey, no, Emma, the Sheriff took him in. Probably has him locked up in Bronson. The Sheriff’s a good man, he saved him from that mob, he’ll keep him safe somewhere. Don’t worry,” Sarah reassured her sister-in-law, but Rose could see the worried looks that Sarah and Beauty exchanged.
“Where are the children? Where’s Scrappy?” Beauty asked.
“They’re coming by the back way,” Gussie told her. “I didn’t want them to see if we found him.”
Scrappy and the children still hadn’t arrived by late afternoon and everyone was worried. The long day went on and the Carrier women sat in the kitchen, waiting for the mob to leave town, as the late afternoon passed towards evening. The crowd could be heard, moving up and down the road alongside the railroad tracks. Sarah told the children to stay indoors and threatened to whip A.T. when he complained. His shocked eyes made clear the oddness of the day, and relenting, Sarah sent him out to chop kindling along side Roy and Daniel cutting wood.
Rose slipped upstairs several times to check on Queen. She was in a deep sleep every time and had to be shaken awake to drink the herbal teas Sarah brewed for her. Whenever Rose woke her, Queen started to cough, a thick wet cough that lasted a long time. She could barely finish a cup of tea before she drifted back off to sleep, sliding heavily back down into the covers.
Beauty came upstairs with Rose the third time.
“I think this is more than a cold,” she said, worried. “She’s sleeping so deeply, she’s hardly coming around when we wake her. We’d better tell Mama.”
“Give me strength,” Sarah sighed when they told her about Queen, but she came upstairs to check on her granddaughter. Queen finally woke up enough to allow Beauty to help her sit up, but began coughing up thick, green mucus. Soon she was gasping for breath and Sarah sent Beauty down to her bedroom for her medicine box.
“If I could just stop coughing,” Queen wheezed, “if I could catch my breath, I know I’d start to feel better.”
“You need some medicine, help you stop coughing so hard. Something to bring down that fever,” Sarah told her.
Rose went downstairs for hot water that Sarah used to make a tea. Once Queen had drank the medicine Sarah gave her she drifted back into sleep. Pulling the covers up over her shoulders, Sarah asked Rose to go downstairs and try to rescue the neglected supper they had begun earlier, and to try to find enough food for everyone.
“Make a pot of coffee, and slice up some bread. I’ll see what else when I come down, I want to stay for a bit and make sure she’s resting.”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“We usually have a big meal on New Year’s day. Ham and black eyed peas, greens, and a big cake with a prize hidden inside. Well, the peas are on, the greens can go on now. I guess we’ll have to make do with cold ham this year,” she told Rose.
Scrappy and all of Emma’s grandchildren were in the kitchen when Rose came down. Despite the marauding gangs of men, Scrappy had led the children along the forest paths to Sarah’s. She sat exhausted from fear and the cold weather, in front of the hot tea Beauty had made her.
Emma held Scrappy’s hand and watched as her grandchildren, already forgetful of the day’s horrors, played with their cousins by the stove.
“We played Indians on our way over here,” Minnie Lee told Emma. “We were silent in the forest,” she bragged, obviously quoting Scrappy’s directions. “We followed the path and walked without making any sound, just like Pocahontas.”
Rose and Beauty set the table and began to attend to the last details of the meal. Sarah came down and was overjoyed to see the rest of the children; she smiled with them and listened intently to the story of their adventure as described by Minnie Lee and her brother Ruben.
After supper was cleared away and the children were washing up for bedtime, Sarah started to discuss Queen’s illness with Emma but was interrupted by the roaring noise coming from the road out in front of the house.
Sarah pulled the shotgun from its place behind the door and hurried out into the hall.
“Take the children upstairs,” she called back.
Beauty, Rose and Marlene followed her as Emma, Scrappy and Gussie urged the children upstairs ahead of them. Daniel and Roy, coming in from the back yard with A.T., moved through the pantry and dining room into the parlor. The two groups met at the front parlor window, looking out at the road.
The posse of men looked as if it had grown to over a hundred, and all of them had guns. There were enough cars and trucks to block the road now. A large group of horses was held back from the crowd by the group of dog boys. A wagon was stopped in front of the house, held up by the same crowd of men that earlier had assaulted Aaron. They were shouting at the driver, an older man who was standing up on the wagon boards and frowning down on the crowd surrounding him.
“That’s Sam Carter,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “Why are they bothering with him?”
The crowd of men suddenly reached up and pulled Carter, unresisting, from his wagon. A shout went up when someone reached under the wagon seat and pulled out a rifle. Amidst the shouting one phrase grew loudest.
“Get a rope!” the posse yelled, and the dog boys brought one up from where the horses rested.
The crowd of angry yelling men dragged Sam Carter around the side of the house and across the side yard towards a group of trees at the edge of the forest. He was fighting them now, struggling against them and yelling, but there were enough men to hold him and pull him over to the trees. The long end of a rope was thrown up over a branch of one of the tall oaks there.
When a man stepped up and dropped the noose of the rope over the old man’s head, Beauty backed away from the window.
“They’re going to hang Sam Carter Mama, they’re going to hang him,” she said, unbelieving.
When her mother didn’t reply, just stood and watched, Beauty fled the room, running upstairs to where the other women had led the children.
Sylvester’s hunting dogs were penned in the back near the barn and were baying and barking, carrying on over the strangers crossing their property. One man veered off from the crowd and walked to the pens. A.T. cried out as the man shot each dog in turn; his favorite, Jennie, was the last shot and he screamed when she yelped as the bullet put her down.
“Quiet, son. Don’t carry on now,” Sarah hushed him, but she pulled him close and turned him away from the window.
Daniel moved towards the front door.
“You stay in this house,” Sarah snapped at him. “There’s nothing to be done. Every one of those men have a gun, and if you go out there they’ll just haul you up too. You stay in, there’s nothing to be done now.”
Her face was terrible as she spoke, fierce and sorrowful and awful to see.
“Lord, help us now,” she prayed. She turned back to the window as a shout went up and Sam Carter was pulled up in to the air and hung from the oak branch.
At first he struggled, his legs scissoring and his arms reaching up, holding on to the rope as he swung back and forth, back and forth, but soon his hands stopped digging at the noose around his neck and fell to his sides, rising less and less until they were still. A dark stain spread across the front of his overalls. As his body went slack a shout went up.
“That’s too easy! It’s too quick! Let him down, let him down!” the men cried.
The rope was released and Sam Carter fell to the ground. A man stepped forward and loosened the noose from his neck. He began to choke and heave as air entered his lungs. He crawled to his knees and, coughing and vomiting, tried to stand by pulling himself up on the tree where he had hung. Several men started yelling at him and one struck him back to the ground when he gave an answer.
“Grandmama, they’re going to kill him,” Daniel begged.
Sarah, staring out the window, didn’t turn away.
“You stay in here. Nothing to be done.” She stood like a statue, praying under her breath as the crowd dragged Sam Carter up and put the noose over his head a second time.
Rose took Daniel’s hand and held it, tight, as the man was pulled up and hung until almost lifeless, dropped down and questioned a second time and then hung again.
The third hanging seemed to be the limit of his body’s strength. He dropped to the ground after the third release and didn’t rise again.
A disappointed groan went through the crowd. A young man stepped forward and poured a bottle of liquor over Sam Carter’s head and he started up, but his body was no longer able to rise and he fell back to the ground. The crowd of men grabbed him and dragged him over to the stump of a tree Sylvester had cut down that week. Four men pinned him against the stump as one man stepped forward to speak to him. He said something to Sam Carter and when Carter replied, the man yelled out, “Why, you son of a bitch!” He lifted his rifle, held it against Sam Carter’s lowered head and pulled the trigger.
A flock of crows that nested in the evenings at the edge of the woods flew up at the sound of the gunshot. They fled, cawing, as the furious crowd heaved forward and grabbed the dying man, cutting off his clothing and then his flesh for souvenirs. The younger Davis boy pulled off a boot and began sawing at the left big toe. Others hacked and sawed away as one man, dangling his prize, called out “I got his watch!”
Marlene stumbled into the hall and vomited on the rug as the rest of the family watched through the window in horror. Rose backed away right into Queen, who had come downstairs, clutching her quilt around her. Rose turned and pulled Queen close, pushing her face into her shoulder so she couldn’t see what was happening outside.
The mob dragged what remained of the body of Sam Carter back to the hanging tree and strung it up one last time. Shouting, laughing men piled wood pulled from the surrounding trees beneath, then doused the wood and the body with kerosene and set fire to the remains. The last rays of the sun illuminated the awful scene as the moon rose bright and night fell.
Lynching of Jesse Washington, Waco TX 1916