pagesofjulia

A historian with personal connections to its players expertly researches a specific lynching case in this razor-sharp report.

In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning is a story with personal significance for Grace Elizabeth Hale (Making Whiteness), who tackles some of the greatest race-relations demons–historical and continuing–in the United States. In this thoroughly researched account, Hale investigates the 1947 murder of a man named Versie Johnson in rural Jefferson Davis County, Miss. The author’s beloved grandfather served as sheriff at the time, and her mother originally offered this tale as one of righteous heroism: her white grandfather stood up to a mob and refused to release his Black prisoner, who was somehow nevertheless removed to the woods where he died. But Hale learns that her grandfather’s involvement was neither innocent nor heroic.

In her thoughtful narrative, Hale places the death of Versie Johnson in layers of context. She works to find personal information about Johnson, with limited results: one theme of her book is the lack of recorded facts about people judged inconsequential by the record-keepers. She struggles to reconcile very different accounts of Johnson’s alleged crime (rape of a white woman). She studies the history of lynching in the United States, by its various definitions; the history of Jeff Davis County and Mississippi; and a handful of similar cases in nearby counties before 1947. By the end, she reconstructs a passable version of events: possibilities about the life of Versie Johnson and an estimation of her grandfather’s decision-making on the night he was among the group that drove his prisoner from the town’s jail out to the field where a crowd of white locals witnessed Johnson’s murder.

A historian of American culture, Hale began her research for this book as she finished a doctoral dissertation on southern segregation, Jim Crow, lynching, and white supremacy. She brings this expertise to a subject about which much information has been lost. “Family trees, genealogies filled with relatives’ names and the dates when they were born and died, depend on archives. And official repositories of documents in turn depend on a society’s ideas about who matters.” Research skills and informed guesses (always clearly indicated) do, however, yield a story. “The past does not have to be ancient to be made of splinters and silence,” Hale writes, and what she reveals is important for a national reckoning as well as Hale’s personal one.

In the Pines is elevated by lovely writing: “Family trees are metaphors. They share with pines both a basic structure and a tendency to flourish only when conditions are right.” It is also marked by incisive thinking about race in history and in the present. Hale’s work is a significant contribution to that larger conversation.

This review originally ran in the September 18, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: history, nonfiction, race, Shelf Awareness |