Va-Hist subscribers will no doubt find this review of Suzanne Lebsock's
new book of interest. Please respect the letter and spirit of the
copyright notice at the end of the review.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 3:12 PM
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Subject: REV: Hudson on Lebsock, A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice
on Trial

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(September, 2004)

Suzanne Lebsock.  A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial.  New
York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.  442 pp.  Maps, notes, and
index.  $26.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-393-04201-4.

Reviewed for H-SAWH by Lynn M. Hudson, Department of History, California
Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Race, Memory, and a Murder

When a white woman named Lucy Jane Pollard was murdered with an ax on a
sticky June afternoon in 1895, it set in motion a bizarre set of events
in rural Virginia.  A Murder in Virginia:  Southern Justice on Trial,
the story of these events, is a murder mystery and a finely wrought
historical investigation by prize-winning historian Suzanne Lebsock.

In the course of the narrative, Lebsock unravels the mysteries of some
of the most pressing and thorny questions in southern history:  How is
the color line constructed?  What are the messy overlaps of race, class,
gender, and sex in a small rural town?  And what do these convergences
mean for southerners of all description in the age of Jim Crow?  This is
a complicated tale to tell, partly because when the story is told
correctly, things are not what they seem.  Unlike Lucy Jane Pollard,
however, the reader is in safe hands.

Lebsock's first book, The Free Women of Petersburg:  Status and Culture
in a Southern Town, 1784-1860, explored gender and race relations in a
sizable Virginia community.[1]  This study, however, takes place not in
a city or even a town.  Lunenburg County, Virginia, "had no newspaper
and not a single settlement big enough to be called a town" (p. 16).
Eighty miles south of Richmond, in the tobacco belt, Lunenburg makes an
ideal setting to examine the relations between southern urban centers
and the region's vast rural areas--very different, if proximate, worlds.
It is also a provocative site to uncover the complicated relationships
between black and white southerners. 

Lebsock displays an uncanny ability to convey the intimacy between the
black and white inhabitants of this rural county.  White Virginians were
busy segregating, in the author's words, "everything that wasn't already
segregated" at the close of the nineteenth century. Lunenburg County was
a place where the color line was everywhere and nowhere.  It should come
as no surprise, then, that within days after the murder of Pollard,
authorities had arrested three African American women and one black
sawmill hand, all of whom maintained their innocence.

Lynch mobs formed as inhabitants of Lunenburg sought revenge.  In order
to put the suspects on trial, they first had to be kept alive.  The
women, Pokey Barnes, Mary Barnes, and Mary Abernathy, were whisked off
to Petersburg where, due to extensive publicity, they had become
celebrities.  Solomon Marable, the only male accused, would prove to be
a slippery suspect; two days after the murder he disappeared into the
woods, but was soon caught by a posse that included black and white men.
According to Marable, the women did it. 

Not surprisingly, the press made much of the murder, the arrests, and
the subsequent trials.  After all, as Lebsock reminds us, ax murders
sell papers.  From the press's earliest coverage of the murder to its
function as "a thirteenth juror" in the trials, media coverage shaped
the outcome of the trials and thus played no small role in the fate of
the accused.

This careful attention to the role of the press is one of the strengths
of the book.  To her credit, Lebsock underscores the role of Richmond's
black newspaper, The Richmond Planet and its activist editor, John
Mitchell, Jr., who hired the three lawyers who defended Pokey Barnes and
the two Marys.  It was the Planet that published the first photos of the
four prisoners on August 3, 1895.  An intriguing, if incidental, part of
the story comes when Lebsock shows how Mitchell manipulates mammy
stereotypes in his newspaper's coverage of Mary Abernathy, "betting that
white people's declared love for mammy could be strategically deployed
on behalf of living black Americans" (p. 156).

The initial trials of the three women and Solomon Marable provided ample
fodder for journalists.  But they were not the only onlookers; soldiers
had to be called to Lunenburg Courthouse to keep the peace and protect
the prisoners.  In fact, Lebsock is at her best when she chronicles the
spectacle that occurred inside and outside the courtroom.  One of the
singular contributions of A Murder in Virginia is the way in which the
author conveys the intensity and significance of this oft-neglected
arena of racial meaning.  Stories of lynching often-and rightfully-take
center stage in histories of Jim Crow's vicious reign, but this book
shows that the courtroom offers an equally rich site to explicate the
ways Jim Crow justice--and injustice--were meted out.  Of course, the
two venues were linked; African Americans who appeared in courtrooms
made easy targets for lynch mobs. 

How and why African Americans were lynched are questions woven
throughout the narrative.  Lebsock lays waste to the claim that the
upper South only dabbled in lynching, leaving states like Georgia and
Mississippi to perfect the craft.  "Virginians," she writes, "could
lynch with equal determination and festivity" (p. 63).  Like lynching,
white supremacy and segregation animate this story from beginning to
end.  Black resistance is also here but does not make its presence felt
until halfway through the narrative, when  black Richmond and its
activist women appear.[2]  Giving voice to the black actors in this
narrative is crucial, and Lebsock handles the task well, given that none
of the suspects could write. 

Some readers might find Lebsock's prose a bit daring when she makes
suppositions about the interior lives of her subjects.  Was John
Mitchell, Jr., for example, "depressed beyond speaking" when he took the
train to Farmville to witness Mary Abernathy's second trial?  And did
Pokey Barnes look at a witness "as if she were homemade slime"?  Maybe.
But herein lay Lebsock's dilemma:  How to tell the story as a
page-turner and stay true to her craft as a historian?   In the
Prologue, the author states explicitly that she did "not put words in
people's mouths" (pp. 18-19).  Of that, I have no doubt.  This book is a
model of meticulous research and carefully executed narrative.  It is
also, like Simon Schama's Dead Certainties:  Unwarranted Speculations, a
meditation on what historians can know.[3]  Lebsock makes use of
courtroom narratives to get at larger questions about race, memory,
evidence, and proof.  

A biracial jury found all of the suspects guilty in the initial trials
held in Lunenburg County; three were sentenced to hang, and Mary Barnes,
who was judged to be an accessory to murder, was sentenced to ten years
in the penitentiary.  But the case was far from over.  In a fascinating
twist, the accused were granted new trials in Farmville, located in
adjacent Prince Edward County.  This time the jury consisted of sixteen
white men, all "substantial farmers" (p. 210).  In the new courtroom,
the testimony of the women themselves proved far more significant-even
momentous.  The attorneys for the accused decided to put Mary Abernathy
and Pokey Barnes, both "unlettered," up against some of the best trial
lawyers in the state.  Lebsock's juxtaposition of the educated lawyers
and the illiterate orators works well and exposes the problematic
assumptions that reside in such a facile dichotomy.  

Of course, the dichotomy that A Murder in Virginia addresses most
explicitly is that of black and white.  Teasing out the meanings of race
in Virginia between Reconstruction and the Jazz Age is the task Lebsock
sets for herself.  Her success at this endeavor means that readers will
learn about much more than a murder.  Yet because this is history and
not fiction, a simple ending is not forthcoming.  In this unsolved
murder mystery, the lessons are about race and remembrance, not
whodunit.

Notes

[1].  Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg:  Status and Culture
in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York:  W.W. Norton & Co., 1984).

[2].  See also Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the
Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from
Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture 7 (1994): 141-144.

[3].  Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New
York: Knopf, 1991).

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