Va-Hist subscribers will be interested in this on-line review of Suzanne
Lebsock's most recent book, A Murder in Virginia.

Please respect both the letter and the spirit of the copyright notice at
the end of the review.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
[log in to unmask]

Visit the Library of Virginia's web site at http://www.lva.lib.va.us


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (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,
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): pp. 141-144.

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


Purchasing through these links helps support H-Net:
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?
partner_id=28081&cgi=product&isbn=0393042014
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393042014/hnetreview-20?dev-t=ma
son-
wrapper%26camp=2025%26link_code=xm2
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393042014/hnetreview-21
http://service.bfast.com/bfast/click?
bfmid=2181&sourceid=41034484&bfpid=0393042014&bfmtype=book

Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational
purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web
location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities &
Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at [log in to unmask] .

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html