Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Her name was Alma Howze. Her sister’s name was Maggie and she was hung with sisal rope next to her. The names of their children, still unborn, still inside their bellies, we will never know. It is said that people who came to see the bodies of the sisters hanging from a bridge in Shubuta, Mississippi, in 1918, could still see the babies “wriggling” inside even after the mothers died.
I no longer believe that accounts of barbarism against black bodies in America elicit empathy or shame. I believe, in fact, that barbarism against black bodies has and continues to be an American pastime.
What interests me here are the people who came to see the hanging of the Howze sisters—the spectators, those who came with their covered dishes of potato salad for an afternoon of noosed necks.
These hangings were not incidental; they were ritualized entertainment. Sometimes the audience would participate, setting fire to the bodies after they were released from the tree limbs. The spectators often took souvenirs, like skin from the backs to make wallets and purses. Or smaller momentos to pocket, like a finger or toe.
Photos snapped and used as postcards were distributed nationwide. One such postcard was source material for Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms and Accessories, in which the artist frames the faces of three white women, spectators at a double hanging, in bejeweled pendants. The expressions on the faces of the women do not reflect the macabre scene they witness: They range from indifferent to amused. The artist explains he named his masterwork “Accessories” in that these women were accessories to a double murder, “Heirlooms” in that they would pass on an inheritance of violence with impunity.
Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, in musing she’d follow a friend “to a public hanging,”
https://www.newsweek.com/senator-hyde-smith-mississippi-flag-must-go-1227987
I no longer believe that accounts of barbarism against black bodies in America elicit empathy or shame. I believe, in fact, that barbarism against black bodies has and continues to be an American pastime.
What interests me here are the people who came to see the hanging of the Howze sisters—the spectators, those who came with their covered dishes of potato salad for an afternoon of noosed necks.
These hangings were not incidental; they were ritualized entertainment. Sometimes the audience would participate, setting fire to the bodies after they were released from the tree limbs. The spectators often took souvenirs, like skin from the backs to make wallets and purses. Or smaller momentos to pocket, like a finger or toe.
Photos snapped and used as postcards were distributed nationwide. One such postcard was source material for Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms and Accessories, in which the artist frames the faces of three white women, spectators at a double hanging, in bejeweled pendants. The expressions on the faces of the women do not reflect the macabre scene they witness: They range from indifferent to amused. The artist explains he named his masterwork “Accessories” in that these women were accessories to a double murder, “Heirlooms” in that they would pass on an inheritance of violence with impunity.
Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, in musing she’d follow a friend “to a public hanging,”
https://www.newsweek.com/senator-hyde-smith-mississippi-flag-must-go-1227987
