The Cross and the Lynching Tree

The final chapter begins with the narrative of a Black woman who just happened to be the wife of a man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Haynes Turner was a Black man known to quarrel with a white man who had just been murdered, Hampton Smith. Since the mob that had gathered couldn’t find the man accused of the crime (one Sidney Johnson), they decided to lynch Haynes instead. Hayne’s wife Mary, eight months pregnant at the time, raised her voice in protest at this horrific miscarriage of justice and was lynched herself. Cone recounts the horrific crime in detail—she was arrested by the local sheriff, who then turned her over to the mob. She was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death” before “a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death” (170).

This lurid scene shows that even though women made up only 2% of lynching victims, their stories are no less horrific or worthy of attention. Often, it was not the threat of death that served as the greatest existential threat to Black women but fates even worse in the form of sexual assault and degradation.