HELL PUT TO SHAME

Historical true-crime tale that demonstrates the all-too-real horrors of the peonage system in the American South.

In his latest book, Swift, author of Chesapeake Requiem, Across the Airless Wilds, and Auto Biography, unfurls the heinous acts that took place in 1921 at a Georgia farm known as The Murder Farm, where 11 Black men were found shot, bludgeoned, or drowned at or near the farm. Held by a form of debt slavery known as peonage, these men and others were maliciously killed by the farm’s owner, John Sims Williams, in order to keep secret the unspeakable acts that took place there. As the FBI began searching Williams’ land for evidence of malfeasance, bodies were found in the nearby river tied at the neck to bags of rocks. So began the investigation and trial that brought the dark, then-commonplace racist practices of Georgia’s white citizens into the spotlight of the nation. Swift provides word-for-word accounts from Clyde Manning, the farm boss whom Williams threatened to kill should he not commit the murders, as well as trial transcripts and newspaper reports that clearly show the deeply entrenched racist system that dominated the South in the early 20th century. The author fully exposes the hellscape that enabled peonage to thrive, with hundreds of lynchings and mass murders of Black people by white mobs. “It seems too tranquil a setting for the lessons it offers,” writes Swift about the river where the bodies turned up. “That the past lurks close. That we haven’t learned as much as we think we have. That maybe we never do.” This unflinching narrative will make readers examine not only America’s dark history, but also the disheartening parallels that exist today.

A gripping, memorable work that wholly confronts a hellish past that continues to bleed into the present.