LAY THIS BODY DOWN

Freeman’s first book has a subtitle calculated to bring readers up short. Plantation slaves in 1921? Therein lies a horrifying tale of the Old South. A Georgia-based journalist, Freeman first came across this story when his hometown, Atlanta, was hosting the 1996 Olympics (although it was widely covered even in the northern press at the time of the events described in the book). Although slavery theoretically died with the Confederacy, in the Jim Crow South there were still forms of debt bondage, called peonage, that were little more than gussied-up versions of the “peculiar institution.” A young black man would find himself arrested for some minor offense and issued a fine that he would be unable to pay; a local farmer would pay his fine and put him to work under slavery-like conditions, ostensibly to pay off this unasked-for loan. In the case of gentleman farmer John S. Williams, the result could be death by beating, bludgeoning, shooting, or drowning. Williams, unwillingly aided by his black overseer, Clyde Manning, murdered eleven of his plantation workers in 1921 when he thought that the nascent Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) was considering federal charges against him for peonage. Eventually, the story came to the surface with a trio of the corpses he and Manning had tossed into a nearby river. Remarkably, Williams was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, primarily on Manning’s testimony—the first white southern male convicted of first-degree murder of a black man or woman since 1877. (It would be 45 years before it would happen again.) Freeman walks the reader through the eleven murders and their aftermath with cool detachment. The book is scrupulously researched, with an eye for the telling detail. A good true-crime story, with far-reaching implications. (12 b&w photos, not seen)