They burned his coat before they killed him. This was in Fort Worth, in 1921, during a strike at a packinghouse: A Black worker, excluded from the whites-only union, crossed the picket line. After his shift, he was confronted by white strikers. What I know of the story comes from century-old newspaper accounts that I suspect may have favored drama over accuracy; they say the man talked back to the picketers, was stabbed by one of them, and pulled a gun from the pocket of his overcoat and shot two people. Then he was badly beaten and left for dead. Once the police had hauled him off, the man’s attackers, in the words of the next day’s edition of the Fort Worth Record, “made a bonfire of the Negro’s coat on Exchange Avenue.”
It takes some effort to burn a coat. Hence the bonfire. Although this is another detail I can’t verify, the coat burning has the strangeness of truth—of an omen, even. It’s as though the killers wanted to destroy evidence ahead of time.
To go looking for traces of a person who was lynched is to encounter one erasure after another, beginning with a bonfire lit one winter afternoon. I’m tempted to fill in details: the stink of burning wool, mingled with the packinghouse odors of cowshit and blood. The flames gobbling up the fabric. A handful of white people lingering with fists in their pockets, mesmerized by the fire.
