I remember my grandmother mentioning this lynching in 1906 but I was too stupid to get details. Someone else has done it for me. My own Julian family played some role in this tragedy--an unjust lynching. Asheville Citizen review by Rob Neufeld The truth of horror: Salisbury author does dogged detective work about a family murder One of the most chilling recent books about local history comes to our eyes via self-publication. In “A Game Called Salisbury” (Infinity Publishing), Susan Barringer Wells presents the story of a series of murders and retributive lynchings that had taken place within her family a century ago. The book is exhaustively researched and compellingly related. To be passionate about a subject is one thing; to tell the story in a fresh and focused way, as Wells does, is a rarer achievement. On July 13, 1906, three sisters, ages ten to 17, came downstairs from their bedroom in their Salisbury home to discover the bludgeoned and burned bodies of two younger siblings and their parents, Isaac and Augusta Barringer Lyerly. Within a few hours, a throng of people arrived in the Lyerly yard, contaminating the crime scene and spreading rumors. A few weeks later, three African-American sharecroppers, who’d worked for the Lyerlys, were dragged from a prison and brutalized in an unspeakable manner. The reporters who arrived shortly after the Lyerly murders were, for the most part, related to the sheriff or connected to white supremacist newspaper editors, such as Josephus Daniels of the Raleigh “News & Observer.” H.E.C. Bryant, a reporter for the Charlotte “Observer,” confected an emotional brew of fiction and fact. Mary, Addie, and Janie were “brave girls” who fought a raging fire to rescue their expiring six-year-old sister Alice and carry her to a friend’s house a mile away. No mention was made of the half-brother who lived close by, and with whom the girls did not seek refuge; nor of other possible suspects. Instead, Bryant fingered one of the sharecroppers, Jack Dillingham, for the deed—before any law officer or lawyer had made a judgment. An Asheville connection The myths we make of history, even when they’re false, usually have a more significant effect on subsequent history than does truth. Therefore, myths are a legitimate part of history. This should not cloud our need for accuracy and honesty, which arises from a reconciliation of multiple points of view. Wells appreciates the mythical complexity of history, and thus starts her book with an Asheville anecdote. “On a warm summer day in western North Carolina,” she writes, “Embler Kibler came running home from play with an ugly red mark around his neck and his face discolored. Embler’s older friend Jack McClay had brought a rope with him that day and suggested they play a new game. Jack had appointed himself executioner.” Embler was six. After Jack and his friend Porter Claxton had strung Embler up by a noose to a nail in a porch beam, they ran off, leaving Embler with his toes barely touching the ground. He managed to struggle free after a few minutes. McClay went before a judge and explained himself with the comment that he was “just playing a game called ‘Salisbury.’” It was not the only mock hanging based on the sensationalized Lyerly story that took place in North Carolina in 1906, Wells documents. Wells also documents another spooky piece of Asheville lore. Earl Lyerly, son of the Lyerly girls’ older half-brother Joseph, had told Wells that Della Dillingham, wife of Jack, one of the lynching victims, had fled to Asheville. She “had been pregnant,” Earl had heard, “when she was pushed off a train into the French Broad River.” Getting at truth What are the repercussions of history? When something grisly or damnable happens, is there a price to pay or a correction to make in compensation, no matter how much the truth is muddied? Wells exhumes every tag end of information and examines them in the light of related larger stories. Her Edgar Allen Poe-like account features the dual attributes of Poe’s writing: doggedly rational detective work; and an appreciation of the larger-than-life—often macabre—nature of people’s take on things. Perceptions of the Lyerly murders were colored by the mentality of the racist cartoons of the 1890s, which depicted African-Americans as demons asserting “Negro Rule.” The Lyerlys’ funeral became a mass spectacle. The prosecutor’s number one witness, grandson of one of the accused, had been fathered by a “well-known white man.” That last piece of information was the product of several years’ research by Wells. Her search had begun with her observation that a microfilm copy of a Salisbury “Post” transcript included some blank spots. “Just when I was about to give up,” Wells writes, “I found what I thought no longer existed…I ran across it by mistake, while looking for something else, in a little library on the Old 64 route I often took to Salisbury.” It was a detailed report of a key hearing published in the Pittsboro “Chatham Record.” Wells then traced it to the full version in the Charlotte “Observer,” which she had missed because it had been microfilmed out of sequence. She includes eighteen pages of the testimony in her book. In the fashion of a horror story, Wells does not blink. “A Game Called Salisbury” includes a photo of the lynched men. And she does not end with a climax, but with an ebbing of shock waves: a survey of propaganda in American history; and an epilogue that tells us about the fates of the principal players. Rob Neufeld writes about books for the Citizen-Times. His column runs in the Sunday Arts & Living section. Contact him at 768-BOOK or [email protected] Visit his blog, “The World and Books,” at www.citizen-times.com/booksblog. BOOKS REVIEWED A Game Called Salisbury: The Spinning of a Southern Tragedy and the Myths of race” by Susan Barringer Wells (Infinity Publishing trade paperback, 2007, 467 pages, $23.95; toll free call, 877-BUY BOOK) It can also be ordered thru www.amazon.com. I think there are some used paperbacks there. I hope it is all right to post this on the mailing list. I thought some other researchers might be interested in the 1906 milieu in Salisbury, where our real people are figured. I am getting the book. Betty Pace ____________________________________________________________ Click here to shop from a huge selection of personalized gifts for any occasion! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3mM4ThbTjLs3AghXh9SjBM7fwS44NrS3LN10o3BsYTCk2eOU/