Book review: A truth stranger than fiction

The Lynching of Claude Neal

The 1934 Murders of Claude Neal and Lola Cannady

By Dale Cox

(Available at Chipola Books and Tea and on Amazon)

Every novelist has heard stories drawn from the woof and warp of real life that are far stranger than fiction. Jackson County is home to such a story — the 1934 rape and murder of Malone farm girl, Lola Cannady, and the brutal lynching of the young man accused of killing her, Claude Neale. The murders, bestial in nature, and committed within a week of each other, sparked a rash of racial violence so notorious that, till this day, local citizens hesitate to discuss it with outsiders, and often quote the old saw about “letting sleeping dogs lie.”

Local son and Southern historian Dale Cox has begged to differ.

After 10 books on subjects as diverse as ghost stories, the history of Two Egg and The Battle of Marianna, he has turned his hand at penning an account of the most enduring ghost story of all, The Lynching of Claude Neal (Old Kitchen Books, 2011.)

Cox is a native of Two Egg, and with a minimum of embellishment, recounts the details of the murder of the 19-year-old Cannady, who was out watering the family hogs when she was brutally attacked and bludgeoned to death on Oct. 18, 1934.

Even before her body was recovered, suspicion had fallen on 23-year-old Claude Neal, a black farmhand whose great-aunt lived across the fence.

Neal was implicated by physical evidence and, from the moment of his arrest by Sheriff Flake Chambliss, was hotly pursued by a group of local men intent on vigilante violence who christened themselves The Committee of Six. For the better part of a week, they tracked Neal from one local jail to another, finally to Brewton, where they abducted him at gunpoint with dynamite in hand.

An invitation to Neal’s lynch party was broadcast locally and drew a crowd numbering in the thousands to the Cannady farm. The Committee of Six, who held Neal captive at a nearby abandoned riverboat landing, became wary of the size of the crowd, and decided to kill him themselves, by means of nearly incomprehensible torture.

They carried his body to the Cannady farm and left it for the crowd of would-be lynchers, who were furious they had been deprived of their prey. In a thumb of their noses at both the Committee and the Sheriff, they took Neal’s mutilated corpse to the courthouse square in downtown Marianna, and tied it to a tree a block from the sheriff’s office.

News of the “courthouse lynching” quickly circulated, and downtown Marianna soon erupted into a day of racial violence so intent that National Guard soldiers with machine guns were called to control it.

A photograph of Neal’s strung-up corpse, taken by a local newspaper editor, sent shock waves across the nation. The NAACP sent a special investigator down, and governors of both Florida and Alabama promised arrests, but the grand jury failed to indict a single member of the Committee of Six or arrest anyone in connection with the riots.

In the absence of legal answers, an entire subculture of gossip and speculation grew up around the murders, along with several historical dissections and one full-length book, Anatomy of a Lynching (LSU Press, 1979) by Professor James McGovern, long considered the definitive work.

Cox had grown up in the shadow of the speculation, and as a young reporter in the early 1980s began gathering evidence from a variety of sources, including the first-hand accounts of members of the Neal and Cannady families, and two surviving members of the Committee of Six.

The result is a carefully drawn chronological history that does not overly concern itself with the psychology of either victim or killer, but offers a simple structure and setting — literally, including maps — to a week punctuated by moments so savage they are nearly incomprehensible. Cox does not pretend to be the last word, but invites other books’ other interpretations, making for a book which does what all good books are meant to do: it compels dialogue.

It does not let sleeping dogs lie.

Marianna native Janis Owens is the author of three novels — “My Brother Michael,” “Myra Sims” and “The Schooling of Claybird Catts” — and a memoir and cookbook, “The Cracker Kitchen.” Her new novel, “American Ghost,” will appear in September.