she pled,
He took his stick from the trash pile
And hit her across the head.
The tears rolled down her rosy cheeks,
While the blood flowed down her back,
But still she remembered telling her mother
What time she would be back.
He killed little Mary Phagan—
it was on a holiday—
And he called on Jim Conley to take her body away.
He took her to the basement,
She was bound hand and feet,
And down in the basement little Mary
lay asleep.
Angelina Phagan with her daughters and grandchildren. Mary Phagan is at right on her lap.
Ollie Mae and Mary Phagan (Mary is at right).
William Joshua and Fannie Phagan.
A postcard Mary Phagan sent to her mother in 1911.
Newt Lee was the watchmen—
when he went to wind his key,
Down in the basement,
little Mary he could see.
He called for the officers—
their names I do not know.
They came to the pencil factory
Says “Newt Lee, you must go.”
They took him to the jailhouse,
They locked him in a cell,
But the poor innocent negro
Knew nothing for to tell.
I have a notion in my head
that when Frank comes to die,
And stands the examination in
the courthouse in the skies,
He will be astonished at the questions
The angels are going to say
of how he killed little Mary on one holiday.
Come all you good people
wherever you may be,
And supposing little Mary
belonged to you or me.
Her mother sat a weeping—
she weeps and mounts all day—
She prays to meet her darling
in a better world some day.
Little Mary is in Heaven,
while Leo Frank is in jail,
Waiting for the day to come
when he can tell his tale.
Judge Roan passed the sentence
And you bet he passed it well;
Solicitor Hugh M. Dorsey
sent Leo Frank to hell.
Now, God Bless her mother.
He told me that his mother had sung the ballad throughout his childhood. He had never forgotten a word. While he was singing the ballad, I realized that little Mary Phagan was me too—not a separate entity—and I could not evade our relationship. Nor did I want to.
I was ready to search for answers to those haunting questions. Now I had to know if what my father taught me was accurate and factual. I began extensive research. I looked again at the Brief of Evidence, reference books, and the newspaper accounts in a different way, a critical way. I read everything I could find on the economic, political, social and psychological climate of the South in 1913.
By the time little Mary Phagan was murdered, the Civil War had been over only forty-eight years. Today, other parts of the country accuse Southerners of “still fighting the Civil War.” To an extent that is true. It was true to an even greater extent in 1913.
The focus of Southern society was tradition—which also meant opposition to change. And the commitment to tradition was often manifested in a loyalty on the part of Southerners to “their own kind” which usually resulted in a paranoid suspicion of outsiders.
Another strong part of this tradition is the esteem in which white women, and particularly young white girls, are held. Southerners have always had a fear—whatever its origins—of assaults upon women.
The industrialization which began in the last part of the nineteenth century centered on the cities, and it was in the rural areas that the commitment to tradition held most strongly. But life in rural areas was difficult—very difficult for most of the poorer people. So they emigrated to urban areas.
Apparently, life wasn’t much better in the cities, although the opportunities to make money were far greater, and it was especially dreary in Atlanta. Those who came in from the country to find work in the mills and factories were white tenant farmers and they lived for the most part in the bleak factory slums which surrounded Atlanta’s industrial sections. Just as Grandmother Fannie Phagan Coleman was preparing to move her fatherless children from Alabama back to Atlanta/ Marietta around 1908 or 1909, about a third of Atlanta’s population had no water mains or sewers. Two years before little Mary Phagan was slain, between fifty and seventy-five percent of the schoolchildren of Atlanta suffered from anemia, malnutrition, and heart disease. In 1906, 22,000 out of a population of 115,000 were held by the police for disorderly conduct or drunkenness. That year, one of the worst race riots in memory broke out in Atlanta, and the newspapers seized upon stories—true or not—of Negro assaults on white women.
Wages were low in the mills and factories and the normal workday began at 6:00 a.m. and ended at 6:00 p.m. Mary Phagan had earned only ten cents an hour at the National Pencil Company. Children were exploited—especially in the cotton mills.
I thought of my father’s description of his grandmother Mary Richards Phagan, whom the factory bosses would hide from the labor inspectors.
It was probably inevitable that family and communityties, another bulwark of tradition, began to weaken, despite people’s struggles to hold onto them, and they grew increasingly resentful of those whom they considered to be their exploiters.
I realized, as my research began to clarify a lot of things for me, that little Mary Phagan, white, pretty, well- liked, just short of fourteen, a laborer in a factory or “sweat shop,” came to stand for what was good, pure,