She turned her head slightly, and her eyes swept over Mary Phagan’s gravestone. “We remember different times. Times long ago. Times that don’t come back except for her story.”
She paused and added, “We were there. And little Mary Phagan’s story remains with us. All the sadness and some of the hate—we felt it. Yes, times were different all right. A lot of murders happen today. But they don’t symbolize something like hers did. We were one of her kind, hard-working and striving to have a decent life. We made it, but she didn’t.”
For the first time, she looked closely at me. “You look a lot like her,” she said, her voice faltering.
I nodded sadly. “My name is Mary Phagan. Little Mary Phagan was my greataunt.”
For a moment the couple stared at me in disbelief, and then they wrapped their arms around me to comfort me. “Yes,” the old woman said, “I can see the resemblance now.” Breaking the embrace, she patted my shoulder gently. For a while, we were silent and then, as daylight faded, they politely excused themselves.
After they left, I stood there feeling again all the conflicting emotions which I could not resolve or forget. My mind spun back fifteen years.
I was thirteen. We were living in Charleston, South Carolina, where my father, the First Sergeant of the 17th Air Transport Squadron, was stationed. Mr. Henry, my eighth-grade science teacher at R. B. Stall High School, registered astonishment when I told him my name was Mary Phagan. “You know,” he said, “there was a little girl who was murdered in Atlanta years and years ago who had the same name as you. Are you, by any chance, related to her?”
I told him I didn’t know.
That conversation disturbed me. I became curious. Was there really another Mary Phagan?
During recess some of my classmates taunted me. “Are you that dead girl’s reincarnation?” Another called out, “Are you the little girl who had been murdered?” and ran away.
I cried all the way home from school. My father happened to be home. “What’s wrong?” he asked when he saw my tear-stained face.
“I want to know who the little girl named Mary Phagan that was murdered was,” I said, trembling. “Am I related to her?”
He put his arm around my shoulders, walked me into the kitchen, and sat me down at the table in the sunny alcove.
He poured two glasses of milk, brought them to the table, and sat opposite me. The afternoon sun played up the reddish tints in his light brown hair, worn in a severe military crewcut, and glinted off his military-issue glasses.
“Yes, you are related to little Mary Phagan,” he said solemnly. “She was your grandfather’s sister. She would have been my aunt. You are her greatniece and are named for her.”
Gently, he told me the outline of the story of Mary Phagan. That she had caught the English Avenue Street Car the morning of Saturday, April 26, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day, to go to the National Pencil Company where she had worked in downtown Atlanta to pick up her wages of $1.20. She had made plans to stay and watch the parade. Governor Joseph M. Brown and other dignitaries were to share the reviewing stand. It was a legal holiday that the South still celebrated then. The War Between the States had been over for only forty-eight years. There were still some surviving Confederate veterans.
“That day would change the lives of everyone it touched.
“Tom Watson would reflect the mood of us Georgians in his magazine and newspaper. He would be elected to the United States Senate, and his statue placed in front of the Georgia State Capital Building. Solicitor Hugh M. Dorsey would ride right into the Governorship of Georgia.”
As my father leaned back, the sunlight turned his hazel eyes to green. “Your grandmother Fannie Phagan Coleman remembered that day the rest of her life,” he said. “Little Mary was dressed in a lavender dress that her Aunt Lizzie had made for her. She carried a parasol and a German silver mesh bag. She had ribbons in her hair that tied her long reddish hair up. She was a beautiful young child—” my father paused, “—like you.
“Little Mary entered the pencil factory about noon that day,” he continued. “What happened then, no one will ever really know. Newt Lee, the night watchman, found her body in the basement next to the coal bin that Sunday morning at about 3:00 a.m. She had been brutally raped and murdered. Newt Lee was a Negro, and, remember, in 1906 Atlanta had one of the country’s worst race riots. So right then he feared for his life. He would have been afraid to lie even if he had wanted to. He ran up to the telephone and called the police. Two notes were found by her body but Mary did not write these notes, according to Grandmother Fannie.
“Grandmother Fannie had been expecting Mary back home that evening after the parade. Sundown came and still no little Mary. My stepgrandfather went downtown to try to locate anyone that could give him information on little Mary’s whereabouts. No luck. It would be the next day, the twenty-seventh of April, before they were told that little Mary had been found dead. The family was terrified. Shocked. She was so young. And she’d been violated.
“Little Mary’s body was taken to Bloomfield’s, a local undertaker, which was also used as Atlanta’s morgue. The funeral was held that Tuesday, April 29, 1913. Her casket was surrounded by flowers—the flowers were expressions of the whole state’s sympathy to the family. She was laid to rest that day in Marietta City cemetery.
“Leo Frank, the supervisor of the factory, was charged with the murder. His trial started on the twenty- eighth day of July that year. The case became famous because it was reportedly the first time in the history of Georgia and the South that a black man’s testimony helped to convict a white man.”
Looking closely at me, my father realized that I did not understand all he was telling me. And so he simplified the story as much as he could.
As soon as we got up from the table I went upstairs to my room and examined what I saw in my mirror: Pretty? Was I?
Satisfied with my father’s explanation, I relaxed a bit. It was just a coincidence that Mr. Henry, my science teacher, had known the story of little Mary Phagan, I told myself. I was positive that I would never be asked that question again.
That was in 1968. My father decided to retire from the United States Air Force after serving some twenty-two years in that same year. Then he went to work for the United States Post Office as a letter carrier in Charleston.
During my summer vacation that year I went to Chicago to visit relatives with my grandmother, Frances Petullo Mastandrea, who had lived with us for five years. A few weeks after our arrival in Chicago, my parents called to say the family was moving to Atlanta. “Our family is in Atlanta,” my father said, “and my parents are getting older. I want us to know them as we do Grandma Frances.”
He was right. We never really knew any of our family. And I was ready to settle down and live somewhere for more than a couple of years. I was excited as we arrived at our new home in DeKalb County, on the outskirts of metropolitan Atlanta and close enough to my grandparents in Atlanta.
It was a nice suburb in which to raise a family, and the high school, Shamrock, was the best the area had to offer.
When school began, I soon learned that making friends might be difficult: most of the cliques had gone to school together since kindergarten. That was hard for me to imagine. I had never had a friend more than a few years; to have a lifetime friend seemed impossible.
The first day, the teachers called out our names, glancing at each student in