I hold your stories. I am Georgia’s red clay and black land. The silence that speaks beneath the roar of trains and traffic. I am a record. You call me soil, but I am memory.
I remember how Black life rose after slavery’s end. How men and women carved businesses into my streets, lifted schools on my back, built homes, churches, barbershops, laundries, groceries. I held Alonzo Herndon’s dream, his barbershop on Peachtree, gleaming with polish, his hands making a fortune from skill and dignity. I held Clark University and Gammon Theological Seminary in Brownsville, where scholars and preachers walked across me in their Sunday coats.
I remember too when white fear grew heavy that September. How newspaper headlines screamed false stories, lurid tales of Black men attacking white women. How those lies piled up like kindling. How politicians sharpened them into promises. They set fire to lies and handed them to the crowd.
On Saturday night, Sept. 22, 1906, the storm broke. From Five Points, where the corner of Peachtree, Marietta, Edgewood, Decatur, and Pryor meet, pulling us into its center of the city. The crowd poured outward, thousands strong, drunk on lies and rage. Knives and pistols, clubs and fists.
The soil drank blood for four days that September until it could hold no more. And still it came.
Forsyth Street. I received Frank Smith. He was 18, full of errands and haste, crossing the bridge with telegrams before they caught him. Stones cracked against his flesh, knives carved, fists crushed. His body dragged, hurled onto the tracks. The trains rattled on, carrying strangers away. They did not know his name, but I did. I caught him. I kept him. I have whispered “Frank” into the iron and dust ever since.
Mitchell Street. I caught Leola Maddox. She walked with her husband, hand in hand, beneath lamps glowing against glass. Laughter rested between them. The mob shattered it. Steel driven into her body again and again until she fell. Her husband was beaten down beside her. The bricks still stand, but I was the one who received her. I held her warmth, her blood, her last breath. Love and pain together, pressed into the soil. I have never let them separate.
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Peachtree Street, beneath the towering Henry Grady statue, became an altar, holding William Welch and Will Marion. William worked with his hands, cutting hair or shining shoes — it no longer matters which. He was shot, dragged, laid at the statue’s base. Will fell too, his end blurred in print but not in me. They are side by side in my keeping. The statue above calls itself progress, but I know better. Its shadow lengthens each evening across the place where I cradled their broken bodies.
West Third Street, I met Annie Shepard. A laundress, hands raw from soap and water, she carried strength in her arms. A bullet struck her chest, dropped her in the road. The papers nearly erased her, but I wrote her name again and again into my clay. Annie.
On Peters Street, in the shadows of Snake Nation, I took in Milton Brown. He ran hard from Castleberry toward home, bullets chasing him. The police stood still, eyes on violence they chose not to stop. As Milton bled, he whispered: I knew nothing of the trouble going on. I kept those words, folded them deep inside, repeating them in his name.
Downtown, they entered Alonzo Herndon’s barbershop, one of the finest Black businesses in the South. They shattered glass, splintered wood, beat his workers until one lay dead. The pride of craft and enterprise, broken in a night. Yet I held the men they struck down. I held their skill, their dignity, their refusal to be erased. Because Herndon’s Crystal Palace did rise again.
In Brownsville, the voices came to me in chorus. Clark University (currently where Carver High School stands) students and families hid, boarded doors, prayed, but the mob and the law entered as one. I took Sam Magruder, who leapt from a streetcar and was riddled with bullets. I took Frank Fambro, once praised for halting a lynching, himself shot down in his store. I took George Wilder, 70 years old, a Union veteran left dead in a shed. I took Clem Rhodes, his death scattered in newspapers but held whole in me. I braided them together: Sam and Frank and George and Clem. The soil aches with the weight of them, yet I carry them still.
Eight miles south, in East Point, I bent low beneath the pines. They dragged Zeb Long from his jail cell, tied the rope, marched him to the grove. He begged. They did not listen. The pine bore his body; I bore his silence. Zeb is still here with me, his last cry a root running through me.
At Randolph and Magruder, I absorbed Will Moreland and James Fletcher. Police shot them down, said they fired first. No court ever proved it. The law turned away, but I did not. I sealed their names in the stone of my memory.
And there were others. Sam Robinson, a carpenter, gunned down for failing to halt. Eleven more unnamed, three dragged to the Grady statue, left at its base as if bodies were offerings to stone. Eight others were never identified as I held them waiting for family. Their names were never spoken again, but they pressed into me. I have never let them go.
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By the time the massacre stilled, twenty-five names were tallied. Survivors whispered closer to one hundred. The city moved forward with business, but the soil is layered with memory.
Forsyth carries Frank. Mitchell holds Leola. Peachtree and Marietta bear William and Will. Third Street whispers Annie. Peters repeats Milton’s words. Downtown cradles Herndon’s broken pride. Brownsville binds Sam, Frank, George, Clem together. East Point breathes Zeb among the pines. Randolph bears Will and James. And everywhere — the unnamed, the uncounted, folded into the soil like seeds.
You walk me still. You lay asphalt over me, raise towers on my back, drive your cars across me. But I am not silent. I speak through cracks.
I want you to know this was no riot. It was a massacre.
And I, the soil, though paved and pressed, though silenced by stone and glass, have not forgotten.
