Was He There?

By Harry Coverston

Was he there that night

When those angry white men strung up Sam Mosely,

His young black body

Glistening with a cold sweat of terror

Out on the edge of Lake City

In the same neck of the woods

Where lynchings always occurred

Hung from a tree and then riddled with bullets

As was the fashion

Across the former Slave Belt of Florida

That deadly Red Summer of 1919

When the Black veterans marched home

From the world war

Did my great uncle share

His brother’s despising of the Klan

My Grandfather’s defiant refusal to accede

To demands he join their clandestine group

(Their hooded membership the worst kept secret in Homestead, Florida)

Willing to risk the retribution

That refusal could have provoked

Retribution that could come in the dark of night

As grown men dressed in ghoulish costumes

Like those worn on Halloween

Would come to set fire to his home

With the torches they otherwise used to burn crosses

All in the name of Jesus, of course….

Was my kinsman at home that night

In this growing community to which he had just moved

Seeking a new start after his own time

In the great war to end all wars

His brand new furniture store downtown

His pride and joy

Had he heard of the deadly plans

To murder Sam Mosely and desecrate his body

Did he simply opt out

Perhaps out of fear

Perhaps out of conscience

Did he dare speak out against this malevolence?

Did he simply pretend not to know?

When news of the lynching

Spread around town the next day

Did he join in the confabulation explaining those bloody deeds

Echoing the talking points

That sought to legitimate them

Talking points for which the newspapers

Would offer a semblance of credibility

Publishing in a one-paragraph cryptic blurb

Buried on an inside page

The lie they had all agreed to –

That Sam Mosely had “forfeited his life”

By “allegedly assaulting a white woman”

Allegations never proven

About yet another Black man

Presumed guilty

His accusers proceeding directly to punishment

I wonder if the purveyors

Of their agreed upon lie

Realize that those who feel the need

To legitimate their attitudes, words or deeds

Unwittingly confess

That they recognize them to be illegitimate…

Was he there that night

Joining the angry mob

Fueled by fear and rage

Lubricated by cheap whiskey

Loudly reassuring themselves

They were rightfully protecting their property

As they saw their women and their children to be

Indeed, they told themselves,

Their very way of life was on the line

I wonder how difficult was the disconnect

From their consciences

That place deep inside where they knew

Knew

That what they were doing was wrong?

Was he swept away by the mindlessness

Of his new fellow townsmen

His own consciousness descending

To the lowest common denominator of the mob?

Was he there that night

Because he shared those racist views

That saw any means

To maintaining white domination

As fair game

Including the use of a human body

To drive home their point

As he attended the sunrise service that next Easter

On the shores of Alligator Lake

Would he make the connection of their deadly deeds

To the Romans who executed the Jesus

Whose resurrection they celebrated

An empire who perfected this terrorist tactic centuries before

The rotting bodies they left dangling from crosses

Lining the road into Jerusalem at Passover

Including the one above whose head a sign read

“This is Jesus, the King of the Jews…”

And whose unwritten post-script included the warning

“…and this is what happens to anyone

Who would presume to be king in Caesar’s Empire.

Do not challenge the imperial order.

We will crush you.”

That morning when they sang

“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”

How many truthfully raised their hands?

Was he there that night?

A century later, his great nephew –

Searching for traces

Of the truncated life of Sam Mosely

Wonders

All the while knowing

There is no way to answer that question now

His children all deceased

The family secrets they might have kept

Dying with them.

But even if my kinsman was not there

There were enough angry white men that night

To engage in an atrocity

One of many that bloody Red Summer of 1919.

And even as I ponder the question at hand

The queasy feeling in my gut

Poses a deeper, more troubling question:

Had our roles been reversed,

Would I have been there, too?

For now my calling is to tell the stories

Entrusted to me

To adamantly refuse

To let the Sam Mosely’s of our common history

Be lost to us

Erased from our collective memory

Repressed from our collective consciousness

Released from our collective conscience

A wise rabbi once said,

“Remembrance is the secret of redemption.”

This day I wrestle with my soul

Pondering the role my kinsman

Might have played in a public atrocity

But even as I do

I refuse to let death have the last word.

This day, I insist that we remember

The Sam Moselys of our state

Taking up once again

The long, hard work of redemption

Of our collective soul.