to pick up her pay of $1.20, a day’s work.” My father sighed and looked out the window.
“When Mary had not returned home at dusk, your great-grandmother began to worry. It was late, and she had no idea where Mary could be. Her husband went downtown to search for Mary. He thought perhaps she had used her pay to see the show at the Bijou Theater and waited there for the show to empty, but found no sign of her.
“He returned home and suggested to Fannie that Mary must have gone to Marietta to visit her grandfather, WJ. Since they had no telephone, they couldn’t communicate with the family to verify that Mary was with them. Fannie sort of accepted this explanation, since she knew how Mary loved her grandfather. It did seem plausible that she could be with the family in Marietta. But Fannie, being a mother, spent a restless night.”
My father paused, stared into the middle distance. I could see my grandfather pointing to Mary’s photograph, then to me, then sobbing almost uncontrollably. My father continued.
“The next day, April 27, 1913, Grandmother Fannie’s worst fears were confirmed. Helen Ferguson, their friend and neighbor, came to the house to tell them she had received a phone call about Mary. Their Mary had been found murdered in the basement of the National Pencil Company.
“The company, a four-story granite building plus basement, was located at 37-39 Forsyth Street. It employed some one hundred people, mostly women, who distributed and manufactured pencils. Its windows were grimy. It was dirty. It had little ventilation. Most of the workers were paid twelve cents an hour. It was in fact a sweat shop of the northern, urban variety.
“Mary worked in its second floor metal room fixing metal caps on pencils by machine. Her last day of work had been the previous Monday. She was told not to report back until a shipment of metal had arrived.
“Her body was discovered at three o’clock in the morning on April twenty-seventh, in the basement of the pencil company by the night watchman, Newt Lee. Her left eye had apparently been struck with a fist; she had an inch-and-a-half gash in the back of the head, and was strangled by a cord which was embedded in her neck.”
He shook his head sadly. “Her undergarments were torn and bloody and a piece of undergarment was around her hair, face, and neck. It appeared that her body had been dragged across the basement floor; there were fragments of soot, ashes, and pencil shavings on the body and drag marks leading from the elevator shaft.
“There didn’t seem to be any skin fragments or blood under her fingernails, which indicated she hadn’t inflicted any harm on whoever did it.
“Two scribbled notes were found near her body. They were on company carbon paper.”
Here, my father got up and walked across the room to the secretary against the far wall, opened the desk flap, reached in and retrieved a sheet of paper, and returned to his chair near the window. He handed me the sheet. It was a photostatic copy of two nearly-illiterate notes:
Mam that negro hire down here did this i went to make water and he push me doun that hole a long tall negro black that hoo it was long sleam tall negro i wright while play with me.
he said he wood love me and land doun play like night witch did it but that long tall black negro did buy his slef.
My father sat silently while I read the notes. When he continued, his voice was almost hoarse. “When they went up to tell William Jackson Phagan—now, that’s your grandfather’s grandfather, he said—my daddy remembered it word for word: ‘The living God will see to it that the brute is found and punished according to his sin. I hope the murderer will be dealt with as he dealt with that tender and innocent child. I hope that he suffers anguish and remorse in the same measure that she suffered pain and shame. No punishment is too great for him. Hanging cannot atone for the crime he has committed and the suffering he as caused both too victim and relatives.’”
My father swallowed hard a couple of times. After a while he continued.
“Mary was buried that following Tuesday,” he said. He suddenly began to quote the newspaper account of little Mary’s funeral service. He’d committed it to memory. “’A thousand persons saw a minister of God raise his hands to heaven today and heard him call for divine justice. Before his closed eyes was a little casket, its pure whiteness hidden by the banks and banks of beautiful flowers. Within the casket lay the bruised and mutilated body of Mary Phagan, the innocent young victim of one of Atlanta’s blackest and most bestial crimes.’
“’L. M. Spruell, B. Awtrey, Ralph Butler, and W. T. Potts were the pallbearers. They carried the little white casket on their shoulders into the Second Baptist Church, a tiny country church. Every seat had been taken within five minutes, every inch of the church was occupied and hundreds were standing outside the church to hear the sermon.’
“The choir sang ‘Rock of Ages,’ but what everyone heard was Grandmother Fannie, wailing as if her heart would break.
“And,” my father added, “it probably did.”
“’The light of my life has been taken,’ she cried, ‘and her soul was as pure and as white as her body.’
“The whole church wept before the completion of the hymn. The Reverend T.T.G. Linkous, Pastor of Christian Church at East Point, prayed with those at the Second Baptist Church.”
My father continued the words that must be etched in his heart:
“’Let us pray. The occasion is so sad to me—when she was but a baby. I taught her to fear God and love Him—that I don’t know what to do.’
” ‘With tears gushing from his eyes, he found the strength to continue. “We pray for the police and the detectives of the City of Atlanta. We pray that they may perform their duty and bring the wretch that committed this act to justice. We pray that we may not hold too much rancor in our hearts—we do not want vengeance—yet we pray that the authorities apprehend the guilty party or parties and punish them to the full extent of the law. Even this is too good for the imp of Satan that did this. Oh, God, I cannot see how even the devil himself could do such a thing.”
“’Fannie Phagan Coleman controlled her crying when he spoke of the criminal and WJ. Phagan, Mary’s grandfather, exclaimed: “Amen.”
“’ “I believe in the law of forgiveness. Yet I do not see how it can be applied in this case. I pray that this wretch, this devil, be caught and punished according to the man-made, God-sanctioned laws of Georgia. And I pray, oh, God, that the innocent ones may be freed and cleared of all suspicion.”
“’With hearing this, Mary’s Aunt Lizzie let out a piercing scream and collapsed and she was taken home,” my father interjected.
“Mothers,”’ Dr. Linkous declared, “I would speak a word to you. Let this warn you. You cannot watch your children too closely. Even though their hearts be as clean and pure as Mary Phagan’s, let them not be forced into dishonor and into the grave by some heartless wretch, like the guilty man in this case.
“’ “Little Mary’s purity and the hope of the world above the sky is the only consolation that I can offer you,” he said, speaking directly to the bereaved family. “Had she been snatched from our midst in a natural way, by disease, we could bear up more easily. Now, we can only thank God that though she was dishonored, she fought back the fiend with all the strength of her fine young body, even unto death.
“’ “All that I can say is God bless you. You have my heartfelt sympathy. That
