The aluminum wire mesh strainer I used to sift the soil dug from the ground where Eugene Daniel was lynched was rusted and battered.
I stood among a small cadre of volunteers laboring around picnic tables at Hanks Chapel United Church of Christ, just east of Pittsboro. Our group objective: to reduce a few buckets of clumped clay soil — it had been extracted by shovel from the earth some days earlier — into tiny pieces of organic material and base minerals. We did this by hammering and beating at the clods and clumps in an improvised fashion with a brick, the fragment of a discarded wooden post, and even a small hammer.
We then used strainers of various kinds — my battered tool ended up doing the job perfectly well; someone else used one made of plastic from their kitchen — to sift the worked soil, removing small rocks, roots and the detritus of the forest floor and discarding those into a trash bucket. We reworked the remaining smaller clumps of clay again, with more pounding and hammering, then sifted one final time.
Eventually, we filled two five-gallon buckets with fine, clean soil.
On this morning — last Wednesday, an overcast, humid start to a late summer day —we didn’t really stop to talk about the significance of the soil we were handling. We just worked. But we knew, of course. And we knew, too, that day — that Wednesday — was 99 years and 364 days removed from Eugene Daniel’s last day of freedom. The 100th anniversary of the beginning of the just-turned 16-year-old’s nightmarish journey to the noose was the very next day.
Eugene’s life would end on Sept. 18, 1921, not too far down the road from where we stood. His murder occurred after he was wrested from the jail in Pittsboro and hung by a tire chain thrown over what was described in a press account as “a convenient limb,” his body then riddled by shotgun and rifle blasts.
Some of our group — members of the Community Remembrance Coalition of Chatham County — wore work gloves. I didn’t; neither did Bob Pearson, whom I worked beside. I’d come prepared to help, but didn’t bring gloves, so in short order my hands were tinged orange from handling the soil, as were Bob’s.
It was from Bob that I first heard about the lynchings in Chatham County — six of them in all, though some records suggest seven. Two years ago, meeting for the first time, we’d sat across from each other at the Sweet Bee Caffe coffee shop in Pittsboro. Bob, a retired diplomat, spoke of Chatham’s lynchings and the work of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, to memorialize our nation’s 4,400 or so victims of racial terror lynching in the time between Reconstruction and World War II, then of his idea for soil removal (also an EJI project) from the lynching sites and the creation of some kind of remembrance memorial or marker for Eugene and the others. And his vision for telling the truth, and working toward real racial reconciliation, in the county he and his wife Maggie now call home.
That initial meeting eventually led to a two-part series I wrote for the News + Record about an effort to memorialize Eugene — the last of the lynching victims — and the others: Harriet Finch, Jerry Finch, Lee Tyson and John Pattishall (1885), and Henry Jones (1899). (Some lists of victims include Richard Cotton, lynched in 1865.)
In researching and writing, I was particularly struck by Eugene’s story, in part because of the various press accounts describing the events. And there I was, this past week, joining other CRC-C members and volunteers in preparing soil taken from the earth near the area where he died.
On Saturday, that soil was worked again: two large jars were filled, spooned into place — with help from Cheryl Taylor, one of Eugene’s descendants — just feet from Eugene’s burial site near New Hope Baptist Church. One jar was given to representatives to be permanently displayed as part of the Community Soil Collection Project in the EJI’s Legacy Museum. The other will be put somewhere in Chatham County, in a place yet to be determined — maybe the county’s historical museum, or a library.
The rest of the soil was scooped carefuly into small jars and shared with family members and others. Mary Nettles, who leads the East Chatham Branch of the NAACP and has organized much of the soil retrieval, presented me with jar. The inscription on the small jar’s lid reads: “Eugene Daniel, 1905-1921.”
Back on Wednesday, after an hour or so of work handling the same soil that would find its way into those jars, I left the group — departing with Ray Bland, who lives in the Hanks Chapel Road area. Ray had joined us to recount an incident from his boyhood, from well over a half century ago: He was riding shotgun in his father’s truck down a road alongside nearby Robeson Creek when his dad gestured out the window and said, “Over there, up on that hill, they took a Black man and tied him to a tree a shot him.”
His father never said another word about it. Until recently, neither had Ray.
Was the reference to the lynching of Eugene Daniel? Impossible to say now. But Ray’s recollection is vivid. I’d been told — I’d read, too — that the spit of land which held the tree and the “convenient limb” from which Eugene was hung was now under water. It may be. It may not be.
I accompanied Ray to the area and saw the hill his father had pointed to. We stood and talked for several minutes in view of a stretch of Robeson Creek and caught glimpses of a large group of young people — some, no doubt, 16 years old, like Eugene was — cavorting about in canoes on the creek. Just a minor meandering stream a century ago, the creek is now a good-sized tributary for the Haw River and nearby Jordan Lake.
Before Ray and I parted, I wiped the last vestiges of the soil from my hands.
Though, of course, I’ll always have it with me — in the small jar Mary gave me, in the memory of Eugene and his tragic and senseless murder, in remembering the work we did on Wednesday and the full day of events later on Saturday set aside to remember Eugene and honor Chatham County’s Black history.
The creation of Jordan Lake may or may not have submerged the site where Eugene Daniel died. It doesn’t matter. It was the manner and the nature, not the location, of his death, which makes the soil sacred.
We’re all stained by it. The cleansing will require some work. Each of us has our own narratives to grind down and sift through to get to truth, and then reconciliation.
Bill Horner III can be reached at bhorner3@chathamnr.com or @billthethird.