Why Crozet? Is a continuing story featuring people who play a part in the making Crozet and surrounding towns and countryside a fascinating place to live. Born here, or drawn by the climate and the beauty of the area, many gifted artists, writers and musicians live among us. This month we feature Earl Swift, an accomplished journalist and best-selling author who has just released a compelling book.
Earl Swift was rummaging around in some old microfilm records, trying to find a sentence or two that might illustrate a point in his 2011 book, “Big Roads.” It will come as no surprise to Swift’s fans that he spent hours searching for just the right news report to show that the legislation authorizing federal aid to highways wasn’t greeted with any particular excitement. He’s known for his painstaking, fastidious research and his tireless attention to any fact that might help him tell his stories, all of them real and supported by mountains of evidence.
In his research, he came across a news story from 1921 about the grisly discovery of some bodies floating in Georgia’s Yellow River. Once he saw it, he couldn’t look away. “This was 2007,” Swift said. “I didn’t have time just then to pursue it.” Over the years, between writing other books, leaving his job with the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, becoming a writer-in-residence on the Lawn at UVA and then moving to Afton, he remained fascinated by the unfolding of those events in rural Georgia.
“I had never heard of peonage,” Swift said. This was a practice in the early 20th-century of placing convicts who couldn’t pay small fines with farmers who worked them long hours, imprisoned them at night, and beat them if they tried to escape. Somehow, the debts were never forgiven, as expenses for room, food and other expenses mounted to far more than the fines. Many of the arrests and fines were arranged in advance with the police when a local farmer needed field hands. All the men were poor, and most were Black. The breaking news stories of the ’20s alerted a horrified international audience to the mounting number of bodies found when one of the farmers, John S. Williams, tried to cover up his participation in this cruel arrangement.
“It was particularly tragic,” Swift said, “because the testimony of a paid farmhand at the time said the men thought they were finally being let go, but instead were bound, shot, weighted down and thrown in the river.”
In those days, Swift was pressed for time. He was a single father (his daughter lives in Crozet) and he was always focused on the next book (“I have this thing — I like to eat,” he said) so he took trips to Georgia when he could, going through dusty boxes of microfilm, interviewing descendants of the murdered men as well as the plantation owner, and getting a feel for Jasper County, the place where the multiple murders occurred. “I never felt I had a firm enough grip to tell the whole story,” Swift said. It was a huge story, picked up by major newspapers of the day, but he wanted more: more context, more of a sense of place, more on how the lives of the principal players unfolded later. He wanted to look at the trial from a modern point of view, and find out what happened to the people who served justice as well as those who obstructed it.
It’s all there in Hell Put to Shame. Swift talked about his latest book at Bluebird & Company last month. In an interview later, he talked about his writing process. It’s hard for him to let a book go, he acknowledged. “I do make my deadlines, but usually it’s 11:58 p.m. on the last day.” Even then, it’s not a cue for him to breathe a sigh of relief and take a vacation. “As soon as I turn it in, I start re-writing,” he said. “By the time I get the edits, I’m actually on the third or fourth draft.”
Somewhere near the end of the process, he starts thinking about his next book. He chooses topics based on acute observation of the world around him. He wondered why are there so many Dollar Stores in rural areas, and wrote One Buck at a Time with Nathan Brock. He was curious about how the interstate system was planned and built, resulting in Big Roads.
Sometimes Swift carefully documents a complex human story. In his best-selling Chesapeake Requiem, he examines the lives of the watermen whose homes are sinking even as they scoff at global warming and believe divine providence will save them. He lived on Tangier Island, off and on, for more than a year to understand the lives he wrote about. In Auto Biography, Swift told the story of a man, battered by his life’s circumstances, who finds comfort and purpose in restoring a ‘57 Chevy that had 13 previous owners.
For Hell Put to Shame, he found the farm, long since sold and reconfigured, tracing its ownership through deeds. “I wanted to pinpoint the exact plot of land,” he said. “I wanted to know the topography, the weather, the crops, what it was before the 1920s.” He found that then-owner John S. Williams had sold it to pay his lawyer, and his sons had disbursed, speaking to no one about their connection with the murders. Through ancient court records, he pieced together reports of the trial and its aftermath, and traced the descendants of the murdered men, most of whom were unaware of the tragic events of a century ago.
Swift is doing a different kind of research for his next book, and he’s been at it for a long time. The Appalachian Trail is just a few steps from his home, and he’s hiked nearby portions of it every morning for years. He’s also covered longer stretches as he can. He confirmed that the trail will be the subject of his next book.
By late April, most major critical outlets had reviewed Hell Put to Shame. Publishers Weekly said “The ease of reading Swift’s efficient prose belies its elegance….This is a must-read.” The New York Times included the book in a comprehensive review of recent books focusing on the importance of personal integrity when it intersects with law enforcement. They singled out the jury assembled in a South that, even today, is poorly understood by outsiders. They noted that a century ago, an all-white jury convicted Williams, a white man, on the testimony of a Black farm hand. Kirkus Reviews calls it a “gripping, memorable work.”
Swift himself, in his prelude, suggests that the drama surrounding this sensational case may have been an incentive to put a stop to the cruel practice of peonage. There’s no tangible reminder of the murders in Jasper County, Georgia, he notes, but the widespread attention in its time may have served a higher purpose than attracting readers, and “by dragging it into the light, perhaps helped to hasten its decline.”
