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or carpetbaggers, as it did "the darkies." She had no clue that this mass murder - if indeed it was murder - was just one more obscure incident, violent and brutal, in a time and place unparalleled in American history for violence and brutality.
I turned 21 before I ventured south of the Mason-Dixon Line. I had already criss-crossed the city of Buffalo from library to historical society, from one Catholic parish to another, from cemetery to Erie County courthouse, culling every fact about Joe and Barbara Ring I could find. But their life in Buffalo shed no light on the circumstances of Joe's demise in Mississippi. So as soon as I could - it was 1971 - I shifted the field of my investigation. Five more trips to the Delta would follow over the years, as well as excursions to federal, state and local repositories in other states, too. But it was on that first trip south that I discovered George F. Ring.
There was no George F. Ring in Grandma's account. Evidently she had never heard of him. Yet without him she would have had no story to tell. George would turn out to be the instigator of it all. Without him, Joe and Barbara would never have been lured away from the humble tranquility of Buffalo's Cherry Street. They would never have found themselves co-owners of a building and stock of merchandise in the savage swamps of the Delta. Yet I stumbled upon George's name by accident, in real estate transactions involving Joe Ring, and before I flew home, I had determined that the two were brothers.
Even if Grandma had heard of George, though, she would not (knowing Grandma) have repeated the rumor - one of many that circulated after the event - that George himself was responsible for the crime. Grandma would never have perpetuated the accusation - made by certain parties at the time - that, by extension, George had killed his own brother!
As a boy all I wanted was to draw a family tree. I never imagined, as I transcribed the names and dates Grandma dictated while she cut out her dress, that one branch of my ancestry would lead me to this gigantic building collapsing in flame. I never imagined that I would become obsessed with unpuzzling what really happened, and why, and that the only way for me to behold the truth was to tailor anew the ghoulish raiment in its entirety. For that is precisely what I had to do: piece together the historical context of this family story. The events Grandma related had not happened in a void; they had transpired in a real physical place at a particular moment in time. The challenge taunting me was to reconstruct the social, political, economic, cultural and geographic conditions that prevailed in the Rolling Fork of 1873. How else could I identify suspects, and motives, and evaluate them, and determine who was innocent and who was guilty?
The task might not have taken 30 years had I not been hampered by preconceived notions of "The South." Time and again the facts I uncovered failed to fit with what I had learned in school about Mississippi, about Reconstruction and carpetbaggers, and emancipated slaves. On the contrary, my findings, at every turn, exploded stereotypes and contradicted traditional scholarship and common knowledge about "The South." Repeatedly I had to shake my head clear and start again.
Who could have imagined that Mississippi was a land of promise for Blacks after the Civil War? But it was, in the Delta. Who would have guessed that a majority of the merchants were foreign-born, and that most of those were German-speaking, and Jewish? But they were, in the Delta. Who ever heard of landowners leasing convicts from the state, or importing coolies from China, to work their fields? But it happened, after the war, in the Delta. The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta - what unexpected realities lay veiled within that compounded Indian name!
It was the last American frontier east of the Mississippi River. It engendered a new society, heterogeneous and inflexibly stratified. It was the only place where the antebellum plantation system persisted long after the Civil War. The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, it would turn out, was a part of the South, true enough; but the South was certainly not the Delta. Learning the truth about my great great grandfather would require that I abandon all presumption, and examine from a purged perspective the myriad factors that collided to produce the horror of March 4, 1873.
Searching document by document, year after year, I would find George, Joe and Barbara no less troublesome to discern, and no less entrancing once they took shape, than the facts of the incident itself. George F. Ring was the classic
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