A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial.

A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial. By Suzanne Lebsock. (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003. Pp. 442. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-393-32606-3; cloth, $26.95, ISBN 0-393-04201-4.)

In A Murder in Virginia, Suzanne Lebsock displays the virtuosic research skills that earned acclaim for her earlier publications. Here Lebsock relates a story of sufficient complexity and drama to allow her storytelling ability to shine with equal luster. She will justly reach a wide audience of both academic specialists and general readers.

In June 1895 Lucy Jane Pollard, a white farmwife, was killed in rural Lunenburg County, Virginia. Within days local officials had arrested a black man named William Henry (Solomon) Marable and three black women--Mary Abernathy, Pokey Barnes, and Mary Barnes--and had charged each with murder. Marable confessed to a role in the killings and implicated the other three as conspirators. Jurors found Marable guilty on July 13, and before the end of that month all three women had been convicted on the strength largely of Marable's constantly changing story. The judge condemned Marable, Abernathy, and Pokey Barnes to hang, while Mary Barnes received a ten-year sentence. Lebsock propels her detailed and gripping narrative by disentangling the ravel of investigations, appeals, retrials, public uproar, and political maneuvering that freed the last of the innocent women by Christmas 1896. Before his execution Marable denied the women's involvement in the killing, saying instead that he had been forced to help a local white man kill Pollard. With fine historical sleuthing, Lebsock evaluates the various candidates for the role of the white murderer, but ultimately she cannot attribute guilt with certainty.

Abernathy and the Barnes women owed their freedom to Virginians of both races. At moments, white Virginians--guards, appellate judges, even the governor--acted with fairness toward the accused, even as other whites displayed complete disregard for justice. In perhaps her most compelling and valuable passages Lebsock reconstructs efforts by blacks in Virginia to gain freedom for the imprisoned women. John Mitchell Jr. used the pages of his Richmond Planet to keep the case before the public, and he tirelessly raised funds, secured lawyers, and coordinated public events. Rosa Dixon Bowser and the Richmond Women's League brought to bear the formidable organized support of black women's groups.

Lebsock accepts two compromises in order to craft a narrative free of obstacles. First, points that beg for additional context and nuanced analysis must be passed over with brutally brief mention. For example, each of the four trials initially held in Lunenburg County included either two or four black men among the twelve jurors. Lebsock explains their presence as "a legacy, it appears, from the brief but intriguing period when the Readjustors bad run Virginia" (p. 71). Retrials held in neighboring Prince Edward County featured all-white juries, "possibly a sign that in Prince Edward, white Democrats had attained a dominance that their Lunenburg counterparts still dreamed of" (p. 210). Lebsock leaves the reader largely in the dark as to whether blacks often served on Virginia juries in the 1890s. What would compel the black men to convict the defendants on the flimsiest of evidence? Did the inclusion of blacks on juries help create a fairer system of justice in Lunenburg on other occasions? How often in Virginia and the South did black protest of corrupt trials achieve results? Of broader importance, on any other occasions in the segregated South did white men aid black defendants to gain some measure of justice? More comparisons and deeper analysis would have given the book greater value beyond its immediate story.

Second, in her use of historical evidence Lebsock likewise favors a clear narrative over exact, if sometimes halting, use of quotations. She elegantly incorporates substantive bits of testimony and description. Only in the documentation can one learn that in many instances she has combined material from two or more sources into a single quotation. For example, she acknowledges, "The exchange between [Cass] Gregory and Pokey Barnes was closely paraphrased in the Times and Dispatch, both 18 September 1895, as well as the Planet, 27 June 1896. I have spliced these paraphrases together and converted them into dialogue" (p. 386n5). Elsewhere, Lebsock relates the request of a visiting researcher that Mary Barnes, imprisoned in Richmond, clean her hands before being examined--"A guard brought soap and a basin of water and told Mary to start washing" (p. 299). In the endnote one learns that "[t]he soap and water detail is borrowed from the Evening Leader's account of [the researcher's] earlier visit to the Henrico County jail" (p. 405n15). Each reader will need to consider whether consistent use of imaginative methodology impairs or enhances the book's value.

Journal of Southern History

RANDAL L. HALL