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LRB
1 November 2007
Colin Dayan
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The White Tree
Colin Dayan
The 'white tree' in Jena, Louisiana was cut down this summer. In
September 2006 a black pupil asked the white principal of Jena High
School if black students could sit under this tree, where only white
students ever sat. He answered: 'You can sit anywhere you want.' Three
nooses then appeared in the tree, fights began, and six black
teenagers were charged with the attempted murder of one white boy, who
was well enough to go out on the evening of the day he was attacked.
The white boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for
three days. An all-white jury convicted Mychal Bell, one of the black
students, on a reduced charge of aggravated second-degree battery,
which could have brought a 15-year sentence. The saga of the Jena Six
began, a story of unequal punishment before the law that is all too
familiar. Bell's conviction has now been overthrown and he has been
released on bail after ten months in jail, although he still faces
trial as a juvenile, and charges against the other five have been
scaled back.
An American story? Well, not entirely. The tree's destruction takes us
back to old English law; it is a ritual of expiation. In medieval
jurisprudence, inanimate objects could have intent, homicidal taint
and malicious influence. If a thing caused death, it was declared
deodand, 'a thing given to God'. If a man tripped over his dog and
died, the dog would be judged legally as 'moving to the death' of his
master. If a person possessed of reason was thrown off his horse or
fell off his boat when drunk, vengeance was taken on the horse or the
boat. In The History of English Law (1895), Frederic Maitland and
Frederick Pollock observed that 'many horses and boats bore the guilt
which should have been ascribed to beer.' The ritual survived in
England until 1846, when the public balked at its application to
railway engines.
In The Common Law (1881), Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that 'the
customs, beliefs or needs of a primitive time establish a rule or a
formula. In the course of centuries the custom, belief or necessity
disappears, but the rule remains.' In the Deep South, slaves had the
legal status of a dog, a horse, or any other object of value. And it
was as his possession that the master would deliver a slave up to
justice. Often he would receive compensation from the state for his
loss. The legal terror that was so much a part of slavery depended on
maintaining this fitful valuation of persons as things.
The law of the deodand redeemed deaths by misadventure, and the
cutting down of the tree is intended to redeem what went on in Jena.
One member of the LaSalle Parish School Board, Billy Fowler, explained
that 'there's nothing positive about that old tree. It's all negative.
And I'm serving on the new school board, and we're wanting to start
fresh on some things.' Starting fresh is part of the American dream.
Perhaps that's why the realities of lynching – 'Black bodies swinging
in the southern breeze,/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,'
as Billie Holiday sang – are part of a history that is erased with
every new administration, with every Martin Luther King Day. But the
return to chain gangs in the summer of 1995, the hitching of prisoners
to posts in Alabama, the purging of books, both legal and religious,
from prison libraries throughout the US right now, remind us that
though the tree in Jena has been surrendered to the myth of a new
beginning, the past lives on.
The tree did not offend. The officials who cut it down sought to
cleanse the place of hate, while absolving the students who tied the
nooses. Does that forfeit remove the taint of prejudice and
discrimination? Does it cancel the debt owed the stigmatised? Two
hangman's nooses were found at the US Coast Guard Academy in the
summer, the first in the bag of a black cadet and the second in the
office of a woman who gave race relations training. And a noose was
discovered last month on the office door of a black professor at
Columbia University Teachers College. Intolerance and humiliation
coalesce in these new rituals. The irrational continues to haunt the
civilising claims of the reasonable.
Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor of the Humanities at
Vanderbilt University, is the author, most recently, of The Story of
Cruel and Unusual.
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Blogging as Leo Africanus
http://theleoafricanus.blogspot.com/
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