To Write, or Not to Write

One of the stories that came up while researching and writing A Common Life started with a single line in a diary entry from July 7, 1918:

Three of the negro soldiers at C Dodge were found guilty and hung Friday morning. Oh these are terrible times.

My initial reaction to reading the entry was, "Whaaaa?!?!?" There were no entries foreshadowing it and she never mentioned the event again.

I researched enough to know what happened and why the 3 men were executed. But from the very first newspaper article I read about the hanging, I thought the details just didn't add up. I wrote about some of that for the book (World War I chapter) but I didn't dig more deeply into it because it was peripheral to the diary itself. For A Common Life, I couldn't justify the time to dig into the story behind the headlines and articles I read or I'd have never gotten the book published in 2022.

But the story hasn't let me alone. I still find my self thinking about the 5 men who were accused and the 3 that paid the ultimate price.

Since the book was published, I've done some more research. I've read newspaper accounts from many different newspapers in many states. This, unfortunately, didn't clarify anything. Many were clearly just quoting each other. Others had dramatically contradicting accounts.

I thought the best way to know what evidence was used to convict the 3 men could be found in the transcripts of their court martial trials. Surely, those transcripts would present the information and testimony that would lay out the path that led to conviction.

So I found those transcripts. Since they were military trials, the transcripts are a matter of public record. All you have to do is go to the archives that contain the physical documents or requisition copies to be made and mailed to you.

I haven't taken that step yet. The copy fee is charged by the half-inch and, for the three men's trials, that's maybe a few hundred dollars.

But that's not what stops me. What stops me from diving into the research is this thought:

"Who am I to tell this story?"

I think the execution was clearly racially motivated. I think the soldiers were somehow being made an example of. I think this one story is just a small piece of the overall racial fabric of the United States in the early twentieth century.

I'm a white woman from the rural Midwest with almost no connection to the African-American experience. I can research the facts that can be known about trials and men who were executed. I can find out more about what was going on with respect to race relations at the time. But so much of the actual events and the experiences of the men leading up to those events are going to go over my head. It's not that I can't empathize or call out injustice, if that's what it turns out to be. It's that I would miss critical features of the story and the men's lives because I won't even recognize them.

That would be worse than not writing the story at all.