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"YES, BUT DO YOU LIKE IDA WELLS?" asked a friend and fellow historian. She had read a fair amount of Wells's writings, including her diary from the 1880s, and had noticed the mercurial temperament. I was about halfway through the writing of this book when my friend put the question to me. I was a bit startled to realize that I hadn't asked it myself. I found Wells fascinating. I had never stopped to consider whether I liked her. Perhaps the oversight arose because I was not thinking of 'They Say' as a biography. It ends, after all, when Wells is thirty, just approaching the apogee of her career. More than half of her very active life remained to be lived. In any case, two studies of Wells have appeared within the past ten years that sensitively explore her contributions over a full lifetime. Although the subtitle of 'They Say' is Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race, the more I wrote, the more I became convinced that the reconstruction of "race" was the book's central focus. In that regard, lynching—not Wells—had been my point of entry to the story. In 2001 I read, or tried to read, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. The hangings, burnings, and executions depicted within were extremely difficult to look at. James Allen, who collected the photographs, noted that for him, they provoked "a strong sense of denial...and a desire to freeze my emotions." What shocked me as much as the acts of torture themselves was their memorialization on postcards. I had grown up having been introduced to the garden-variety, rosy-tinted reproductions, collected by my strange and imperious great aunt Robina, who fled the winters of Rochester, N.Y., for Miami and brought back the beaches and palm trees to be stowed in a cubbyhole in her secretary. Without Sanctuary possessed a few such tinted wonders, including a quaint view of Cairo, Illinois, with trolley car and a decorative archway stretched across Commercial Street. That one, however, also included a handwritten x by the arch and the notation, "where they hung the coon." Most of the cards were more explicit, like the photo of Laura Nelson seen in the prologue of this book, peddled to Allen by a flea-market trader who pulled him aside and "in conspiratorial tones" offered to sell him a real photo postcard. |
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