Creator Ann Hite pays her respects to the topic of her newest guide. (All images courtesy of Ann Hite)
It ought to have been a effective, frivolous Saturday for Lucille Selig Frank within the spring of 1913.
A vivacious socialite, she went to an opera matinee after wheedling her husband, Leo, to accompany her. He was a dutiful workaholic, nonetheless, so he retired to his desk on the Nationwide Pencil Firm to finish a enterprise report as a substitute. There, he crossed paths with Mary Phagan, a 14-year-old worker, whose auburn-haired magnificence was turning heads across the manufacturing unit. From this level on, the story varies in line with the narrator.
Leo Frank was the final recognized individual to see the woman alive. Her brutalized physique was discovered within the constructing later that day. A number of males, possessed of means and alternative, had been suspected of the crime, however Frank, a Jewish mental from New York with nervous mannerisms, was convicted after a sensational trial. Most historians consider he was harmless. Whereas he was held in custody, a mob of distinguished group leaders, in a paroxysm of xenophobia, extracted him and lynched him from a tree in Marietta, the place Phagan was from.
That primary abstract of occasions is critical for newcomers to grasp I Am a Georgia Lady: The Lifetime of Lucille Selig Frank, 1888-1957 (Mercer College Press, 2025), the most recent work by Atlanta writer Ann Hite. However most Southerners — and all Jews — know one thing of the unhappy saga, which has been exhaustively rehashed in music and story. Parade, a Tony-winning musical, explores the ugly prejudice at challenge, and Steve Oney’s sprawling, elegant masterpiece, And the Useless Shall Rise, addresses the case in granular element. (Oney graciously allowed Hite to sift via his notes along with her different analysis.)
“It’s a narrative with quite a lot of layers that also captivates folks,” Hite stated. “And for me, it feels very private.”
Hite’s grandmother was considered one of many youngsters taken to view the lynching on the age of 6. “It was a circus ambiance, with folks having picnics with watermelon and Coca-Cola and folks snapping images for postcards,” Hite recalled, shaking her head. “My granny advised me all about this after I was 10, and the case has fascinated me ever since.”
And close to the middle of the motion was a compelling, enigmatic determine whose voice had not absolutely been heard: Frank’s spouse Lucille.
“Leo had three strikes in opposition to him — a very powerful being that he was a Yankee and educated, third that he was Jewish,” Hite stated. “It was Lucille who was sounding the alarm and getting in everyone’s face, saying that antisemitism was the reason for the decision.”
The younger spouse mounted a petition marketing campaign for her husband’s innocence, which unfold from New York to Chicago and flooded the governor’s workplace with pleas for a pardon.
“She was a really sturdy, very outspoken girl,” Hite stated. “The information media typically painted her as loopy or a hysteric, however that was regular for girls in that period. Who wouldn’t have PTSD and emotional fluctuations going via all that? The extra I realized about her, the extra I needed to honor her reminiscence.”
Hite, 67, lives in Marietta and has written six historic novels and two nonfiction books. I’m a Georgia Lady is a dense, Southern-inflected quantity — like a very good pound cake — that chronicles her topic’s blissful and promising youth in addition to the somber silence that descended later. Frank’s marriage lasted solely three-and-a-half years. She by no means remarried, and till her dying signed her identify “Mrs. Leo Frank.” She was letting folks know he was not erased,” Hite stated.
“In her fiction, Ann Hite doesn’t promote issues prematurely, however they arrive naturally, organically within the story,” stated Hite’s editor, Marc Jolley. “This might be taken as a given, however many writers should not in a position to let tales develop on their very own.”
The title comes from Lucille Selig Frank’s final public assertion in regards to the execution — her poignant method of claiming, “We’re considered one of you — not unique interlopers.”
“Ann Hite’s soulful work all the time captures tales simply earlier than they will recede into the shadows,” stated Atlanta novelist Kimberly Brock. “She is aware of her ghosts. She stays with them on the web page, not by way of flimsy nostalgia however with indelible truths of humanity and braveness. And with each phrase of her newest, I think about a dialog, two heads collectively within the early hours earlier than daybreak, one Georgia woman to a different, each in fervent settlement that this work doesn’t ask us to recollect — it asks us to vary.”
Nonetheless, issues haven’t modified as a lot as Hite would love. “Once I first introduced this mission on Fb, I out of the blue observed all of those folks unfriending me. Properly, it turned out my husband is said to the Phagans. They usually’re very very like: You’re both in Mary’s camp or Leo’s camp. You may’t be in between. I needed to jot down in regards to the in between.”
Even at present, within the fever swamp of social media, there exists a virulently antisemitic phenomenon of “Leo Frank truthers,” who insist he deserved his destiny. “And a few years in the past, Jewish households in Fulton County awoke to search out these fliers on their garden with Leo’s face on them,” Hite stated. “Sadly, this story of an previous homicide and an previous hanging stays related and topical.”
As a gesture of appreciation, her topic’s nephew gave Hite the writing desk as soon as utilized by his long-suffering aunt. “As a result of I’m Appalachian at coronary heart and consider in indicators, I took that as an indication that Lucille permitted of my mission,” Hite stated.
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Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in magazines resembling Atlanta, Backyard & Gun, Males’s Journal and Nation Dwelling. She is the writer of Road Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Trigger: Music from Macon.
