Fire in Canebrake by Laura Wexler Term Paper

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Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, Laura Wexler paints a disturbing and convincing portrait of race in America. Her detached point-of-view allows the reader to become personally involved in the story, and creates a powerful feeling of suspense. Further, Wexler's thorough analysis of the search for the killers is equally involving. Ultimately, Fire in a Canebrake reveals a great deal about the pervasiveness of racial tension and inequalities in America.

Fire in a Canebrake tells the story of the lynching deaths of two black couples in Walton County, Georgia, in 1946. The events that led up to this event, notes Wexler, are tinged with sex, jealously, racism, and violence. The events were sparked by a fight between black bootlegger Roger Malcom and Dorothy Dorsey, his common law wife that began in the middle of a road. Malcom accused Dorsey of having sexual relations with Barnette Hester, their elderly white landlord, and chased Dorsey onto Hester's home. There, Malcom stabs Hester in the chest, and later barely survives and attempted lynching. Malcolm is thrown in jail, where he is certain that he will ultimately find himself in the hands of another angry white mob. Writes Wexler ominously, "on this evening, Roger Malcom wasn't headed to Standpipe, because he'd stabbed his white landlord. He didn't know if Barnette Hester was still alive, but he knew he himself wouldn't live much longer. Tonight or the next night, he would be taken out of jail and lynched.

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The thick cement walls wouldn't protect him from a mob of white men."

Ultimately, Malcom's premonition comes true. Hester survives the knife wound, and Malcom is released to the community to await trial on bond, where he soon falls into the hands of those who want to se him pay for the attack on Hester. Hester, Dorothy Dorsey, her brother George Dorsey and Mae Murray Dorsey (the common law wife of Dorsey), all die at the hands of a white mob by a bridge in Walton County on July 25, 1946. The title, Fire in a canebrake, comes from the similarity between the sound of a hollow river cane being ignited, and the sound of the more than 60 shots that were fired during the lynching.

Throughout her descriptions of the events that lead to the lynching, Wexler's style creates a great deal of dramatic tension and suspense. Her writing style is detached and journalistic nature, and the book reads almost as a newspaper account. In not allowing her own opinions and thoughts into the narrative, Wexler brings the reader into the story, and allows the reader to form their own opinions of the events. The end result is the creation of an interesting and captivating story that draws the reader into the events.

Wexler's accounts of the events that follow the lynching are no less interesting than her initial overview of the dramatic events that lead to the violent deaths. She painstakingly recreates the aftermath.....

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"Fire In Canebrake By Laura Wexler" (2004, May 05) Retrieved May 22, 2025, from
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