Summary Of A Murder In Virginia By Suzanne Lebsock
When major things happen in a community, it makes people look at life in ways they never thought they had to. When a white woman by the name of Lucy Jane Pollard was brutally murdered with an ax on a hazing June afternoon in 1895, it opened the door to chaos for rustic Virginia. Prize-winning writer Suzanne Lebsock’s A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial, finds a way to organize it’s way through the craziness. This book takes on questions posed all throughout out southern history head on in regards to race, gender, class and sex in addition to life for Southerners. There are twists and turns that make this story complicated, in turn making readers wish that Lucy Jane Pollard made it through to tell the story herself. There has always been talk about a “color line” and where exactly it might have been closer to the closing of the nineteenth century. Lunenburg County, the setting of this story, had a color line that wasn’t too distinct. This …show more content…
A biracial jury found all of the suspects guilty in the initial trials, consequences including three being sentenced to hang, and Mary Barnes, who was judged to be an accessory to murder, was given ten years in the penitentiary. This wasn’t the conclusion of the chaos. In a crazy twist, the accused were luckily granted new trials in Farmville. What made this significant and interesting was the fact that the jury was comprised of sixteen white men. In the new courtroom, the testimony of the women themselves proved far more important—even pivotal. The attorneys for the accused decided to put Mary Abernathy and Pokey Barnes, both “unlettered,” facing some of the best trial lawyers in the state. Lebsock’s juxtaposition of the educated lawyers and the illiterate orators works well and exposes the problematic assumptions that reside in such a facile
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