A Hanging Haunts East Texas

Ugly and evocative, the story seared its way through town: In the deep, lonesome woods south of here, a black man was found dead, hanging from a pine bough.

In the month since Clarence Otis Cole’s body turned up, an extension cord knotted around his neck, nobody’s been able to figure out why he died.

Maybe the 43-year-old Sunday school teacher killed himself. Or maybe he didn’t. The Texas Rangers and the FBI have opened inquiries into his death.

The damage already is deep. A bitter battle over Cole’s death spread 350 miles southwest to the state Capitol in Austin. The two women who loved Cole most are barely speaking--his mother suspects he was killed for dating a white woman.

If this mystery haunted some other town in some other state, it probably wouldn’t take such a toll. But this is East Texas, a swath of farm and forest running south from Arkansas along the Louisiana line. It’s a region struggling to scrub away the stain of recent racial strife, a place frequently dismissed as an insular and anachronistic backwater.

“East Texas continues to suffer from these events because when something like this happens, their history is resurrected,” says Mark Briskman, director of the North Texas-Oklahoma region of the Anti-Defamation League. “Unfortunately, they can’t escape history.”

It isn’t fair, maybe, but there it is. In a nation struggling with its past, the modern South is a lesson in the strength of symbols. The Confederate flags fluttering on the country roads. A hanging man.

These things don’t go down easy.

“Why would a black man hang himself?” asks Azzie Cole, fingering snapshots of her dead son. “That don’t even make sense.” It’s a common question: Why would he choose a method braided deep into the memory of old-time lynchings? Why would he kill himself in the first place?

A man with no debt, no history of depression. The father of an 8-year-old daughter remained friendly with his ex-wife. He held a 3.8 grade-point average and was set to graduate from a two-year electronics program this summer. Sunday afternoons, the family gathered on the lawn of his mother’s house for fish fries and barbecues. They called him Tank. He was a man with plans, a man with family.

The last couple of years, Cole lived with his white girlfriend. His family believes resentment over the relationship might have done him in.

A Short Note at Center of Inquiry

County officials have said there’s no evidence of foul play. State and federal investigators weren’t brought into the case until weeks after Cole’s death.

“You can’t go to the scene and say, ‘Well, there’s a footprint,’ ” says Texas Ranger Howard L. Dunham. “Time has passed. People have been out there.”

The investigation turns heavily on a short note found in Cole’s Chevrolet Nova, parked near the glade where his corpse was found. Scrawled in a childish hand on a scrap of lined paper, it reads: “I’m sorry. I love you all, but I hate myself. Don’t know no other way to fix this. I’m sorry, Love u all, Tank.”

Tank’s family doesn’t buy it. The script, they say, looks nothing like the pretty, precise cursive the former Army man used in other letters. Texas Rangers are waiting for word from a handwriting expert. It could take weeks, and final results from the autopsy won’t be out for another month. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but wait, and wonder.

Time is crippling Azzie Cole, a 71-year-old widow living alone in an old wooden house.

“When I go to bed to shut my eyes, I have to open them because I start to think what might have happened to him,” she says. “I try to be calm, but I just want to know. I want to know what he went through before he died.”

The last time she saw Tank was on a bright Friday afternoon, March 30. He sat at the table to gobble down his mama’s fried apple pie. He fiddled with her truck. Then he took off. “See you tomorrow, Mama.”

Back in town, D’Ann Surratt’s nose is pink from crying. When Cole left her house that Friday night, he said he’d be right back. The next Monday, two men found his body suspended from the tree branch. His feet touched the ground, his knees were bent.

“None of it makes sense,” Surratt says.

She’s sick of the rumors, tired of what she calls a circus. She can’t believe Tank, a devout Baptist, killed himself--but she doesn’t believe their love affair caused his death either. Surratt grew up here, and she’s been dating black men since high school.

“It’s not like we had crosses burning on our yard,” she says. “People liked us; they liked Tank. We never had a single problem.”

She’s alone now. Her two daughters are at school; her closet is stuffed with a dead man’s clothes. Under the friction of blame and grief, her ties to the Cole family have frayed thin.

“His family was my family; I thought I was theirs,” she says, casting a miserable gaze at the ceiling. “I feel like not only did I lose him, I lost them too.”

Anger is deep throughout the region. Some fear a cover-up; others believe the community has been maligned--yet again--over a simple suicide.

“Some people are gonna sit back and think bad about us, and we don’t deserve that,” Cass County Sheriff James Estes says. “They don’t know anything about this place, so they should just keep their comments to themselves.”

Just how deep racism runs in East Texas, and whether it’s really any worse than in the rest of the nation, is a loaded and long-standing debate.

In all his life, the sheriff declares, he’s never seen a single scrap of racial strife here.

The daughter of sharecroppers, Azzie Cole has spent most of her life in these woods. She insists the Ku Klux Klan still is active here. Indeed, hate groups including the Klan remain active in East Texas, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“They may want to deny it, but it’s still alive,” Cole says.

Mark Lesher, a prominent white lawyer in Texarkana, doesn’t blink when he calls the region racist. As a general rule, he can’t get a jury to side with a black client, he says.

“We’re a racist, redneck community,” he proclaims, swaggering from the room to spit out a mouthful of tobacco juice. “The banking, the churches, the schools, the workplace--everything we do is racist. They run right over the minorities.”

Nearly a Fifth Live in Poverty in Cass County

This is the Texas of blue shadows falling long over the pine groves, of red dirt roads lain like stripes of rust on the pastures.

Folks in Jefferson, Linden and Texarkana mend tanks and piece together hand grenades in a pair of government munitions plants. They fell logs in the forest, and punch the time clock at the paper plants.

It’s poor and rural; black and white. Nearly a fifth of the people in Cass County live below the poverty level. About 80% of the county is white, and most of the rest are black.

“I don’t like it up there; there’s an oppressive air, an antebellum culture,” says Ron Wilson, a Houston legislator who entreated federal and state officials to look into the Cole hanging. “Law doesn’t change a culture overnight. They’re able to live isolated from the free world and continue to practice the old slave ways.”

In a state enamored of progress and modernity, a land more inclined to call itself Southwestern than Southern, East Texas has long been a sore spot.

Decades back, when Klan membership was all but a civic duty, lynchings were public rituals of blood and pride. You could slice off a corner of a coat, a scrap of skin, a finger. Children posed by the corpse; entrepreneurs printed postcards.

By the time accused rapist William Vinson was seized and killed by a Texarkana mob in 1942, lynchings were on the way out. Texas hasn’t seen a real lynching since the 1940s, Texas A&M; University history professor Walter L. Buenger says.

“It was almost a ritual cleansing of the community,” he says. “Very much an expression of the public.”

Those days are long dead. Racism is mercurial now, elusive; violence and vandalism tend to come from the adolescent, the uneducated, the outsider.

In June 1998, when white supremacists chained James Byrd Jr. to the back of a pickup and dragged him to death on an East Texas country road, the residents of Jasper recoiled.

In the years since then, the town has pointed out, time after time, that Byrd’s gruesome death was the work of outcasts and ex-convicts. This isn’t us. It happened here, but it wasn’t our doing.

“Jasper was given a bad name; it was crucified,” Ranger Dunham says. “The people of Linden don’t want that.”

Quietly, history piles up. Around the time Cole died, a 150-year-old, predominantly black church in nearby Sand Flat in Henderson County was spray-painted with references to the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1994, a black Texarkana woman was shot to death on a sidewalk by police. The officers were cleared of wrongdoing, and the city quietly paid an undisclosed sum to the family to settle a lawsuit. There were no riots, little uproar. The death slipped off; the city moved on.

In 1990, the former police chief of Hemphill and two ex-Sabine County sheriff’s deputies were found guilty of beating a black prisoner to death in 1987. One of the convictions was later reversed.

In Linden, the hurt will stick, even if investigators conclude Cole hanged himself. Some damage can’t be undone. Some suspicion doesn’t melt off. “There’s always gonna be that question in our minds,” Surratt says, sniffling.