Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (25 page)

⁵⁶
    “Will Be Disappointed, An Expectant Throng Will Gather at the Court House To-Day,”
Memphis Commercial
, Feb. 17, 1892.

⁵⁷
    “The Mitchell Case,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, Jan. 28, 1892, 4.

⁵⁸
    Of course, Native Americans had been challenging this narrative since Christopher Columbus “discovered” America.

CHAPTER 10: ATTENDANCE EVEN
GREATER THAN OPENING DAY

⁵⁹
    This scene has been reconstructed based on testimony, “The Hypothetical Case,” and newspaper articles in which more than three corroborated phrases or scenes.

⁶⁰
    For more on women as spectators, see Ann Jones,
Women Who Kill
(New York, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2009).

⁶¹
    The first Civil Rights Act of 1875—also known as the Enforcement Act—was intended to guarantee African Americans equal treatment, but it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. In the first half of the 20th Century, Jim Crow laws, increased lynching, and limited opportunities led to the Great Migration: Six million African Americans left the south for the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West—usually sticking to urban areas. For more information on this subject, see Edward Ayers,
The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

⁶²
    I rely on theatrical terms, and my understanding of public spectatorship was informed by Oskar Negt and Alexander Klug,
Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere
, trans. Peter Labany, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

⁶³
    “Second Day!”
Memphis Public Ledger
, Feb. 24, 1892, 1.

⁶⁴
    “The Pity of It,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, Feb. 26, 1892, 4. “The Criminal Court Goes On,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, Feb. 27, 1892, 5.

CHAPTER 11: QUITE A FLIRT

⁶⁵
    “Miss Mitchell’s Trial,”
New York Times
, Feb, 22, 1892. The defense was not alone in their desire to see the letters. Though one would think that jokes about murder were inappropriate in the aftermath of a teenage girl’s slaying, there were plenty of
jokes made on the pages of local papers about discovering Peters’s mangled body in the basement of the Press Club, killed by frustrated reporters.

⁶⁶
    “A Crime of Passion? The Day the Doctor Shot the General,”
The Nashville Tennessean Magazine
, July 14, 1963, 8-9.

⁶⁷
    He was born Hamilton Rice Patterson in 1861, but five years later, his name was changed to Malcom; he continued to be called “Ham.” He was admitted to the bar in 1883, and would serve as attorney general for Shelby County from 1894 to 1900. He moved on to the United States House of Representatives in his father’s former district (the tenth), from 1901 to 1906, before challenging his party’s nomination for governor in 1906. He criticized his republican opponent, Henry Clay Evans, for supporting the Lodge Bill, which sought to protect the rights of black voters. During his tenure, he banned gambling on horse racing, enacted food and drug regulations, and signed the General Education Act (which established four colleges, including the University of Memphis), but his career ended in scandal. Edward W. Carmack, who had lost the nomination to Patterson in 1908, mocked Patterson’s advisor, Colonel Duncan Cooper. Cooper and his son, Robin, ran into Carmack shortly thereafter on the street, and a shootout ensued. Robin was injured and Carmack died, but both Coopers (even though it was only Robin who engaged in the gunfight) were tried for murder. The public was enraged when Patterson pardoned his advisor; he had made 1,400 pardons during his time in office, and was accused of abusing his powers to aid his political allies. He later joined the Anti-Saloon League and supported Prohibition. By 1921, he was writing a column for the
Memphis Herald Courier
, and by 1923 he was appointed a judge in Shelby Court. A biographical sketch of his career can be found in the Malcom Rice Patterson Papers, Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Evidence!”
Memphis Commercial
, Feb. 23, 1892, 1.

⁶⁸
    Flirting on trains was an unenforceable concern for the men who sought to regulate it. In 1897, Representative Prichard B. Hoot introduced a bill to regulate flirting on trains in Missouri, but it was unsuccessful. That same year, Senator James G. McCune recommended Virginia make flirting a misdemeanor.

⁶⁹
    “Present Insanity,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, Feb. 2, 1892, 5.

⁷⁰
    “Unfolded,”
Memphis Commercial
, Feb. 24, 1892, 1.

⁷¹
    Ibid.

⁷²
    Ibid.

CHAPTER 12: FAIR LILLIE

⁷³
    “Fair Lillie,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, Feb. 25, 1892, 3. “Fair Lillie,”
Memphis Commercial
, Feb. 25, 1892, 3.

⁷⁴
    Ibid.

⁷⁵
    “Second Day!”
Memphis Public Ledger
, Feb. 24, 189, 1.

⁷⁶
    “Fair Lillie,”
Memphis Commercial
, Feb. 25, 1892, 1.

⁷⁷
    Lillie Is at Home,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, Feb. 28, 1892, 5.

⁷⁸
    “She Is Out on Bail,”
Memphis Commercial
, Feb. 28. 1892.

CHAPTER 13: THE OLD THREAD-BARE LIE

⁷⁹
    “The Great Actress Wanted to See Miss Alice Mitchell,” the
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
exclaimed, but even Sarah Bernhardt could not breach the defense’s strict policy of denying access. The French actress, who was arguably the most famous of her time, had been performing in Memphis during the case. To learn of the crime, she needed only descend the theater steps, but she likely encountered news of the same-sex murder alongside reviews of her own performances in
La Tosca
,
Fedora
, or
Jeanne d’Arc
. She and Alice shared more than just space on those pages. In “the sensational” opera,
La Tosca
, Bernhard played “a love sick” Floria, a celebrated opera singer who commits murder, and then kills herself.

But Bernhardt’s failed attempt to see Alice was no social call. The theatrical nature of the same-sex love murder appealed to her, and she had reportedly compiled clippings related to the case in a scrapbook. She wished to collaborate with French dramatist Victorien Sardou to turn the tragedy of Alice and Freda into an opera. The
Appeal Avalanche
made much ado of the rumored opera, imagining it “will not be wanting in thrilling situations and sensational development.” The newspaper offered its own artistic interpretations of the theatrical show and, most importantly, speculated over which role the great Belle Époque actress should play. Editorialists thought Freda’s part too brief, and Alice’s too violent, but Lillie Johnson, the case’s swooning, innocent darling, seemed like just the right role.

Nothing ever came of Bernhard’s visit, but if Alice had actually been asked if she would like to receive the actress, she may have done so to honor Freda’s memory. In happier times, the doomed couple had gone to the Grand Opera House and various theaters together—that is, the respectable ones with audiences free of mixed classes and races. They probably went unescorted, which had become increasingly acceptable at the time, offering Alice and Freda a tiny taste of freedom and independence. It gave each girl, in her own way, a means to imagine a world other than the one
she knew. “Bernhard in the Jail….The Great Actress Wanted to See Alice Mitchell,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, Feb. 17, 1892.

⁸⁰
    Blaine T. Browne and Robert C. Cottrell,
Lives and Times: Individuals and Issues in American History: Since 1865
(Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009).

⁸¹
    Ida B. Wells,
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

⁸²
    I found Stewart Emory Tolnay’s
A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995) to be an excellent resource, as well as
Lynching and Spectacle: Witness Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). For more on Wells, see Martha Hodes,
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

⁸³
    Ida B. Wells,
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells
.

⁸⁴
    For a thorough examination of the concurrent, but racially segregated lives of Alice Mitchell and Ida B. Wells, see Lisa Duggan’s
Sapphic Slashers
.

⁸⁵
    Ida B. Wells-Barnett,
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
(New York: The New York Age, 1892).

⁸⁶
    Attorney General Peters, the Wards, and the Volkmars wanted Alice tried for murder, but the hanging of a white woman was a very different story.

⁸⁷
    In
Sapphic Slashers
, an academic book, Duggan presents the Mitchell-Ward case alongside the simultaneous lynching narrative.

⁸⁸
    In
Sapphic Slashers
, historian Lisa Duggan thoroughly explores these points. In the 1890s, the United States was cementing its national identity, and it was predicated upon maintaining the white home on a national level. Same-sex love and African American men and women were cogent threats to the rigid hierarchy of race and gender, and the reactions on a local level from the judge, jail, sheriff, and newspapers speak to the national construction of American modernity. For more information on American modernity, see Peter Taylor,
Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

CHAPTER 14: THE HYPOTHETICAL CASE

⁸⁹
    F. L. Sim, “Alice Mitchell Adjudged Insane,”
Memphis Medical Monthly
(August 1892).

⁹⁰
    The Hypothetical Case was inspired by the long reports that medical journals had been running for decades. Medical experts would receive these reports and study them in advance of a court case. They would then testify to the diagnoses offered.
If the prosecution had found any medical experts, they would have likely provided their own hypothetical case.

⁹¹
    Charles Rosenberg,
The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968).

⁹²
    “Not a Murder,”
Memphis Commercial
, July 31, 1892, 4.

⁹³
    According to The Hypothetical Case, Dr. Comstock, and others who weighed in. As I suggest throughout the text, I do not presume this evidence can be taken as fact. Postpartum depression, which accounts for many of Isabella’s symptoms, is by no means an uncontested diagnosis today. Some experts find it to be somatic, while others maintain it is a psychological disorder.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Wallpaper,” was published in January, 1892—the same month that Alice murdered Freda. The story speaks, however, to Alice’s mother, Isabella. It is a first-person collection of journal entries written by Jane, who has been confined to the upstairs bedroom of a house rented by her husband John, a physician. Jane has just given birth, and John believes she needs the “rest cure” and locks her in the nursery. There is a gate at the top of the stairs, and John, who leaves for work every day, controls Jane’s access to the rest of the house. The nursery’s windows are barred; her confinement is much like being institutionalized. Jane has been diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency,” and her mental health devolves as her confinement goes on and she is deprived of stimulation—just like Isabella’s supposed stages accelerated, from puerperal insanity to recovery, in the hospital.

⁹⁴
    Melancholia could have meant many things in 1892. Isabella might have seemed sad or depressed, but as a new mother, she may have just been tired. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian American
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

⁹⁵
    “Sane or Insane?”
Memphis Commercial
, July 19, 1892, 1.

⁹⁶
    The Hypothetical Case states Isabella Mitchell gave birth seven times, but only four adult children were on record, and that same number are buried in the family plot at Elmwood. Only one deceased child (the first one) is mentioned.

⁹⁷
    Judith Walzer Leavitt,
Women and Health in America: Historical Readings
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).

CHAPTER 15: VICARIOUS MENSTRUATION

⁹⁸
    Thomas Maeder,
Crime and Madness: The Origins and Evolution of the Insanity Defense
(New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 114.

⁹⁹
    “Still in Doubt,”
Memphis Commercial
, July 20, 1892, 1. “None but Freda,” July 22, “Myra Is a Myth,” July 23,
Memphis Commercial
, 1892.

¹⁰⁰
  Vicarious menstruation is bleeding from a surface other than the mucous membrane of the uterine cavity. It occurs around the time when “normal” menstruation should take place, hence the emphasis on the onset “around the time [Alice’s] womanhood was established.”

¹⁰¹
  “Silly Letters,” July 21, 1 and “Not Love at All,” July 24,
Memphis Commercial
, 1892.

¹⁰²
  “None but Freda,”
Memphis Commercial
, July 22, 1892, 1.

¹⁰³
  “An Analysis of Love,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, July 24, 1892.

¹⁰⁴
  Ruth Harris, “Melodrama, Hysteria and Feminine Crimes of Passion in the Fin-de-Siècle.”
History Workshop 25
(Spring 1988).