I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction

by Kidada E. Williams

“I was living under fears of being attacked again,” an Alabama survivor said. He felt this way despite being well known and generally liked by people in his community. “To tell the truth, I am not over it yet,” the man said of the strike, during which he had been shot. “I cannot rest satisfied, because I know how this ball felt in my neck,” he added. The man’s statement indicates the ways physical injuries were linked to emotional suffering. When asked if he still felt fear of being attacked again, despite no immediate threat, he answered, “[A] little doubt still seems to arise; I can’t help it to save my life; it will come up sometimes.”51 Witnesses also shared stories of people they believed had died due to the horrors they experienced.52 Speaking of his daughter, Amanda, Abram Colby said night riders had “frightened her to death”: “She never got over it until she died.”53 The fright the Colby girl endured from the man leveling his shotgun at her could have initiated her withdrawal from the world. Doctors in twenty-first-century conflict zones report instances of resignation syndrome, a disorder in which young victims give up on life.54 Such a condition could explain what Abram observed in his daughter before she died.