When Crooks asks Curley’s wife to leave his room, she checks him by asking, “You know what I could do?” Crooks backs down but she continues, saying “Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny.”
Of Mice and Men – 10
Of Mice and Men – 11
When Lennie accidentally kills Curley’s wife, Candy says, “You don’t know that Curley. Curley gon’ta wanta get ‘im lynched.” This reference to lynching creates an association between dehumanized Lennie, who’s often described as if he’s an animal, and black people who were dehumanized, described as if they are animals and lynched.
In an essay published in 1900 entitled “Lynch Law in America,” Ida B. Wells-Barnett describes lynch law as a form of justice that emerged in light of the exigencies of westward expansion. As white people moved further away from settlement and civilization on the eastern seaboard, they established an ad hoc method of dealing with criminality. Suspects were tried by a small group of men and hung because there were no courts that would have made it possible for them to receive due process of law. Later though, this process appeared in the south where, as Wells-Barnett puts it, “No emergency called for lynch law.” Despite the fact that there were formal institutions that would have made it possible for people to be tried in a more standard and legitimate manner, lynch law emerged as a way of addressing supposed black criminality. Ironically, in the instance Douglass describes, the law would have been applied to him in a region of the country that had been settled for some time. Despite the fact that there was a fully functioning justice system in Baltimore, Douglass could have easily been at the mercy of a mob that intended to apply it’s own form of law.