Good Afternoon, back in 05 I posted an article from the, Guardian,
entitled "Life after a lonesome death." The newspaper article below
from the, Associated Press, is an update to that story, and hopefully
a closure to arguably one of Dylan's most poignant songs. I believe
in forgiveness - I practice it - and so I wish all those involved in
the "Lonesome Death..."

Rest in Peace!

D0wn by that Higwayside --


¸.•*¨)
*¸.•´ (¸.• ~ Michael



'Be aware of the time passing by,
they say the end it's the wink of an eye!'



CHARLOTTE HALL, Md. (AP) — William Zantzinger, a wealthy Maryland
landowner whose fatal beating of a black barmaid was recounted in a
Bob Dylan protest song of the 1960s, was buried Friday. He was 69.

Zantzinger died Jan. 3. His family did not provide further details of
his death, the Brinsfield-Echols Funeral Home said.

The tobacco farmer served six months and was fined $500 for
manslaughter in 1963 for striking the 51-year-old barmaid with his
cane for taking too long to serve him a drink. Hattie Carroll later
died of a stroke. In the "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," Dylan
criticized different standards of justice meted out to whites and blacks.

Zantzinger was allowed to delay the start the sentence two weeks so he
could harvest his tobacco crop and served the time in the Washington
County jail, working in its kitchen.

"There is something wrong with this city when a white man can beat a
colored woman to death and no one raises a hand to stop him," the Rev.
Thomas C. Jackson said in his sermon at Gillis Memorial Church the
Sunday after Carroll's death.

News accounts at the time said Zantzinger had been seen drinking with
his wife at a dinner before a ball. While dining, Zantzinger told
jurors he began hitting waitresses with the cane.

"I'd been smacking — tapping — waitresses on the tail, and they didn't
say anything. I was just playing," Zantzinger told the jury in
Hagerstown, where the case was tried.

"I had no other purpose than to have a good time," Zantzinger
testified. "The last thing I intended was to harm or injure anyone. I
never even thought about it."

Zantzinger, who later became a foreclosure auctioneer, didn't answer
questions about Dylan's song for years. In 2001, he spoke with Dylan
biographer Howard Sounes about the singer, saying he "should have sued
him and put him in jail. (The song is) a total lie."

Larry Jenkins, a publicist for Dylan, said the songwriter was not
available for comment.


--- In bringingitallbackhomeclub@yahoogroups.com, Sun Feb 27, 2005,
"Michael Norville" <Prairiesedge@...> wrote:

Author, Ian Frazier
Publication , The Guardian, Friday 25 February 2005
Article history
Life after a lonesome death...
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 00.02 GMT on
Friday 25 February 2005. It appeared in the Guardian on Friday 25
February 2005 on p4 of the Friday review features section. It was last
updated at 00.02 GMT on Friday 25 February 2005.
guardian.co.uk
Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/feb/25/bobdylan

On February 9 1963, William Zantzinger, a rich young farmer, struck
Hattie Carroll, a black barmaid, with his cane. She died that night;
he got six months. Her story lives on in Bob Dylan's brilliant
protest song - but where is Zantzinger now? And did The Lonesome
Death of Hattie Carroll really change anything? Ian Frazier reports

Friday February 25, 2005
The Guardian

Do you know the Bob Dylan song The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll?
Put it on now and listen to it, if you happen to have it on a CD or
an album. If you don't, or you don't remember it, it's about a young
society swell named William Zantzinger who, in 1963, killed a black
serving woman named Hattie Carroll at a ball at a Baltimore hotel by
striking her with a cane. Dylan was just 22 when he wrote it, and the
lyrics show him at his high-energy, internal-rhyme-spinning peak:


William Zanzinger [sic] killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger ...
[She] Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room,
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle ...
Zantzinger's motive, Dylan sings, was that he "just happened to be
feelin' that way without warnin'". When Zantzinger came to trial,
charged with first-degree murder, the judge "spoke through his cloak,
so deep and distinguished", and gave Zantzinger a six-month sentence.
At this last injustice, the song ends:


But you who philosophise disgrace
And criticise all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face,
For now is the time for your tears.
The song contains errors of fact. Dylan misspells the perpetrator's
name, omitting the letter T - perhaps deliberately, out of contempt,
or perhaps to emphasise the Snidely Whiplash hissing of the Zs. And
Zantzinger's actual arrest and trial were more complicated than the
song lets on.

Police arrested him at the ball for disorderly conduct - he was
wildly drunk - and for assaults on hotel employees not including
Hattie Carroll, about whom they apparently knew nothing at the time.
When Carroll died at Mercy Hospital the following morning, Zantzinger
was also charged with homicide. The medical examiner reported that
Carroll had hardened arteries, an enlarged heart, and high blood
pressure; that the cane left no mark on her; and that she died of a
brain haemorrhage brought on by stress caused by Zantzinger's verbal
abuse, coupled with the assault. After the report, a tribunal of
Maryland circuit court judges reduced the homicide charge to
manslaughter. Zantzinger was found guilty of that, and of assault -
but not of murder.

The judges probably thought they were being reasonable. They rejected
defence claims that Carroll's precarious health made it impossible to
say whether her death had been caused, or had simply occurred
naturally. The judges considered Zantzinger an "immature" young man
who got drunk and carried away, but they nevertheless held him
responsible for her death, saying that neither her medical history
nor his ignorance of it was an excuse. His cane was considered a
weapon capable of assault, though it was merely a toy one he got at a
farm fair.

According to the New York Herald Tribune, the judges kept
Zantzinger's sentence to only six months because a longer one would
have required that he serve it in state prison, and they feared the
enmity of the largely black prison population would mean death for
him. He served his time in the comparative safety of the Washington
county jail. The judges also let him wait a couple of weeks before
beginning his sentence, so he could bring in his tobacco crop. Such
dispensations were not uncommon, apparently, for offenders who had
farms.

Nowadays, I like to listen to Dylan's old protest songs. Something
about them suits a current need, with commercial radio so jingly and
dead and Dylan himself doing the music for Victoria's Secret lingerie
ads. He must be proud of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll; since
the song came out in 1964, he has included it on a greatest hits CD
(Biograph) and on a live CD. The song is also part of his touring
repertoire, an exposure that has brought it many listeners in recent
years. On the long and sad list of victims of racial violence, most
names are forgotten after the news moves on. Dylan's poetry has
caused Hattie Carroll's name, and the sorrow and true lonesomeness of
her death, to stick in some people's minds.

Dylan describes Hattie Carroll as a 51-year-old maid who waited on
tables, took out garbage, emptied ashtrays and "never sat once at the
head of the table". He mentions that she had borne 10 children. Of
Zantzinger, he says:


William Zanzinger, who at 24 years,
Owns a tobacco farm of 600 acres
As I listened, I noticed the tense of that verb. The Lonesome Death
was perhaps Dylan's most journalistic song, nearly contemporary with
the events it chronicles. Hattie Carroll died on February 9;
Zantzinger went to jail on September 15; Dylan recorded the song in
New York City on October 23, all in 1963. The immediacy of
that "owns" got me wondering about the actual event, and about its
consequences working themselves out through time.

For example, William Zantzinger: What happened to him? Does he own
that farm today? Zantzinger is, it turns out, an amazing guy. In the
semi-rural part of Maryland where he still lives, many people know
his name. If you mention him to someone working in property, the
antiques business, the legal profession or law enforcement, you get a
reaction. People don't want to talk about him, or they do, or they
want their names left out of it, or they shake their heads and laugh;
they never have to be told who he is. Many say he's a wonderful
person, always polite and smiling, a good friend. Because Dylan's
song made him a "story", in the news sense, reporters come to Charles
County, Maryland every so often to see what Zantzinger is up to now.
They are usually surprised, as I was, that he is hard to summarise.

When Zantzinger got out of jail in early 1964, he returned to his
family and farm. He had a wife and two young boys. (His wife, Jane,
had been charged with assaulting a policeman at the ball.) The farm
is called West Hatton. Its main house, a three-story brick mansion,
has pillars and a porch on the side facing the Wicomico river. A
veteran of the Revolutionary war built the house in about 1790. Both
of Zantzinger's parents also lived on the farm; his father could
trace his ancestry from the earliest white settlers of Maryland, and
his mother from a governor of Maryland. Neighbours of the Zantzingers
owned enough land that you could ride to hounds on it. Zantzinger
loved foxhunting, and some of the 1963 news articles identified him
as a "huntsman". Yet the Zantzingers were country gentry - he worked
his farm alongside his employees, and he drank with the locals, black
and white, in the nearby bars.

At some point, Zantzinger sold the farm and got into real estate.
Notoriety did not pursue him, and his name stayed out of the paper
until it began to appear regularly in the notices of Charles County
property owners who were delinquent with their taxes. In 1986,
because of the back taxes, the county took possession of some
ramshackle rental houses he owned in a neighbourhood called Patuxent
Woods.

What Zantzinger did next got his name back in the news. He knew that
the county now owned the properties, but the renters, all poor and
black, did not know. Counting on a lack of attention all around, he
simply went on collecting rents as before. Even more enterprising,
when tenants fell behind on their rent, he filed complaints against
them and took them to court. The county court, in calm and
bureaucratic ignorance, heard the cases. And to put the cap on it, he
won.

Eventually, local authorities caught up with him. In 1991, a
sheriff's deputy arrested Zantzinger on charges that included fraud
and deceptive business practices. A number of newspapers, the
Washington Post among them, did stories about this latest chapter in
the Zantzinger saga. The houses he had been renting were such
disasters - run-down shacks without plumbing or running water - that
they embarrassed the county and gave traction to local fair-housing
advocates. All the same, a few tenants came forward to speak up for
Zantzinger, saying that without him they would be living on the
street. When the judge sentenced him to 18 months on work-release in
the county jail, 2,400 hours of community service and about $62,000
in penalties and fines, there were people in the courtroom who cried.

Zantzinger reportedly now lives on a farm in neighbouring St Mary's
County. People say he's had a few health problems; he's a big man,
6ft tall and heavy, and he is 65. They say he still owns a lot of
rental properties, some as run-down as Patuxent Woods. (He doesn't
talk to reporters, so I never found out for sure.) Candice Quinn
Kelly, a former housing activist in La Plata, Maryland, told me: "I
was on the other side from Zantzinger in the Patuxent Woods
situation. In fact, it was our organisation that uncovered his fraud
to begin with. Maybe I've mellowed or sold out, but I don't see
things as clear-cut as I did then. Billy Zantzinger provides housing
to marginal folks nobody's going to give a lease to, because they
don't have a job or a rent deposit or a bank account or whatever. I
learned that you can offer people tons of help and they still can't
get out of poverty. Billy rents to those people anyway. Since
Patuxent Woods, I've met him and talked to him a couple of times, and
I feel strange saying this, but Billy Zantzinger is really a very
nice man."

In Baltimore, 70 miles to the north, friends and acquaintances of
Hattie Carroll don't agree. Carroll lived in Cherry Hill, a lower-
middle-class black neighbourhood, and attended Gillis Memorial
Christian Community Church. People there remember Hattie as a quiet,
well-dressed woman, tall and poised, with good taste in hats. She
sang in the church's over-45 choir and was a member of the Flower
Guild, which does floral displays for the altar and other projects of
church beautification. Away from work, at least, Hattie Carroll seems
not to have fit the picture of the lowly person Dylan described. Few
people I talked to at the church knew that her death had been the
subject of a widely played protest song.

I stopped by the church one day just as the noon service ended. The
minister, the Reverend Dr Theodore C Jackson Jr, was making some
final exhortations, boosted by an organ's repeated chords. In the
parish hall, still glowing from his preaching, he told me that he had
been away at a seminary when Hattie Carroll died. Then he introduced
me to two longtime parishioners, Dorothy Johnson and Mildred Jessup.
Both are preachers - the Reverend Johnson for 30 years, and the
Reverend Jessup for 28. Both knew Hattie Carroll.

They sat with me for a while in the church's library and talked. "I
remember that Hattie went to work at the hotel that day, and later
word came back that she'd been struck with a cane," said
Johnson. "And right after that we heard that she had died. Everybody
in the church was very upset. It was a terrible blow. She had a huge
funeral, people filling the church to the doors and hundreds more
standing on the street. A sad, sad day."

"I wonder what kind of respect did that man have for people? What
kind of respect did he have for ladies?" asked Jessup. "He wasn't
thinking about people at all. He was acting under the slave
mentality."

"Hattie's family suffered so, her children, after she died," added
Johnson. "They don't go to this church anymore. Four of them, I
think, became Muslims. One daughter ended up in a mental institution.
But whatever you cause by word and by deed, it's all comin' back to
you."

"If I was that man's nurse - I used to be a nurse at Johns Hopkins -
I would give him so much prayer to think about that he'd be
miserable," said Jessup.

I asked the reverends if they thought God would forgive Zantzinger.

"You see, you are not your own," Johnson said. "You belong to God.
God gives you agape love - deep, unconditional, fatherly love. And
with God, all things are possible. Didn't he forgive Peter, who
denied him three times? Now, if the man who killed Hattie Carroll is
willing to repent, and if he is really godly sorry for what he did -
and God knows if you are truly godly sorry - I know God will forgive."

"How about you?" I asked. "Could you forgive him?"

"Yes, I believe I could," said Johnson. "I've forgiven people that
did worse than he's done."

"For myself, I don't know about that," said Jessup. "Things may be
possible for God that are not possible for me. But I will tell you
one thing. Because of what happened to Hattie Carroll, I have a
phobia about canes to this day. I don't like to even see 'em, and I
can't stand when people be foolin' with 'em. Just don't be bringin'
no canes around me."

According to press accounts of Zantzinger's trial, he and his wife,
Jane, arrived at the dance, a charity event called the Spinsters'
Ball, at the Emerson Hotel on Friday evening, February 8 1963. He was
in top hat, white tie and tails - attire with which a cane is
optional. Unlike other guests, Zantzinger didn't check his cane at
the door because, as he said: "I was having lots of fun with it,
tapping everybody." Tapping turned to hitting; a bellboy named George
Gessell said Zantzinger struck him on the arm, and a waitress named
Ethel Hill said Zantzinger argued with her and struck her several
times across the buttocks.

At about 1:30am, he ordered a drink from Hattie Carroll, one of the
barmaids. When she didn't bring it immediately, he cursed at her.
Carroll replied: "I'm hurrying as fast as I can." Zantzinger said: "I
don't have to take that kind of shit off a nigger," and struck her on
the shoulder with the cane. Soon after, Carroll said: "I feel deathly
ill, that man has upset me so." She then collapsed and was taken to
the hospital.

"What makes it hard to bear was that no one at the party challenged
him, no one stopped him," Jessup said. "He was bold enough to behave
like this in the presence of many people, and not one of them
intervened. Maybe they had connections to him, maybe they came for
business, or their hands were tied by who he was. But not one of
those people stood up for her."

I spoke to Bobby Phelps, a friend of Zantzinger's since
childhood. "Can you imagine waking up from a drunk to find out you'd
done something like that?" he asked. We were talking on the front
porch of the post office in Mount Victoria, a hamlet just up the road
from Zantzinger's old farm. "I'd've probably blown my brains out if
it had been me. And what I really can't understand is, when Billy
started getting crazy at the party, why somebody didn't just kick his
ass for him and throw him out on his ear.

"You think about it and you feel bad for everyone," Phelps went
on. "Billy is somebody I would trust with my life. Billy didn't hate
black people - he used to sit with them here in my bar and drink with
them. A coloured woman that used to work for the Zantzingers told me
that Mr Zantzinger - Billy's father - was pacing the floor and
saying, 'How could my boy have done such a thing?' His parents were
just devastated. What a hell of a sad thing that was, that Hattie
Carroll killing. You look back and wonder: how in hell did that all
happen?"

Zantzinger was sentenced on August 28 1963. As it happened, that was
the day of the march on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr
delivered his "I have a dream" speech. The New York Times, the
Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun all ran brief stories about
the sentencing; none mentioned that anybody objected to the lightness
of the sentence.

All three papers devoted pages and pages to the march; and it is
striking, to a reader four decades on, how blind (for want of a
better word) the coverage all was. What comes through in the stories
about the march is a vast sense of relief - shared, presumably, by
the reporters, the papers' management and their readership - that the
200,000 or more assembled "Negroes" hadn't burned Washington to the
ground. All three papers used the adjective "orderly" in their
headlines; all reported prominently on President Kennedy's praise for
the marchers' politeness and decorum. The Post and the Sun gave small
notice to Dr King, and less to what he said. Neither made much of the
phrase "I have a dream". Only James Reston of the Times understood
that he had witnessed a great work of oratory, but even his story
veered into brow-wiping at the good manners of the marchers.

Listening to The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll today, you can hear
Dylan shouting against exactly this blindness. The song he wrote took
a one-column, under-the-rug story and played it as big as it deserved
to be. Dylan's voice sounds so young, hopeful, unjaded,
noncommercial - so far from the Victoria's Secret world of today.
Even the song's title is well chosen: Before I went to Carroll's
church, I had not quite understood why her death was "lonesome". But
of course, as Rev Jessup noted: "Not one of those people stood up for
her." In a party full of elegant guests, Hattie Carroll was on her
own.

If it weren't for television and videotape, we would not know how
powerful the march on Washington, or Dr King's speech, really was.
And if it weren't for Dylan, nothing more would have been said about
Hattie Carroll.

· Reprinted with permission from Mother Jones magazine, © 2005,
Foundation for National Progress.

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll


William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder.
But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.
William Zanzinger, who at 24 years
Owns a tobacco farm of 600 acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland,
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling,
In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking.
But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.
Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen.
She was 51 years old and gave birth to 10 children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level,
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room,
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle.
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger.
But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom,
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'.
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished,
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
Oh, but you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears.

· By Bob Dylan. © 1964; renewed 1992 Special Rider Music