Image (.jpg file) of the linocut print Giddap cut by Hale Woodruff circa 1935, printed by Robert Blackburn in 1996 (image courtesy of Artnet)

Content and Analysis:

Lynching, especially by hanging, is an event, not a moment. These extrajudicial hangings rarely involved the construction of a scaffold that would allow for a precise moment at which point a lever could be pulled, releasing a trap door beneath the victim’s feet, sending the victim to fall to his or her death. So how does one depict a lynching by hanging with a single static image? Which moment should be chosen to represent the entire event? The moment the noose is placed around the victim’s neck? A moment in which the victim hangs, grotesquely gasping his or her last breaths? A moment after the victim has died and now swings lifelessly in the noose?

Hale Aspacio Woodruff’s linocut print Giddap locates the precise moment of a lynching in a chilling image of a black adult man standing on the back of a horse-drawn cart. His hands are behind his back, presumably tied, and a noose is prominent around his neck. Trees crowd the image, and the noose disappears into the foliage above the man’s head, presumably tied to one of the branches above. A crowd of white men, women, and children surround the cart, shaking their fists and yelling at the victim. In the background, a white adult male sits at the front of the cart, one hand pulled back and holding a small branch, swinging his arm toward the horse tied to the cart. Once that branch strikes the horse, the horse will move forward, pulling the cart out from underneath the victim’s feet, at which point, he will fall, suffer, and die. The location of this hanging in the woods and at night and the use of a cart and branch to create the hanging clearly express the fact that this event is an extrajudicial hanging. Woodruff has captured the precise moment of a lynching in this chaotic and disturbing scene.

This focus on the precise moment of a lynching is underscored by the piece’s title, “Giddap,” which is an earlier form of “giddy-ap” or “giddy up,” the command to urge a horse forward or into movement (Harper; Oxford UP). In Woodruff’s image, the viewer sees the final moment of the lynching victim’s life, the final moment before he falls, strangles, and dies.

The word “giddap,” especially when combined with the action of striking the horse, is the means through which this victim is going to die. The very name of the piece, then, is the tool of execution. Anyone who references the piece, who talks about it by name, has no choice but to utter the same word as the driver of the cart, the man directly responsible for this victim’s death, thus conflating anyone discussing the piece with the driver, creating an inferred level of complicity for the audience.

This complicity is increased by the perspective Woodruff uses. The viewer is looking slightly down on the scene, probably so that the viewer can see and understand the logistics of what is about to happen. But the placement of the viewer, whose perspective is slightly blocked by the members of the angry crowd, positions the viewer almost as part of this crowd. While some of these onlookers shake fists, bear guns, or scream insults, a few members of the crowd simply stand and watch, not moving or speaking. They are less active bystanders, but their proximity to the event and their failure to intercede certainly implies guilt on their part. Anyone who gazes on this piece, then, joins this crowd. Woodruff reminds the viewer that one can still be complicit even without screaming or waving a gun. The silent, unmoving viewers of this piece are made just as guilty as the silent, unmoving crowd members included in this mob.

Despite the presence of a few unmoving individuals in the gathered crowd, the overall tone of the image is one of chaos and noise surrounding the lynching victim. To the victim’s right, an elderly man and woman both shake their fists, their faces in profile, the woman silent, the man open-mouthed, seeming to yell. In the foreground, to the victim’s left, a mustachioed man appears to yell while pointing a shot gun at the victim. Two other figures, apparently adult males, are faceless, one of them waving a fist at the victim while the other watches on without moving. A fourth man in this section can be seen in profile, watching silently. With this group of males, a female child, denoted by pigtails, waves her fist at the victim as well. The image of this mob indicts all levels of white society: adults, children, and the elderly, male and female. Interestingly, there are no adult women other than the elderly woman, and there are no young boys. This omission, however, is probably due to practical constraint; the image only has room for so many figures. Ultimately, the crowd represents a critical view of all strata of white society.

In contrast to the busy crowd, the lone lynching victim stands silent and unmoving. The placement of the figures of the crowd and the faceless cart driver serve to frame this victim. Additionally, the leading lines created by the cart on which the victim stands, the eyes and arms of the crowd, the tree immediately behind the victim, and the noose all immediately lead viewers’ eyes towards the victim, especially his face. His mouth appears to be partially open, as though he is already beginning to gag or struggle for breath within the noose wrapped tightly around his neck. The noose shows no slack and is drawn up high beneath the victim’s chin, clearly already pulled upward, highlighting the intensity and pain of this event and the imminent struggle and death to come.

The image itself is stark, immediate, and intense. The nature of the linocut leaves little room for gradations. A portion of the block is either present and thus takes ink, leaving black on the paper, or a portion is absent, taking no ink, leaving white space. Woodruff could have used multiple fine lines to create some areas of shading but instead fills the image with stark contrasts between black and white.

The figures in the crowd wear clothes bearing busy patterns, stripes or plaids, or else they wear solid colors that are smeared with shadow. In contrast, the lynching victim stands out in dark solid pants and a bright white shirt. Despite his degrading situation, Woodruff depicts him with quiet dignity, standing straight, his shoes still on, his shirt still tucked in. Even his knees have not yet buckled under the terror of his situation. He remains the calm, unmoving center of this brutal spectacle. Interestingly, his clothing echoes that of the driver who appears immediately behind him, dark solid pants and bright white shirt. The eye is immediately drawn to these two central figures, the victim and the man most directly responsible for his impending death.

The image is filled with a sense of dreadful anticipation and also hectic claustrophobia. The figures of the crowd are crammed together in close proximity to the cart, blocking a large portion of the cart and a part of the victim’s one leg. None of their bodies are portrayed in full, increasing the sense of proximity even as the trees and foliage similarly close in around the scene. The viewer feels close, too close, to this image, once again as though the viewer is trapped within this crowd.

There is no doubt that the viewer is meant to sympathize with but also somehow admire the victim standing in the image’s center. His body is the only body that is completely depicted, and his is one of the only two faces fully revealed, the other being the face of the man holding a shotgun. These two make a powerful pair, the one face open-mouthed and yelling, aggressively aiming a shot gun at the victim’s torso while the victim looks away, silent, already struggling to breathe. The image is undoubtedly a condemnation of the white race that allows or actively participates in such injustice.

According to Michael D. Harris, “For many African Americans in the twentieth century, cotton, plantations, lynching, the Klan, and segregation seemed to overlap as a series of related tropes signifying oppression and exclusion” (144). Harris labels Woodruff’s Giddap an angry protest against the white terrorism of the black community and against black bodies in general (144).

"Giddap, Uncle!" Cream of Wheat advertisement, 1914, 1921

Giddap, Uncle!

In addition to the connections between the victim and the driver, Woodruff creates a connection between the victim and the horse pulling the cart. The victim and horse are the only two figures in the image depicted as black. Woodruff could have made the horse white or only slightly shaded with lines, but instead, he chose to depict the horse as black, conflating this beast of burden being struck by a white man with the body of a lynching victim. Looking at this image and seeing a black beast being struck by a white man obviously connotes images of slavery and white oppression of black people in general, further criticizing the society of the time. This conflation is even more significant when one considers a popular magazine advertisement of the period, "Giddap, Uncle!", an advertisement for Cream of Wheat that depicts an elderly black man pulling a white boy in a wheelbarrow while the boy, laughing, pulls back a rod or whip with which he is about to strike the man while urging him to move. This ad, which appeared in a 1914 issue of American Cookery and in a 1921 issue of Youth’s Companion and probably appeared in many other places, was immensely popular. Living in the south, Woodruff would have seen it, and it is possible he is intentionally connoting its image through his choice of title and composition.

It is worth noting that only two of the eight linocuts included in “The Atlanta Portfolio” confront lynching: Giddap, the first in the series, and By Parties Unknown, the second in the series. Both were produced for An Art Commentary on Lynching, held in New York in 1935. When looking at these two prints side-by-side, the viewer can almost imagine them as part of a single narrative. By Parties Unknown depicts the dead body of a black man, remnants of a noose around his neck, left on the doorsteps of a rural, dilapidated church. The man’s face cannot be seen, but he wears the same clothing as the lynching victim of Giddap, solid dark pants and a white shirt, though now his shirt sleeves have been ripped and are missing. It seems highly possible that the figure in both images is meant to be the same man.

Image (.jpg file) of the linocut print Giddap with Rule of Thirds grid imposed for compositional analysis

Composition and Rule of Thirds

Regarding the piece’s composition, one should consider the Rule of Thirds, a compositional approach to images in which an image is broken into thee equal sections both horizontally and vertically to create a grid of intersection points. Images composed using this grid tend to be more balanced. Additionally, viewers’ eyes tend to fall most often on the intersection points of the imposed grid, which can be used to compose an image to be as effective as possible (Rowse).

If the Rule of Thirds is applied to Giddap, one can note that the victim stands in the central section of the entire image and that one of the intersection points for the imposed grid falls almost perfectly on the eyes of the lynching victim. Additionally, another intersection point falls near the fist being waved by a member of the crowd while another intersection point falls at base of the arm of the driver swinging the branch, about to strike the horse into motion.

Applying the Rule of Thirds grid to this image explicitly reveals how Woodruff composed this image to manipulate viewers' eyes to three significant areas of content: the eyes of the lynching victim, a waving fist, and the swinging branch that is about to cause the man's death.