On July 20, 1899, five Sicilian men were hanged in Tallulah, a village in Madison Parish in the Delta: the brothers Carlo (called Pasquale in some accounts), Giuseppe and Francesco Defatta, and their cousins Rosario Fiducia and Giovanni Cirami. Italy's embassy called the killings atrocious and said they were meant to remove foreigners whose business competed with Tallulah's residents. The men came from Cefalù, and most sold fruit, vegetables or groceries. The trouble began with goats. Dr. J. Ford Hodge, the parish coroner, shot goats that kept straying onto his property, and the goats belonged to Francesco Defatta.
The night
Accounts differ on how Hodge's quarrel with Francesco's brother Carlo, also called Pasquale, went. In each, another brother, Giuseppe, then fired on the doctor. Hodge was wounded, and he lived. A mob seized Carlo and Giuseppe and hanged them at a slaughter yard. Francesco, and their cousins Rosario Fiducia and Giovanni Cirami, were taken from the jail and hanged from a cottonwood tree in the village. In the account Enrico Deaglio reconstructed, the telegraph operator was held at gunpoint so that no one could call for help.
Giuseppe Defina, the Defattas' brother-in-law, kept a store at Milliken's Bend, also in Madison Parish. Two doctors warned him that armed men meant to lynch him, and he fled by skiff with his son to Vicksburg, leaving his store and property behind. On July 31 he gave a sworn statement there to the Italian embassy's secretary.
Three grand juries
On July 21 a grand jury foreman reported that the men had conspired to kill Hodge and that the mob could not be identified. Nobody was arrested. The sheriff said it was too dark to recognize anyone. Italian investigators reached Tallulah on July 24, and one of them, the journalist Enrico Cavalli, reported two days later that witnesses were reluctant to talk. Three grand juries heard the case and indicted no one. Italy's ambassador, Baron Fava, sent a list of 19 alleged participants in January 1900 and in May called the result a denial of justice.
What Washington paid
Italy's consul argued that all five were still Italian subjects, since the three who had filed for citizenship had not finished the five years the law required. Louisiana's governor, Murphy J. Foster, reported that three were naturalized. President McKinley raised crimes against foreigners in his December 1900 message to Congress. Fava said an indemnity alone was no final answer and urged Congress to pass bills changing federal jurisdiction over such crimes. The United States paid $4,000, to the families of the two men whose Italian citizenship was not in doubt.
Eight years earlier a New Orleans mob had killed eleven Italians in a jail, and at least fifty Italians were lynched in the country, mostly between 1890 and 1924. Deaglio found that Hodge left his post within months and disappeared, and that several members of the mob had business or personal motives.
Tallulah lies in Madison Parish, which is also home to Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge, and the cotton country around it is told at the Louisiana State Cotton Museum in Lake Providence.