Slavery by Another Name

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Slavery by Another Name Page 18

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  5:31 P.M. each day. Half an hour later, he would be on the outskirts

  of Goodwater.

  As the train ambled forward, Davis must have felt a contradictory

  set of worry and relief as panoramas of cot on elds ashed by in a

  gentle blur on each side of the tracks, bobbing across the low

  foothil s at the southernmost base of the Appalachian range. He

  would have to hurry to see Nora and the children, and stil return to

  Nixburg in time to save his cot on. He prayed he was not going to

  Goodwater to bury his wife. He had to know he might not make it

  home before his fields were ruined.

  Stil , the dust-choked freight car rat ling across the landscape was

  in its own way a respite from the torturous tasks of the harvest.

  Gathering a season's cot on was excruciating work. Davis, like

  nearly every black man and woman in Alabama, had spent most of

  his waking life pawing through such elds. The passing crop rows

  soon would be choked with laborers: strapping young men coursing

  through the rows with swift, nimble expertise; young mothers with

  babies towed atop long sacks of cot on dragging behind them;

  nearly feeble old men and women—African Americans whose lives

  were grounded immutably in the seasonal rhythm of growing,

  tending, and picking cot on for other men.

  tending, and picking cot on for other men.

  The eldest in the elds were slavery's children—the toddlers and

  adolescents and near adults of the emancipation time—who had

  experienced the ful exuberance of freedom and citizenship and

  then the terror of its savage and violent withdrawal. Now they

  moved slowly behind their young people, picking with thin

  leathery ngers whatever ber had been missed by the others,

  while the toddling children of this sour new era of oppression

  scrambled alongside, heaving their own sacks. Albert and Alice

  would absorb for themselves the same unchanging equinoxal cycle

  of cot on growing and cot on picking, but in their lives—at least

  until old age—it would never be sweetened or leavened by even

  the ash of freedom that the children of slavery days had brie y

  known three decades earlier.

  On the plants, blanketing the elds and rising in the most fertile

  places as much as six feet high, supple green buds that had swol en

  beneath smal graceful owers were by now turning hard and

  brit le. Split open and dried dark brown, the outer skin of each pod

  was sharp to the touch. As the strongest eld hands moved down

  the furrows, pul ing the cot on and passing it into their sacks,

  ngers and palms began to crack and bleed from the pricks and

  slices of thousands of bol s. Depending on the weather and

  condition of the cot on, harvest season might wel begin in

  September and drag past Christmas, long after the cot on stalks had

  frozen and died.

  With every passing week in that span and each downpour of rain,

  the crop grew less saleable and more vulnerable to swings in the

  prices o ered by the ginners who consolidated the local harvests for

  sale to cot on brokers in Montgomery or Columbus, Georgia. At

  critical junctures in the picking season, poor weather or lack of

  su cient laborers could destroy an entire year's crop. For the white

  men who owned cot on land in 1901, mobilizing every available

  black worker—man, woman, and child—into the elds at picking

  time was the single most crucial chal enge of the entire season.

  Even the most progressive and generous white men in America,

  whether in the South or the North, almost universal y agreed that

  whether in the South or the North, almost universal y agreed that

  blacks were preter-natural y skil ed at this particular task, and

  natural y and spiritual y ordained to perform it. That it might be

  wrong to coerce or compel African Americans to work the elds

  when the crop was in danger rarely occurred to any white man.

  White farmers needed similar numbers of black workers in the

  early weeks of the fol owing spring, when seed was being planted

  and bright new shoots of cot on had to be careful y tended, each

  furrow regularly hoed to keep weeds from smothering the fragile

  seedlings. Once the cot on was up, and stretching toward the sky,

  and al through the hot months of summer, there could be fewer

  hands. Nearly al the women and children were idled during the

  humid months. So long as rain and sun came in the correct

  proportions, the cot on would stretch higher and ful er. In some

  years, it grew as tal as a man's shoulders, thick and impenetrable,

  straining with the weight of blossoms. After the cot on was picked

  in the fal , there was once again lit le work to be done. African

  Americans faced the long, hungry "lay by" of winter.

  This conundrum of farm labor management—the need to satisfy

  radical y spiking demands for labor and the absolute peril of failing

  to do so—had been the most compel ing impetus for slavery in the

  nineteenth century. There were many other reasons that slavery

  survived in the Deep South too, some economic and some cultural.

  But in the end, it was the particular nature of cot on production,

  requiring absolute access to armies of laborers for brief periods at

  crucial points in the calendar, which made slavery a superbly

  successful economic mechanism. By holding laborers captive,

  plantation men could dragoon every worker, regardless of age or

  strength, at those urgent junctures and marshal them into highly

  e cient gangs of eld workers—al without worry that they might

  ever drift away in search of bet er circumstances during the lean

  months in between.

  In the nearly four decades since emancipation of the slaves, white

  farmers in the South had evolved only negligibly in their abilities to

  manage enterprises with free labor. Concepts of industrial labor

  practices—such as set working weeks and xed hourly wages—

  practices—such as set working weeks and xed hourly wages—

  remained foreign to most late-nineteenth-century southerners. They

  were mysti ed and o ended by the demands of former slaves—

  encouraged by agents from the federal government in the

  immediate wake of emancipation—that they be paid regular, set

  amounts and receive guarantees of certain working conditions

  through a writ en contract with white farmers. Even sharecropping

  —in which black farmers lived on and worked smal parcels of land

  in return for keeping a portion of their harvest—and

  straightforward renting of farm land to African Americans required

  a form of business acumen and honest dealings that few southern

  whites were capable of ful l ing in their relations with blacks.

  White landowners in the South almost universal y believed that

  management of their farms could be successful only if, in one way

  or another, "their Negroes" could be tied to the land. Coercion and

  restraint remained the bedrock of success in the cot on economy—

  and the cornerstone of al wealth generated from it.

  To establish a ser ike status for blacks, whites relied on a bit erly

  repre
ssive new social code. Few would hire a black worker who

  did not have the express approval of his or her former white

  employer to change jobs. O the farms, only the most menial work

  could be awarded to African Americans—a convention that both

  blacks and whites violated only at risk of their own physical harm.

  Black public behavior beyond the "bumbling Negro" caricature

  acceptable to whites—whether in at itude, dress, or visible

  aspirations—also invited economic ostracism by whites, at best, and

  physical injury at worst. The possibility of mob violence against any

  African American who blatantly rejected the unwrit en code

  lingered in the background of black life, a relatively infrequent but

  omnipresent threat.

  Just as ubiquitously undergirding the new conventions of black

  and white relations—and overshadowing every aspect of the lives of

  young black men—was "the Lease," as most southerners generical y

  cal ed the new system for seizing and sel ing African Americans. In

  addition to the black men compel ed into slave mines and lumber

  camps, thousands of white landowners and local businesses in the

  camps, thousands of white landowners and local businesses in the

  countryside and in provincial towns like Goodwater, Nixburg, and

  nearby Columbiana regularly purchased black men from local

  sheri s and judges who participated in or turned a blind eye to the

  process.

  There was also no longer any possibility that blacks might

  obstruct the new trade in forced labor through political

  participation. As of 1901, nearly every African American had been

  e ectively stripped of al elective rights in Alabama and virtual y

  every southern state. After passage of a new state constitution in

  1901, Alabama al owed the registration only of voters who could

  read or write and were regularly employed, or who owned

  property valued at $300 or more—a measure clearly aimed at

  complete elimination of blacks from voting. In Mississippi, only

  those who were able to pay a pol tax of up to $3 and who could,

  according to the voting registrar's personal assessment, read or

  understand any clause in the U.S. Constitution could register.

  Louisiana permit ed only those who could read and write or owned

  at least $300 worth of property. (However, any person who could

  vote on January 1, 1867, or his descendants, was al owed to

  continue voting regardless of reading skil s. This literal "grandfather

  clause" guaranteed continued voting rights for il iterate and

  impoverished whites.)

  South Carolina required literacy or property ownership. North

  Carolina charged a $2 pol tax and required the ability to read.

  Virginia, after 1904, al owed to vote only those who had paid their

  annual $1 pol tax in each of the three years prior to an election

  and who could l out a registration form without assistance.

  Veterans from either the armies of the Union or the Confederacy

  were exempted of the requirements—though few of the thousands

  of African Americans who fought in the Union army were

  acknowledged as veterans.

  During the same legislative gathering at which the new Alabama

  constitution was drafted, a delegate from Chambers County named

  James Thomas He in came to prominence. Over the next thirty

  years, he would be the state's most in uential gure, serving as a

  years, he would be the state's most in uential gure, serving as a

  U.S. senator and an early master of the rhetoric of white supremacy

  that would be emulated across the South by men such as Theodore

  Bilbo in Mississippi, Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, and Bul

  Connor and George Wal ace in Alabama. During debate over how

  completely blacks should be blocked from the vote, He in argued

  that there should be no possibility of African Americans casting

  bal ots, regardless of their individual intel igence or wealth.

  Standing in the elegant legislative chambers of the state capitol in

  Montgomery—a building that forty years earlier had served as the

  rst seat of government of the Confederacy—he boomed: "I believe

  as truly as I believe that I am standing here that God Almighty

  intended the negro to be the servant of the white man." Anticipating

  eventual war between the races, He in continued: "I do not believe

  it is incumbent upon us to lift him up and educate him on an equal

  footing that he may be armed and equipped when the combat

  comes."3

  When debate turned brie y to whether the whipping of prisoners

  leased to coal mines and lumber camps should be prohibited, a

  representative from Sumter County summed up the position of the

  constitutional convention:

  "Everybody knows that the great bulk of convicts in the state are

  Negroes," he said. "Everybody knows the character of a Negro and

  knows that there is no punishment in the world that can take the

  place of the lash with him. He must be control ed that way"4 The

  laws remained unchanged.

  • •

  As Central of Georgia No. 1, carrying John Davis on a car close to

  the rear, approached the nal wide curve of the tracks on the

  outskirts of Goodwater on that Tuesday in September 1901, the

  conductor blew his whistle and slowed dramatical y as the engine

  eased past Sterling Lumber Company. For almost thirty years, this

  had been the point of disembarkation for the scores of

  impoverished men—mostly black and a few white—who used the

  impoverished men—mostly black and a few white—who used the

  freight trains of the South routinely to move from town to town and

  job to job. The railroad bed was itself the handwork of forced

  laborers, as was the case for nearly al southern rails built before

  the Civil War or in the rst decades after. Goodwater was a place of

  rich opportunity for men seeking menial work. It had grown into a

  ourishing commercial center as the hub of the cot on economy in

  the verdant plain of farmland that rippled between the Coosa and

  the Tal apoosa rivers—which plunged on paral el currents, eighty

  miles apart, out of the Appalachians and into the Black Belt of

  south Alabama. As the picking season progressed each fal , farmers

  pul ed their cot on in long trains of mule-powered wagons from

  outlying set lements to the gin and rail station at Goodwater. From

  there, the compressed bales of lint were shipped by train southeast

  through a succession of other Alabama towns to Columbus, Georgia,

  sixty miles away. River barges took them down the Chat ahoochee

  River to ports on the Gulf of Mexico at Pensacola and Apalachicola,

  Florida.

  For the paying passengers on the line, Goodwater was a welcome

  respite from the dusty rails. The town had been the nal stop on

  the line in the railroad's rst years of operation, feeding a

  ourishing local economy of hotels, restaurants, and carriage rentals

  to continue the journey to the new city of Birmingham. Goodwater's

  Pope House hotel was a nineteenth-century culinary landmark. The

  nearby Palace Hotel and Argo Saloon were famous as outposts of

  com
fort and vice. After the rails were extended the remaining

  distance to Birmingham in the 1880s, nearly every train on the line

  continued to stop at Goodwater to rest passengers and load cot on,

  coal, and water for the steam engine.

  After the nal whistle before the train neared Sterling Lumber,

  John Davis and the other informal travelers deftly hopped o . It

  would soon be dusk, and Davis began making his way by foot

  toward the home of Nora's parents. As he arrived at the rst cluster

  of houses near the Goodwater train station, within earshot of the

  Pope House and its dinnertime banter drifting in the late-day quiet,

  a white man suddenly appeared in the road ahead.

  "Nigger, have you got any money?" he shouted.5

  The man was Robert N. Franklin, one of the town's appointed

  constables and keeper of a dry goods store perched at the top of the

  muddy dirt street that led through Goodwater's commercial district.

  Davis certainly would have known who Franklin was. Short-necked

  and rotund, Franklin and the store he ran had been xtures in

  Goodwater for at least a decade. There were no black-owned

  enterprises in Goodwater, and Davis's parents would have traded

  regularly at the store owned by Franklin. The very overal s that

  Davis wore that day almost certainly came from Franklin's store or

  one of the other white-owned mercantile shops facing Main Street.

  That mat ered lit le at the moment Franklin appeared from the

  shadows. The question he bel igerently posed was a simple but

  perilous provocation. However Davis answered was fraught with

  jeopardy. Under the new racial statutes and conventions of the

  South, demanding whether an itinerant black man had money was

  tantamount to asking him to prove his right to freedom, or his right

  even to live. A black man traveling alone in Alabama could be

  arrested and charged with vagrancy on almost any pretense. To

  have no money in hand demonstrated his guilt without question

  and, worse, was seen as absolute proof of his worthlessness. Almost

  every possible consequence of admit ing indigence or joblessness—

  much less of having ridden for free on a freight train—was terrible.

  Yet given the vulnerability of every black man among whites—

  even more so a white with some measure of o cial authority and

  community respect—to reveal that he possessed cash exposed him

 

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