Slavery by Another Name
Page 18
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