Slavery by Another Name
Page 19
to more grave risk. Vulgar whites like Franklin could rob or harm a
black man with impunity, against which he had no recourse.
Contrarily to accept the risk of a vagrancy charge and lie to a local
o cial might be the beginnings of even more serious trouble. Davis
had only to glance around as the light faded that evening to be
reminded of his vulnerability. The road ahead ran from the edge of
town, alongside the tracks, rising slowly up a long hil . It passed the
open gal ery of the Pope House and its two stories of painted
wooden clapboards—al o limits to African Americans. Railroad
wooden clapboards—al o limits to African Americans. Railroad
Street continued rst past the crude one-room brick lockhouse that
passed for the town jail, and then the enormous Goodwater train
depot, and nal y to a crest where Franklin's store looked over the
set lement. At the train station, as a score or more of white
passengers disembarked, local black men hustled to unload baggage
and l the freight cars with freshly ginned bales of cot on. Al but a
few came from farms owned by white men but worked by black
men.
A partly blind African American man clad in threadbare overal s,
cal ed "Bad Eye" Bradley, furiously re l ed the steam engine's
boilers with water and its fuel car with coal. He was one of the few
black men in the town with a job paying regular wages. Across the
street from Franklin's store, Davis could have seen the plate glass
windows on the front of the saloon and the balustrade of the
second- oor balcony of the Palace Hotel—both destinations of
relative luxury that no black man would ever dare enter as a
customer. Tethered out front were the one-horse carriages and
open-bed wagons that only the rarest African American owned.
Out of sight from Davis, except for their clut ered rear entrances,
stood a succession of new brick buildings extending south from
Franklin's store for several hundred yards. Among them were
businesses operated by the mayor, Dave M. White, and his close
friend, justice of the peace Jesse L. London, as wel as the vacant lot
where construction of the new town hal was to begin in a few
months. Only to the north, across the railroad tracks, among a
ramshackle col ection of shotgun houses and unpainted bungalows
where most of the town's black population lived, was there a place
of refuge for an African American man. Davis had prayed to reach it
before Franklin appeared in the street. Now it was too late.
With his single hostile query—"Nigger, have you got any
money?"— Franklin distil ed the smothering layers of legal and
economic jeopardy that de ned black life in the twentieth-century
South. Davis was pinned.
"No, I have not got any money," the black man stammered. Then,
gambling on what Franklin was up to, he corrected himself. "I have
gambling on what Franklin was up to, he corrected himself. "I have
some, but not for you."
"When are you going to pay me the money you owe me?"
Franklin pressed.
"I don't owe you anything," Davis said.
The two men stood facing each other in silence for a moment.
Then Franklin went on his way, but Davis knew the incident wasn't
over. He crossed the iron rails and made his way to the home of
Nora's parents as quickly as he could. For a few hours, there was a
quiet reunion of the farmer, his children, and the stricken wife and
mother.
But later that evening, the constable showed up again. He cal ed
for Davis to come outside.
"I want that money, or I wil arrest you," Franklin shouted.
"You wil have to arrest me. I do not owe you anything," Davis
said, clinging to the hope that a higher authority would see through
Franklin's ruse.
Gal ed by the black man's resistance, Franklin left again. But soon
another local constable arrived, Francis M. Pruit , a burly mass of
man who sported a bushy western mustache and a wide-brimmed
black hat. He said he held a warrant for Davis's arrest.
"Let me see it," the black man said.
"Come up town and I wil let you see it," Pruit rejoined.
There was lit le else Davis could do. Earlier in the day, he might
have escaped by catching another railroad car and eeing the
county as quickly as possible. But the chance for that was passed
now. Docile cooperation was Davis's only reasonable recourse, his
only chance of seeing Nora again, of ever returning to his elds. It
was stil conceivable that he could weather this scrape with no
harm, that a reasonable voice would come to his aid. If necessary,
he would simply submit to whatever the white men demanded. It
was a dance every black man in the South was being forced to
learn. To resist only invited far worse.
Davis trudged to the center of town with Pruit , who locked him
Davis trudged to the center of town with Pruit , who locked him
in the calaboose near the train station, not far from where his
encounter with Franklin had begun. Four other African Americans
seized by Franklin and Pruit in the previous forty-eight hours were
already there. Davis never saw the ostensible warrant for his arrest,
and would have been unable to read it if he had. Later Jesse
London, the justice of the peace, would testify that Pruit himself
had sworn out a warrant claiming Davis "obtained goods under false
pretenses" from him—rather than Franklin—and that Davis
wil ingly pleaded guilty to the charge.6 London claimed he ordered
Davis to pay a ne and the costs of his arrest and trial, though no
one involved could later recal what the amount of the sentence had
been.
The next morning, Pruit retrieved Davis and the others from the
calaboose and hustled them onto the train platform to board the
No. 3 train from Birmingham at 9:55 A.M.—one of two daily runs
rat ling from Alabama's booming new industrial center, down
through the prosperous provincial towns of Sylacauga, Goodwater,
Dadevil e, and beyond to either Montgomery, the state capital, or
the river port at Columbus.
"We are going to carry you over to Mr. Pace's," Pruit informed
Davis.
"I don't know Pace's," Davis replied.
"We know," the white man answered.7
John Davis had been snared in the web. In the section of Alabama
where Davis traveled that fal , at least two dozen local white men
were actively involved in a circuit of tra c in human labor orbiting
a seventy- ve-mile stretch of the Central of Georgia rail line, with
the town of Goodwater as its epicenter.
Pruit and Franklin were the most regular procurers of stout-
backed black workers for men of means in the surrounding towns
and counties who needed a steady stream of compliant hands.
Nearly every sheri and town marshal in southern Alabama made
Nearly every sheri and town marshal in southern Alabama made
his primary living in some variation of this trade in human labor—
some through formal contracts between the counties or towns and
the big mining companie
s and timber and turpentine operations.
Others limited themselves to the less organized, clandestine capture
and sale of black men along the railroads or back roads—such as
John Davis. Pruit and Franklin and many others operated with a
measure of o cial police power given by local governments. Even
more men—typical y brutish plantation guards or the young adult
sons of large landowners—acted as "special constables" or
temporary deputies appointed to serve arrest warrants concocted to
justify the capture of a particular black man.
To give the arrests an imprimatur of judicial propriety, Franklin,
Pruit , and others relied on the judges of what were cal ed
Alabama's "inferior" courts. In these lower courts, town mayors,
justices of the peace, notaries public, and county magistrates had
authority to convene trials and convict defendants of misdemeanor
o enses. A relic from the frontier era, every Alabama town or rural
community had such local judges appointed by the governor or
local y elected. Most were store owners or large landowners— men
of limited substance but in the context of their world the most
substantial men of the community. In the town of Goodwater, the
amateur judiciary consisted of Mayor White and Jesse London.
Once appointed justice of the peace by one governor, such men
retained their powers almost in perpetuity either by routine
reappointment from successive governors or so long as local citizens
accepted their continuation in uno cial "ex o cio" capacities. By
the turn of the century Alabama had thousands of such judges
scat ered through every community and at almost every major
crossing of roads, so many that no one in the state capital even
maintained a comprehensive list of who they were.
Mayor White's dry goods store was a few doors down Main Street
from Robert Franklin's. London, whose mercantile business was
nearly adjacent to the mayor's, was almost as young as White's
oldest children, and he was married to a cousin of White's wife. The
two wives, both reputed to be marvelous cooks, at times managed
two wives, both reputed to be marvelous cooks, at times managed
the Pope House hotel near the train station.8
Mayor White, the son of a blind farmer, had grown up without
education under di cult circumstances in the countryside of
another rural Alabama county. To his death in 1935, his tastes
never deviated from the poor people's fare of squirrel, opossum,
and chit erlings. Yet in spite of those origins, White moved to
Goodwater intent on lifting himself from the coarse life of frontier
Alabama through sheer labor and wil power. He had no patience
for games or those he considered loafers. "By the eternal, if you
need exercise, get a hoe and do something constructive with it,"
White liked to tel children. Over time, he acquired farms and a
livery stable in addition to the store. With success, he took on the
air of a benevolent businessman, donning a daily uniform of a
pinstripe shirt, gray suit, black bow tie, and a black hat. At
Christmastime, he secretly passed out food and paid for medical
care for poor whites in the town. He was active during the turmoil
of Alabama's late-nineteenth-century political bat les, eventual y
winning election to the Alabama Senate and the Executive
Commit ee of the state Democratic Party9
But the emergence of a place like Goodwater, or a man such as
White, into the rst degrees of twentieth-century sophistication was
not entirely what it seemed. Long into middle age, White would
ght any man he believed insulted him. He impressed his children
with his gal on-by-gal on consumption of moonshine whiskey, and
ability to chain-smoke cigars. On one occasion, he survived a
gunshot wound received during a political argument at a ral y in
Dadevil e. He was an early proponent of the de ant "states’ rights"
agenda that would consume southern Democrats, and in the next
generation fuel segregationists like Strom Thurmond and in the
fol owing generation George Wal ace. He made bit er enemies in
politics and business, and believed there were "parasites"
threatening the society that whites like him had wrested from the
tailings of the previous century. He was contemptuous of the notion
that African Americans deserved the ful citizenship of the Fifteenth
Amendment.
Amendment.
Yet it was this man—uneducated and crude—who held power in
Good-water, conducting rudimentary trials on the boardwalk in
front of his store, maintaining a clumsy "city court" docket of
warrants and verdicts behind his counter, and extending his legal
authority in support of the county's busy slaving network. Under
White's acquiescence, his friend Jesse London summarily found
John Davis guilty of a misdemeanor—despite the fact that Franklin
and Pruit couldn't agree on what charge they were claiming to
bring against him.
In adjoining Tal apoosa County, the man most relied on to
sentence free men to hard labor was a justice of the peace named
James M. Kennedy, a civic jack-of-al -trades who extracted a steady
income from a col ection of overlapping, periodic public
appointments. He had been an election inspector for the area in
1892, and not infrequently was made a special temporary deputy
sheri to serve warrants in civil and criminal cases. Most important,
Kennedy was named by Governor Wil iam Oates in 1894 a justice
of the peace and notary public for the remote section of Tal apoosa
County where he lived—though a decade later he was no longer
certain by which governor or in which year his tenure as a judge
had begun.
Few of the part-time judges such as White and London had any
legal or academic quali cations beyond bet er than average
handwriting. Even that skil was not often apparent. There were no
clear guidelines for the proper operation of the inferior courts or
clear case law de ning their parameters and jurisdiction. Like so
much of the legal and administrative systems of regions only
decades removed from wilderness status, the lower courts of
Alabama were policed mainly by citizens’ innate sense of justice.
The power of these il -de ned casual judges, particularly over
il iterate and impoverished citizens, was immense.
Above men like Kennedy, White, and Franklin, at the top of the
pyramid of players in the rural forced labor networks, were large
landowners, entrepreneurs, and minor industrialists—just as they
had been in the years before the Civil War. In Coosa and Tal apoosa
had been in the years before the Civil War. In Coosa and Tal apoosa
counties, the trade in African Americans relied on three powerful
families, al of whom in turn at least periodical y employed or
conducted business with most of the other men involved in the
buying and sel ing of black men.
The two most prominent buyers, John W Pace and James
Fletcher Turner, together held a contract to "lease" every prisoner
sentenced to hard labor by the t
wo counties. Turner and sometimes
Pace also leased from the city of Dadevil e al prisoners who had
been convicted under the town ordinances.10 Sometimes in
conjunction with each other, sometimes operating independently,
Pace and Turner actively purchased African Americans through
every o cial and uno cial means available. Both operated farms
with hundreds of acres under til , large sawmil s, and mining or
quarrying. In 1900, Pace paid $2,600 to expand his holdings to
include a ve-hundred-acre plantation near his main farm.11 He ran
the farm from a large and comfortable country home—where he
had become wel known in the county for his lavish hospitality—
and maintained a second residence in town, less than a block from
the Dadevil e square.
Turner, known to acquaintances as Fletch, owned a large farm
four miles outside the town limits, in a place cal ed Eagle Creek, a
booming sawmil at a set lement cal ed Camp Creek, and a major
stake in a limestone quarry at Calcis opened by his father and
managed by his younger brother Eliza. Even measured against the
wide scope of human horror being perpetrated in the slavery
operations of Pace and Turner at their farms and sawmil s, the
quarry near the newly founded town of Calcis stood alone as a
place of notably perverse abuse.
Situated thirty- ve miles northeast of Goodwater, the quarry was
halfway up the rail line to Birmingham. Inside its compound,
workers heaped huge quantities of shat ered limestone into two
thirty-foot-high cylindrical kilns, which superheated the rock with
blasts of burning coal piled into a lower chamber. Under intense
heat, the limestone turned to quicklime, a highly caustic powder
heat, the limestone turned to quicklime, a highly caustic powder
that when moist turned instantly into a burning, potential y
explosive acid.
Eliza Turner was a man of questionable mental stability—
claiming later in life that he had invented the radio, the X-ray, and
the Teletype, only to have been robbed in each case by Guglielmo
Marconi and others.12Laborers who survived the Calcis quarry told
frightening stories of tubercular men and sexual y abused women
quarantined to a sick house hidden deep in the adjoining woods.
Equal y horrifying were the fates of workers who accidental y came
into contact with quicklime unintentional y mixed with water. The