Slavery by Another Name
Page 47
cartridges and placed in holes dril ed at the edge of the seam—
could separate the coal from surrounding rock. Lighting a cartridge
with a crude fuse, the miners hurried out of the room and back into
the shaft seconds before the ceiling of coal col apsed with the
explosion. Many men were caught by the fal ing coal and kil ed or
maimed.
Once broken free, the coal was hammered into fty- and
hundred-pound pieces and loaded into the train cars. Once a day,
another prisoner came by with a bucket containing portions of
crude food.
Here there was lit le of the eld hand or rail bed singing that
Green had heard among country blacks back in Bibb County, no
community of shared perseverance. There was only the furious
scramble to crack and pry and stack and sort the rock and coal, and
watch other stone-faced men moving in the shadowy dark.
Each day, Green spent nearly every waking hour stretched in a
room o the main shaft. Once the coal was freed and broken up, he
loaded coal furiously as a boss, another black convict, snarled that
he would feel the whip if Green mixed rock with the coal in the
wagons to be pul ed from the mine sixteen hours later. After six
days in Slope No. 12, Green had only to return to the mine once
more before Sunday, the one day of rest and of daylight. After that,
there would be twenty-four more Sundays before his time in the
mine was scheduled to end.
If the worst of a day in Slope No. 12 had been only the physical y
If the worst of a day in Slope No. 12 had been only the physical y
wracking intensity of the labor, then this sentence, even if meted
out by a crude sheri for the imsiest al eged infraction against the
law, might have been bearable. But there was far worse. Green and
Mun were fortunate that they were strapping, grown men, at the
peak of their physical strengths. They were fortunate too that their
stay with the sheri had lasted only three days, not long enough for
the starvation rations to weaken them material y.
The prison mine in some respects was an improvement over the
Shelby County jail. The men were fed semiregularly A doctor lived
in the simple "hospital" across the yard—a big advance over earlier
medical care at Prat Mines, which consisted of a crude one-room
shed, with barn doors, a dirt floor, and one window for light.10
Conditions at the Prat Mines had improved since the deadly
epidemics of disease that regularly occurred in the 1880s and 1890s
—but only marginal y. Inside the shafts, deadly gases accumulated
in unventilated sections, work continued even as water, seeping
from the wal s and fouled with the miners’ waste and excrement,
accumulated in the shafts. Intestinal disorders, malaria, pneumonia,
and respiratory problems dogged the men. Endless contact with
coal dust led to black lung disease, a miserable and certain slow
death.
Hardly a week passed that accidents didn't take men's ngers,
hands, toes, or worse. Often the cause was a careless swing of a
pick. But almost as frequently men were crushed by coal fal ing
before they expected, or pinned by railroad cars that derailed. After
electric trol eys and lights were instal ed in some areas, many a
miner died from "touching a live wire," according to state
inspectors.
Younger and smal er men—and the dozens of pubescent boys
forced into the shafts—on their rst days in the mines faced a
terrible initiation. Argued over—often violently—by the convicts
with bit er months and years of time in the mine behind them, the
boys were pushed into corners of the pitch black mine rooms,
beaten into submission with the handles of the pickaxes or rough
beaten into submission with the handles of the pickaxes or rough
leather belts worn by the men, and raped daily and nightly.
Disagreements over ownership of the sodomized "gal-boys" or other
infractions of the prisoners’ code erupted into bizarre violence. Men
made huge by their years of labor and hardened by their fates
at acked each other in the constricted spaces with axes, knives,
rocks, and bare hands. Homicides were a constant occurrence.
The ranks of those condemned to the mines were so broadly
uneducated and il iterate—even by the elementary standards of
1908—that hardly any eyewitness accounts were recorded of the
nightmarish episodes beneath the surface. The shame of witnessing
—or being a participant in—such acts further sti ed
acknowledgment of the rapes and violence that accompanied them.
But virtual y every surviving account of life in the slave mines
referred in at least muted tones to these spectacles of sexual abuse.
One white man wrote after his release how "men, degraded to a
plane lower than the brutes, are guilty of the unmentionable crimes
referred to by the Apostle Paul in his let er to the Romans." He cited
the verse: "The men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned
in their lusts one toward another, men with men, working that
which is unseemly"11
As shocking as the sodomy were the o cial punishments of the
mines and convict labor camps administered under the sanction of
government authority. At the end of the day, whatever had
happened deep in the earth, each man was held to account for the
coal he col ected while in the shaft. Healthy prisoners such as Green
and Mun were required to produce eight tons each day. Any man
who came up short of his assigned "task" was subject to the whip—
held over a barrel by two other black men with his shirt removed
and his pants pushed to his knees as the white mine superintendent
or the designated whipping boss lashed him with a thick, four-inch-
wide strap of leather. On some days, as many as two or three dozen
men felt the bite of forty or fty strokes. Those who chronical y
failed to meet task were beaten every day, often in the morning as
wel to remind them of the fate that awaited failure that night.
A convict named Alvaran Snow Al en published a simple
A convict named Alvaran Snow Al en published a simple
religious lea et near the turn of the century titled "The Story of a
Lie," recounting the misdeeds of his life and how they led him to
become "Convict No. 2939" in an unspeci ed labor prison. In
excruciating detail, he recounted the methods, lexicons, and
apparatuses of prisoner punishment used throughout the southern
prison labor system. "Come-a-longs" were steel bracelets snapped
onto the wrists and fastened by a chain to a smal metal crossbar.
Turning the crossbar instantly twisted a man's arms into a knot,
forcing him to his knees. In a punishment known simply as "the
chains," a prisoner was placed in handcu s at ached to the ends of a
thirty-inch-long steel bar, which was then hoisted with a pul ey
until the man hung clear of the oor, to be left suspended "from 50
minutes to two hours."12 A variation on this torment was known in
some camps as the "alakazan degree," in which the victim's ankles
were cu ed behind hi
s back and then his feet "drawn upward and
backward until his whole body is stretched taut in the shape of a
bow" and then tied to his wrists. Once pinioned, the most
unfortunate prisoners were then placed in a closed and darkened
box cal ed a "crib" and left there in su ering. "The intense agony
in icted by this method of torture is indescribable; every muscle
throbs with pain," wrote one prisoner after his release.13
"Lit le shackles" were egg-shaped pieces of iron riveted onto
ankle rings on prisoners in rural work camps to make their feet too
heavy to run. "Whipping straps" weighed two to seven pounds for
routine beatings. "Shackles and chains" was a three-foot section of
chain with an ankle cu at one end and a two-inch ring at the other
end. Once the cu was riveted to a prisoner's leg, the chain was
wrapped around the leg during working hours, and then unspooled
at day's end to be at ached to the one long chain holding al
convicts in a particular sleeping area.
Famous to prison mines and camps in Alabama, Georgia, and
Florida was the "pick shackle," which Al en described as a
sharpened pick head riveted upside down to a prisoner's ankle—
making it ut erly impossible to run or even walk normal y—and
making it ut erly impossible to run or even walk normal y—and
typical y left there for the duration of a convict's sentence.14 Worn
for months or years at a time, the twenty- to thirtypound picks
rubbing against bare skin caused abrasions that led to pus- l ed
lesions and infections prisoners cal ed "shackle poison." Lit ered
through the records of convict camps are amputations of feet and
lower legs as a result of blood poisoning from the injuries.
By far the most torturous and widely used punishment was the
"water cure," a medieval cruciation whose many variations rendered
the strongest and most de ant of men ut erly compliant. In its most
moderate form, the water cure was simply forcing a man to stand
naked under a shower of cold water until he convulsed with cold.
More often, prisoners described being stripped of their clothing and
tied to a post or chair. A water line—often a high-pressure re hose
—was turned on the naked prisoner, pounding his skin with intense
pressure and l ing his mouth and nose with torrents of water until
he became convinced he was about to drown.
In the Alabama prison mines where Green Cot enham was now
an inmate, the preferred form of the water cure was simply to lift a
man o his feet and plunge him head rst into a barrel, with his
arms tied or held useless to his sides. Guards or prisoners working
under the supervision of one held the man's furiously kicking feet
to keep the barrel upright until his thrashing subsided—usual y two
to three minutes after being plunged into the liquid. Then the
prisoner was hauled, gasping, out of the bucket, given a few
seconds of air, then plunged down again. Repeated again and again,
virtual y no prisoner could avoid being turned into a shivering,
begging wretch.15
For the hundreds of men who could not endure the physical abuse
or the grinding labor, or who were kil ed by guards and other
prisoners, death brought a final brief journey into the earth. At dead
center of the sprawling Prat Mines complex, facing Smokey Row,
sat an unkempt 1,300-acre triangle of land, hemmed on two sides
by tracks to the three nearest shafts. Here and there, heaps of coal
by tracks to the three nearest shafts. Here and there, heaps of coal
slag and rocky debris jut ed from the ground, amid a helter-skelter
pat ern of shrubby trees. Lit ered randomly among the debris and a
web of muddy footpaths were hundreds of graves—many already
slumping slightly into the earth and overgrown with weeds, many
others stil mounded high from recent burials.
Just outside the fence at Slope No. 12, another burial eld held
the men who died in the newest shaft. In the big cemetery at the
bot om of the hil , a few graves bore simple stones with the names
of free blacks permit ed by TCI to be buried on company land. The
rest—and al the burials outside the new prison at the top of the
slope—were the hastily l ed graves of mine prisoners from
families too poor or forgot en to retrieve the bodies of their dead.16
A few days after Cot enham arrived at Slope No. 12 in April 1908,
the president of U.S. Steel, W. E. Corey, and a contingent of other
top executives from the Pit sburgh headquarters made their rst
visit to inspect the new Alabama properties. There was great
applause in Birmingham for the men whose purchase had saved
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. from nancial ruin. But the
enthusiasm of the city's leaders was tempered by the quiet
recognition that the South's greatest industrial concern had come
under the control of men in Pennsylvania. Whatever ambition there
had been for Alabama's iron and steel industry to eclipse its rivals
in the North was lost. Already, there were rumors that the new
owners were uneasy about the conditions of the prison mine and
the brutality in icted on African Americans there. For the time
being though, lit le would change. Four more convicts died before
the end of the month. Five more in May. Another four in June and
four more in July17 The burial eld at Slope No. 12 quickly began
to fil .
By midsummer, U.S. Steel and other mine owners in Birmingham
were moving toward a bit er climax in their struggle with the
United Mine Workers. Seven thousand free miners were on strike—
United Mine Workers. Seven thousand free miners were on strike—
this time joined by ve hundred free black miners, many of whom
had been brought in as strikebreakers during earlier labor unrest
and had never been welcomed by a union run by white men. Now
hundreds of miners swarmed the entry-ways of the mines, harassing
any workers who entered and threatening to break free convicts as
they moved from the mines to their prison. The homes in Prat City
of some leading company of icials, as wel as miners who continued
to work, were dynamited in the night.
Coal company o cials petitioned the state to break up the strike
with militiamen and hired armed deputies, importing sixty "Texas
sharpshooters" to help defend the mines. To keep operating,
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad and Sloss-She eld pushed
Cot enham and other convict laborers—who had no choice but to
continue working—to excruciating limits. They soon resurrected the
long-abandoned and notorious practice of hiring black work gangs
through white foremen—often farm owners with large groups of
African American tenants under their control. In a practice
reminiscent of the Confederate government's inducements to slave
owners to work mines during the Civil War, white foremen brought
in workers from the countryside and directly supervised them in the
mines. The white "owner" col ected al their wages and paid his
black subjects a fraction of the pay of real miners.18 Trains loaded
with b
lack farmworkers from the Black Belt pul ed into
Birmingham each day—to the hoots and threats of strikers. Al the
while, company labor agents prowled the countryside for more
convicts, encouraging local sheri s to arrest and sel as many more
men as possible.
The specter of black and white miners uni ed against the coal
companies was terrifying to the elite of Birmingham—and across
the South. Mine owners responded with an aggressive campaign to
divide the union along racial lines. A prominent African American
union leader, Wil iam Mil in, was taken from jail and lynched with
the aid of two white deputy sheri s. A week later, another union
miner was hanged from a tree—again by a deputy sheri —after
being accused of dynamiting a company miner's house. Governor
being accused of dynamiting a company miner's house. Governor
Braxton Comer issued orders preparing the state militia to mobilize
and banning strikers from congregating outside mine entrances.19
In the midst of the crisis, on August 2, Cot enham could not
return to his place in the mine. Green had survived ve months at
Slope No. 12. But he had become a shadow of the man arrested
behind the train station in Columbiana. A doctor diagnosed
Cot enham as having syphilis. If the doctor's assessment was correct,
Cot enham almost certainly was already infected at the time of his
arrest in Shelby County. Even in the bacterium's most aggressive
form in a nineteenth-century medical regime without knowledge of
penicil in, syphilis took at least two years to reach Green's mortal y
il condition. In the unsanitary circumstances of the prison mine, the
symptoms of syphilis were exacerbated and sometimes confused
with other maladies. Already, the organism that causes syphilis—a
bacterium called Treponema pal idum—had infected his central
nervous system. The dorsal columns of Cot enham's spinal cord
already were hardening or developing lesions—triggering
excruciating stabbing pains in his legs, rectum, and upper
extremities.
Even for the most fortunate patients, there was no cure for
syphilis in 1908. Doctors gave those who could a ord it doses of
mercury in the belief it fought the progress of the bacteria.
Otherwise, good food and clean surroundings were the only
prescription for extending the vigor of the patient. Cot enham had