That evening, the sound of car engines and metal hitting wood jolted him from a deep sleep. Never leaving his bed, the groggy Adams peered out the window. The street was aglow from two cars’ headlights and a red police light atop one of the cars turning around and around. The other car had a bent chrome bumper that had peeled the bark off the trunk of the chinaberry tree growing at the corner of the house near his bedroom window. That summer, Adams’s mature chinaberry looked like a giant umbrella with yellowish-green leaves, a thick, long, sturdy hardwood trunk, and a hearty root system—the kind of tree that wouldn’t budge when hit by a two-ton, chrome-laden 1950 Chevrolet.
Adams laid his head on the windowsill and watched sleepy-eyed as Cowboy Clark stomped up to the other car and in a hard voice yelled, “Get out, boy.” When the driver hesitated, Clark shouted again, “Get out, boy.” The car door opened, and a young black man stood up. Adams squinted and rocked his head to and fro to make out the face. He recognized the young man standing beside the car as Caliph Washington.
Adams watched Washington and Clark standing silent and motionless. They stood less than a yard apart and stared—one imposing, pale, and erect; the other dark, tall, and lean. During these long, dragged-out moments, there were no sounds except their breathing and the thousands of unseen summer night bugs. “Them fellows didn’t say nothing,” Adams later recalled, no cussing and no fussing. “Didn’t nary a word pass—nary a forceful word. Nothing.”
Finally, Cowboy Clark told Caliph Washington to place his hands over his head. He complied, and the officer then carefully patted down the suspect. When he finished, Clark, in his usual unhurried gait, escorted Washington from the driver’s side of the Chevrolet to the rear of the Lipscomb patrol car and out of Adams’s prone line of sight. Two or three minutes later, Adams heard three gunshots in rapid succession—Bam! Bam! Bam! And like a turtle emerging from a shell, he craned his neck farther out the window to see what had happened.
Fearful, Adams was not about to get out of bed. “I didn’t go,” he remembered. “I say I was scairt [sic], and I ain’t going out there. I ain’t going to be in that mess. I ain’t going out there.”
Washington tried to get in his daddy’s car and go home. From the darkness, someone yelled, “Boy, you get out. You better get from out of that car. You better get away from here. These white folks will kill you.” Caliph left the driver’s door open and ran into the shadows, holding Cowboy Clark’s pearl-handled pistol and flashlight. Adams looked for him. “I didn’t see Caliph no more,” Adams later recalled. “Caliph disappeared, I guess.”
A FEW BLOCKS away, Bessemer policemen Wood and Pace heard a distorted radio call from Cowboy Clark in patrol car number thirteen. “We weren’t able to understand what he was saying,” Wood remembered. “He was shouting in the mic. Apparently he had it too close to his mouth.” Clark never radioed his position, leaving Bessemer patrolmen searching the Dartmouth area for him. Clark made one last radio transmission. “He told us that he’d been shot in the stomach and then he groaned,” Wood said.
Wood and Pace drove the patrol car straight up Fourteenth Street, crossing Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, and Fairfax Avenues; they turned left onto Fairfax and left again on Sixteenth Street and drove back down the alphabet and turned left on Dartmouth. As they crossed Fifteenth Street, Pace thought he saw something to his left down an unpaved alley. Wood made a U-turn and turned right onto the dirt street. Through a veil of thin red dust clinging to the muggy summer air, the officers spotted a flashing red light reflecting off of a whitewashed cinder-block building. It was car number thirteen.
It took almost twenty minutes for Wood and Pace to locate Clark’s patrol car at the 1500 block of Exeter Alley. As they slowly drove up the narrow path, headlights shining, the duo spotted Cowboy Clark on the dirt roadway kneeling like a drunkard in prayer. He was on the passenger side of the car—his head and left arm resting on the vinyl-covered front bench seat and the microphone a hand-length away. Wood stopped the car, radioed their position, and both officers rushed over to Clark. “He was in extreme pain,” Wood later remembered. “His legs were continuously thrashing—just like a chicken that had been killed. We could hardly hold him.”
Clark tried to say something to Wood and Pace, but they couldn’t make out his pained, mumbled words. The two officers took a removable seat cushion and a long piece of cardboard from Clark’s car and placed them in the dirt next to the open door. As if in slow motion, they eased Clark onto the makeshift pallet, then knelt beside him and spoke comforting words.
From his crouched position, Wood looked through the dusty haze illuminated only by the glow of headlights and saw a crowd of black faces gathered in the shadows, some standing on John Adams’s front porch. Within a few minutes, an ambulance and several other Bessemer police cars arrived on the scene. The ambulance driver and officers Pace and Wood helped place Clark on a stretcher and load him into the vehicle. The ambulance rushed off, with Pace and Wood following behind in their patrol car, to Bessemer General Hospital—a poorly equipped, outdated, and understaffed facility that looked more like a run-down three-story apartment building than a hospital.
One of the nurses on duty that night in the emergency room was Dorothy Burroughs, the wife of G. W., Clark’s former employer at the Gulf gas station. When the ambulance crew rolled the gurney with Clark’s blood-soaked body into one of the cramped examination rooms, the ER doctor declared him dead on arrival. Nurse Burroughs covered his body with a white sheet and went to the nearest phone and dialed Hamilton 5-3925. She said to her husband as he answered: “G. W., Cowboy Clark is laying up here dead at the hospital. Someone shot him down.” Just like in the lyrics of “The Cowboy’s Lament,” Cowboy Clark had passed on:
Go bring me a cup, a cup of cold water,
To cool my parched lips,” the cowboy said;
Before I turned, the spirit had left him
And gone to its Giver—the cowboy was dead.
Across town, Caliph Washington was still running in the darkness. He dashed through the cornfield behind John Adams’s house, scaled a chicken-wire fence, and jumped into the drainage ditch where Fifteenth Street came to an abrupt dead end. He climbed out of the ditch near Exeter Avenue, ran to Sixteenth Street, and climbed the steep grade to Brickyard Hill. At some point in the early morning hours, he slipped back down the hill and traveled north to the area around the Pullman Train Car Plant and the home of his acquaintance Elijah Honeycutt, who lived at 2803 Arlington Avenue. Between 2 and 2:30 a.m., Washington knocked on the screen door and awakened Honeycutt and his girlfriend, Rosie Merritt.
“Who is it?” a groggy Honeycutt yelled. “Caliph,” a voice answered. “Caliph who?” he asked.
“Caliph Washington.”
Honeycutt sat on the side of the bed for a few minutes, yawning and rubbing his eyes. When he opened the door, the young man asked, “Don’t you remember me?” He told him yes and asked what was wrong.
Washington explained that his car had broken down, and he needed a ride over to Travellick. Honeycutt and his girlfriend dressed and drove Caliph over to the western edge of Birmingham. It all seemed like a dream for the foggy-minded Honeycutt, and he later barely remembered driving him. “Well, we left there and went straight over the hill there,” he recalled. “We went around and down one road, and I don’t know, we come up on the one and then we done come up the other road.”
When they got up to a deserted area of Travellick, Honeycutt pulled the car over at the entrance to a dark dirt road heading up along the slopes of Red Mountain. Washington said, “I’ll get out here.” He thanked them for the ride and told the couple, “I’ll see you,” and disappeared into the darkness.
Washington hid in the dense, kudzu-infested woods near the Wenonah Iron Ore Mines that clung to the side of the mountain. July in Alabama was no time to be sleeping out in the woods. The night was warm, humid, and clear; a waning moon cast shadows through the tall pines and hardwood trees; no comforting wind could be
found; countless bugs made a symphony of sounds. All this only added to the horror of Washington’s hellish quandary. He was scared, confused, and alone. He spent a fitful night going over and over, again and again, the deadly events of just a few hours before. He knew not what to do.
At some point during the day that Friday, he hiked out of the woods and walked over to Robert Shields’s house on Park Avenue. Dirty, sweaty, tired, and hungry, he knocked on the door. When Shields opened it, he saw Caliph, still wearing his pleated black dress pants and dirty white sport shirt. Caliph Washington recounted the entire incident to a stunned Robert Shields. “I need your help,” he meekly asked. Shields and his mother gave the weary young man two ham sandwiches and a clean shirt. Washington then walked back in the Wenonah woods and hid the rest of the day.
CALIPH WASHINGTON WAS not the only American hiding that Friday, July 12, 1957. Across the country, citizens in more than one hundred cities prepared to take shelter during Operation Alert 1957, the annual program for preparing citizens and government for the “real thing”—an “imaginary torrent of nuclear death and destruction.” Near 10 a.m. that morning, civil defense sirens echoed throughout Birmingham and Bessemer, warning of an immediate nuclear attack. Enemy planes—presumably Soviet—were flying south from Canada and carrying hydrogen bombs five times more powerful than the one that had hit Hiroshima almost twelve years before. Civil defense officials warned citizens to take cover immediately. Washington, undoubtedly, heard the sirens.
At 1:58 p.m. the imaginary bomb “exploded” at the intersection of Vanderbilt Road and the Southern Railroad Tracks in North Birmingham. An Alabama newspaper reported that the “theoretical” blast “gouged out the heart of the city” by severely damaging buildings and leaving the streets impassible. The faux nuclear holocaust rained down “a shower of death-dealing radioactive particles,” civil defense officials supposed. Yet local observers predicted the death of only 2,100 people, the injury of 11,000 more, and the survival of over 80 percent of the population—exaggerated numbers for an imaginary scenario to protect the public from the harsh realities of a nuclear war.
The next day, Saturday morning, staying alive remained Caliph Washington’s top priority. He walked to a small grocery store and bought a pack of cigarettes, a cold drink, a block of cheese, and a slice of cake. Just outside the door was a newspaper rack stuffed with the morning’s Post-Herald. If the fugitive had stopped to look at the paper, he would have seen a half-page spread devoted to James B. “Cowboy” Clark and his death. Large photographs showed the crime scene and investigators sifting through evidence. A picture of Cowboy Clark revealed a broad somber face, a small thick-lipped mouth, a prominent jaw, cold dark eyes, and a too-tight collar on his police uniform. Just below was Caliph Washington’s picture, an unflattering police mug shot from 1955 with his head in bandages. To the right of Clark’s and Washington’s photos was a heart-tugging picture of Clark’s sorrowful widow and his two fatherless stepdaughters.
The story of the incident was uncomplicated. Early Friday morning, James Clark had been shot “near the heart” and found dying alongside his patrol car in Bessemer. The shooting had taken place in the 1500 block of Exeter Alley in Bessemer. Residents of the community told police they heard cars speeding around the area before they heard three gunshots. An intensive manhunt was under way for a Negro in connection with the officer’s fatal shooting. The fugitive was Caliph Washington, and Bessemer police warned that the suspect was armed and dangerous.
That Saturday evening, Washington once again walked down to Robert Shields’s house. He asked Shields’s stepfather, Tommy Lee Silmon, to drive him to his cousin’s house in Adamsville, a small municipality on the Memphis Highway northwest of Birmingham. “What kind of trouble you in?” Silmon asked, and Caliph recounted the incident with the police officer. He pulled a shiny nickel-plated pistol from a brown paper sack and said, “That was the police’s gun.”
Silmon looked at the gun and then glared at Caliph and said, “That officer is dead.”
Washington sat in cold silence. He understood that a black man involved in the killing of a white man—whether by accident or not—would bring a swift and harsh reprisal in the Jim Crow South. Washington’s own living memory bespoke the horrors of violating the code of racial justice. Almost all black families in the South, an observer noted, had a story of an ancestor who “come up missing” and “vanished into that empty place—the rural crossroads or rail siding, the bayou or jail cell—where the white South at times sought to resolve its most intractable ‘problem.’” When Washington was a little boy, as the family told the story, a maternal uncle left home one evening bound for a community dance. He never returned. At the hands of persons unknown, he was chained to railroad tracks along an isolated stretch of the Alabama Great Southern Railroad. When an AGS locomotive came roaring out of Meridian, Mississippi, bound for Birmingham and then on to Chattanooga, the giant iron wheels sliced his body into tiny pieces.
Caliph Washington feared an equally violent death from Bessemer vigilantes. He had to get out. He had to put distance between himself and the brutal white establishment in Bessemer. “I left,” he later recalled, “because I knew what they would probably do.” He decided that his only opportunity for freedom and safety was to leave Alabama and get to his brother Wilbert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But how? He needed help and his options were few.
Washington again asked Silmon to drive him to Adamsville. He said no. “I’m too drunk,” he told Caliph. Silmon had been drinking most of the day, and the short, wiry man could not hold his liquor. “I was scared to go that far away,” he later explained. “You see, my tires wasn’t no good, and then I was drinking anyway. When I am drinking, I don’t drive my own car.”
Washington and Silmon both later claimed that a stranger drove the pair out to Adamsville in a late-model Ford sedan. According to their account, when Silmon refused to give Washington a ride, the fugitive walked out of Silmon’s house and stood on the front porch. As he contemplated his predicament, he claimed that he spotted a man working under the hood of a Ford sedan. “I don’t know this fellow’s name,” Caliph later recalled. “I seen him up the road there and I done asked him” to drive me to Adamsville. He offered to pay for the ride, and the two men climbed into the car and drove down the street and picked up Silmon. The promise of more beer convinced a drunken Silmon to ride in the car. “I don’t know who he was because I didn’t ask him,” Silmon remembered. “He asked me to come on and go up there. He knew there was a beer joint up there, and he was going to buy some more beer.”
It was after 9 p.m. when they arrived at the Adamsville home of Caliph Washington’s one-eyed cousin, Earnest Cross, and his wife Hattie. Cross was a seventy-two-year-old retired coal miner, and although illiterate, he spied Caliph’s picture in the Saturday evening paper and realized that the lad was in serious trouble. As he exited the car, Washington handed either Silmon or the unnamed driver three dollars and said thanks and goodbye. Cousin Earnest, who saw only one person in the car besides Caliph, stood in the doorway and welcomed the troubled young man into his home as the car sped away.
Inside the house, Washington clutched a crumpled brown paper sack and recounted the incident with the policeman. As he told the story, he reached into the bag and pulled out a shiny pistol to show Cross. The old man grew concerned and his mind drifted. “I got scared then,” he remembered. “I don’t know hardly what he did say.” When he snapped out of his haze, he realized the dangers of having the fugitive in his home. He picked up the telephone and called Fred Patterson, who lived nearby in the old Alden mining camp, and arranged for Washington to spend the night.
After taking Washington over to Patterson’s house, Cross devised a plan to get his cousin out of state and on the road to New Mexico under the guise of a fishing trip, but he needed help from someone with a car more reliable than his old oil-burning Buick. Cross also believed a car filled with black men gone fishing would attract less attention
than two people taking a drive; there would also be support if they ran into trouble. He turned to two reliable friends, Zack Graham, who owned a trusty dark green Studebaker, and Grover Pearson.
Early Sunday morning before 7 a.m., the men tied four fishing poles to the top of the Studebaker and placed tackle boxes in the floorboard. They drove over to Patterson’s house and picked up Washington, who was clean shaven that morning and wearing a mismatched assortment of borrowed clothes. The crowning touch was a well-used, ill-fitting fuzzy gray fedora that he could pull down low over his eyes.
It was a hazy July Alabama morning as the group drove northwest on U.S. 78 toward the Mississippi border. They passed Walker County coalfields around Carbon Hill and Texas. At Guin in Marion County, they turned southwest on U.S. 278, passing through Beaverton and Crews before exiting the state after Sulligent. They entered Mississippi at Gattman, and the road turned north to Amory—a sleepy railroad town near the banks of the Tombigbee River. If traveling by rail, Amory marked the halfway point, approximately 125 miles, between Birmingham and Memphis. In 1887, when executives from the Kansas City, Memphis & Birmingham Railroad decided to build a new rail line from Memphis to Birmingham, they drew an X on the map at the exact center of the route and sold land for a new settlement named after railroad tycoon Harcourt Amory.
Around 10 a.m. on July 14, Cross, Pearson, Graham, and Washington arrived in Amory, at a time when most good citizens of the quiet hamlet were attending church services. They drove along the town’s empty wide avenues and parked near the Greyhound bus stop located at a small city diner. Washington handed Grover Pearson a handful of cash, and he walked inside and bought the fugitive a bus ticket to Memphis. When the bus pulled up in front of the diner and opened its doors, Graham started the Studebaker and pulled to the curb behind the bus. Washington jumped out of the car, handed the driver the ticket, boarded the bus, and walked to the back as mandated by law and custom. The other three men left Amory, driving south toward Aberdeen.
He Calls Me by Lightning Page 6