Water Tossing Boulders

by Adrienne Berard

  Its furrowed fields tugged at a piece of Brewer’s history, a time in his life very few people knew or understood. The soil stirred memories of a young man, barely sixteen, a burlap pick sack strapped to his shoulders, harvesting cotton in the blistering heat of a Delta summer. He was alone and a long way from home, far from that small plot of farmland on a hillside in Carroll County, the place where Brewer was raised.

  Brewer was born in the blaze of August in a single-story farmhouse in Midway, Mississippi, in 1869. His father, Ratliff Rodney Brewer, was a captain in the Confederate Army. After the war, tired and defeated, Ratliff returned home to his wife, Lizzie, on an old mule he borrowed from a Union soldier. Their war-ravaged cabin looked nothing like the home he had left just years before. Lizzie comforted Ratliff with the promise that they would rebuild, and the two began to farm again as they prepared for the birth of their first child, Eloise. After Eloise came Earl, their first son, then Claude, Helen, King Ratliff, who died in infancy, John Dodridge, and baby Melinda, better known as Mel.

  As the eldest son, Brewer was taught by his father to work the land. Together they raised alfalfa, crimson, and red clover hay. They planted and harvested crops of corn and peas and beans. They raised and slaughtered hogs. Brewer learned to feel the pulse of the seasons. The family survived on what the soil gave them, their vitality and purpose rooted in the earth beneath their bare feet.

  In the fall of 1881 Ratliff became ill and died soon after. Brewer was twelve years old. He buried his father in the same land the man had taught him to till. After his father’s death, Brewer assumed the responsibility of the household, raising extra crops to pay off the family’s debt on the property. Brewer’s younger brother Claude was of age to farm, but walked with a crutch and was too weak to perform hard labor. So Brewer farmed the land with his mother, who taught him passages from the Bible as they worked. Brewer would later say it was his mother who proved to be the greatest influence on his life. He would quote her in courtrooms as often as he quoted the law.

  By 1884, at the age of fifteen, Brewer had managed to pay off all the debt on the farm. When his older sister, Eloise, married, bringing her new husband to live with the family, Brewer asked his mother’s permission to leave home. The widow told her young son to travel, to broaden his understanding of the world, to see if he could get an education for himself. Unable to bear the pain of saying goodbye to his siblings, especially his brother Claude, Brewer snuck away early one morning before daybreak. He wandered west toward the Delta, eventually reaching a bend in the Mississippi River known as Friar’s Point.

  Two years earlier, a violent storm had caused the levee there to burst open, flooding a vast region of Delta farmland. The break was the result of heavy rains that had lasted for more than five months, causing over a hundred similar breaks in levees throughout the Mississippi River valley. Water inundated twenty-two thousand square miles of alluvial plain and displaced a population of over four hundred thousand people.

  Destitute, without homes and land to farm, thousands of people across the flooded region made appeals to the federal government for aid. On August 2, 1882, the US Congress gave the Mississippi River Commission its first federal funding. The River and Harbor Act appropriated $4.1 million for improvements of the river’s levee system, of which an estimated $155,000 was allocated to build thirty-four miles of levee between Friar’s Point and Sunflower, Mississippi.

  Arriving at Friar’s Point in the summer of 1884, Brewer quickly found work repairing the levee for a small monthly salary.

  The brutality of levee work deeply affected the young man. During the late nineteenth century, the majority of the levees in the Lower Mississippi valley were built by means of the convict leasing system. Under that system, black men and women, working in chains, under the crack of a bullwhip, were forced to haul dirt, trees, and stones to form the new embankments.

  For months, the fifteen-year-old farmboy moved great mounds of earth alongside prisoners, many of whom were worked to death, their bodies buried in the very levees they built. After that first summer, Brewer asked Thomas Aderholdt, his overseer, if there was other work to be had in the county.

  Aderholdt offered Brewer a job picking cotton on his family’s farm in Friar’s Point. Brewer was a fast worker and was soon gathering bolls by the hundreds. If he awoke before dawn and worked until nightfall, he could earn decent enough wages, more than he’d earned on the levee. As Brewer bowed to collect the bolls, knotting his fingers between sharp pods of cotton, he swore to himself that he would one day return to this place a wealthy man, that he would own some of the Delta for himself.

  When spring came, Brewer drifted west. He worked at a sawmill in Arkansas and herded cattle on a ranch in Texas. Then, in 1887, his sister’s husband died, and Brewer returned home to once again work the farm with his mother. For five years he cared for his family. Then, at the age of twenty-three, he borrowed $400 from a local storekeeper and enrolled in a two-year law course at the University of Mississippi. He completed the degree in six and a half months.

  In 1893 Brewer opened a law practice in Water Valley, Mississippi, with his classmate Julian Wilson. Water Valley served as the local headquarters of the Illinois Central Railroad, a powerful corporation that wielded a monopoly over the state’s transportation system. As Mississippi’s largest cotton freighter, the company’s interests generally coincided with those of most Delta politicians, to the detriment of rail line laborers seeking better working conditions and wages from their employer. By locating their practice in Water Valley, Brewer and Wilson became the primary legal advocates for thousands of Mississippi rail workers and their families.

  Realizing the limits of what he could accomplish as a lawyer, Brewer decided to run for the state legislature. He billed himself as a candidate who could not be bought, and charged the political leadership of the Delta with corruption, claiming that it had allowed the Illinois Central to avoid paying taxes by falsifying state records, assessing the company’s value at $11 million when it was really worth $58.5 million. Brewer also took on the railroad, accusing its executives of using physical intimidation and bribery to gain favorable treatment from politicians and the press.

  Brewer’s bold campaign proved successful, and in 1895 he was elected to the Mississippi State Senate. During his first year in politics, Brewer married Minnie Marion Block, a high school student from Water Valley. Ten months after the wedding, their first child was born, a daughter named after her mother and grandmother, Minnie Elizabeth. When Minnie was three years old, Brewer was appointed district attorney for Mississippi’s newly created Eleventh District in Coahoma County. He moved his family to Clarksdale and bought a house at 41 John Street, where they would reside for another thirty years.

  In 1911 Brewer decided to run for governor. He was unopposed in the Democratic primary, and easily won the governorship in the 1912 election. Newspapers scoffed at the “barefoot ploughboy from Carroll County” who had been raised by a single mother and worked on the levees and in the fields with Negroes. He advocated stronger labor laws and railed against corporate wealth. If ever there was an outsider in Mississippi politics, it was Earl Brewer. Only now, he was the state’s governor.

  During his inaugural address, Brewer set his sights on a complete moral reform of the state, to outlaw drinking and gambling, to raise the age of consent, to adopt labor laws that protected women and ensured collective-bargaining rights for industrial workers. But the real reform, the one that was closest to his heart, was not mentioned in his speech. Brewer, haunted by ghosts from his childhood, planned to reform the state penitentiary system. In a silent, radical pact, Brewer vowed to abolish convict leasing.

  By the time Brewer took office in January 1912, Mississippi prison inmates had been used to build public works for nearly half a century. Following Emancipation, the Mississippi legislature passed a series of acts known collectively as the Black Codes. The laws, copied in half a dozen other Southern states, listed specific crimes
applicable to the “free negro” alone, such as: “mischief,” “insulting gestures,” and intermarriage with whites, which carried the penalty of “confinement in the State penitentiary for life.”

  At the heart of the codes was the Vagrancy Act, which guaranteed planters a continued supply of black labor by requiring that “all free negroes and mulattoes over the age of eighteen” carry written proof of employment. Those found to be “vagrants” were fined fifty dollars. If they could not afford the fee, the ex-slaves worked off their fine picking cotton, scrubbing floors, and hauling lumber. The new laws ensured that the region’s Negro population remained in chains, as every offense against a white citizen became an offense against the state.

  “In slavery times,” one freedman recalled, “jails was all built for the white folks. There warn’t never nobody of my color put in none of them. . . . They had to work; when they done wrong they was whipped and let go.” Following Emancipation, the pattern was reversed. Free from the bonds of slavery, thousands of men and women across the South entered the criminal justice system.

  Mississippi’s first Negro convicts were put to work building track, but as the railroad boom trailed off in the mid-1880s, most convicts were transferred to the emerging Yazoo Delta to clear land and build levees and infrastructure for future cotton plantations.

  It was this state-sponsored resurrection of slavery that the fifteen-year-old Brewer encountered at Friar’s Point as a levee worker in the spring of 1884. And it was the atrocities of the convict leasing system he witnessed firsthand that stayed with him. Men who tried to escape were “whipped ’till the blood ran down their legs” and returned to the chain gang with metal spurs riveted to their feet to keep them from running. Laborers collapsed from sunstroke, dysentery, and gunshot wounds. They died from exhaustion, from malaria, from consumption. They died from the very chains that bound them, from shackle poisoning caused by the constant rubbing of leg irons against bare flesh.

  “It is not the shame or the hard labor to which we object,” wrote a levee worker from Okolona, Mississippi, in 1884. “It is the slow torturous death inflicted by the demonic-like contractor who takes us to the Yazoo Delta to ‘wear our lives away.’ It is fearful, it is dreadful, it is damnable.”

  In 1904, shortly after Brewer was appointed Clarksdale’s district attorney, a Democrat named James Kimble Vardaman was elected governor. Just prior to Vardaman’s election, the state legislature had purchased more than twenty thousand acres of Delta farmland in Brewer’s neighboring Sunflower County. Once in office, Vardaman oversaw the construction of a prison on the site. The convicts would be worked almost exclusively for the production of cotton. He created the post of penitentiary superintendent to manage the expansive penal farm. The superintendent lived in a Victorian mansion beside the cotton fields and was referred to by convicts as “master.”

  Vardaman’s farm, which he named Parchman, was soon generating more revenue than any other state institution. But no government regulation accompanied the rapid increase in the production of state cotton. When Brewer came into office in 1912, thousands of bales of cotton were being sold to foreign markets, as trustees of the state penal board pocketed the profits. Brewer’s first move as governor was to conduct a thorough investigation of Parchman and the state’s penitentiary system.

  Once rumors began to spread about the investigation, the president of the prison board, C. C. Smith, threatened Brewer. He warned the governor that if he did not drop the case, the Democratic Party would crush him. When Brewer pushed forward with the investigation, Smith made good on his word. The legislature held an emergency meeting and refused to allocate funds for the investigative committee. Unmoved, Brewer continued to finance the investigation through his own private accounts.

  In August 1912 he traveled to Europe and spent a month tracking the sale of state cotton to firms across the Atlantic. When he returned, Brewer had gathered enough evidence to charge C. C. Smith with embezzlement. As the case went to trial that fall, Brewer received a series of death threats. One was particularly jarring. It warned Brewer to keep an eye on his third and youngest daughter, Claudia, who was attending elementary school in Jackson. Claudia was assigned a bodyguard, a convict named Henry Trott, who worked in the mansion. “For over a year, a trusty negro convict accompanied me,” Claudia recalled, “everywhere I went.”

  In times of great struggle, Brewer turned to his faith for guidance. He knelt by his bedside each morning and called to his daughters. Together, they prayed. “Ere we leave our room this morning, we shall think to pray and sue for loving favor as our shield today.”

  Smith’s eventual conviction was hardly a victory for Brewer. He was fighting for a greater cause, for divine justice. Such an aim would require personal suffering, the suffering of the righteous for their faith. He was waging a battle that would test his very creed. “I beg to thank you for your very interesting letter,” Brewer wrote a friend in Coldwater, Mississippi. “And note what you say as how many matters have come to vex me lately. Since you mention Job and how near he came to giving up the fight, you will remember that in the end he was greatly prospered. I am in the penitentiary fight to stay until it is over and my only desire is see every guilty man punished and all innocent men exonerated.”

  Brewer questioned the legality of the prison-labor system. He wrote to the state’s attorney general on April 3, 1913, to ask “whether the Board of Trustees of the penitentiary can work the State convicts on the levees of the Mississippi River.” He wanted it to be unlawful, to be condemned, to be stopped. He wanted the penitentiary board to pay for sins they had committed in the name of progress, in the name of the state. Instead, Brewer received a response as heartless as the acts he had witnessed on the levee.

  “The board of trustees have full power to place convicts on the levees,” wrote the attorney general, Ross A. Collins, “provided they do not keep them there for such a length of time as would prevent the proper cultivation and growing of a crop, and under the condition that they shall be under State management. It is my opinion that the board of trustees has the power to send as many convicts as the necessity requires, subject to the conditions above.”

  By the summer of 1913, Brewer, with the help of the William J. Burns Detective Agency of New Orleans, was able to prosecute eight prison officials on charges of thievery, graft, and embezzlement. Despite the convictions, Brewer’s fight was far from over. He came into the investigation with one singular goal and he would not stop until it was accomplished. He was determined to end the cruel abuse of convicts in Mississippi.

  “It is freely predicted that the scandal has far from reached a climax,” read an article announcing the convictions. “Governor Brewer has headed the investigation and brought charges before grand juries. . . . He now is investigating stories of serious conditions at the State prison farms.”

  Since beginning the investigation, Brewer had spent most of his time questioning cotton buyers. He visited foreign firms and tracked cotton bales from Memphis to London. He spoke regularly with wealthy planters and statesmen, but rarely did Brewer interact with the prisoners themselves.

  On February 12, 1914, Brewer left his office inside the Capitol to spend the day interviewing prisoners at Parchman farm. He was joined by Dan Lehon, the southern district manager of the Burns Detective Agency and several of his associates. On that cold morning in February, Brewer understood that the board’s greatest crime was not theft, but brutality.

  The Parchman interviews lasted late into the day. Investigators spoke with commissary clerks, reverends, doctors, and prison workers. They learned how the farm functioned, how rules were enforced, how secrets were kept. “He held a gun in one hand and strapped me with the other,” one inmate told the detectives. “I says, what made you whip me? . . . And he says, well, you talked to that god damned committee.”

  At 3:25 in the afternoon, Brewer met an aging inmate named J. G. Bennett. Bennett began the interview by making small talk with one of the inves
tigators named Detective Johnson. Then Johnson asked about the routines on the farm, the seasons, the crops, and Bennett’s tone changed, as if a stone had settled inside him.

  “The day before Thanksgiving would be picking day,” Bennett began. “And [the cotton] would be weighed on Thanksgiving morning.”

  Johnson asked Bennett to tell him about the man doing the weighing, a farm manager appointed by the board named Mr. Stubblefield.

  “He whipped nine men for not picking 150 pounds,” Bennett responded, describing Stubblefield. “He whipped everybody . . .”

  “What time of year was that?” Johnson asked.

  “That was Thanksgiving Day.”

  Brewer needed to uncover evidence that would point to the theft of state cotton, so the detectives interviewed one of the farm’s bookkeepers. The sergeant, who had been keeping a partial record of the board’s affairs, testified that he did in fact have evidence, but all of his books were kept at his house outside the farm. The detectives requested he return with the records on a future date. The sergeant agreed. That night, at his home, he lit a fire. Then he systematically tore the leaves from every file and cast them into the flames. When all of the records were burned, the bookkeeper committed suicide.

  As Brewer closed out his term as governor, he was left with the burden of his failure. Every man he convicted was eventually pardoned. The penitentiary system was no more regulated than when he first took office. Brewer had always lived his life according to the belief that true righteousness rested in the rule of law. He read the Bible and the legal code in tandem, as though one could not exist without the other. “Zion will be redeemed with justice,” God told the people of Jerusalem.