The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  De Soto rode through it searching for treasure, massacring its people, demanding at every village to know where he could find gold. “To the west,” the people always said, to keep him on the march, to get rid of him, till he died disappointed on the Mississippi.

  But the whites kept coming, for timber, for bottomland, for coal and ore buried in the hills. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, the land west of the state of Georgia and east of the Choctaw lands of Mississippi was known as the Alabama frontier. Some of these men, too, had dreams of empire, but most of them had nothing at all.

  They were bony and callused and their clothing fit them like feed sacks tied to crossed broom handles. They had carrot-colored and sandy hair and fair skin that burned red in summer, and looked out from blue eyes that swam with suffering and suspicion. Their only birthright was stoop labor, and their class was stitched like patches across the generations, in Scotland, Ireland, the poorhouses of England, and the ever-crowding land in the American East. Most of them had never been inside a school, but they told stories of famine, leaky ships, selfish lords and debtors’ prison, quoted a Bible they had never read, and were raised from birth to believe that black is the true color of a rich man’s heart.

  At night, they beat Irish drums, tooted tin whistles and plucked dulcimers as they danced across dirt floors, and sang in lilting, tragic voice of lost homes, lost love and lost wars. They served crowns and toffs and top hats who ordered them into cannon fire for a few pieces of silver, and barely set foot in the red dirt before they marched off to fight for Andy Jackson and the land speculators in the Indian wars. No one told them that, once all the red men were gone, they still could not afford what the land would cost at federal auction.

  The gentry called them clay eaters behind their backs, free men without property in a time of human bondage, of less value than a slave. But they cleaved to their cracked, flawed democracy, voted for the populists who told the sweetest lies, and danced on the air, legs kicking, when the deprivations of class forced them to take a respectable man’s hog, cow or purse. There is little photographic record of them and they left few letters or diaries, but look into the faces of the people of the mill villages, and you will find them there.

  Look even deeper, and you will see the ghosts of a people who were here before.

  I have done the white people all the harm I could.

  —CHIEF RED EAGLE OF THE CREEK NATION

  (from Inside Alabama by Harvey H. Jackson III)

  The men were called Red Sticks, from the paint on their war clubs. They carried iron-forged tomahawks and muskets, wore flowing capes and parson-like coats over soft buckskin and wrapped their hair in turbans. The women, regal cheekbones framing eyes like slivers of coal, wore their lustrous black hair loose to the waist. Part of a confederacy of tribes that coexisted with whites for a generation, they were not nomads. They built cabins and hoped to live in them a lifetime, and for twenty years they signed treaties, trading land for lies. As British warships set sail for America in what would be the War of 1812, the Red Sticks declared their own war on the United States.

  A bloody saga played out in places like Burnt Corn and Holy Ground. The Creeks left settlers dead in squalid, smoking cabins and on muddy trails, as white militia killed whole villages. Enraged by the massacres, Chief Red Eagle and 700 warriors surrounded Fort Mims, a settlement on the Alabama River, and killed 340 militia, women and children. In the North, newspapers ran lurid accounts, and the destruction of a people was begun.

  In Tennessee, Jackson raised an army and rode south into the frontier, collecting fighting men along the way, resting awhile at a trading post called Drayton, on the edge of hostile land. It was a beautiful place, a green place with good water in the foothills of the Appalachians, and some of the men said they would come back here to farm, once the Indians were killed.

  From there Jackson pushed south into the heart of Creek land, fighting as he went, and backed the last Red Sticks into a crook of the Tallapoosa called Horseshoe Bend. On March 27, 1814, he attacked 1,000 warriors with 2,600 white soldiers, 500 Cherokee and 100 friendly Creeks. His Indian allies swam the river and stole the Red Sticks’ canoes, loaded them with troops and set a torch to the village, burning men, women and children alive. As it burned, Jackson ordered a drumroll and sent his force on a direct assault of the breastwork that guarded land access to the stronghold. This, according to a National Parks Service account of the battle, is what happened next:

  A slaughter. European American soldiers and their Creek allies killed as many Red Sticks as possible. They set fire to a heap of timber the peninsula’s defenders had hidden behind; when the Red Sticks emerged, they were immediately shot down. The bloodshed continued until dark; the next morning another 16 Creek, found hidden under the banks, were killed. In the end, 557 warriors died on the battlefield, and an estimated 250 to 300 more drowned or were shot trying to cross the river.

  The river ran red for a mile.

  The genocide of a nation all but complete, Red Eagle rode into Jackson’s camp.

  “How dare you?” Jackson said.

  “General Jackson, I am not afraid of you,” Red Eagle answered. “You can kill me if you wish. I have come to beg you to send for the women and children, who are starving in the woods. I am now through fighting.” (From Know Alabama: An Elementary History by Frank Lawrence Owsley, Jr., John Craig Stewart, and Gordon T. Chappell.)

  Jackson rode his military victories into the presidency. He ignored treaties that set aside land for Southern tribes, and ordered the removal of the tribes—even many of his Creek and Cherokee allies. Starving, freezing, dying on the way, they walked to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, on the Trail of Tears.

  In 1832, an old chief named Ladiga signed away the last of the Creek land at the Treaty of Cusseta in Washington, but was given title to his homestead, which included Jackson’s old camp on the campaign south, the picturesque Drayton. In 1833, Ladiga sold it to a land speculator for $2,000, and left. The little trading post of Drayton would become a cultural and business center on the frontier. In 1834, to honor the man who opened the land to expansion, a grateful citizenry changed the hamlet’s name to Jacksonville.

  But even after Horseshoe Bend and the Trail of Tears, enough of a beaten people remained, drop by red drop, to color the heritage of this place, and the imaginations of little boys who ran whooping through pines with chicken feathers in their hair. If you ask old people in the mill village if they have Indian blood in them, they will tell you they are an eighth Indian, or a sixteenth, and show you faded photographs of their great-great-grandmothers or-grandfathers, of high cheekbones, hooked noses, hair like ink, and say with great pride that “she was almost full” or “he was pure, I believe.” I always thought the Indian blood in us was Cherokee, but that was unlikely, said my father’s kin. More likely, on his side at least, it was Creek, from a far-back place in the mountains called Pinhook. But even if there was no other evidence, it is there, in my father’s face, a blue-eyed white man in the county ledger, but as much war whoop as Rebel yell.

  I pledge you my word. I’ve never heard such a cry for bread in my life. If anything can be done, for God’s sake, do it quickly…This is no panic, but real hunger that punishes the people.

  —W.B. COOPER, a prominent citizen in Jacksonville during the Civil War, writing to Governor Lewis E. Parsons for help for women who roamed the streets of the town to beg for food (from Poor but Proud by historian Wayne Flynt)

  The next war, the rich man’s war, starved them. In Jacksonville, the citizens were split over the idea of secession, but a majority, urged on by the increasingly affluent planter class, would favor it. In the prewar excitement, the name of the county was even changed to erase the shame of being named for antisecessionist senator Thomas Hart Benton. It was renamed Calhoun, to honor John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who had threatened to cane a colleague in Washington who opposed a state’s right to choose its destiny.

  When the war
was still new, the Tenth Alabama Regiment gathered on the steps of the brick courthouse in Jacksonville, where ladies of the town presented officers with a hand-sewn standard they would carry into battle. “It was made of blue satin,” wrote one of the ladies, Carolyn Woodward, in her diary, reprinted in a history of Jacksonville commissioned by the First National Bank. “On one side was painted a cotton plant bearing fifteen bolls. At its topmost branch was a crown.” They chose the cotton boll because they believed the town’s future was bound to it, the sovereign under which they all served. The sharecroppers marched away to hurrahs in one of the true oddities of Southern history, to die to preserve a way of life closed to them. It is hard to explain that to Northerners, hard to explain why, a century and a half later, poor men still fly the Confederate battle flag from rusted pickup trucks. It is hard to explain that, for some men, the fight, not the cause, is what they have.

  The cannon and the dysentery took the men who worked the fields, so crops failed and farms failed, and the state sold the farms at auction, sometimes for just a few dollars in back taxes. In 1864, four years in, the families of Confederate soldiers were starving. Troops, many fighting a hopeless war without shoes, began to desert.

  The upper classes were still fighting it, across teacups, as the centuries changed. The Confederate on our square was erected forty-five years after the war ended, paid for by the General John H. Forney Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The inscription reads:

  Times change, men often change with them, principles, never. Let none of the Survivors of These men offer in their behalf the Penitential Plea, “They believed they were right.” Be it ours to Transmit to Posterity our Unequivocal Confidence in the Righteousness of the Cause for which these men died.

  For destitute and landless farmers, jobless laborers and wandering freedmen, the war would never end. Between Lee’s surrender and the turn of a new century, they would endure unrelenting poverty that left them reliant on government doles of corn, meal and salt until they surrendered to a life as day laborers who owned no property and had no future. They sent letters to the capitol in Montgomery begging for seed corn. As poor whites and blacks fought over the scraps, hatefulness grew. It was always blamed on color but just as surely was a by-product of a desperate competition for a place in society, any place except last.

  The term “one-crop mule” came into use. It meant that tenant farmers could not afford a mule that was expected to live more than a season. Starved, blind or staggering, the mules wobbled down the rows, a whole family’s hopes resting on whether they could stay upright long enough to break ground in one essential field. When they went down, desperate men cussed them up again, whipped them with chains, built fires against their bellies, or just pulled at the reins, man against dying brute, until the leather snapped in their hands.

  It was about then that my father’s father emerged from the mountains as if from some bleak fairy tale. In the mountain enclave of Pinhook, at the turn of the twentieth century, time had stood still. The farmers, loggers and cotton pickers of the valleys were tame and gentle people compared to the ones who lived higher up and deeper back, in squalid one-room shacks and lean-tos surrounded by families dressed in smut and rags. They wore loaded pistols down the front of their greasy britches and loaded shotguns with bent nails. They came to town once or twice a year to buy sugar, yeast and meal and packed bust-head liquor down the hillsides on mules. They lived in poverty but independence, a community of half-breeds, poor whites, poachers, hog farmers, fatherless children, wanted men, and unwanted women.

  One of them, a woman named Frankie Bragg, dragged fallen logs into the clearing around her windowless cabin and piled them into massive, popping bonfires, to scare the panthers away. There was no man, only rumors of one. Frankie grubbed out a living with a hoe, and raised her children, Bobby, Arthur, Joe and baby girl Eldora. “Somewhere down through the kinfolks, there’d been an Indian,” and the children all had black or dark red hair, said Carlos Slaght. Eldora was his mother. Bobby, his uncle, was my grandfather.

  What few, precious things Frankie owned, she carried “tucked in her buzzom,” he said. “An aspirin box, Bull Durham sack, chewing gum…She was thirteen, when she had Uncle Bobby.” They ate poke salad, highland watercress and May Pop, till Bobby was old enough to be the man. He saved them, pure and simple. “Uncle Bobby was the provider,” Carlos said. He hired himself out when he was still a little boy to farmers, and carried his mother and siblings with him. He never went to school, just sweated for another man’s profit when he should have been rolling marbles.

  It was then, when Bobby was still a boy, that the red-brick walls began to reach into the sky, and locomotives dragged in machines big enough to swallow a man whole. It was salvation. The cost would be terrible, but it was salvation just the same.

  If a horse had been killed, I would have lost $200. I can get more men, anytime.

  —Attributed in a family history to JAMES EVERELL HENRY, a Northern timber baron and principal investor in the Jacksonville cotton mill, after one of his loggers was killed in an accident

  In the mountains around Jacksonville, it was Yankee money that saved them, that, and a rich man’s delicate nose.

  In faraway St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the eldest son of Elmore T. Ide, the handsome and charming George Peabody Ide, was expected to assume the presidency of his father’s gristmill in 1887. But the dust from pulverized grain, drifting up from the grinding wheel, caused a severe allergic reaction in young Ide. “This created a serious problem,” wrote his nephew Knox Ide, in his memoirs. It was decided by the family that George sell his interest in the gristmill back to the company, and he joined his uncle, diplomat Henry C. Ide, on a voyage by locomotive, steamboat and horse and buggy to the Deep South. They chased the promise of unlimited natural resources to a place called Jacksonville. “George thrived and became very popular with the ‘natives,’ especially the ladies, many of whom set their caps for him…a handsome dashing figure when behind two full-blooded carriage horses,” wrote his nephew Knox. These were the men—visionaries, in recorded history—who held the fate of a people, a people who could be used up and discarded, with more, always more, to take their place.

  From the beginning, it was more than industry. The mill, formed from 1.5 million red clay bricks, seemed to grow out of the earth instead of just being built upon it, and in a way it did. The clay was dug from the ground at the construction site, and fired in ovens, right there, into hard, brittle permanence. The bricks rose around a skeleton of massive beams and round, hardwood pillars, all of them hacked and smoothed from giant, ancient trees. It was the single biggest man-made thing most of them had ever seen, three stories of vast, echoing rooms and towering ceilings, a battleship long, and so wide a man could not throw a silver dollar across it. The windows glowed even at midnight, lit by a coal-fired, crackling generator that must have seemed like alchemy in a town still lit by kerosene.

  When it ran wide-open, when workers fed trainloads of cotton into its massive, gnashing machines, the mill seemed to take on some malevolent spirit, to come alive. The hardwood floors, built to last a hundred years, trembled and popped under tons and tons of vibrating steel, as billions of tiny scraps of cotton spun off the machines and flew like clouds of gnats through giant, stifling rooms. The separators, designed to rip and tear a 500-pound bale of cotton, were just the start of it. Stretching across the floor were eleven thousand spindles, bolted to the hardwood with iron screws as long as railroad spikes. They did the work of a million old women at a million looms, but screaming, shuddering, cutting and biting. The machines would do the spinning, but had to be fed, fixed, and unclogged when the yarn broke or fouled, and for that, the company needed people brave enough to reach into the spinning, whirring gears. If you were careless, even for a second, it would get you. Over the years, the machines and the people mingled, not in a silly philosophical sense but in a real one, as it took their fingers, hands and arms and pumped their lungs full
of cotton dust, until they were each part of the other, metal, cotton, flesh and bone.

  The company knew where to fish for such men and women, and knew what bait to use.

  Beside the mill, a village took shape, a community of small, solid, decent houses, every one exactly the same. The streets were named just A Street, B Street, and so on, as if these plain people did not require anything else. There would be 136 houses in all, a town within the town. Made of cheap but sturdy weatherboard and roofed with wooden shingles, they were designed by George P. Ide’s new bride, Margaret Rosa Borden, a true Southern belle. She insisted that the roof lines of the little millhouses be designed to mirror the roof lines of their elegant home in Jacksonville—the antebellum Boxwood. In this way, she explained, every worker would share in its beauty.

  But inside the red-brick walls of the mill was a netherworld. Women marched home, stunned and ashamed, after the machines ripped the hair from their heads or stripped off their clothes. One man died smoking on one of the mill’s walls after the bosses refused to stop production even as he worked on the power lines. Barefoot children slaved there for next to nothing, prized by the mill owners because their smaller, delicate fingers could flutter over the tiniest gears without getting caught in the machines. As people toiled, a man in a necktie—the Southern man’s mantle of power—walked the floor with a rattling lockbox under his arm. A man or woman could ask to be paid for the time they had put in, right up to that minute, so they could eat. The man in the tie dispensed not money but cheap metal disks called clinkers, named from the sound the box made. The clinkers could be redeemed for a sandwich, or a cold Coca-Cola. People drank and ate the fruit of their labor at the machine, and went back to work, still poor but not hungry. Paychecks for grown men, after deductions for food, rent and more, routinely read $0.00, so it was hard to tell, sometimes, where the exploitation ended and salvation began.