Slavery by Another Name (24 page)

V

THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE

"I don't owe you anything."

The last thing John Davis should have been doing in the second

week of September 1901 was a long hike across the parched

elds of cot on stretching endlessly along the Central of Georgia

Railway line running from the Georgia state line to the notorious

town of Goodwater. Mil ions of crisp brown cot on bol s, fat and

cracking at the seams with bulging white ber, waited in the elds

and river atlands of central Alabama cal ing out to be picked. The

task would take weeks and demand the labor of virtual y every

available man, woman, and child for hundreds of miles.1

Davis needed to be in his own patch of cot on—the lifeline of his

tiny farm near Nixburg, a wisp of a town twenty miles south of

Goodwater. For him to maintain any glimmer of independence in

the South's terrifying racial regime, Davis had to produce his single

bale of cot on—the limit of the physical capacities of one farmer

and a mule and just enough to pay a share to the owner of the land

he farmed and supply his family with enough food and warmth to

pass the cold months soon to set in.

But as he struggled to reach the tight bend in the rails more than

ten miles from his farm, where freight trains were forced to slow

and itinerant travelers knew there was a chance to leap aboard

empty freight cars, John knew he needed just as badly to see his

wife, Nora. She was il —so sick it had become impossible for him

to care for her and the young couple's two children—especial y at

the very time of the season when he, like hundreds of thousands of

men working smal farms across the South, had no choice but to

remain in his fields from dawn to dusk.

John and Nora had been married for only three years. At twenty-

ve, she was two years older. She came to the marriage with two

children born when Nora was lit le more than a child herself. John

children born when Nora was lit le more than a child herself. John

treated the youngsters as his own. The husband and wife had come

of age just miles apart on the outskirts of the rough-edged railroad

town of Goodwater and married there in 1898. Eleven-year-old

Albert certainly was already John's most important helpmate in the

elds. At harvest time, he would have also needed ten-year-old

Alice and Nora picking the rows.2 Sending them al to Nora's

parents’ house meant John would have to pul every bol himself.

But it must have seemed the only way.

John stayed behind working furiously to bring in the crop. But

Nora remained desperately il . Her husband had to see her now. So

Davis made his way on September 10, 1901, to the big railroad

curve outside Alexander City and waited with the other men

wandering the rails for the No. 1 train. The fal sun was just

beginning to falter as the train eased out of the lit le mil town at

5:31 P.M. each day. Half an hour later, he would be on the outskirts

of Goodwater.

As the train ambled forward, Davis must have felt a contradictory

set of worry and relief as panoramas of cot on elds ashed by in a

gentle blur on each side of the tracks, bobbing across the low

foothil s at the southernmost base of the Appalachian range. He

would have to hurry to see Nora and the children, and stil return to

Nixburg in time to save his cot on. He prayed he was not going to

Goodwater to bury his wife. He had to know he might not make it

home before his fields were ruined.

Stil , the dust-choked freight car rat ling across the landscape was

in its own way a respite from the torturous tasks of the harvest.

Gathering a season's cot on was excruciating work. Davis, like

nearly every black man and woman in Alabama, had spent most of

his waking life pawing through such elds. The passing crop rows

soon would be choked with laborers: strapping young men coursing

through the rows with swift, nimble expertise; young mothers with

babies towed atop long sacks of cot on dragging behind them;

nearly feeble old men and women—African Americans whose lives

were grounded immutably in the seasonal rhythm of growing,

tending, and picking cot on for other men.

tending, and picking cot on for other men.

The eldest in the elds were slavery's children—the toddlers and

adolescents and near adults of the emancipation time—who had

experienced the ful exuberance of freedom and citizenship and

then the terror of its savage and violent withdrawal. Now they

moved slowly behind their young people, picking with thin

leathery ngers whatever ber had been missed by the others,

while the toddling children of this sour new era of oppression

scrambled alongside, heaving their own sacks. Albert and Alice

would absorb for themselves the same unchanging equinoxal cycle

of cot on growing and cot on picking, but in their lives—at least

until old age—it would never be sweetened or leavened by even

the ash of freedom that the children of slavery days had brie y

known three decades earlier.

On the plants, blanketing the elds and rising in the most fertile

places as much as six feet high, supple green buds that had swol en

beneath smal graceful owers were by now turning hard and

brit le. Split open and dried dark brown, the outer skin of each pod

was sharp to the touch. As the strongest eld hands moved down

the furrows, pul ing the cot on and passing it into their sacks,

ngers and palms began to crack and bleed from the pricks and

slices of thousands of bol s. Depending on the weather and

condition of the cot on, harvest season might wel begin in

September and drag past Christmas, long after the cot on stalks had

frozen and died.

With every passing week in that span and each downpour of rain,

the crop grew less saleable and more vulnerable to swings in the

prices o ered by the ginners who consolidated the local harvests for

sale to cot on brokers in Montgomery or Columbus, Georgia. At

critical junctures in the picking season, poor weather or lack of

su cient laborers could destroy an entire year's crop. For the white

men who owned cot on land in 1901, mobilizing every available

black worker—man, woman, and child—into the elds at picking

time was the single most crucial chal enge of the entire season.

Even the most progressive and generous white men in America,

whether in the South or the North, almost universal y agreed that

whether in the South or the North, almost universal y agreed that

blacks were preter-natural y skil ed at this particular task, and

natural y and spiritual y ordained to perform it. That it might be

wrong to coerce or compel African Americans to work the elds

when the crop was in danger rarely occurred to any white man.

White farmers needed similar numbers of black workers in the

early weeks of the fol owing spring, when seed was being planted

and bright new shoots of cot on had to be careful y tended, each

furrow regularly hoed to keep weeds from smothering the fragile

seedlings. Once the cot on was up, and stretching toward the sky,

and al through the hot months of summer, there could be fewer

hands. Nearly al the women and children were idled during the

humid months. So long as rain and sun came in the correct

proportions, the cot on would stretch higher and ful er. In some

years, it grew as tal as a man's shoulders, thick and impenetrable,

straining with the weight of blossoms. After the cot on was picked

in the fal , there was once again lit le work to be done. African

Americans faced the long, hungry "lay by" of winter.

This conundrum of farm labor management—the need to satisfy

radical y spiking demands for labor and the absolute peril of failing

to do so—had been the most compel ing impetus for slavery in the

nineteenth century. There were many other reasons that slavery

survived in the Deep South too, some economic and some cultural.

But in the end, it was the particular nature of cot on production,

requiring absolute access to armies of laborers for brief periods at

crucial points in the calendar, which made slavery a superbly

successful economic mechanism. By holding laborers captive,

plantation men could dragoon every worker, regardless of age or

strength, at those urgent junctures and marshal them into highly

e cient gangs of eld workers—al without worry that they might

ever drift away in search of bet er circumstances during the lean

months in between.

In the nearly four decades since emancipation of the slaves, white

farmers in the South had evolved only negligibly in their abilities to

manage enterprises with free labor. Concepts of industrial labor

practices—such as set working weeks and xed hourly wages—

practices—such as set working weeks and xed hourly wages—

remained foreign to most late-nineteenth-century southerners. They

were mysti ed and o ended by the demands of former slaves—

encouraged by agents from the federal government in the

immediate wake of emancipation—that they be paid regular, set

amounts and receive guarantees of certain working conditions

through a writ en contract with white farmers. Even sharecropping

—in which black farmers lived on and worked smal parcels of land

in return for keeping a portion of their harvest—and

straightforward renting of farm land to African Americans required

a form of business acumen and honest dealings that few southern

whites were capable of ful l ing in their relations with blacks.

White landowners in the South almost universal y believed that

management of their farms could be successful only if, in one way

or another, "their Negroes" could be tied to the land. Coercion and

restraint remained the bedrock of success in the cot on economy—

and the cornerstone of al wealth generated from it.

To establish a ser ike status for blacks, whites relied on a bit erly

repressive new social code. Few would hire a black worker who

did not have the express approval of his or her former white

employer to change jobs. O the farms, only the most menial work

could be awarded to African Americans—a convention that both

blacks and whites violated only at risk of their own physical harm.

Black public behavior beyond the "bumbling Negro" caricature

acceptable to whites—whether in at itude, dress, or visible

aspirations—also invited economic ostracism by whites, at best, and

physical injury at worst. The possibility of mob violence against any

African American who blatantly rejected the unwrit en code

lingered in the background of black life, a relatively infrequent but

omnipresent threat.

Just as ubiquitously undergirding the new conventions of black

and white relations—and overshadowing every aspect of the lives of

young black men—was "the Lease," as most southerners generical y

cal ed the new system for seizing and sel ing African Americans. In

addition to the black men compel ed into slave mines and lumber

camps, thousands of white landowners and local businesses in the

camps, thousands of white landowners and local businesses in the

countryside and in provincial towns like Goodwater, Nixburg, and

nearby Columbiana regularly purchased black men from local

sheri s and judges who participated in or turned a blind eye to the

process.

There was also no longer any possibility that blacks might

obstruct the new trade in forced labor through political

participation. As of 1901, nearly every African American had been

e ectively stripped of al elective rights in Alabama and virtual y

every southern state. After passage of a new state constitution in

1901, Alabama al owed the registration only of voters who could

read or write and were regularly employed, or who owned

property valued at $300 or more—a measure clearly aimed at

complete elimination of blacks from voting. In Mississippi, only

those who were able to pay a pol tax of up to $3 and who could,

according to the voting registrar's personal assessment, read or

understand any clause in the U.S. Constitution could register.

Louisiana permit ed only those who could read and write or owned

at least $300 worth of property. (However, any person who could

vote on January 1, 1867, or his descendants, was al owed to

continue voting regardless of reading skil s. This literal "grandfather