Slavery by Another Name (25 page)

clause" guaranteed continued voting rights for il iterate and

impoverished whites.)

South Carolina required literacy or property ownership. North

Carolina charged a $2 pol tax and required the ability to read.

Virginia, after 1904, al owed to vote only those who had paid their

annual $1 pol tax in each of the three years prior to an election

and who could l out a registration form without assistance.

Veterans from either the armies of the Union or the Confederacy

were exempted of the requirements—though few of the thousands

of African Americans who fought in the Union army were

acknowledged as veterans.

During the same legislative gathering at which the new Alabama

constitution was drafted, a delegate from Chambers County named

James Thomas He in came to prominence. Over the next thirty

years, he would be the state's most in uential gure, serving as a

years, he would be the state's most in uential gure, serving as a

U.S. senator and an early master of the rhetoric of white supremacy

that would be emulated across the South by men such as Theodore

Bilbo in Mississippi, Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, and Bul

Connor and George Wal ace in Alabama. During debate over how

completely blacks should be blocked from the vote, He in argued

that there should be no possibility of African Americans casting

bal ots, regardless of their individual intel igence or wealth.

Standing in the elegant legislative chambers of the state capitol in

Montgomery—a building that forty years earlier had served as the

rst seat of government of the Confederacy—he boomed: "I believe

as truly as I believe that I am standing here that God Almighty

intended the negro to be the servant of the white man." Anticipating

eventual war between the races, He in continued: "I do not believe

it is incumbent upon us to lift him up and educate him on an equal

footing that he may be armed and equipped when the combat

comes."3

When debate turned brie y to whether the whipping of prisoners

leased to coal mines and lumber camps should be prohibited, a

representative from Sumter County summed up the position of the

constitutional convention:

"Everybody knows that the great bulk of convicts in the state are

Negroes," he said. "Everybody knows the character of a Negro and

knows that there is no punishment in the world that can take the

place of the lash with him. He must be control ed that way"4 The

laws remained unchanged.

• •

As Central of Georgia No. 1, carrying John Davis on a car close to

the rear, approached the nal wide curve of the tracks on the

outskirts of Goodwater on that Tuesday in September 1901, the

conductor blew his whistle and slowed dramatical y as the engine

eased past Sterling Lumber Company. For almost thirty years, this

had been the point of disembarkation for the scores of

impoverished men—mostly black and a few white—who used the

impoverished men—mostly black and a few white—who used the

freight trains of the South routinely to move from town to town and

job to job. The railroad bed was itself the handwork of forced

laborers, as was the case for nearly al southern rails built before

the Civil War or in the rst decades after. Goodwater was a place of

rich opportunity for men seeking menial work. It had grown into a

ourishing commercial center as the hub of the cot on economy in

the verdant plain of farmland that rippled between the Coosa and

the Tal apoosa rivers—which plunged on paral el currents, eighty

miles apart, out of the Appalachians and into the Black Belt of

south Alabama. As the picking season progressed each fal , farmers

pul ed their cot on in long trains of mule-powered wagons from

outlying set lements to the gin and rail station at Goodwater. From

there, the compressed bales of lint were shipped by train southeast

through a succession of other Alabama towns to Columbus, Georgia,

sixty miles away. River barges took them down the Chat ahoochee

River to ports on the Gulf of Mexico at Pensacola and Apalachicola,

Florida.

For the paying passengers on the line, Goodwater was a welcome

respite from the dusty rails. The town had been the nal stop on

the line in the railroad's rst years of operation, feeding a

ourishing local economy of hotels, restaurants, and carriage rentals

to continue the journey to the new city of Birmingham. Goodwater's

Pope House hotel was a nineteenth-century culinary landmark. The

nearby Palace Hotel and Argo Saloon were famous as outposts of

comfort and vice. After the rails were extended the remaining

distance to Birmingham in the 1880s, nearly every train on the line

continued to stop at Goodwater to rest passengers and load cot on,

coal, and water for the steam engine.

After the nal whistle before the train neared Sterling Lumber,

John Davis and the other informal travelers deftly hopped o . It

would soon be dusk, and Davis began making his way by foot

toward the home of Nora's parents. As he arrived at the rst cluster

of houses near the Goodwater train station, within earshot of the

Pope House and its dinnertime banter drifting in the late-day quiet,

a white man suddenly appeared in the road ahead.

"Nigger, have you got any money?" he shouted.5

The man was Robert N. Franklin, one of the town's appointed

constables and keeper of a dry goods store perched at the top of the

muddy dirt street that led through Goodwater's commercial district.

Davis certainly would have known who Franklin was. Short-necked

and rotund, Franklin and the store he ran had been xtures in

Goodwater for at least a decade. There were no black-owned

enterprises in Goodwater, and Davis's parents would have traded

regularly at the store owned by Franklin. The very overal s that

Davis wore that day almost certainly came from Franklin's store or

one of the other white-owned mercantile shops facing Main Street.

That mat ered lit le at the moment Franklin appeared from the

shadows. The question he bel igerently posed was a simple but

perilous provocation. However Davis answered was fraught with

jeopardy. Under the new racial statutes and conventions of the

South, demanding whether an itinerant black man had money was

tantamount to asking him to prove his right to freedom, or his right

even to live. A black man traveling alone in Alabama could be

arrested and charged with vagrancy on almost any pretense. To

have no money in hand demonstrated his guilt without question

and, worse, was seen as absolute proof of his worthlessness. Almost

every possible consequence of admit ing indigence or joblessness—

much less of having ridden for free on a freight train—was terrible.

Yet given the vulnerability of every black man among whites—

even more so a white with some measure of o cial authority and

community respect—to reveal that he possessed cash exposed him

to more grave risk. Vulgar whites like Franklin could rob or harm a

black man with impunity, against which he had no recourse.

Contrarily to accept the risk of a vagrancy charge and lie to a local

o cial might be the beginnings of even more serious trouble. Davis

had only to glance around as the light faded that evening to be

reminded of his vulnerability. The road ahead ran from the edge of

town, alongside the tracks, rising slowly up a long hil . It passed the

open gal ery of the Pope House and its two stories of painted

wooden clapboards—al o limits to African Americans. Railroad

wooden clapboards—al o limits to African Americans. Railroad

Street continued rst past the crude one-room brick lockhouse that

passed for the town jail, and then the enormous Goodwater train

depot, and nal y to a crest where Franklin's store looked over the

set lement. At the train station, as a score or more of white

passengers disembarked, local black men hustled to unload baggage

and l the freight cars with freshly ginned bales of cot on. Al but a

few came from farms owned by white men but worked by black

men.

A partly blind African American man clad in threadbare overal s,

cal ed "Bad Eye" Bradley, furiously re l ed the steam engine's

boilers with water and its fuel car with coal. He was one of the few

black men in the town with a job paying regular wages. Across the

street from Franklin's store, Davis could have seen the plate glass

windows on the front of the saloon and the balustrade of the

second- oor balcony of the Palace Hotel—both destinations of

relative luxury that no black man would ever dare enter as a

customer. Tethered out front were the one-horse carriages and

open-bed wagons that only the rarest African American owned.

Out of sight from Davis, except for their clut ered rear entrances,

stood a succession of new brick buildings extending south from

Franklin's store for several hundred yards. Among them were

businesses operated by the mayor, Dave M. White, and his close

friend, justice of the peace Jesse L. London, as wel as the vacant lot

where construction of the new town hal was to begin in a few

months. Only to the north, across the railroad tracks, among a

ramshackle col ection of shotgun houses and unpainted bungalows

where most of the town's black population lived, was there a place

of refuge for an African American man. Davis had prayed to reach it

before Franklin appeared in the street. Now it was too late.

With his single hostile query—"Nigger, have you got any

money?"— Franklin distil ed the smothering layers of legal and

economic jeopardy that de ned black life in the twentieth-century

South. Davis was pinned.

"No, I have not got any money," the black man stammered. Then,

gambling on what Franklin was up to, he corrected himself. "I have

gambling on what Franklin was up to, he corrected himself. "I have

some, but not for you."

"When are you going to pay me the money you owe me?"

Franklin pressed.

"I don't owe you anything," Davis said.

The two men stood facing each other in silence for a moment.

Then Franklin went on his way, but Davis knew the incident wasn't

over. He crossed the iron rails and made his way to the home of

Nora's parents as quickly as he could. For a few hours, there was a

quiet reunion of the farmer, his children, and the stricken wife and

mother.

But later that evening, the constable showed up again. He cal ed

for Davis to come outside.

"I want that money, or I wil arrest you," Franklin shouted.

"You wil have to arrest me. I do not owe you anything," Davis

said, clinging to the hope that a higher authority would see through

Franklin's ruse.

Gal ed by the black man's resistance, Franklin left again. But soon

another local constable arrived, Francis M. Pruit , a burly mass of

man who sported a bushy western mustache and a wide-brimmed

black hat. He said he held a warrant for Davis's arrest.

"Let me see it," the black man said.

"Come up town and I wil let you see it," Pruit rejoined.

There was lit le else Davis could do. Earlier in the day, he might

have escaped by catching another railroad car and eeing the

county as quickly as possible. But the chance for that was passed

now. Docile cooperation was Davis's only reasonable recourse, his

only chance of seeing Nora again, of ever returning to his elds. It

was stil conceivable that he could weather this scrape with no

harm, that a reasonable voice would come to his aid. If necessary,

he would simply submit to whatever the white men demanded. It

was a dance every black man in the South was being forced to

learn. To resist only invited far worse.

Davis trudged to the center of town with Pruit , who locked him

Davis trudged to the center of town with Pruit , who locked him

in the calaboose near the train station, not far from where his

encounter with Franklin had begun. Four other African Americans

seized by Franklin and Pruit in the previous forty-eight hours were

already there. Davis never saw the ostensible warrant for his arrest,

and would have been unable to read it if he had. Later Jesse

London, the justice of the peace, would testify that Pruit himself

had sworn out a warrant claiming Davis "obtained goods under false

pretenses" from him—rather than Franklin—and that Davis

wil ingly pleaded guilty to the charge.6 London claimed he ordered

Davis to pay a ne and the costs of his arrest and trial, though no