Slavery by Another Name (31 page)

out enough to maintain his widowed mother and wife, adult sister

and brothers, and two toddling sons, in a compact wood frame

house near the center of town.

The two men's ostensible police supervisor, Goodwater marshal

John G. Dunbar, also regularly o ered black men for sale, as did

John G. Dunbar, also regularly o ered black men for sale, as did

the town's other constable, Laray A. Grogan, who busily transported

black forced laborers from Goodwater to the Turner lime quarry

and kiln in the town of Calcis. Grogan, thirty years old, lived with

his young wife and three children under age six next door to Mayor

White.41

Early in April of 1902, Franklin and Pruit got word that runaways

had ed the Samples Lumber Company sawmil outside the nearby

town of Hol ands. Samples, like virtual y al lumber cut ing

operations in southern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida at the time,

was a spectacle of horrifying abuse. Young black men—and

occasional y whites—were routinely lured to remote timber camps

deep in the forests with promises of solid wages and good working

conditions. As often as not, the camps became prisons, where men

and boys were held against their wil for months or years, fed and

housed miserably, worked under brutal circumstances, and paid

lit le or nothing. Hundreds of other black men were purchased from

jails across the state. Since black men knew they enjoyed no

protection from these abuses from local sheri s or judges, they

relied on word of mouth in African American neighborhoods or

among other itinerant workers to identify which camps ful l ed

their advertisements and white men who could "be trusted."

On April 2, Dock Crenshaw, a twenty-one-year-old black laborer

from Roanoke, Alabama, agreed to take work at Samples. After one

day, Crenshaw and several other young black men realized they had

been grossly misled. Instead of $1 a day in wages, plus food and a

place to stay, the men were being stockaded and fed prisoner's

rations. Other workers told them they would never receive pay.

Instead, they were being charged $2 a week for their food and

shelter—a third of their supposed total wages.

Five young men, Crenshaw, Charles Wil iams, Pat Hil , Jim

Coleman, and Ed Moody, decided to leave at the end of the

workday and return home. This was a particularly gal ing act to the

white men in charge of Samples Lumber and an overt chal enge to

white men in charge of Samples Lumber and an overt chal enge to

local white authorities. The sight of ve black men, most of them

teenagers, strol ing up a public road, having de ed their white

employer, justi ed a harsh response in the minds of almost every

white in the region.

As Crenshaw and two others ambled under a bridge at the edge

of the town of Goodwater that night, Franklin and a second white

man from the town stepped out of the darkness and said the men

were under arrest for "jumping" a board bil —or not paying for

food provided to them at Samples.

The ve workers were marched back to a general store in tiny

Hol ands where the town mayor convened what went for a

misdemeanor trial. Crenshaw refused to plead guilty, but the others,

pressured by the armed whites, agreed to confess. The men had

eaten only once at the mil , but the mayor found that each had

walked out on a $5 tab. Al were given nes of about $6, plus

unspeci ed "costs." Franklin told the justice of the peace not to tel

the men the ful amount they owed and that he would take care of

it.Franklin loaded the ve into a wagon and carried them back to

Good-water. After several hours locked in the same smal jail near

the railroad tracks where John Davis and so many others had been

held, Franklin, now joined by Pruit , ordered the black men onto

the next train stopping in the town. When they rol ed into the

Dadevil e station, a wagon was waiting to transport the men to

Pace's farm on the Tal apoosa River. Pace gave $25 cash to Franklin

and Pruit , $12.50 for transporting the gang, and a check on the

Tal apoosa County Bank for $100.

After several days detained by Pace, the farmer's resident

magistrate, James Kennedy, read a contract out loud to the men. Al

Charley Wil iams could fol ow was that they would have to work

there for at least seven months. They resigned themselves to their

fate and began working under armed guard every day, plowing,

hoeing, and ditching. At night, the men were locked in a crude

cel .42

cel .

Wil iams knew he was in for a hard time, but he could hardly

have imagined its details. A strapping, barrel-chested farmhand, he

wasn't accustomed to the servile status Pace's farm demanded. He

de ed directions and chal enged guards, and for that he was

whipped nearly every day, usual y with his pants pul ed to his

ankles and his back bared. The instruments of punishment used to

beat him were leather plow lines, trouser belts, or saplings.

"Anything happened to be in the boss man's hands," Wil iams

testified later.43

The younger men in the group were terri ed especial y by what

was happening. Within a month of arriving at Pace's farm, Pat Hil

and Ed Moody, both seventeen years old, tried to run away. After

traveling just four miles, they were captured by Pace's son-in-law,

Anderson Hardy. Kennedy, the justice of the peace employed by

Pace, staged another fake trial and convicted the pair of "breaking

the contract" with Pace and sentenced them to six months of hard

labor for the county. Conveniently, Pace was under contract with

the Tal apoosa County judge to hold al local hard-labor convicts.

So Hil and Moody returned immediately to the same chain gang,

now with an additional term of six months to work and explicitly

classified as criminal convicts.

There was another lesson to be learned, however, and one that

Pace believed the other blacks being held on the farm needed to

share in as wel . The risks and futility of at empting to escape

would be demonstrated for al of Pace's laborers. Hil was led

nearly naked in front of a gang of black laborers working in a eld,

forced to bend at the waist and squat, his hands tied together

behind his knees. The point of these beatings was manyfold: the

most obvious was to create a speci c disincentive to escape. Just as

important was to show the power of whites not just to cause pain

but to force a black man to bear profound humiliation, to be

reduced to a state of pathetic powerlessness, to visibly see how

quickly and e ortlessly even the most simpleton whites could force

a de ant black man to reveal emotional vulnerability and physical

weakness. "My hands were fastened under my knees. I was bent

weakness. "My hands were fastened under my knees. I was bent

over and whipped on the naked back," Hil testi ed stoical y. "He

told me to count, and I counted up to 15, and could not count any

further. He whipped me about 25 licks."44

VI

SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME

"We shal have to kil a thousand …to get them back to their

places."

The spring of 1903 arrived in Alabama with a surreal, portentous

fury. Farmers pushed hard to put a new cot on crop in the

ground, only to see nearly every seedling kil ed by an

inexplicable late freeze. Rain and fungus plagued the corn stands

rising in countless thousands of new rows.

In the black of night on April 8, a funnel cloud descended

without warning from a vertiginous sky, zigzagging north of

Birmingham, shearing one-hundred-yard-wide swaths of trees,

homes, and elds as it bounded madly into the earth and back to

the sky across a path of eighteen miles. The horizon coruscated with

astonishing arcs of lightning. By the time the wind and rain

stopped, a dozen people were dead. Five days later, another storm

lashed Bibb County, scraping past the old Cot ingham farm,

obliterating smal buildings and stripping the buds beginning to

swel on fruit trees. On the same day, another tornado—

mysteriously pouring hail but no rain—ripped through south

Alabama, kil ing three more.

Final y, as evening fel on April 19, an unnatural cold swept

across the state as the sky opened above Goodwater and Tal apoosa

County, pouring a deluge of hail and rain. Trees were stripped bare

of leaves and fruit blossoms. What was left of the cot on, corn,

purple-hul eld peas, and early sprouts of squash and okra was

beaten at into the soil. Farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers—

free and enslaved—rushed into the fields to replant.

But by the end of April, another kind of zephyr, something just as

twisted and contradictory to the new order of the white South, was

lurking on the horizon. Whispered at the train stations and among

lurking on the horizon. Whispered at the train stations and among

black laborers on Sunday mornings was a story so unbelievable

most people said it must be fable. A man who claimed to be a

federal Secret Service detective was visiting black residents in

Goodwater. Some had been sent by train to testify before a federal

grand jury col ecting evidence that white people in Tal-lapoosa

County were stil holding slaves.

By the middle of May the rumors were rampant—and seemingly

con rmed by the nearly continual presence of a burly federal agent

named E. P. McAdams. Then on May 27, newspapers across the

state carried an astounding press release issued from the

Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.:

Washington, May 26—At the request of the Department of Justice, the

United States Secret Service has undertaken the work of investigating the

charge of peonage, or holding another in servitude to work out a debt,

which has been made against persons living in the vicinity of Montgomery,

Ala. The punishment provided by the statute for this crime is a ne of not

less than $1,000 nor more than $5,000 or imprisonment of not less than

one year nor more than five.

One man, named Robert N. Franklin, has already been indicted for

keeping a negro in servitude for at least a year. Information in the hands

of [Secret Service] chief Wilkie tends to show that a regular system has

been practiced for a long time between certain magistrates and persons

who want negro laborers.

It is said the plan is to bring a poor negro before a magistrate on a

imsy charge. He is convicted and, having no money to pay a ne, the

white man o ers to advance him the money, provided the negro will make

a labor contract with him for a length of time su cient to reimburse him

for the money and trouble he has taken to keep the negro out of jail. He is

thereupon taken away and begins what is frequently a long term of cruel

servitude, being frequently whipped for failure to perform work to the

satisfaction of his employer.

An agent of the secret service who is now on the ground will make a

thorough investigation of the whole alleged system and turn over to the

United States Attorney of that district all information he may secure with a

view to the prosecution of said offenders. 1

Unexpectedly and without explanation, a ash of hope bolted

across the dark curtain fal ing on black life. Most amazing was that

it commenced in Montgomery, the city that had served brie y

during the early months of the Civil War as the national capital of

the Confederacy2 It remained the seat of a government that since

the war had eviscerated black citizenship more completely and

enthusiastical y than any other.

That the federal government would initiate such an inquiry was

mind-boggling to white southerners. Investigations of any kind by

federal agencies were extraordinarily unusual in an era that

predated the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Moreover, the South's long asserted right to manage the a airs of

black residents without northern interference had nal y been

achieved. Nearly every southern state, including Alabama, had

completed the total disenfranchisement of African Americans by

1901. Virtual y no blacks served on state juries. No blacks in the

South were permit ed to hold meaningful state or local political

o ces. There were virtual y no black sheri s, constables, or police

o cers. Blacks had been whol y shunted into their own inferior