Slavery by Another Name (53 page)

the just completed harvest. Smoke belched from the gin as the teeth

of its machinery threshed through the last cot on of the season,

separating ber and seed. In the compress, thousands of wagons of

white lint were pressed into bales for shipment. Between the big

houses and the town's center, wood-frame cot ages were wedged

onto newly delineated lots. Along the pit ed roads fanning out into

the denuded countryside, smal clusters of log cabins, rough hewn

from nearby forest and chinked with sticky red clay, housed black

families bound to the land owned by whites.

Dozens of plantations radiated across the at landscape from the

Dozens of plantations radiated across the at landscape from the

Louisvil e & Nashvil e Railway line cut ing due south on a

perpendicular through Pine Apple and across the Black Belt. More

than 35,000 people— the great majority of them black farm

laborers at work on land owned by whites—lived here.

Unprecedented numbers of white families made wealthy by the

turn-of-the-century cot on boom had emerged as a new class of

manor-born aristocrats—consolidating land, intermarrying, and

vying for prestige in the resurgent southern planter elite. Their

towns were strung along the railroad lines through plantation

country like antique pearls of white-columned antebel um

nostalgia. The harvest season had been a euphoric one, the most

bountiful in ve years, exceeding 11 mil ion bales of cot on in the

South.18 Across Pine Apple wisps of white ber—the detritus of the

massive harvest—clung to tree branches, windowsil s, and clumps

of grass.

No family in Pine Apple was more prominent among the

nouveaux riches than the Meltons. As the end of 1903 approached,

the family anxiously prepared for a crowning wedding—the union

of the most glamorous young couple in the adjoining counties and

of two great new families. Lovely Leila Melton, the twenty-two-

year-old daughter of Wil iam and Clara Melton, was set to marry

Claud Swink, a year her senior and a promising young planter in

Dal as County. The Melton clan had long been governed by three

brothers—Wil iam, Evander, and John—whose expansive families

control ed thousands of acres of property near Pine Apple. Swink

was the only child of a similarly successful cot on barony, large and

prosperous enough that the set lement at the crossroads nearest the

family plantation had come to be known as Swinkvil e.

The union of the two young people was momentous as wel as a

distraction for family members stil grieving the death of the family

patriarch, Leila's father, Wil iam Melton. More than four years after

he succumbed on July 4, 1900, the legacy of the fty-four-year-old

plantation master stil loomed over Pine Apple, his brothers, Clara,

and his eleven grown children. Even in death, he would be present

for Leila's wedding, gazing out from an alabaster monument on a

for Leila's wedding, gazing out from an alabaster monument on a

pedestal above his grave on the hil top across the road from the

church.

Melton intended to be remembered in precise detail. His statuary

captured in crisp relief the distinct planter's regalia: a neat fedora

on his brow and a long overcoat reaching past his knees, a trim

bow tie above the vest, a heavy watch chain across a protruding

midri , an intricately decorated walking stick in his right hand, a

bulging Masonic ring on his left—totemic emblems of the wealth

and power he had extended over the family's cot on empire.

Leila's wedding also was similarly designed as an expression of

the family's extraordinary position in southern life. The ceremony

could not have been more removed from the spare a air in which

the ex-slaves of the Cot-tingham plantation set Henry and Mary on

their way a generation earlier. As the December 29 date

approached, the sanctuary of Pine Apple's Friendship Baptist

Church was decorated in an opulent display of wealth. Arches of

smilax and pink and white chrysanthemums were erected before

the altar. Above the center arch, a stu ed dove held loops of white

tul e. Along the aisle, pil ars held a candle for each year of the

bride's age.

Leila's mother busily completed the stitching and embroidery on

a stunning gown of white peau de cygne silk and duchess lace

ordered from France. The bride's second-eldest brother, Henry, was

to give her away in an elaborate ceremony of eighteen at endants,

including male and female cousins, two nieces as ower girls,

nephews as ring bearers, and Leila's brother nearest in age, Tom, as

the best man. Unbeknownst to her daughter —or the groom-to-be—

Clara Melton planned to give the couple an extraordinary gift:

$1,250 in gold with which to begin their life together.19

The lavish plans belied the cold brutality on which the wealth of

the Melton clan rested. However burnished was the Meltons’ new

patina of sophistication, the family was infamous in the area for

brutal subjection of black workers and intimidation of neighbors,

whether white or black. The three Melton brothers for years had

whether white or black. The three Melton brothers for years had

relied on the local constable to help violently coerce blacks to work

on their farms. Another white farmer, J. R. Adams, incensed at the

Meltons’ contumacious terrorization of local African Americans,

including his own workers, wrote the at orney general to urge that

the family be investigated for involuntary servitude.20

"In al probability there is no other section of state in which the

crime of peonage is so common as here," Adams wrote. "The

Meltons and their connections are the worst o enders. They have

held negroes in peonage for years. It is a very rare thing that a

negro escapes from there…It is next to impossible for a negro who

has ‘contracted’ with one of this gang to ever get away."

Adams said two years earlier one of Melton's men kil ed a black

worker who at empted to escape from the farm. "A poor lit le

negro girl who is kept at [the constable's] house occasional y runs

away and begs other negroes to let her stay with them to keep

[him] from beating her," Adams continued. "The negroes are so

intimidated that they refuse to shelter her…. It is very hard to get

evidence out of the negroes, for this gang keeps it impressed upon

them that they wil be kil ed if they give evidence."21 The local U.S.

magistrate near Pine Apple agreed, writing the U.S. at orney that

among the fearful black population near the town, there was

virtual y no possibility of convincing witnesses to testify22

Late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, just four days before the

wedding ceremony, Evander Melton, the bride's seventeen-year-old

cousin and a likely groomsman in the wedding, appeared in an

al eyway near the Pine Apple train station. Evander, the second son

of John and namesake of his imposing uncle, was a fat and

pugnacious boy known in town simply as "Pig." The group of young

black men throwing craps in the al eyway must have known

nothing good could come when Pig Melton, drunk and bel igerent,

pushed his way into the game.

They had few options. Meltons did as they wished among black

people. Besides, the young blacks were caught up in the jovial

ebul ience of the Christmas season—which for southern African

ebul ience of the Christmas season—which for southern African

Americans represented far more than a religious holiday. Christmas

marked the end of the long and di cult cot on harvest—a straining

process that in some years extended from September al the way to

yuletide—and the only payday of the year for most southern blacks.

After the nal cot on was in, tenants and sharecroppers—al those

blacks who had some il usion of independence—came to the white

planter on whose land they lived and asked for "set lement."

Apparently, landowners tal ied the cost of seed, supplies, rent, and

every other purchase taken on interest from their plantation stores

since the previous Christmas, subtracted the total from the value of

each family's share of the cot on they grew, and then paid out the

dif erence in cash.

The reality was endemic fraud. Landowners, acutely aware that

any worker ful y clear of his debts might then at empt to relocate to

a friendlier or more generous white property holder, routinely

exaggerated costs and interest so that virtual y no sharecroppers

could ever ful y extinguish their obligations. Instead, African

Americans typical y left the transaction with a smal cash "bonus" or

loan to use for a few weeks of merriment before work for the new

cot on season would begin again.

The young black men in Pine Apple were quickly burning

through their Christmas windfal —consuming liquor and trading

what lit le cash they retained with the dice bouncing across the

chil y soil.

Soon, the dice turned against the Melton teenager. He grew angry

and loud. His losses mounting, a quarrel ensued. Unexpectedly, a

pistol shot crackled in the crowd, from an unknown gun. More

shots may have been red in response. Whatever the case, Melton

fel to the ground, bleeding profusely. In the pandemonium that

fol owed, the black gamblers ed the scene—rushing to reach the

sanctuary of cabins deep in the forests or scrambling madly to

escape the county before nightfal . Arthur Stuart—a thirty-one-year-

old black farmworker whose wife, two-year-old son, and infant

daughter waited for him on rented land at the edge of town—wasn't

fast enough.

fast enough.

No one knew who fired the shot that hit young Melton—who was

taken to his family's house for a doctor to at end the wound. But

Stuart was black and nearby. He was instantly identi ed as an

accomplice. That he was stil in the town at al when the sheri

came was the strongest evidence of his innocence. Any black man

aware that he was within miles of a shooting of a Melton would

have fled for his life.

There was lit le doubt what would happen next. Word spread on

Christmas Eve that Pig Melton was recuperating at home and would

survive his injury. Yet the Meltons vowed a lesson was stil to be

taught. Late on Christmas night, after the day's church services in

praise of the birth of Jesus, family dinners, and singing of carols

had been nished, a smal group of white men led by fty-one-

year-old Evander M. Melton assembled at the center of Pine Apple.

At 4 A.M., the mob easily broke into the jail—the constable was

assisting them—and beat Stuart senseless in his cel . In short order,

the men doused his body with kerosene and set it afire.

Hoots and cheers arose from the unpaved street outside as the

lynchers rushed out the doors of the jail. But soon more than Stuart

was burning. Flames quickly l ed the rst oor of the building.

Orange and red swel s pushed through the windows and ashed up

the sides of the jail. Then brie y the scene was silent except for the

loud roar of re and the groans of the building as its skeleton

col apsed into an embering heap.

The murder of Arthur Stuart and even the destruction of the jail

would have been an almost routine a air except for what fol owed.

A sudden gust of wind whipped through the town. A shower of

burning embers—thousands of missiles of re—poured into the sky

and then scat ered across Pine Apple. The wispy blanket of cot on

dusting the town ignited unpredictably. A burst of ames appeared

on the porch roof of the farm feed store adjacent to the jail. The

roof of cedar shake shingles was a mass of re within minutes.

Whipped by the gusting winds, the ames leapt next to a wagon

Whipped by the gusting winds, the ames leapt next to a wagon

repair shop, the inferno now rippling across the sky like a zephyr

turned red and gold. It blew onto the town bank, the post o ce,

and then beyond to houses and eight stores clustered at the center

of town. Most devastating, the ames reached the great mounds of

cot on bales stored in and around the warehouses of the gin and

compress—turning the cubes of burlap-wrapped white cot on into

roaring blocks of fire. Within minutes of Stuart's last cries in his cel ,

the entire commercial district of Pine Apple was a mass of raging

heat and blaze.23 Where just hours before the sounds of "Joy to the