Slavery by Another Name (61 page)

dice, or to nd a day's labor, or for some other claimed reason that

in truth was no di erent from any other. The train station was

simply where he went almost every day, where nearly al young

black men found themselves.

The freight docks of the station in Columbiana, and in every

other county seat on the Southern Railway line between

Birmingham and Eufaula, a lush cot on center deep in southern

Alabama, were the hub of life for African American men in the

South in 1908. Open freight cars, easily boarded as trains eased out

of towns like Columbiana or when they slowed to cross rickety

bridges and tight curves, were the only mechanized means of

movement for the armies of destitute blacks searching or waiting

for work in the rst years of the century—especial y those like

Green who had uncoupled themselves from the traditional black

life of serfdom in a cot on patch. The tracks themselves, removed

from the view of most whites, were the safest paths for walking

from town to town as wel . Either way, a man on the rails or the

trains was violating Alabama law by entering the property of a

railroad company. But the appeal of motion and movement, of

opportunity, that the tracks and trains represented was too much

for a young man like Green to resist.

That spring, there were hardly any jobs for cash to be had for a

black man, unless he was wil ing to take up a cot on hoe or venture

into the giant lumber camps on the rail lines thrusting into the

into the giant lumber camps on the rail lines thrusting into the

swampy jungle forests below the Florida state line, or across the

Georgia border. Railroad companies claimed to pay $2 a day for a

strong hand who could handle an axe, cut ing trees or shaping rail

ties. But the railroad camps sat at the ends of long spurs cut into

near-virgin forests, with no roads or other means of exit except via

the trains that brought more fresh backs every day. Once a man

arrived, there was no departing unless the camp boss al owed it.

And there was no knowing whether the Southern Railway or any

other company would keep its word to pay the amount it

promised, or even to feed men or keep them out of the rain and

swamps. Guards with shotguns and dogs patrol ed the perimeters of

the worksites. The captains of the camps kept long leather straps,

a xed to thick wooden handles, to beat men who tried to ee.

County sheri s developed an uncanny eye for spot ing any eeing

African Americans who made it through the woods to a farm or

town, and received rewards for hauling them back in chains.

That was the work available to an independent black man like

Green: free labor camps that functioned like prisons, cot on tenancy

that equated to serfdom, or prison mines l ed with slaves. The

alternatives, reserved for African Americans who crossed a white

man or the law, were even more grim. Stil , the freight depots were

a magnet of excitement. There was always in some corner a simple

game of dice being played for pennies or tobacco. Now and again,

the freight agent or some farmer in town with a wagon would pay

a man a nickel or a quarter to help move a trol ey of crates from an

open freight car. In picking season, white men would come to the

station every day looking for extra hands in the cot on elds,

apprising on sight—by the look of their hands or the smel of liquor

on their breath— whether an African American boy or man was

worth paying for a week's work in his elds, or whether they

belonged to the new class of independent blacks that whites saw as

the scourge of their lives and towns.

Regardless of their conclusions, every African American was a

nigger in a white man's eyes. So the term for those African

American men deemed speci cal y worthless for their de ant

American men deemed speci cal y worthless for their de ant

at itudes was "cigaret e dudes." These were men cocky by

comparison to their peers; they had learned some reading and

writing, and sometimes worked and sometimes slouched on street

corners. Sometimes cigaret es sat akilter on their lips. There was

likely a bot le of moonshine or a pistol in a pocket somewhere

among each throng of young men gawking from their poses against

the board and bat en wal s of the freight station. Instead of

threadbare overal s, the uniform of al blacks and poor country

whites for as long as anyone could remember, these men might

wear trousers and jackets, even neckties. They stood by the dozens

in the studio of a black photographer in Columbiana, cigaret e

dudes lounging with their arms draped around black girls in their

best Sunday dresses, glaring at the lens. On their faces an air of

de ant con dence, visages of the men they knew they should have

been al owed to be. Among a population of 8.5 mil ion blacks in

the southern states, crushed into subservience in the forty years

since the Civil War, these men were the last refuges of resistance as

the twentieth century dawned.

According to almost every white, these cigaret e dudes were the

source of every trouble in the South. These were the blacks never to

be hired, never to be befriended—to be denied embrocation of any

kind. To be rid of them forever, by whatever means could

accomplish that goal, was something nearly every white man in the

South, most certainly in Columbiana, had openly cal ed for and

worked toward for at least three decades.

This was the snare waiting for Green Cot enham at the Columbiana

railroad station on March 30, 1908. On the prior day, a Wednesday,

the sheri 's chief deputy, a scrawny white man named Newton

Eddings, grabbed Monroe Dolphus, a black man about Green's age,

as he stood in the train yard of the depot. The deputy seized

Cot enham the fol owing day and tossed him into the same fetid

cel where Dolphus had spent the night. There was uncertainty

about what charges against the men should be entered into the

prison registry at the jail.

prison registry at the jail.

Initial y, Eddings claimed that the crime commit ed by Dolphus

was taking a 25 cent tin of sh from the lunch pail of a Southern

Railway worker. Cot enham was charged with riding a freight train

without a ticket. There was no tangible evidence that either man

had commit ed any infraction at al .

Taken before Judge Longshore the fol owing day, Cot enham and

Dol-phus each denied the charges. Eddings was unable to produce

any evidence or witnesses to convict them. But sticking to the

cynical script fol owed thousands of times in the South, Judge

Longshore chose not the release the men anyway. Instead, he

declared them guilty of "vagrancy" that catchal of ense to which any

black man was vulnerable at almost any time. 1

Longshore sentenced both Dolphus and Cot enham to three

months of hard labor for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. Under its

standing contract with Shelby County, the company would pay the

county $12 per month for each man as long as he worked in their

mines.2 The two prisoners were also ordered to pay fees to the

sheri , judge, and other local o cials totaling $31.85 for Dolphus,

$38.40 for Cot enham—extraordinary sums for an unemployed

black man. Unable to pay those costs, Dolphus was ordered to

work an extra two months and twenty days at the mines to cover

the fees. Cot enham would have to spend an additional three

months and six days.3

A day later, Eddings arrived at the county jail with his shiny, six-

inch-barreled Colt .38 pistol in a holster dangling against his thigh.

A simple metal badge pinned to his coat read "Deputy Sheri ." He

carried thick round manacles connected with three tight steel links.

A trace of chains was draped over his shoulder. Eddings barked for

Cot enham and the nine other men in the Shelby County cel s to get

up. It was time to go to "Prat s."

The jail sat at the corner of South Main and Mildred streets,

almost directly across from the spare old county courthouse that the

town fathers had just abandoned for their ostentatious new structure

town fathers had just abandoned for their ostentatious new structure

three blocks to the north.

Green had never felt irons before that day.4 5 As Deputy Eddings

clapped a shackle on his left ankle, Green must have been surprised

how quickly his skin began to bruise, how heavily the rings of iron

clung to the ground between himself and Monroe Dolphus. Then

there was the startling sharp cold of the steel when Eddings slipped

a metal col ar around his neck.

Eddings locked the clasp on Green and did the same to "Mun," as

the men cal ed Dolphus, and then to each of the other eight

prisoners in the lockup that morning. Earley Bol ing, House

Pearson, and four others had been arrested at the train station too

and convicted for hopping a ride on an empty freight car without

permission. Henry Witherspoon was found guilty of petit larceny—

a crime applied to the theft of any object worth more than $10.

John Jones, arrested as he played dice inside a circle of other black

men squat ed in the dirt on the edges of the railroad yard, was

convicted of gambling. Once al ten were chained together, Eddings

told them to start walking back to the railway station. They trudged

out the scu ed rear door of the jailhouse and around the corner,

passing by the back porch of Sheri Fulton's wood-frame house

next door and on toward Main Street.

Al in the ragged group were stil in the street clothes they had

worn at the time of their arrest. But now the men were smeared

with the lth of the jail's grimy, wet interior. Most had been there

for several weeks, waiting for the monthly delivery to Tennessee

Coal, Iron & Railroad. Several walked shakily, taken aback by the

bright sunlight and unbalanced by subsistence on the sheri 's

meager rations and the partial sleep of nights on remnants of putrid

bedding. As they passed the sheri 's home, the men crossed the

shadow of the jail, looming above them, higher than al the

surrounding structures, the face of the massive tower interrupted

only by the keyhole window in the hanging chamber.6 On a

Saturday morning three months later, the sheri would release the

trapdoor of the sca old there, and Tom Pat erson, a thirty-eight-

trapdoor of the sca old there, and Tom Pat erson, a thirty-eight-

year-old black man convicted of murder, would twist to his death at

the end of the rope.

At the station, Eddings took Green and the other prisoners to the

far end of the platform to wait for the early morning train. They

rode the one-hour journey in the baggage car. Outside the

Birmingham depot, Eddings piled the shackled men into an open,

horse-drawn wagon he had telegraphed ahead to hire. Two mules

slowly pul ed Green and the others away from the city's bustling

center, then through the tempestuous streets of Prat City, past a

haphazard cemetery bulging with dead prisoners’ remains near

Smokey Row, and nal y up the long hil rising from the saloons

and whorehouses past the Catholic church to Tennessee Coal, Iron

& Railroad's newly completed wooden stockade at Slope No. 12.

It was a familiar journey for Eddings, and one he didn't mind. He

had delivered more than sixty men to the Prat Mines in the

previous twelve months, nearly al of them black men he had

himself rounded up and testi ed against to obtain conviction. As

chief deputy, Eddings made considerably less than the high sheri ,

but the business of arresting blacks and get ing them to the Prat

Mines was a good one for a scantly educated man from deep in the

countryside. He'd come to Columbiana to get away from the

drudgery of the isolated farm road where his father and older

brother lorded over his childhood, while the mother who gave birth

to him midway through the Civil War grew progressively demented.

By the time Eddings reached manhood, she was ful y insane.7

Sometimes it seemed the whole South was insane in 1908. Vast

numbers of freed slaves and their o spring like Green had

abandoned their former owners’ lands and scat ered across the rural

landscape, demanding wages and, almost as ridiculously to whites

such as Eddings's father, insisting on writ en contracts to be paid for