Slavery by Another Name (63 page)

spel ing the name of the company that for al intents and purposes

owned him then as much as old Elisha Cot ingham had owned his

father and grandfather. Perhaps he mouthed the words—Tennessee

Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.—and then craned his neck to glimpse

behind him the clinking column of slaves, the glow of the city, and,

beyond, a last flash of stars and predawn sky.

XIV

ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE

"Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes."

By al accounts, Slope No. 12 was the nest prison ever built in

Alabama. The two-story wood-frame dormitory, constructed in

the shape of a giant T, stood at the center of the fenced

compound where Green Cot en-ham was deposited by Deputy

Eddings. From the front door, atop ten steps beneath a smal

portico, the prison extended outward in three wings. The six

"sleeping rooms" were each large enough to accommodate up to

sixty men sleeping in close quarters on the odd swinging bunk beds.

One room was reserved for whites only. A contained walkway

connected the building to a kitchen immediately to the rear.

Inside, prisoners young and old, hardened and innocent, mingled

whenever they were not chained apart. On Sundays, the one day of

rest, card and dice games continued unceasingly. "They wil gamble

the but ons o their clothes," an inmate told one visitor. Sexual

abuse was rampant, in the darkness of the prison and the isolation

of the mine shaft. "Sodomy is prevalent among these massed men,"

wrote journalist Shelby Harrison in 1912, after a visit to Prat No.

12. "The older men pick out the young ones to make advances to. It

is commonly said in some of the camps that every prisoner has his

‘gal-boy’ "1

Across a eld of grass cropped close by goats wandering inside

the compound stood the o cers’ quarters, a simple but spacious

two-level house with a veranda and rocking chairs anking three

sides. Nearby was a mess hal for the guards. A pressurized water

spigot—a luxury—stood beside the front porch. A tin cup and towel

hung permanently on a nail, where o cers stopped for a drink or

to wash on the way inside at mealtimes.

At the opposite corner of the enclosure stood a storehouse, where

prisoners fortunate enough to have any money could buy from their

prisoners fortunate enough to have any money could buy from their

keepers tobacco or extra rations on Sundays. Nearby was a smal

hospital building where the sick could be segregated. When the

mine opened in early 1908, with a workforce made up total y of

forced laborers, state o cials declared the prison the "best in the

state."

For more than a decade, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad—

irritated by criticism that its mines and furnaces were inferior to

those of competitors in the North and that its miners, free and

forced, worked at perpetual risk to their lives—had invested heavily

in dramatic technological improvements and fresh underground

exploration. The new prison cost $54,570— a substantial sum.

The company instal ed thousands of additional coke ovens, added

miles of new railroad track, and developed a breakthrough

technique for forging steel train rails—a rst for any company in

the South. On the outskirts of Birmingham, at the edge of Red

Mountain, the company built a new complex of deep-shaft iron ore

mines. Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad also was abandoning its old

system of dragging coal to the surface in carts pul ed by mules and

instal ing steam-powered systems using cables to pul enormously

greater tonnage of coal from the shafts.2

With U.S. Steel's acquisition of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in

November 1907, the pace of new construction and advancements in

the mines accelerated rapidly. But with the company's progress also

came destruction. On the surface, the toxic e uent of the digging

was pumped into wooden ues that poured into vast, fouled

moonscapes of dead forest. Nearby, steam shovels clawed scars fty

feet deep and hundreds of feet wide into the landscape to lay bare

ore, limestone, and other minerals. Near every mine—especial y

those in long operation—gargantuan mounds of slag, the worthless

rock drawn out with the coal, loomed ever larger on the horizon.3

The shafts closest to the center of Prat City—some of them in

production for more than two decades—were depleting. Most had

already been repeatedly extended, rst hundreds of feet below the

surface and then for thousands of feet horizontal y, fol owing the

surface and then for thousands of feet horizontal y, fol owing the

thick deposits of coal threading from the Prat seam. The longer the

mine shaft grew, the slower and more expensive it became to

remove coal from the mine—prompting the company to instal new

shafts to the surface closer to the most active areas of mining.

Even the construction of the model new prison carried an ironic

human cost. In 1902, leaders of the Colored Methodist Episcopal

Church bought ten acres in a new residential development designed

by a white investor as a refuge for prosperous African Americans on

the outskirts of Birmingham. The place was cal ed Booker City—

after Booker T Washington. The African American church opened a

smal and struggling high school for black children, similar to the

Calhoun School in Lowndes County, on an elevated point three

miles from the center of the Prat Mines complex.

Five years later, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad recognized that

the acreage owned by the black school would be an ideal location

for a new mine. In return for thirty acres of property in another

location and $30,000, the church sold the property on which the

Slope No. 12 prison would soon be built. A year later, the

Methodists opened a new four-year institution for African

Americans, named Miles Memorial Col ege, in honor of a former

slave who became a famous church bishop after the Civil War.4

At the same time, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad built Slope

No. 12 and its prison compound. Connecting the mine and prison

to the company's coke ovens and industrial infrastructure was a new

railroad spur snaking along a ridge rising from Prat City's old

convict cemetery to the site of the then empty Booker City High

School.

The black Methodists there had struggled to keep their school

operating and its desks and teaching positions l ed. There was no

such di culty with the prison that succeeded it. Under the lease

U.S. Steel quickly signed with the state of Alabama, the company

could shift four hundred convicts from two other Prat Mines to No.

12. U.S. Steel also obtained leases on hundreds more county

12. U.S. Steel also obtained leases on hundreds more county

prisoners. Under a contract with Je erson County, the company

paid the local government nearly $60,000—equal to about $1.1

mil ion a century later—to acquire every prisoner arrested during

1908.5

Similar standing agreements were in place with twenty other

Alabama counties, set ing the prices for each laborer between $9

per month for Choctaw County and $28.50 for prisoners captured

in the state capital of Montgomery.6 New leases entered into by

U.S. Steel after it bought TCI were supposed to guarantee a steady

stream of convicts until at least the end of 1912.7

The supply of forced labor became even more critical as tensions

mounted between the coal-mining companies of Birmingham and

the local United Mine Workers organization—which had

aggressively organized more than ten thousand free miners in

Alabama. Convicts—who had no choice but to continue digging

coal under whatever circumstances the company demanded—were

crucial to maintaining operations during a strike or other labor

interruption.

Through the spring and summer of 1908, the number of men

purchased for use in Slope No. 12 steadily climbed—by August

reaching nearly six hundred prisoners taken from county sheri s

and just under four hundred from the state.8 Of the sixty men

delivered by Deputy Eddings in the twelve months before

Cot enham's arrest, nearly half were charged with "jumping"—or

riding a freight train without a ticket. Eddings's jail registry said

George Roberson was sent on a conviction for "assault with a stick."

Another black man, Lou Wil iam, was sold to Slope No. 12 for

adultery. John Jones had been sold for gambling.9

Al his life, Green had heard of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.

Every African American in Alabama had been told stories about the

vast prison mines at Prat City. For a generation it loomed over the

lives of black people, a mysterious hel in living earth buried

lives of black people, a mysterious hel in living earth buried

beneath a licentious mining boomtown. Men sent there for three

months or six months instead disappeared for a year, or forever.

The few men who straggled back to their homeplaces told of a

whole city of mines, where shafts crisscrossed the subterranean

world like a crazy quilt of streets with hundreds of underground

"rooms," sometimes nearly intersecting with the shafts of other

mines. Other mines named Flat Top, Coalburg, and Banner, owned

by di erent companies, cut from nearby camps into the fabulous

seam of bituminous coal coursing, four feet thick in some places,

through the low ridges of northern Alabama.

Like Prat City, the mines at Flat Top and Coalburg were packed

with black men forced underground at gunpoint. The others l ed

each day with white men paid by the hour who despised the black

convicts, partly out of the habit of despising African Americans but

more now for the crippling damage their presence did to the free

miners’ pleas for bet er wages and working conditions.

Sometimes the convicts laughed at how the free miners so hated

them, as if black laborers chained to their beds had chosen to be

there. It was another sign that most white people seemed to be

simply crazy when it came to the lives of black people. No sane

man who had ever visited Flat Top, with its two thousand

desperate black prisoners, or the slopes at Prat City, l ed with

1,500 emaciated African American laborers, black whipping guards,

and the white captains who wielded the lash as mercilessly as any

of the old slave masters, could believe such a thing.

Shortly after Slope No. 12 opened in 1907, arrangements were

made for a series of celebratory photographs for the company. At

the storehouse, convicts stand in bright white uniforms. The grassy

yard is pristine and dot ed with newly planted banana trees ready

to unfurl their long, wide leaves. The fence around the compound is

hidden in trees. But behind the barred windows, Slope No. 12 and

the other prison shafts at Prat were beginning a hel ish headlong

descent in the chaotic aftermath of U.S. Steel's abrupt takeover.

descent in the chaotic aftermath of U.S. Steel's abrupt takeover.

In February, three months after the merger, a wave of pneumonia

and tuberculosis swept through the prison miners, kil ing nine. In

March, six more convicts died of tuberculosis, including Roberson,

the Shelby County man convicted of "assault with a stick."

Nearly al the men thrown into Slope No. 12 shared the same

di cult background of deep poverty and the circumscribed

opportunities of their Black Belt origins. They came in hues every

man of the Black Belt could describe—deep dark like country night,

gingercake, the high yel ow of mulat oes, the sharp features of red

bone. They were farmhands mostly. Baptists and African

Methodists. Nearly al were the children or grandchildren of slaves.

Most knew the families who had once owned their kin. They al

knew no black man would ever see justice in the prisons of white

men.

Yet in the bowels of Slope No. 12, there was lit le more kinship

of skin than that. When Green arrived, nearly a thousand laborers

toiled in the same grueling rhythm. Transported deep into the shaft

on the same narrow gauge trams that would be used to carry out

the coal they mined from the soft bituminous seam, each man

carried a pick, a shovel with a short handle, a sledgehammer, and

two iron or wooden wedges.

Once deep in the mine, the convicts were parceled in pairs into

narrow "rooms" carved at right angles from the sides of the main