Slavery by Another Name (64 page)

shaft under the seam of coal. Many of the rooms were more like

long tunnels—some as tal as four feet but many barely two feet

high and two feet wide. The circumscribed chambers extended

more than twenty- ve feet from the main shaft, forcing Green and

other miners to slide on their stomachs a distance ve or more

times the length of their bodies. The cavities were il uminated by

ickering lanterns hooked on leather straps around their heads.

Shaped like a smal teapot, a lantern held a reservoir of oil, with a

wick running through the snout to the flame.

Crouched or lying in the claustrophobic space, with no light other

than the feeble ame of his oil or carbide headlamp, Green slung

his steel pick in constricted sidelong arcs, shat ering the worthless

his steel pick in constricted sidelong arcs, shat ering the worthless

stone and rock below the coal. He drove wedges into the coal to

separate sections weighing a half ton or more. After enough slams

of the sledge, the huge slabs of coal cracked free, sometimes

unexpectedly for inexperienced convicts, landing in thunderous

crashes inches from the prostrate miners. When men worked

entirely beneath the coal seam, they instal ed wooden supports

cal ed sprags to prevent an unexpected col apse. Sometimes only

blasting powder—wrapped in newspaper to make simple

cartridges and placed in holes dril ed at the edge of the seam—

could separate the coal from surrounding rock. Lighting a cartridge

with a crude fuse, the miners hurried out of the room and back into

the shaft seconds before the ceiling of coal col apsed with the

explosion. Many men were caught by the fal ing coal and kil ed or

maimed.

Once broken free, the coal was hammered into fty- and

hundred-pound pieces and loaded into the train cars. Once a day,

another prisoner came by with a bucket containing portions of

crude food.

Here there was lit le of the eld hand or rail bed singing that

Green had heard among country blacks back in Bibb County, no

community of shared perseverance. There was only the furious

scramble to crack and pry and stack and sort the rock and coal, and

watch other stone-faced men moving in the shadowy dark.

Each day, Green spent nearly every waking hour stretched in a

room o the main shaft. Once the coal was freed and broken up, he

loaded coal furiously as a boss, another black convict, snarled that

he would feel the whip if Green mixed rock with the coal in the

wagons to be pul ed from the mine sixteen hours later. After six

days in Slope No. 12, Green had only to return to the mine once

more before Sunday, the one day of rest and of daylight. After that,

there would be twenty-four more Sundays before his time in the

mine was scheduled to end.

If the worst of a day in Slope No. 12 had been only the physical y

If the worst of a day in Slope No. 12 had been only the physical y

wracking intensity of the labor, then this sentence, even if meted

out by a crude sheri for the imsiest al eged infraction against the

law, might have been bearable. But there was far worse. Green and

Mun were fortunate that they were strapping, grown men, at the

peak of their physical strengths. They were fortunate too that their

stay with the sheri had lasted only three days, not long enough for

the starvation rations to weaken them material y.

The prison mine in some respects was an improvement over the

Shelby County jail. The men were fed semiregularly A doctor lived

in the simple "hospital" across the yard—a big advance over earlier

medical care at Prat Mines, which consisted of a crude one-room

shed, with barn doors, a dirt floor, and one window for light.10

Conditions at the Prat Mines had improved since the deadly

epidemics of disease that regularly occurred in the 1880s and 1890s

—but only marginal y. Inside the shafts, deadly gases accumulated

in unventilated sections, work continued even as water, seeping

from the wal s and fouled with the miners’ waste and excrement,

accumulated in the shafts. Intestinal disorders, malaria, pneumonia,

and respiratory problems dogged the men. Endless contact with

coal dust led to black lung disease, a miserable and certain slow

death.

Hardly a week passed that accidents didn't take men's ngers,

hands, toes, or worse. Often the cause was a careless swing of a

pick. But almost as frequently men were crushed by coal fal ing

before they expected, or pinned by railroad cars that derailed. After

electric trol eys and lights were instal ed in some areas, many a

miner died from "touching a live wire," according to state

inspectors.

Younger and smal er men—and the dozens of pubescent boys

forced into the shafts—on their rst days in the mines faced a

terrible initiation. Argued over—often violently—by the convicts

with bit er months and years of time in the mine behind them, the

boys were pushed into corners of the pitch black mine rooms,

beaten into submission with the handles of the pickaxes or rough

beaten into submission with the handles of the pickaxes or rough

leather belts worn by the men, and raped daily and nightly.

Disagreements over ownership of the sodomized "gal-boys" or other

infractions of the prisoners’ code erupted into bizarre violence. Men

made huge by their years of labor and hardened by their fates

at acked each other in the constricted spaces with axes, knives,

rocks, and bare hands. Homicides were a constant occurrence.

The ranks of those condemned to the mines were so broadly

uneducated and il iterate—even by the elementary standards of

1908—that hardly any eyewitness accounts were recorded of the

nightmarish episodes beneath the surface. The shame of witnessing

—or being a participant in—such acts further sti ed

acknowledgment of the rapes and violence that accompanied them.

But virtual y every surviving account of life in the slave mines

referred in at least muted tones to these spectacles of sexual abuse.

One white man wrote after his release how "men, degraded to a

plane lower than the brutes, are guilty of the unmentionable crimes

referred to by the Apostle Paul in his let er to the Romans." He cited

the verse: "The men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned

in their lusts one toward another, men with men, working that

which is unseemly"11

As shocking as the sodomy were the o cial punishments of the

mines and convict labor camps administered under the sanction of

government authority. At the end of the day, whatever had

happened deep in the earth, each man was held to account for the

coal he col ected while in the shaft. Healthy prisoners such as Green

and Mun were required to produce eight tons each day. Any man

who came up short of his assigned "task" was subject to the whip—

held over a barrel by two other black men with his shirt removed

and his pants pushed to his knees as the white mine superintendent

or the designated whipping boss lashed him with a thick, four-inch-

wide strap of leather. On some days, as many as two or three dozen

men felt the bite of forty or fty strokes. Those who chronical y

failed to meet task were beaten every day, often in the morning as

wel to remind them of the fate that awaited failure that night.

A convict named Alvaran Snow Al en published a simple

A convict named Alvaran Snow Al en published a simple

religious lea et near the turn of the century titled "The Story of a

Lie," recounting the misdeeds of his life and how they led him to

become "Convict No. 2939" in an unspeci ed labor prison. In

excruciating detail, he recounted the methods, lexicons, and

apparatuses of prisoner punishment used throughout the southern

prison labor system. "Come-a-longs" were steel bracelets snapped

onto the wrists and fastened by a chain to a smal metal crossbar.

Turning the crossbar instantly twisted a man's arms into a knot,

forcing him to his knees. In a punishment known simply as "the

chains," a prisoner was placed in handcu s at ached to the ends of a

thirty-inch-long steel bar, which was then hoisted with a pul ey

until the man hung clear of the oor, to be left suspended "from 50

minutes to two hours."12 A variation on this torment was known in

some camps as the "alakazan degree," in which the victim's ankles

were cu ed behind his back and then his feet "drawn upward and

backward until his whole body is stretched taut in the shape of a

bow" and then tied to his wrists. Once pinioned, the most

unfortunate prisoners were then placed in a closed and darkened

box cal ed a "crib" and left there in su ering. "The intense agony

in icted by this method of torture is indescribable; every muscle

throbs with pain," wrote one prisoner after his release.13

"Lit le shackles" were egg-shaped pieces of iron riveted onto

ankle rings on prisoners in rural work camps to make their feet too

heavy to run. "Whipping straps" weighed two to seven pounds for

routine beatings. "Shackles and chains" was a three-foot section of

chain with an ankle cu at one end and a two-inch ring at the other

end. Once the cu was riveted to a prisoner's leg, the chain was

wrapped around the leg during working hours, and then unspooled

at day's end to be at ached to the one long chain holding al

convicts in a particular sleeping area.

Famous to prison mines and camps in Alabama, Georgia, and

Florida was the "pick shackle," which Al en described as a

sharpened pick head riveted upside down to a prisoner's ankle—

making it ut erly impossible to run or even walk normal y—and

making it ut erly impossible to run or even walk normal y—and

typical y left there for the duration of a convict's sentence.14 Worn

for months or years at a time, the twenty- to thirtypound picks

rubbing against bare skin caused abrasions that led to pus- l ed

lesions and infections prisoners cal ed "shackle poison." Lit ered

through the records of convict camps are amputations of feet and

lower legs as a result of blood poisoning from the injuries.

By far the most torturous and widely used punishment was the

"water cure," a medieval cruciation whose many variations rendered

the strongest and most de ant of men ut erly compliant. In its most

moderate form, the water cure was simply forcing a man to stand

naked under a shower of cold water until he convulsed with cold.

More often, prisoners described being stripped of their clothing and

tied to a post or chair. A water line—often a high-pressure re hose

—was turned on the naked prisoner, pounding his skin with intense

pressure and l ing his mouth and nose with torrents of water until

he became convinced he was about to drown.

In the Alabama prison mines where Green Cot enham was now

an inmate, the preferred form of the water cure was simply to lift a

man o his feet and plunge him head rst into a barrel, with his

arms tied or held useless to his sides. Guards or prisoners working

under the supervision of one held the man's furiously kicking feet

to keep the barrel upright until his thrashing subsided—usual y two

to three minutes after being plunged into the liquid. Then the

prisoner was hauled, gasping, out of the bucket, given a few

seconds of air, then plunged down again. Repeated again and again,

virtual y no prisoner could avoid being turned into a shivering,

begging wretch.15

For the hundreds of men who could not endure the physical abuse

or the grinding labor, or who were kil ed by guards and other

prisoners, death brought a final brief journey into the earth. At dead

center of the sprawling Prat Mines complex, facing Smokey Row,

sat an unkempt 1,300-acre triangle of land, hemmed on two sides

by tracks to the three nearest shafts. Here and there, heaps of coal

by tracks to the three nearest shafts. Here and there, heaps of coal

slag and rocky debris jut ed from the ground, amid a helter-skelter

pat ern of shrubby trees. Lit ered randomly among the debris and a

web of muddy footpaths were hundreds of graves—many already

slumping slightly into the earth and overgrown with weeds, many

others stil mounded high from recent burials.

Just outside the fence at Slope No. 12, another burial eld held

the men who died in the newest shaft. In the big cemetery at the

bot om of the hil , a few graves bore simple stones with the names