Slavery by Another Name (39 page)

"Mr. Turner said he bought us al three for $50 …and we were to

work for four months and a half a piece," testi ed Dave Johnson.

"Mr. Dunbar sold us to him. I don't know for how much," Helms

later told the grand jury. None signed contracts agreeing to the

arrangement, though later such documents mysteriously appeared

with "X" ‘s purporting to be those of the three black men. The

gossamer facade of judicial process took only three days to weave.

The trio had been arrested on a Thursday, tried, sentenced, and

delivered to a new owner on Friday, and were at their forced labor

by dawn's break on Saturday.12

At Turner's farm, the black laborers were put to work digging

drainage, cut ing wood, and cleaning up recently cleared new

pasture—the most grueling sunrise-to-sunset tasks of a farm stil

being carved from forest. Dave Johnson was beaten on the rst

Saturday by Al en Turner, son of the man who had purchased the

three. "I was whipped," Johnson said, "because I did not know how

to ditch—laid me down at on my stomach, one man on my head

and another man to hold my legs, and whipped me across my back,

my clothes were on. I was whipped with a piece of stick about as

big as a broom handle. I got about 25 licks. I was whipped about

every day."13

Helms received his rst beating a day after Johnson's: "I was

whipped about two days after I got there," Helms testi ed later.

"Whipped me a long time, I could not tel how many licks.

Sometimes I was whipped two or three times a day, sometimes

took my clothes down and whipped me with a stick on the bare

back."14Esau Wil iams said his rst corporal punishment came a

week after arriving at Turner's farm. Over the fol owing four weeks,

"I was whipped nearly every day…. Would drop our clothes and

whip us with hickory sticks," Wil iams recounted.15 When guards

were particularly sadistic, they at ached an empty metal bul et

cartridge to the end of the stick to gouge the skin with each swing

of the branch.

After days of testimony by victims of the forced labor ring, the jury

was greeted on May 11, 1903, by the hulking gure of John Pace.

The strange weather of early spring had nal y entered a long calm.

Replanting was in ful swing. Weeks of rain had abated, and the

drying elds were teeming with workers put ing in seed. Just a few

weeks earlier, Pace and his son-in-law, Anderson Hardy, had been

aggressively gathering more laborers, some hired as free men but

most captured through the courts or their procurers scat ered in the

countryside.

Suddenly ordered to appear before the grand jury, Pace turned

the operations over to Hardy and boarded a Central of Georgia

morning train at the Dadevil e depot where he had purchased

hundreds of black men over the prior twenty years. The ride from

Dadevil e's simple train platform to the immense new red-brick

Union Station in Montgomery took not much more than an hour.

Completed just ve years earlier, Union Station, receiving trains

from six competing railroad lines, was the bustling hub of

Alabama's economy—a veritable temple to the cot on-driven

prosperity that the South was reestablishing for itself and that this

federal investigation seemed intent on disrupting.

Wel before noon, Pace was in the capital city. He walked two

short blocks down Commerce Street to Dexter Street, almost

certainly unaware of the irony of his passing the fountain in Court

Square, where Montgomery's antebel um slave market had thrived

for almost fty years with the daily auctions of African Americans

like Scip, the Cot ingham slave, and the forebears of the men and

women Pace held on his farm. Across the street was the federal

court building. Almost exactly forty years after Lincoln's order

freeing the slaves, Pace entered the grand doorway of the

courthouse, the rst man in Alabama to face the threat of criminal

sanction for holding black slaves. Forty-two years later, the modern

U.S. civil rights movement began at the same intersection when

Rosa Parks boarded a bus at the Court Square stop and refused to

give up her seat to a white man.16

In a wood-paneled private chamber inside the court building,

In a wood-paneled private chamber inside the court building,

Pace o ered the grand jury a sanitized, yet nonetheless damning,

version of his dealings with black laborers. It must have been

unnerving for him to face a panel of "peers" that included black

men, holding authority over his freedom and fate. Whatever his

reaction to the African American faces gazing at him from the jury

box, Pace described a plantation melodrama in which he acted not

as oppressor but the rescuer of penniless blacks who preferred life

on his farm to jail or a forced journey into the coal mines of

Birmingham. Ignoring the rst twenty years of his active trading in

black laborers, Pace dated the beginnings of his dealings to April

1901, just two years earlier.

"The first man I got was Elbert Carmichael," Pace said, naming the

victim in what he knew was the earliest case federal investigators

had unearthed so far. Pace insisted that he asked for the proper

paperwork proving that every black man sold to him was a

legitimate convict serving a judge's sentence, but that he took the

word of constables such as Robert Franklin and John Dunbar who

sometimes said the documents had been lost. "They claimed they

did not have time to make the papers out before they caught the

train," Pace said of his arrangement in 1902 to acquire a young

African American boy named W. S. Thompson.17

In the cases of Joe Pat erson and Jim Caldwel , Pace testi ed that

he "noti ed the white people that these boys" were under his

control and that their freedom could be purchased by reimbursing

the $70 he paid for them. A few days later, G. B. Walker, the

at orney, arrived to obtain their release. Pace told the jury he was

outraged to learn that the supposed court fees on the men had

totaled only $22.50 and that they had been improperly placed on

his farm. "I did not want to hold the negroes under those terms, and

I demanded my money back," Pace testified.

As for John Davis, Pace said the black man freely admit ed

shirking a $40 bil at Robert Franklin's dry goods store. He said

Davis volunteered to work o the debt and a $35 ne under guard

at the convict farm. Pace claimed to have sent $4 to Davis's wife at

one point during the year that he held him, but admit ed that he

one point during the year that he held him, but admit ed that he

recouped nearly al of his expenditures at the end of the twelve-

month contract by sel ing Davis to another white farmer for $50. He

o ered no explanation for how he had the power to sel Davis,

even after al his al eged debts were paid.

Pace explained that Joe Pat erson was kept under guard an extra

half year to pay a $25 doctor's bil for treatment after Pat erson's

ngers were cut while working on the farm. Yet more time was

added, Pace explained, as penalty after Pat erson at empted to

escape and used another white landowner's boat to cross the Coosa

River during his ight. The owner of the boat and Pace's foreman,

Todd Berry, recaptured Pat erson two days later, after trailing him

with bloodhounds. Dragged back to the Pace farm, the justice of the

peace, James Kennedy, held another sham trial and sentenced

Pat erson to an additional six months of labor. Pace said other

charges could have been brought as wel , but he chose not to. "I felt

kindly towards the boy and I wanted the mat er dropped," Pace

said.18

The next day, Fletcher Turner arrived in Montgomery and made

the same walk to the courthouse to appear before the panel of

jurors. His account was even more blatantly self-serving. Turner

agreed to take on Esau Wil iams, Dave Johnson, and Glennie Helms

only as a favor to another black laborer who asked him to help the

imprisoned three youngsters, he testi ed. There had never been any

violence against anyone on his farm.

"They have three negroes down yonder," Turner quoted the other

black laborer as saying. "And I know a brother of one of the boys,

and the boy knows me, and wants me to come around and see if

you want to make a trade with him."

When Turner arrived at the train station, he said he found the

three black workers "tied in the buggy with a rope." Other white

men, including John Pace, had gathered to inspect them, a common

occurrence when word went out of black men for hire or purchase.

Turner said the three blacks looked worthless: "I wanted negroes

but no such things as them cigaret e dudes," he said, using a

but no such things as them cigaret e dudes," he said, using a

common epithet for independent black men. "I asked what is the

cost of them negroes anyhow ? Where were they tried, and what

did they try them for?" Deputy Dunbar answered that they could be

had for $17.50 each.

Turner repeated to the jury his dialogue with the young black

men in the buggy:

" ‘Hel o nigger, how much is your cost?’ One of them commenced

crying and said, ‘Boss, if you wil take me I wil work for you two

years,’ " Turner claimed. "I said, ‘You are nothing but cigaret e

dudes and I would not have you.’ "

Turner described how he nonetheless began bargaining with

Grogan, the marshal from Goodwater who had arrested the three.

Grogan insisted that Turner would have to pay $53 and take al

three men.

"I won't pay any such amount," Turner said he replied.

"What wil you give?" Grogan said.

"Forty dol ars," Turner answered.

"Make it forty-five," Grogan shot back.

"No," said Turner.

Final y, Grogan relented. "Give me the money."

Turner walked into a nearby business, asked for a blank check,

and wrote it out to Dunbar for $40, against an account at the

Tal apoosa County Bank.

Turner told the jury he was incensed when he later learned that

each of the three blacks had only been ned $5 or $6 when

arrested. Turner claimed he told the young men they could leave

after four months of work instead of a year. He said the workers

were "perfectly satis ed," though he admit ed that Speedy Helms—

the "best negro of the bunch"—tried to run away. He was recaptured

and returned to the farm for a reward by a policeman in Opelika.19

Three days later, George Cosby took the stand. Like Pace and

Turner, he told the grand jury he was abbergasted by the

al egations against him by various African Americans. Cosby said

al egations against him by various African Americans. Cosby said

he'd had nothing to do with slavery, forced labor, or peonage. He

said he'd been a consistent friend to blacks, paying their debts and

providing work out of kindness and good intentions. His version of

events was that he paid a $10 debt to Pace on behalf of "a darkey"

named Elbert Carmichael in January or February 1901. Afterward,

he "al owed" Carmichael to live on his farm.

Carmichael was "a mighty good negro, a might good hand … a

preacher," Cosby said. He freely left the farm to return to his home

in another county. Cosby couldn't remember helping arrest and

hold on a bond a man named Jasper Kennedy. A black woman

named Mat Smith "never worked a day for me in her life," Cosby

said, reporting that after he paid a $3.45 ne for Smith, she

disappeared to her father's. As for Lum Johnson, a black worker

Cosby paid nes for on two occasions, "that negro is working for

me now. He is free. I never whipped him." The same went for Wil

Get ings, "a free hand …working for $7 month." John Bentley,

another black man on the farm, "came along the road the other day

and I hired him," Cosby said. Bentley feared he was about to be

accused of stealing some fence wire in another town, and wanted

Cosby to shelter him. Cosby said he agreed to do so for $9 a month,

but insisted that Bentley remained free at al times.

"Those three negroes are al that I have. I don't lock them up at

night. I have no hounds, I keep a rabbit dog. I don't go armed about

my place," Cosby said. "Those negroes are absolutely free."20

On the same day that Cosby testi ed, a federal marshal escorted

into the courthouse James M. Kennedy, the jack-of-al -trades justice