Slavery by Another Name (62 page)

their labor—despite that only the rarest among blacks could write

their own names, much less read the words on the page. Stil ,

blacks insisted upon it, and whites initial y acquiesced, knowing

that cot on could not be grown and picked without black labor.

Stranger stil , until just barely a decade earlier, in the counties to

Stranger stil , until just barely a decade earlier, in the counties to

the south of Eddings's boyhood home, where slaves had

outnumbered whites before the war, tens of thousands of African

Americans continued to cast bal ots in every election. Only the

sustained war of atrocities against African Americans in every

section had nal y forced them to ful y submit to Alabama's new

constitution and its provisions banning them from the vote and any

aspects of legal equality. Stil , a perverse cloud hung over the state

of white and black coexistence.

The New South, with its rising great cities of Birmingham and

Atlanta, railroads and factories, was by contrast a utopia compared

to the civil bat le elds of the countryside. Like thousands of other

young southern whites and crowds of young blacks, Deputy Eddings

ed the scarred rural landscape for a semblance of civilization and

opportunity. Now, at the age of forty-two, he was ful y a town man,

moving on the edge of the circle of leaders who were shaping

Columbiana into a model of what prosperous Alabama wished to

be in the young twentieth century. He enjoyed the monthly trips, or

sometimes more often if the mines needed more men, to deliver

African Americans to Prat City. He ignored the prisoners’ pleas to

let them escape and their promises to bring him cash from a father

or uncle if he would set them free.

When girlfriends or mothers of young black men came begging at

the jailhouse, he couldn't help but be tempted. The carnal pleasures

of taking a black girl when you pleased had been a privilege of rich

white men for so long in the South. Now simple men like Eddings

could do the same—tel ing girls to come around to the jailer's room

for an hour of compulsory sexual performance in exchange for a

favor to their man inside. It was hardly even furtive. Guards did the

same at hundreds of jails. At the lumber camps in southern

Alabama, women seeking the freedom of their men were simply

arrested when they arrived, chained into their cel s, and kept to

serve the physical desires of the men running the camps. The slave

camps and mines produced scores of babies—nearly al of them

with white fathers.8

There was no risk of penalty to any white law enforcement

There was no risk of penalty to any white law enforcement

o cer who chose to force himself on a black woman who

presented herself in the vulnerable circumstances of a jail. To al

whites, these were by de nition worthless women—even more

worthless than other black females. Even many African Americans,

terri ed of losing further respect or security among whites, looked

askance at any black who became associated with prisoners and

debt slavery. These women were friendless and abandoned even

among their own. And the laws of the South were interpreted

explicitly to ensure that the rape or coercion of a black woman by a

white man would almost never be prosecuted as a crime.

Indeed, South Carolina governor Cole Blease, citing his belief in

the animalistic inability of blacks to control themselves, routinely

pardoned the kil ers of black men, especial y in the case of African

Americans commit ing violence against African Americans. "This is

the case of one negro kil ing another—the old familiar song—‘Hot

supper; liquor; dead negro,’ " the governor wrote in one

explanation of a pardon. As for sexual assaults of black women,

Governor Blease asserted it was the nature of every African

American woman to want sex at any opportunity. "Adultery seems

to be their most favorite pastime," he said. "I have …very serious

doubt as to whether the crime of rape can be commit ed upon a

negro."9

On each trip to Prat , Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. paid

Eddings a fee for every African American, in addition to his

expenses for train fares, meals, wagon rental from the livery, and,

occasional y, lodging in the city when Eddings couldn't make the

last train back to Columbiana.

Arresting, convicting, and transporting these prisoners was

Eddings's primary livelihood. His and Sheri Fulton's entire

compensation came from an assortment of fees charged for every

action taken by the o ce and paid into the Shelby County Fine and

Forfeiture Fund. The courts col ected fees for serving subpoenas,

foreclosing on delinquent loans, arresting and testifying against

foreclosing on delinquent loans, arresting and testifying against

criminal defendants—tacking the charges onto the nes levied

against nearly every person brought before the county or circuit

judge. Eddings and the sheri —along with the court clerk, the town

solicitor, jury members, witnesses, and nearly any other white

person who played a part in the seizure and conviction of each

prisoner—were awarded fees by the judge and received warrants to

exchange for the money as the prisoner's labor paid down his nes.

Since that typical y took months, or years, the sheri and others

accumulated court-issued scrip for the money—IOUs of a sort. Over

time, they cashed the redeemable warrants as money accumulated

in the county cof ers.

The remuneration was often lucrative. Sheri Fulton, a smooth-

shaven man partial to bow ties, was already balding when he was

rst elected at age thirty-one in 1906. He defeated the former chief

deputy by just seven votes—and even then only by packing the

bal ot box with votes cast by dead men. (Fulton was thrown out of

o ce by a judge two years later for the fraud, but never pursued

criminal y.) During the November before Green Cot enham was

arrested, Fulton cashed out a stack of scrip stemming from sixty- ve

di erent cases in the prior year, and col ected a total of $373.50—

equivalent to about $7,000 a century later.

More lucrative stil , Sheri Fulton, like al his counterparts in

Alabama, also was al owed to keep whatever excess remained from

the state's monthly "feeding" payments received for food provided

to prisoners in the jail. Since nearly al the arrests in the county

were of black men who were soon shipped to Prat Mines, they

required lit le more than cornmeal mush and pork fat, which

Sheri Fulton's wife could prepare. Unlike the occasional white

man thrown into the jail, the black prisoners, nearly al of them

itinerants with no local families or white landowners to speak for

them, could neither say nor do anything about the scant provisions.

Deputy Eddings arrived at the Prat Mines complex and continued

up the hil , past the coke ovens, to the new Slope No. 12 mine at

Booker City, a black neighborhood bought up by Tennessee Coal,

Iron & Railroad when a thick mineral vein was identi ed there a

Iron & Railroad when a thick mineral vein was identi ed there a

year earlier. He delivered Cot-tenham, Dolphus, and the others to

the prison captain. What the company's mine boss and guards did

with Cot enham, or any of the hundreds of other black men they

purchased, was entirely up to them.

Even as a child of two former slaves, versed in the old people's

stories of whips and dogs and weeks spent with feet blistered and

ngers bleeding from picking cot on, Green had never conjured

anything so foreign as what he witnessed on the surface and in the

catacombs beneath Prat City.

For ve days after arriving at Slope No. 12, Green Cot enham had

not seen the rising dawn or the set ing sun. It was not as if he were

a "farm Negro," panging to be on the land and in the sun like so

many of the others around him. It was not as if he had never before

been in the company of brutish or crude men. And it was not as if

he had never before been compel ed to spend his days in grueling

labor. But however contemptuous he might have been of the

whining country boys shivering and sniveling at the shouts of the

crew boss, and however boldly he may have chal enged any man to

touch him, Green could not have been prepared for his fate befal en

here.

Green spent every day but one in a vast labyrinth of black rock

tunnels, shared only by dozens of dirty mules and squadrons of

desperate men, al slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal.

The absence of sunlight, vegetation, or any prospect for the touch of

a not venal human hand had to tear at his soul.

Long before sunrise each morning, two white men swung open

the doors from the entryway at the center of the wooden prison

barrack and pushed into the rancid wooden cavern where Green

and two hundred other black men, chained to one another, lay

wrapped in coarse blankets. Running the fty-foot length of the

room, a continual series of bunk beds dangling on pipes at ached to

the ceiling were piled with bodies. Where there was no space on a

surface, men draped themselves in suspended contortions across

canvas hammocks stretched between the bunks on either side of a

narrow aisle down the center. A single potbel ied stove, long gone

narrow aisle down the center. A single potbel ied stove, long gone

cold, stood at the center of the room.

On Saturday, April 11, 1908, the sudden opening of the doorway

ushered in a blast of crisp spring air, cut ing with swift relief

through the musty wet stink of the men, stil sheathed in the black

detritus of the mine waiting for them outside. As the guards moved

toward the opposite end of the room, releasing the men's irons

from chains looped through their beds and barking for reluctant

prisoners to wake, the men responded in an awkward, col ective

undulation. As each awakened and moved, a succession of pairs of

legs and irons slid wearily toward the keys held in the hands of the

guard, each time pul ing the legs of the next man toward the guard

as wel , and then the next, and the next, al of them spil ing

gradual y of the bunks in a long, groggy metal ic jangle.

Once on their feet and refastened to their chains, Green and the

column of prisoners led out through a front stoop, down the

wooden steps, and into a plain kitchen. Each man stu ed a biscuit

and a cut of cold bacon into his mouth and shuf led out the door. At

the point of shotguns, they tramped into the deep darkness, across

the bare yard, past the pen of bloodhounds trained to track "Negro

scent," past the barrel across which men were stretched naked

almost nightly to be whipped with a leather strap, out the

mammoth gate of the stockade, and up to the ori ce where they

would enter the earth.

There, high on the ridge above Prat City, Green for a moment

would have glimpsed the luminescence of the industrial spectacle

throbbing atop the geological wonder of the coal and iron ore

discovered beneath the hil s of northern Alabama. There had been

nothing more than one prosperous farm in this val ey forty years

earlier, but now in 1908 a city of nearly 150,000 people was

consuming the land. The acrid smel of coal smoke never

dissipated. On the farthest horizon glowed the Sloss Furnaces,

where Col. James W. Sloss, the man more responsible than any

other for the sensational economic boom of what was cal ed "the

Magic City," had presided over a con agration of re, machines,

and molten iron unlike anything ever before seen in the South. In

and molten iron unlike anything ever before seen in the South. In

the val ey between the high smokestacks of the furnaces and the

hil top perch of Slope No. 12, the lights of new o ce buildings and

churches glimmered at the commercial center of Birmingham.

One can only imagine what l ed Green's mind as he walked

toward the manway to Slope No. 12 in the darkness that Saturday

morning. Farther than he had ever been in his twenty-two years

from the two counties—Bibb and Shelby—where his family, rst as

slaves, then as freedmen, lived for four generations, blinking

through the darkness and the grit in his eyes, he must have studied

the molded let ers in the concrete archway above the portal