Slavery by Another Name (75 page)

The episodes that make up the narrative could have just as easily

been rsthand accounts of the ery lynching disaster in Pine Apple,

Alabama, the brutish violence and perversion of Lowndes County

three decades earlier, or the "murder farm" of John S. Wil iams.

Unlike the plethora of chain-gang-themed novels and movies that

fol owed in the next four decades such as the 1967 lm Cool Hand

Luke—nearly al of which assiduously labored to depict the

southern penal barbarism as something directed equitably at both

whites and blacks—Spivak made no e ort to blunt the overtly

racial character of involuntary servitude. He unstintingly portrayed

a system designed to enslave or intimidate black men into

obedience. That a smal minority of white men were drawn in as

wel was peripheral and inconsequential.

Spivak created a character named David Jackson, a black

sharecropper's son rst sentenced to the chain gang of ctional

Ochlockonee County for no apparent crime. Stil a teenager, he was

released from the traveling camp—in which prisoners were, as in

actual life at the time, held in rol ing cages similar to circus wagons

transporting exotic animals. The men were perpetual y chained to

one another—eating, sleeping, working, bathing, and defecating

together, never freed from their heavy iron links.

After the character's release from the chain gang, David watched a

game of dice in an al eyway during a Saturday visit to town. A ght

breaks out: "A steel blade glinted in the yel ow light. The burly

nigger grunted and clutched at his neck. The assailant dropped the

knife and ed. Someone scooped up the money and ran. Only the

knife was left by the time the restaurant proprietor and his two

customers rushed out. David instinctively turned to the lighted

streets, hoping to lose himself in the crowds. Dark forms scurried

by. A strong hand grasped the boy's arm and a voice demanded:

‘What's yo’ hurry nigger?’

" ‘I didn't do nothing,’ " he protested frantical y.2

Rounded up with four other young black men, none of whom

was connected to the ght, Jackson is convinced by the sheri that

was connected to the ght, Jackson is convinced by the sheri that

he must al ow the county's largest landowner to buy him or sit in a

vermin-infested jail for a year, awaiting trial. Sold to the white

plantation farmer for $25—ostensibly to pay a ne for disturbing

the peace—David is taken in chains to Jim Deering's remote

plantation. There he is worked as a slave, and witnesses how

Deering handles those blacks who resist any order— ogging men

on their naked but ocks with straps dipped in syrup and sand,

beating men with sts and clubs. As the farm fal s behind during

picking season—raising the prospect that some of the cot on in the

eld could be lost—Deering's methods of compel ing the slaves to

work harder grow even more sadistic. To teach others a lesson, he

orders a man nicknamed "High Yal er" for his lighter skin to be

whipped for stopping to get a drink of water.

A guard slipped handcu s on him. Another appeared with a long,

leather strap of knotted thongs. With a quick movement the guards threw

him face down. One sat on his shoulders and the other on his feet. Charlie

slipped the niggers overalls down until the buttocks were exposed, took

the strap and stepped back. It swished through the air and cracked like a

pistol shot on the brown flesh.

High Yaller screamed and squirmed, rubbing his face in the soil. The

guards dug their feet into the earth to keep from being thrown off.

Red welts showed on the skin.

The strap swished through the air again. High Yaller ceased screaming

before the twentieth stroke. He moaned and his body jerked

spasmodically. His face was scratched and bleeding. He tried to spit the

red clay from his mouth but it stuck to his lips and chin. The exposed

esh was a mass of welts and criss-crossed lines of blood…. Flies settled

on the raw buttocks.3

Another morning a sick prisoner named Limpy—for his injured

hip— begs in the road to be al owed to rest. Ordered to begin

picking cot on again, Limpy has the audacity to resist. He accuses

the farmer of trying to work him to death, of treating the prisoners

worse than "real" slaves before the Civil War. "If I was yo’ slave an’

you paid a t'ousan’ dol ar fo’ me you'd tek care o’ me when I git de

you paid a t'ousan’ dol ar fo’ me you'd tek care o’ me when I git de

mis'ries but you kin git plenty mo’ niggers cheap if I die,’ " Limpy

yel ed from the pages of the book.

Deering turned on him white with fury. His st smashed against the

nigger's face. Limpy sank to the ground, blood running from his nose and

mouth….

"Get up and go to work!" Deering ordered tersely. "Get up, or I'll give

you something to get sick over!"

"Sho," he growled, "why doan you kill me now instead o’ sendin’ me out

in de fiel's to die!"

The planter's face turned apoplectic. For a moment he tried to restrain

himself. Then with a swift movement his hand darted to his hip and drew

his pistol.

With a hoarse scream Limpy tried to scramble to his feet, his hands half

raised in supplication.

"Mist’ Deerin’—" he cried.

Deering red twice. Limpy slumped to the ground, his head on his

chest….

"You asked for it, you black bastard! …I want no impudence around

here!" he shouted to the terrified niggers at the tables. "Remember that!"

He turned to the gigantic nigger beside him. "Weight the son of a bitch

and bury him in the swamp!"4

Spivak's protagonist eventual y escaped Deering's farm, but his

freedom leads only to a series of pathetic and ever more desperate

e orts to avoid returning to his slave status under Deering or

another white man. Final y nding a way out of his home county

and the feudal dominion of Deering and the sheri he control ed,

Jackson discovers that every other town in Georgia is another

vortex of police coercion and involuntary servitude. He is quickly

arrested and sold to other white men. Hunted down by

bloodhounds after another escape—betrayed by a prisoner who had

been "stretched" on a rack by guards—-Jackson is nal y resigned to

his fate. Spikes riveted to his ankles and an iron col ar padlocked to

a five-foot chain, Jackson accepts that he wil die a slave.5

a five-foot chain, Jackson accepts that he wil die a slave.

To underscore the veracity of Spivak's description of black life in

Georgia, the author published as a visual epilogue to the book a

series of photographs taken in Georgia's labor camps. He reprinted

reports detailing whippings, extra chains, and "put in barrel"—a

variation of the sweatbox. One document—titled "O cial Whipping

Report"—listed fty beatings at one camp in August 1930. A gal ery

of photographs showed bloodhounds baying at an escapee in a tree.

Guards proudly demonstrated to their visitor the latest techniques of

punishment and torture—colonial-era stocks, black men trussed

around pick handles like pigs ready for slaughter, the "stretching"

rack.67

Across the South, despite claimed reforms in many states, more

prisoners than ever before were pressed into compel ed labor for

private contractors— but now almost entirely through local customs

and informal arrangements in city and county courts. The state of

Alabama was no longer sel ing slaves to coal mines, but thousands

of men continued to work on a chain gang or under lease to a local

owner. The total number of men arrested on misdemeanor charges

and subject to sale by county sheri s in 1927 grew to 37,701. One

out of every nineteen black men over the age of twelve in Alabama

was captured in some form of involuntary servitude.

The triviality of the charges used to justify the massive numbers

of people forced into labor never diminished. More than 12,500

people were arrested in Alabama in 1928 for possessing or sel ing

alcohol; 2,735 were charged with vagrancy; 2,014 with gaming; 458

for leaving the farm of an employer without permission; 154 with

the age-old vehicle for stopping intimate relations between blacks

and whites: adultery.

Roughly half of al African Americans—or 4.8 mil ion—lived in

the Black Belt region of the South in 1930, the great majority of

whom were almost certainly trapped in some form of coerced labor

like that described in Spivak's chil ing account.

Two Mississippi sheri s reported making between $20,000 and

Two Mississippi sheri s reported making between $20,000 and

$30,000 each during 1929 in extra compensation for procuring

black laborers and sel ing them to local planters. After a plea for

more cot on pickers in August 1932, police in Macon, Georgia,

scoured the town's streets, arresting sixty black men on "vagrancy"

charges and immediately turning them over to a plantation owner

named J. H. Stroud. A year later, The New York Times reported a

similar roundup in the cot on town of Helena, Arkansas.8

Ot o B. Wil is, a forty-six-year-old white farmer living near

Evergreen, Alabama, deep in the Black Belt, wrote the Department

of Justice in 1933, describing the desperate system under which

black families were held as de facto serfs on the land of the county's

white landowners. Why Wil is— an Alabama-born farmer with a

wife and six children, living on land they owned—would be moved

to defend the plight of the tens of thousands of black laborers who

shared rural Hale County with him is a mystery. But in an elegant

longhand, he described point by damning point how black men and

their wives and children were compel ed to remain at work for

years upon years to retire so-cal ed debts for their seed, tools, food,

clothing, and mules that could never be extinguished, regardless of

how much cot on they grew in any year. Lit le had changed since

Klansmen in Hale County shipped R. H. Skinner to the Alabama

slave mines in 1876.

"The negro is worse than broke…. His family goes ragged and

without medical at ention and the women are at ended by ignorant

colored midwives at childbirth and many die from blood poison,"

Wil is wrote. "The negro is half starved and half clothed, yet he sees

no hope of ever being out of debt, cause many landowners tel

them if they move o his land he wil have them put in jail or

threatened bodily harm. Colored people have lit le standing in

court here. So he is afraid to move. So they are forced to remain on

and start another crop for the landlord…. These are the facts…. Is it

right?"9

Whatever motivation Wil is had in penning his detailed litany of

the mechanics of slavery in the 1930s, federal o cials weary of the

the mechanics of slavery in the 1930s, federal o cials weary of the

issue had lit le interest. Writing on behalf of the at orney general,

Joseph B. Keenan replied with the timeworn explanation for why

slavery was not a mat er meriting the at ention of the Department

of Justice—that only narrowly de ned debt slavery would be

examined by federal agents.

"Peonage is a condition of compulsory service based upon the

indebtedness of the peon to the master; the basal fact being

indebtedness," Keenan wrote, in bored, boilerplate language.

Ignoring that Wil is's let er explicitly described a system of holding

laborers against their wil until claimed debts were paid o , the

Justice Department o cial dismissed Wil is with a patronizing

bureaucratic directive. "If you have any speci c facts showing that

the mat er fal s within the above de nition, it is suggested that you

report the same." The case was closed.10

By the middle of the decade before World War I , federal

investigations into peonage al but stopped except in the most

egregious cases. Even those resulted in the rarest convictions. Even

more rare was meaningful punishment. On October 13, 1941,

Charles E. Bledsoe pleaded guilty in federal court in Mobile,

Alabama, to a charge of peonage for holding a black man named

Martin Thompson against his wil . Using the same technique as

John Pace in 1903, Bledsoe didn't resist the charge and trusted that

federal o cials and the U.S. District Court judge would not deal

harshly with a white man holding slaves. He was correct. Bledsoe's

punishment was a ne of $100 and six months of probation. The

status of new black slavery appeared complete. The futility of

combating it was clear.