Slavery by Another Name (26 page)

one involved could later recal what the amount of the sentence had

been.

The next morning, Pruit retrieved Davis and the others from the

calaboose and hustled them onto the train platform to board the

No. 3 train from Birmingham at 9:55 A.M.—one of two daily runs

rat ling from Alabama's booming new industrial center, down

through the prosperous provincial towns of Sylacauga, Goodwater,

Dadevil e, and beyond to either Montgomery, the state capital, or

the river port at Columbus.

"We are going to carry you over to Mr. Pace's," Pruit informed

Davis.

"I don't know Pace's," Davis replied.

"We know," the white man answered.7

John Davis had been snared in the web. In the section of Alabama

where Davis traveled that fal , at least two dozen local white men

were actively involved in a circuit of tra c in human labor orbiting

a seventy- ve-mile stretch of the Central of Georgia rail line, with

the town of Goodwater as its epicenter.

Pruit and Franklin were the most regular procurers of stout-

backed black workers for men of means in the surrounding towns

and counties who needed a steady stream of compliant hands.

Nearly every sheri and town marshal in southern Alabama made

Nearly every sheri and town marshal in southern Alabama made

his primary living in some variation of this trade in human labor—

some through formal contracts between the counties or towns and

the big mining companies and timber and turpentine operations.

Others limited themselves to the less organized, clandestine capture

and sale of black men along the railroads or back roads—such as

John Davis. Pruit and Franklin and many others operated with a

measure of o cial police power given by local governments. Even

more men—typical y brutish plantation guards or the young adult

sons of large landowners—acted as "special constables" or

temporary deputies appointed to serve arrest warrants concocted to

justify the capture of a particular black man.

To give the arrests an imprimatur of judicial propriety, Franklin,

Pruit , and others relied on the judges of what were cal ed

Alabama's "inferior" courts. In these lower courts, town mayors,

justices of the peace, notaries public, and county magistrates had

authority to convene trials and convict defendants of misdemeanor

o enses. A relic from the frontier era, every Alabama town or rural

community had such local judges appointed by the governor or

local y elected. Most were store owners or large landowners— men

of limited substance but in the context of their world the most

substantial men of the community. In the town of Goodwater, the

amateur judiciary consisted of Mayor White and Jesse London.

Once appointed justice of the peace by one governor, such men

retained their powers almost in perpetuity either by routine

reappointment from successive governors or so long as local citizens

accepted their continuation in uno cial "ex o cio" capacities. By

the turn of the century Alabama had thousands of such judges

scat ered through every community and at almost every major

crossing of roads, so many that no one in the state capital even

maintained a comprehensive list of who they were.

Mayor White's dry goods store was a few doors down Main Street

from Robert Franklin's. London, whose mercantile business was

nearly adjacent to the mayor's, was almost as young as White's

oldest children, and he was married to a cousin of White's wife. The

two wives, both reputed to be marvelous cooks, at times managed

two wives, both reputed to be marvelous cooks, at times managed

the Pope House hotel near the train station.8

Mayor White, the son of a blind farmer, had grown up without

education under di cult circumstances in the countryside of

another rural Alabama county. To his death in 1935, his tastes

never deviated from the poor people's fare of squirrel, opossum,

and chit erlings. Yet in spite of those origins, White moved to

Goodwater intent on lifting himself from the coarse life of frontier

Alabama through sheer labor and wil power. He had no patience

for games or those he considered loafers. "By the eternal, if you

need exercise, get a hoe and do something constructive with it,"

White liked to tel children. Over time, he acquired farms and a

livery stable in addition to the store. With success, he took on the

air of a benevolent businessman, donning a daily uniform of a

pinstripe shirt, gray suit, black bow tie, and a black hat. At

Christmastime, he secretly passed out food and paid for medical

care for poor whites in the town. He was active during the turmoil

of Alabama's late-nineteenth-century political bat les, eventual y

winning election to the Alabama Senate and the Executive

Commit ee of the state Democratic Party9

But the emergence of a place like Goodwater, or a man such as

White, into the rst degrees of twentieth-century sophistication was

not entirely what it seemed. Long into middle age, White would

ght any man he believed insulted him. He impressed his children

with his gal on-by-gal on consumption of moonshine whiskey, and

ability to chain-smoke cigars. On one occasion, he survived a

gunshot wound received during a political argument at a ral y in

Dadevil e. He was an early proponent of the de ant "states’ rights"

agenda that would consume southern Democrats, and in the next

generation fuel segregationists like Strom Thurmond and in the

fol owing generation George Wal ace. He made bit er enemies in

politics and business, and believed there were "parasites"

threatening the society that whites like him had wrested from the

tailings of the previous century. He was contemptuous of the notion

that African Americans deserved the ful citizenship of the Fifteenth

Amendment.

Amendment.

Yet it was this man—uneducated and crude—who held power in

Good-water, conducting rudimentary trials on the boardwalk in

front of his store, maintaining a clumsy "city court" docket of

warrants and verdicts behind his counter, and extending his legal

authority in support of the county's busy slaving network. Under

White's acquiescence, his friend Jesse London summarily found

John Davis guilty of a misdemeanor—despite the fact that Franklin

and Pruit couldn't agree on what charge they were claiming to

bring against him.

In adjoining Tal apoosa County, the man most relied on to

sentence free men to hard labor was a justice of the peace named

James M. Kennedy, a civic jack-of-al -trades who extracted a steady

income from a col ection of overlapping, periodic public

appointments. He had been an election inspector for the area in

1892, and not infrequently was made a special temporary deputy

sheri to serve warrants in civil and criminal cases. Most important,

Kennedy was named by Governor Wil iam Oates in 1894 a justice

of the peace and notary public for the remote section of Tal apoosa

County where he lived—though a decade later he was no longer

certain by which governor or in which year his tenure as a judge

had begun.

Few of the part-time judges such as White and London had any

legal or academic quali cations beyond bet er than average

handwriting. Even that skil was not often apparent. There were no

clear guidelines for the proper operation of the inferior courts or

clear case law de ning their parameters and jurisdiction. Like so

much of the legal and administrative systems of regions only

decades removed from wilderness status, the lower courts of

Alabama were policed mainly by citizens’ innate sense of justice.

The power of these il -de ned casual judges, particularly over

il iterate and impoverished citizens, was immense.

Above men like Kennedy, White, and Franklin, at the top of the

pyramid of players in the rural forced labor networks, were large

landowners, entrepreneurs, and minor industrialists—just as they

had been in the years before the Civil War. In Coosa and Tal apoosa

had been in the years before the Civil War. In Coosa and Tal apoosa

counties, the trade in African Americans relied on three powerful

families, al of whom in turn at least periodical y employed or

conducted business with most of the other men involved in the

buying and sel ing of black men.

The two most prominent buyers, John W Pace and James

Fletcher Turner, together held a contract to "lease" every prisoner

sentenced to hard labor by the two counties. Turner and sometimes

Pace also leased from the city of Dadevil e al prisoners who had

been convicted under the town ordinances.10 Sometimes in

conjunction with each other, sometimes operating independently,

Pace and Turner actively purchased African Americans through

every o cial and uno cial means available. Both operated farms

with hundreds of acres under til , large sawmil s, and mining or

quarrying. In 1900, Pace paid $2,600 to expand his holdings to

include a ve-hundred-acre plantation near his main farm.11 He ran

the farm from a large and comfortable country home—where he

had become wel known in the county for his lavish hospitality—

and maintained a second residence in town, less than a block from

the Dadevil e square.

Turner, known to acquaintances as Fletch, owned a large farm

four miles outside the town limits, in a place cal ed Eagle Creek, a

booming sawmil at a set lement cal ed Camp Creek, and a major

stake in a limestone quarry at Calcis opened by his father and

managed by his younger brother Eliza. Even measured against the

wide scope of human horror being perpetrated in the slavery

operations of Pace and Turner at their farms and sawmil s, the

quarry near the newly founded town of Calcis stood alone as a

place of notably perverse abuse.

Situated thirty- ve miles northeast of Goodwater, the quarry was

halfway up the rail line to Birmingham. Inside its compound,

workers heaped huge quantities of shat ered limestone into two

thirty-foot-high cylindrical kilns, which superheated the rock with

blasts of burning coal piled into a lower chamber. Under intense

heat, the limestone turned to quicklime, a highly caustic powder

heat, the limestone turned to quicklime, a highly caustic powder

that when moist turned instantly into a burning, potential y

explosive acid.

Eliza Turner was a man of questionable mental stability—

claiming later in life that he had invented the radio, the X-ray, and

the Teletype, only to have been robbed in each case by Guglielmo

Marconi and others.12Laborers who survived the Calcis quarry told

frightening stories of tubercular men and sexual y abused women

quarantined to a sick house hidden deep in the adjoining woods.

Equal y horrifying were the fates of workers who accidental y came

into contact with quicklime unintentional y mixed with water. The

few who lived left the quarry with terrible, disfiguring acid scars.

Despite the dangers in making quicklime, the substance was a

critical component in the blasting of iron ore into steel and fetched

lucrative prices from the iron companies expanding at breakneck

speed in Birmingham. By the time the Turners’ ve-year-old quarry

and kiln was operating at ful capacity in 1903, its sole customer

was Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.—the company fast

becoming the most powerful commercial interest in the state and

the keeper of more than a thousand forced laborers at its Prat

Mines.

The Turner quarry hired skil ed free laborers to run the

locomotive that dragged tons of limestone up from the quarry pit

and coopers who made barrels to ship the powder. But for the

back-jarring task of wielding picks and sledgehammers in the

bot om of the pit, and the unremit ing task of piling thousands of

tons of stone into the stone kilns, the Turners relied on Franklin,

Pruit , and the others to supply dozens of slave laborers crowded

into a crude log and stone "pen" at the edge of the quarry.

Turner himself lived in a spacious farmhouse at the Eagle Creek

farm with his extended family, including a volatile eighteen-year-

old son, Al en, who took charge whenever his father was away.

Not far from Pace's farm were George D. and Wil iam D. Cosby,

two middle-aged brothers with large landholdings who frequently