Slavery by Another Name (79 page)

white masters. Whites repeatedly tried to stir this internal black tension. When Martin

Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to tour the terrorized surrounding

counties of the Black Belt, he was accused of pitting good blacks versus bad. When he

drove to Lowndes County—which a full century after the end of slavery remained a

place of desolate black powerlessness and unchecked white brutality—King and his

activists were warned not to agitate the docile "good Negroes" of the county. Despite a

population overwhelmingly majority-black, whites controlled virtually all the land, and

every aspect of politics and economics. The Calhoun School had all but collapsed. Most

African Americans remained tenants and sharecroppers, living in unplumbed hovels

little changed from the desperate conditions recorded by DuBois in 1906.

No African American had cast a vote there in the twentieth century. Galvanized by

the work of civil rights ministers, dozens of young African Americans attempted

unsuccessfully during the spring and summer of that year to register to vote outside the

Lowndes County courthouse in Hayneville. On August 20, 1965, after releasing from the

local jail a group of civil rights workers who had attempted a peaceful march in the

county, Deputy Sheriff Tom Coleman—a man cut from the same crude cloth as Sheriff J.

W. Dixon, who drove out federal investigators six decades earlier—followed the

activists down a sunny street, raised a 12-gauge shotgun, and at point-blank range

gunned down two white ministers working with the group. One, Jonathan Daniels, was

killed instantly, his body all but cut in half by the force of the blast.19

Reading Charles Silberman's Crisis in Black and White after its publication the prior

year, Martin Luther King scribbled a long note in the margins of his personal copy:

"The South deluded itself with the illusion that the Negro was happy in his place; the

North deluded itself with the illusion that it had freed the Negro. The Emancipation

Proclamation freed the slave, a legal entity, but it failed to free the Negro, a person."20

In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested

and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the

beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.

In my quest to nd Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when

white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all

marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our

connections to the speci c crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we

are tainted by the failures of our fathers to ful ll our national credos when their

courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at

the expense of others. It is not our "fault." But it is undeniably our inheritance.

I never expected to discover my own family lines as characters in the narrative of this

book. Yet to my great surprise, I learned that the branch of black Cottinghams who left

the old farm in Alabama during the Civil War and made their way to Louisiana settled

in the parish of my mother's birth, the place where I spent countless summer days on

the modest farm of my grandparents. The Cottingham descendants expired generations

in the backwoods black settlements of Jackson Parish through the cruel decades of the

twentieth century, as my family migrated from arch-poverty to blue-collar stability and

nally to the comfort of white middle-class sanctity. Today, an ebullient woman named

Maureen Cottenham, my mother's peer, writes a regular column for the parish

newspaper on the social life of African Americans in and around Jonesboro, Louisiana.

Black Cottenhams are celebrated athletes in the schools of an adjacent town. The law

rm of my eldest cousin has represented young Cottenhams who nd their way into

trouble with the law. There is a measure of relief in that justice.

But there was more. Many times in my childhood, my grandmother Myrtie Wiggins

Blackmon told me the epic story, passed down to her by my great-great-grandmother, of

the family's passage after the Civil War from a place she called New Light, Alabama, to

the hill country of northern Louisiana. Morris Foshee, my great-great-great-grandfather,

had returned from four years of ghting with the 48th Infantry to a devastated

Alabama. An inconspicuous private who had fought with his brother Wiley from 1861

until their surrender with Lee at Appomattox, he had been too poor to own slaves

before the war, and poorer still in its aftermath. But in my visits to Alabama, searching

for the shards with which to reconstruct the evil visage of John Pace, I found in the

Tallapoosa County courthouse, among the slave deeds, mortgages, and convict

contracts, the wedding license signed by Morris and my great-great-great-grandmother. I

found the place of their farm, a few miles upstream on the Coosa River from the

horri c Threat slave plantation. New Light was actually a tiny misremem-bered and

mispronounced town called Newsite. I discovered that a distant Foshee line invested in

a sawmill once operated with forced labor.

As I tugged further at the tightly threaded shrouds of the past, I learned that Morris

and Wiley served in gallant, if misguided, company—the Tal-lapoosa County men who

famously charged the hill called Little Round Top and were repulsed by a hailstorm of

Union gun re and bayonets in the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. They attacked

that day under the direct command of Lt. Col. Michael J. Bulger, the man who thirty

years later rose in defense of John Pace as he climbed to power in Tallapoosa County.

Another decade hence, it was Bulger's son—by then the town's most prominent lawyer—

who represented Pace in his trial for slavery in 1903.

I had no hand in the horrors perpetrated by John Pace or any of the other twentieth-

century slave masters who terrorized American blacks for four generations. But it is

nonetheless true that hundreds of millions of us spring from or bene t as a result of

lines of descent that abided those crimes and benefited from them.

Over the decades, Birmingham spread to surround the cemetery where convicts in the

rst Pratt Mines prisons were buried. Low-rent apartments on one side of the

graveyard, shabby storefronts on another, an industrial site, a city park designated for

"colored" use when it was created. In 1994, industrial archaeologist Jack Bergstresser

found the cemetery while conducting a survey for the federal government to map the

remains of nearby coke ovens, mine shafts, and railroad lines.

As a boy in the 1930s, Willie Clark, a lifelong resident of Pratt City, already knew

what lay deep in the thick underbrush. He and other youngsters played among the

unmarked graves of the rst cemetery, picking blackberries from the thorny vines that

grew wild between the plots. Burials were rare by then. The older graves had begun to

collapse, he says, exposing jumbles of human bones.

"The convicts were buried out there," Clark told me, sweeping his arm toward the

overgrown eld. "I heard my daddy talking about how they would beat the convicts

with pick handles. If they didn't like them, they would kill them…. They would put them

under harsh punishment. It was gruesome back then."21

Though in his ninth decade, Clark, more than six feet tall, could still walk with me to

the site from his nearby home and point out where old mine shafts reached the surface

and where dozens of company houses once stood. He told me his father also said that

when convicts were killed in the shafts, company o cials sometimes didn't take the

time to bury them, but instead tossed the bodies into the red-hot coke ovens glowing

nearby.

"What can you do about it now?" he says, stepping gingerly through the trees and

undergrowth. "But the company…ought to clean that land up, or turn it back over to the

city or somebody else who can make some use of it, take care of it."

On a cool fall night, Pearline Danzey the eighty-eight-year-old matriarch of the

extended family of Martin Danzy who died as a slave worker in a turpentine camp in

1916, welcomed me to her home. She presided from a worn vinyl recliner in her living

room over a parade of nieces, nephews, and children. Across the room, her

bewhiskered grandfather—one of Martin's older brothers—squints from a faded

photograph above the television set. After all these years, it is hard for Mrs. Danzey to

stay focused on the story of Uncle Martin—now commingled with so much time,

struggle, and memories of the other privations and violence that came with life as a

young black girl on a sharecrop farm. Whether the companies that played a hand in the

abuse and death of her uncle and other African Americans should be held accountable

today is an abstraction she can't or won't waste time contemplating.

" To kill a colored person then, it wasn't nothing," she says. "We was slaves too in a

way."22

For most of the Danzeys gathered that night, this is the rst time they have heard

"Pearl," as Mrs. Danzey is known to them all, tell the harsh tales of her childhood. Her

daughter Ida was of the generation in their country town that as teenagers integrated

the local schools and de ed the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s. They are lled with a sense

of righteous victory over the segregation of their childhoods. But until this night, Ida

Hogan and most of the others had never inquired—never considered really—that the

childhood Pearline was born into had been one vastly more difficult than their own.

"Our daddy and momma never taught us to hate white people…. We just got taught

who always got the job, who had authority, and we were supposed to address them with

respect," explained Ida, one of Pearline's nieces. "Until the civil rights movement we

didn't know" life could be any other way, she said.

The racial disparities of the 1950s and 1960s were the routine, rarely commented-

upon backdrop of rural black life. "We had to pick cotton to buy books, so we picked

cotton," said Cynthia James, a great-niece of Pearline's in her late forties. "It was much

later on that we realized that the raggedy old books we were getting were just being

passed on."

Inspired by Martin Luther King's historic visit to Selma, Ida and six other black

children in Abbeville in 1966 insisted on being served in the town's whites-only diner.

It was a turning point for the community. Her generation became the family's bridge

between the desperate farm life Pearl was born into and today's mystifying era, when

relative prosperity, lingering racial tensions, and the occasional biracial marriage all

coexist in Henry County.

The Danzeys live in a place where cotton has been grown for most of two centuries

and where Mrs. Danzey's family traces its history back to 1832 and a slave, Frank,

brought to the county by a local white farmer named John Danzey. Pearline

remembered her uncle Martin mostly as a man who spelled his last name without an

"e," as did one line of white Danzys who lived nearby. She said she no longer

remembered his alleged crime.

"My granddaddy used to talk about him. He went o to prison and died there," she

says. "They was real sad about it."

In years past, Pearline had told her granddaughter, Melissa Danzey Craddock, that

Uncle Martin and another local man were arrested after a brawl among men gambling

outside a rural church. By the end of the ght, one man was dead. It wasn't clear

whether the elder Mrs. Danzey's recollection had failed or, as was the case in many

black families in Alabama, the stigma of imprisonment makes her uncomfortable

discussing the subject. One thing is certain: after his arrest, Uncle Martin never came

back.

Pearl's father sharecropped all his life. "The man would take everything that was

made," she says of the white man on whose land her father worked. "I worked in the

elds for $1 a day." Her three sisters and three brothers worked alongside her. "If a

colored man hit a white man, they could come in and kill him."

She told the story of a childhood friend murdered by a white mob after allegedly

speaking to a white woman. She tells of another night, when one of her brothers, Henry

Edward Danzey, was seized by a mob after an argument at the town movie theater. The

sheri took him to the jail to stop the lynching and then let the black teenager go in

the dark. He made his way home, and Pearline's father and uncles waited all night with