Slavery by Another Name (80 page)

pistols, sticks, and rocks, expecting the mob to arrive. The whites never came, and

Pearl's brother left town to join the army.

Only after Dr. King, she says, did "people see how colored people were treated," and

the terror began to subside.

The younger Danzeys aren't sure what to make of the story of Uncle Martin. "You

can't go back and change the past. Just don't let it happen again," says Cynthia James.

Pearline's granddaughter, Melissa Craddock, disagrees. The companies that made money

o the forced labor of Uncle Martin owe something, she says. "If there was something

that came out of that, then there ought to be compensation," she says. "That was after

slavery ended."

Cynthia's brother, James Danzey, a deeply religious forty- ve-year-old, has listened

intently as his great-aunt unspooled her stories. James Danzey brings up the talk of

slave reparations he has heard recently and of other long-ago abuses of African

Americans that have come to light in recent years.

"I believe it's God's hand," says James Danzey, who works as a counselor at a center

for behaviorally disturbed children in a nearby town. "I believe there are some good

true white people of God, who realize that their ancestors did bad, and they have to

make right."

The indictments of white people, despite her own contributions, begin to make

Pearline uneasy, though. "There've always been some good white people," she interjects.

The younger people nod heads in deference.

But James Danzey doesn't waver. "Think about all the money those companies made

on those people," he says later. "Those companies should be investigated for doing that.

They should have to pay something."23

The Danzeys were as close as I would ever come to the heart of Green Cottenham. But I

did nd a version of his voice. Louis Cottingham lives in Montevallo, Alabama, the

same small town where Green Cottenham's mother went to live on Block Street after her

son's death at the Pratt Mines. Until I called out of the blue in the winter of 2003, he

had never heard of Green Cottenham.

Cottingham's wife answered the phone. She was uncertain at the sound of an

unknown white man's voice seeking her husband. Admittedly, my appearance in the

lives of descendants of twentieth-century slaves was for many akin to the arrival of

some unidenti able creature dropped from the sky. It was, for many, an unnatural, un-

credible event. As I explained who I was, where I was calling from, and my interest in

the genealogy of the black Cottinghams, she grew impatient. No, I don't want to sell

anything, I tried to reassure her. I'm a newspaper reporter in Atlanta, writing a book

about African Americans and your husband's family.

My words, increasingly quick and pleading, were disintegrating in the telephone line

on the way to Alabama. Mrs. Cottingham was hearing none of it. Finally, I blurted that

the book was about a man in their family who had been forced into slavery long after

slavery was supposed to have ended.

"Slavery?" she screeched. "You can talk to my husband. But don't nobody round here

have anything to say about slavery."

Finally, her husband took the receiver, as his wife continued a querulous mutter in

the background. "Slavery! Nothing to say about some slave!"

Louis Cottingham's voice is strong and crisp. It resonates not with the jowly dialect of

rural Alabama blacks but the smoothly de ant lilt of urban Birmingham. "Who are you

asking about?" he wanted to know. "Green Cottenham. I don't know who that is."

"No, he wasn't a brother to my daddy. I know all the names of my daddy's brothers

and sisters."

"My grandfather? No, he wasn't named Henry. His name was Elbert."

"No, not Edgar! Elbert. E-L-B-E-R-T."

Each of his sentences ended with a successively heavier tone of nality, the signal

that at any moment, still ba ed as to why this young white voice was quizzing him

about long-dead family, Cottingham was going to say an absolute goodbye. Asking him

to bear with me just a moment more, I scanned the genealogical chart of the Cottenham

family I'd constructed over the previous fourteen months. Finally, I spotted Elbert, at a

dead end of one branch of the family. His father had been a brother of Green

Cottenham's father.

"I see it now, Cottingham," I said. "Elbert Cottingham. Yes. His father was George,

born on a plantation in Bibb County in 1825. Your daddy must have been named for

him. That was your great-grandfather."

Louis Cottingham went silent for a moment, and then spoke slowly. "Well I never

knew that. I never knew past my granddaddy and my grandmother."

His tone was still unin ected. He was curious, for an instant. Perhaps he would talk

to me, would help me unlock the enigma of Green Cotten-ham. I dropped what I knew

was my only real bombshell.

"I know the name of your great-great-grandfather too," I said. "He was Scip, and he

spelled his name Cottinham. He was born in 1802, in Africa. He's the African slave you

and your family are descended from."

"You say his name was Scip?" Cottingham said.

"Yes, I think that's short for Scipio."

"A slave named Scip. Born in, when did you say? 1802?"

"Yes sir. That's right."

Cottingham turned away from the phone and repeated to his wife, "Says there was a

slave named Scip Cottinham, born in 1802." There was wonder in Cottingham's voice as

he relayed the words. But not the wonder I had hoped for. Instead of astonishment, and

gratitude, that a stranger had o ered up the connection to Africa and lost generations

of souls that millions of American blacks claim a visceral, but ultimately almost never

requited, need to nd, the wonder in Cottingham's voice was at and heavy and

sorrowful. Sorrowful that a past escaped still lived at all. I thought to myself, he's glad

to know, but he doesn't want to know anything else. His wife had been right from the

first instant. Nobody around here wants to talk about slavery.

Still, I tried again. "Could you help me contact your older brothers who are still

alive? Perhaps they remember more," I pressed gently.

"No, I couldn't do that," he said.

Could I come to your home, I o ered, and share all that I've found? Perhaps it would

jog a recollection. Perhaps there's a younger person with an interest in history. "I could

be there in a few days," I said.

"No. No. I don't think so."

As painful as it may be to plow the past, among the ephemera left behind by

generations crushed in the wheels of American white supremacy are telling

explanations for the ssures that still thread our society. In fact, these events explain

more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum

slavery that preceded.

Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any

consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must

acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945— well into the childhoods

of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be

reset.

Even more plain, no one who reads this book can wonder as to the origins, depth,

and visceral foundation of so many African Americans’ fundamental mistrust of our

judicial processes.

Most profoundly, the evidence moldering in county courthouses and the National

Archives compels us to confront this extinguished past, to recognize the terrible

contours of the record, to teach our children the truth of a terror that pervaded much

of American life, to celebrate its end, to lift any shame on those who could not evade

it. This book is not a call for nancial reparations. Instead, I hope it is a formidable

plea for a resurrection and fundamental reinterpretation of a tortured chapter in the

collective American past.

We should rename this era of American history known as the time of "Jim Crow

segregation." How strange that decades de ned in life by abject brutalization came to

be identi ed in history with the image of a largely forgotten white actor's minstrel

performance—a caricature called "Jim Crow." Imagine if the rst years of the Holocaust

were known by the name of Germany's most famous anti-Semitic comedian of the

1930s. Let us de ne this period of American life plainly and comprehensively. It was

the Age of Neoslavery Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's grip on U.S.

society—its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its

injury to millions of black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end—

can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.

A few months before the publication of this book, as I studied a century-old map of

coal mines near Birmingham, it dawned on me that the name of an old mining camp

town called Docena was a Spanish translation of "dozen"—as in Slope No. 12, the

prison mine where Green Cottenham died. I quickly con rmed that Docena, at the top

of the long hill above the graveyard at Pratt Mines, was the site of the No. 12 shaft,

renamed after U.S. Steel nally stopped using slave laborers to avoid association with

the company's last forced labor mine.

I drove there on a Saturday morning, with my wife and young children in the car. On

the way we stopped near the ruins of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's Ensley furnaces.

The giant smokestacks have been dead for decades but still own the sky—like lightning

streaks of rust or a frightening amusement park ride, the kids said.

Nearby was Docena. The old mine had long been abandoned. Its opening at the

center of the little town was collapsed and unrecognizable. Trees and brush crowded a

streambed owing from the site of the entrance. A disabled white man in a crumbling

house nearby told me he remembered an old plot of unmarked graves a short distance

down the hill, in a hollow where his father had kept pigs in his childhood. It was the

mine burial ground. I knew Green's body was almost certainly buried there, just outside

what had been the walls of the Pratt No. 12 prison.

We drove to the site. It was densely covered with undergrowth and pine trees. A path

into the forest led from one heap of garbage and refuse to another. A forest re had

opened the way through another part of the woods. The children and I picked our way

through the litter and foliage. We found the brick and concrete foundation of a shower

room built for free miners after the company lost its slaves. The graves were supposed

to be a few feet away. I pressed into the thicket of scrub and briars. We studied the

ground for the telltale slumps in the earth like those scattered by the hundreds in the

burial eld at the bottom of the hill. I searched for the remains of a fence delineating a

plot, rocks in the symmetry of graves, a crude headstone, any sign. But there was

nothing. Too much time had passed. Too much had been done—or gone undone. The

last evidence of Green Cottenham's life and death was obliterated by the encroachment

of nature and the detritus of man.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As a young seventh grader in the public schools of Leland, Mississippi, in

1977, I decided to enter an essay contest sponsored by the Washington County

Historical Society. For reasons no longer remembered, I settled for a topic on

the story of an all but forgotten civil rights incident on the outskirts of our

Mississippi Delta town a little more than a decade earlier. A group of African

American farmworkers on a plantation there had gone on strike, defended

themselves against the Klan, and ultimately built a desperate but de ant

encampment called Strike City—one that persists precariously even in 2008.

The two-page essay won a second-place certificate during the county fair and

a promise that it would be included in a future journal of the historical

society. A year later, I gave a speech based on the essay in an oratorical

contest held by a local men's fraternal organization. Standing before that group

of middle-aged white men during a springtime lunch hour, I told a story that

to my twelve-year-old thinking was ancient history—but to my listeners was a

searing lightning bolt from the near past. I experienced for the rst time that

day the combustible response that can come with unearthing history that a

community would just as soon forget. My English teacher, Freida Inmon, who

unbeknownst to me had fought behind the scenes to make sure my speech was

heard that day, applauded loudly and then rescued me from an angry critic.

Later I learned that the wrathful man who berated me that day had been one of