worked toward for at least three decades.
This was the snare waiting for Green Cot enham at the Columbiana
railroad station on March 30, 1908. On the prior day, a Wednesday,
the sheri 's chief deputy, a scrawny white man named Newton
Eddings, grabbed Monroe Dolphus, a black man about Green's age,
as he stood in the train yard of the depot. The deputy seized
Cot enham the fol owing day and tossed him into the same fetid
cel where Dolphus had spent the night. There was uncertainty
about what charges against the men should be entered into the
prison registry at the jail.
prison registry at the jail.
Initial y, Eddings claimed that the crime commit ed by Dolphus
was taking a 25 cent tin of sh from the lunch pail of a Southern
Railway worker. Cot enham was charged with riding a freight train
without a ticket. There was no tangible evidence that either man
had commit ed any infraction at al .
Taken before Judge Longshore the fol owing day, Cot enham and
Dol-phus each denied the charges. Eddings was unable to produce
any evidence or witnesses to convict them. But sticking to the
cynical script fol owed thousands of times in the South, Judge
Longshore chose not the release the men anyway. Instead, he
declared them guilty of "vagrancy" that catchal of ense to which any
black man was vulnerable at almost any time. 1
Longshore sentenced both Dolphus and Cot enham to three
months of hard labor for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. Under its
standing contract with Shelby County, the company would pay the
county $12 per month for each man as long as he worked in their
mines.2 The two prisoners were also ordered to pay fees to the
sheri , judge, and other local o cials totaling $31.85 for Dolphus,
$38.40 for Cot enham—extraordinary sums for an unemployed
black man. Unable to pay those costs, Dolphus was ordered to
work an extra two months and twenty days at the mines to cover
the fees. Cot enham would have to spend an additional three
months and six days.3
A day later, Eddings arrived at the county jail with his shiny, six-
inch-barreled Colt .38 pistol in a holster dangling against his thigh.
A simple metal badge pinned to his coat read "Deputy Sheri ." He
carried thick round manacles connected with three tight steel links.
A trace of chains was draped over his shoulder. Eddings barked for
Cot enham and the nine other men in the Shelby County cel s to get
up. It was time to go to "Prat s."
The jail sat at the corner of South Main and Mildred streets,
almost directly across from the spare old county courthouse that the
town fathers had just abandoned for their ostentatious new structure
town fathers had just abandoned for their ostentatious new structure
three blocks to the north.
Green had never felt irons before that day.4 5 As Deputy Eddings
clapped a shackle on his left ankle, Green must have been surprised
how quickly his skin began to bruise, how heavily the rings of iron
clung to the ground between himself and Monroe Dolphus. Then
there was the startling sharp cold of the steel when Eddings slipped
a metal col ar around his neck.
Eddings locked the clasp on Green and did the same to "Mun," as
the men cal ed Dolphus, and then to each of the other eight
prisoners in the lockup that morning. Earley Bol ing, House
Pearson, and four others had been arrested at the train station too
and convicted for hopping a ride on an empty freight car without
permission. Henry Witherspoon was found guilty of petit larceny—
a crime applied to the theft of any object worth more than $10.
John Jones, arrested as he played dice inside a circle of other black
men squat ed in the dirt on the edges of the railroad yard, was
convicted of gambling. Once al ten were chained together, Eddings
told them to start walking back to the railway station. They trudged
out the scu ed rear door of the jailhouse and around the corner,
passing by the back porch of Sheri Fulton's wood-frame house
next door and on toward Main Street.
Al in the ragged group were stil in the street clothes they had
worn at the time of their arrest. But now the men were smeared
with the lth of the jail's grimy, wet interior. Most had been there
for several weeks, waiting for the monthly delivery to Tennessee
Coal, Iron & Railroad. Several walked shakily, taken aback by the
bright sunlight and unbalanced by subsistence on the sheri 's
meager rations and the partial sleep of nights on remnants of putrid
bedding. As they passed the sheri 's home, the men crossed the
shadow of the jail, looming above them, higher than al the
surrounding structures, the face of the massive tower interrupted
only by the keyhole window in the hanging chamber.6 On a
Saturday morning three months later, the sheri would release the
trapdoor of the sca old there, and Tom Pat erson, a thirty-eight-
trapdoor of the sca old there, and Tom Pat erson, a thirty-eight-
year-old black man convicted of murder, would twist to his death at
the end of the rope.
At the station, Eddings took Green and the other prisoners to the
far end of the platform to wait for the early morning train. They
rode the one-hour journey in the baggage car. Outside the
Birmingham depot, Eddings piled the shackled men into an open,
horse-drawn wagon he had telegraphed ahead to hire. Two mules
slowly pul ed Green and the others away from the city's bustling
center, then through the tempestuous streets of Prat City, past a
haphazard cemetery bulging with dead prisoners’ remains near
Smokey Row, and nal y up the long hil rising from the saloons
and whorehouses past the Catholic church to Tennessee Coal, Iron
& Railroad's newly completed wooden stockade at Slope No. 12.
It was a familiar journey for Eddings, and one he didn't mind. He
had delivered more than sixty men to the Prat Mines in the
previous twelve months, nearly al of them black men he had
himself rounded up and testi ed against to obtain conviction. As
chief deputy, Eddings made considerably less than the high sheri ,
but the business of arresting blacks and get ing them to the Prat
Mines was a good one for a scantly educated man from deep in the
countryside. He'd come to Columbiana to get away from the
drudgery of the isolated farm road where his father and older
brother lorded over his childhood, while the mother who gave birth
to him midway through the Civil War grew progressively demented.
By the time Eddings reached manhood, she was ful y insane.7
Sometimes it seemed the whole South was insane in 1908. Vast
numbers of freed slaves and their o spring like Green had
abandoned their former owners’ lands and scat ered across the rural
landscape, demanding wages and, almost as ridiculously to whites
such as Eddings's father, insisting on writ en contracts to be paid for
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 o
thers 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
Slavery by Another Name Page 45
