through the musty wet stink of the men, stil sheathed in the black
detritus of the mine waiting for them outside. As the guards moved
toward the opposite end of the room, releasing the men's irons
from chains looped through their beds and barking for reluctant
prisoners to wake, the men responded in an awkward, col ective
undulation. As each awakened and moved, a succession of pairs of
legs and irons slid wearily toward the keys held in the hands of the
guard, each time pul ing the legs of the next man toward the guard
as wel , and then the next, and the next, al of them spil ing
gradual y of the bunks in a long, groggy metal ic jangle.
Once on their feet and refastened to their chains, Green and the
column of prisoners led out through a front stoop, down the
wooden steps, and into a plain kitchen. Each man stu ed a biscuit
and a cut of cold bacon into his mouth and shuf led out the door. At
the point of shotguns, they tramped into the deep darkness, across
the bare yard, past the pen of bloodhounds trained to track "Negro
scent," past the barrel across which men were stretched naked
almost nightly to be whipped with a leather strap, out the
mammoth gate of the stockade, and up to the ori ce where they
would enter the earth.
There, high on the ridge above Prat City, Green for a moment
would have glimpsed the luminescence of the industrial spectacle
throbbing atop the geological wonder of the coal and iron ore
discovered beneath the hil s of northern Alabama. There had been
nothing more than one prosperous farm in this val ey forty years
earlier, but now in 1908 a city of nearly 150,000 people was
consuming the land. The acrid smel of coal smoke never
dissipated. On the farthest horizon glowed the Sloss Furnaces,
where Col. James W. Sloss, the man more responsible than any
other for the sensational economic boom of what was cal ed "the
Magic City," had presided over a con agration of re, machines,
and molten iron unlike anything ever before seen in the South. In
and molten iron unlike anything ever before seen in the South. In
the val ey between the high smokestacks of the furnaces and the
hil top perch of Slope No. 12, the lights of new o ce buildings and
churches glimmered at the commercial center of Birmingham.
One can only imagine what l ed Green's mind as he walked
toward the manway to Slope No. 12 in the darkness that Saturday
morning. Farther than he had ever been in his twenty-two years
from the two counties—Bibb and Shelby—where his family, rst as
slaves, then as freedmen, lived for four generations, blinking
through the darkness and the grit in his eyes, he must have studied
the molded let ers in the concrete archway above the portal
spel ing the name of the company that for al intents and purposes
owned him then as much as old Elisha Cot ingham had owned his
father and grandfather. Perhaps he mouthed the words—Tennessee
Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.—and then craned his neck to glimpse
behind him the clinking column of slaves, the glow of the city, and,
beyond, a last flash of stars and predawn sky.
XIV
ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE
"Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes."
By al accounts, Slope No. 12 was the nest prison ever built in
Alabama. The two-story wood-frame dormitory, constructed in
the shape of a giant T, stood at the center of the fenced
compound where Green Cot en-ham was deposited by Deputy
Eddings. From the front door, atop ten steps beneath a smal
portico, the prison extended outward in three wings. The six
"sleeping rooms" were each large enough to accommodate up to
sixty men sleeping in close quarters on the odd swinging bunk beds.
One room was reserved for whites only. A contained walkway
connected the building to a kitchen immediately to the rear.
Inside, prisoners young and old, hardened and innocent, mingled
whenever they were not chained apart. On Sundays, the one day of
rest, card and dice games continued unceasingly. "They wil gamble
the but ons o their clothes," an inmate told one visitor. Sexual
abuse was rampant, in the darkness of the prison and the isolation
of the mine shaft. "Sodomy is prevalent among these massed men,"
wrote journalist Shelby Harrison in 1912, after a visit to Prat No.
12. "The older men pick out the young ones to make advances to. It
is commonly said in some of the camps that every prisoner has his
‘gal-boy’ "1
Across a eld of grass cropped close by goats wandering inside
the compound stood the o cers’ quarters, a simple but spacious
two-level house with a veranda and rocking chairs anking three
sides. Nearby was a mess hal for the guards. A pressurized water
spigot—a luxury—stood beside the front porch. A tin cup and towel
hung permanently on a nail, where o cers stopped for a drink or
to wash on the way inside at mealtimes.
At the opposite corner of the enclosure stood a storehouse, where
prisoners fortunate enough to have any money could buy from their
prisoners fortunate enough to have any money could buy from their
keepers tobacco or extra rations on Sundays. Nearby was a smal
hospital building where the sick could be segregated. When the
mine opened in early 1908, with a workforce made up total y of
forced laborers, state o cials declared the prison the "best in the
state."
For more than a decade, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad—
irritated by criticism that its mines and furnaces were inferior to
those of competitors in the North and that its miners, free and
forced, worked at perpetual risk to their lives—had invested heavily
in dramatic technological improvements and fresh underground
exploration. The new prison cost $54,570— a substantial sum.
The company instal ed thousands of additional coke ovens, added
miles of new railroad track, and developed a breakthrough
technique for forging steel train rails—a rst for any company in
the South. On the outskirts of Birmingham, at the edge of Red
Mountain, the company built a new complex of deep-shaft iron ore
mines. Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad also was abandoning its old
system of dragging coal to the surface in carts pul ed by mules and
instal ing steam-powered systems using cables to pul enormously
greater tonnage of coal from the shafts.2
With U.S. Steel's acquisition of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in
November 1907, the pace of new construction and advancements in
the mines accelerated rapidly. But with the company's progress also
came destruction. On the surface, the toxic e uent of the digging
was pumped into wooden ues that poured into vast, fouled
moonscapes of dead forest. Nearby, steam shovels clawed scars fty
feet deep and hundreds of feet wide into the landscape to lay bare
ore, limestone, and other minerals. Near every mine—especial y
those in long operation—gargantuan mounds of slag, the worthless
rock drawn out with the coal, loomed ever larger on the horizon.3
The s
hafts closest to the center of Prat City—some of them in
production for more than two decades—were depleting. Most had
already been repeatedly extended, rst hundreds of feet below the
surface and then for thousands of feet horizontal y, fol owing the
surface and then for thousands of feet horizontal y, fol owing the
thick deposits of coal threading from the Prat seam. The longer the
mine shaft grew, the slower and more expensive it became to
remove coal from the mine—prompting the company to instal new
shafts to the surface closer to the most active areas of mining.
Even the construction of the model new prison carried an ironic
human cost. In 1902, leaders of the Colored Methodist Episcopal
Church bought ten acres in a new residential development designed
by a white investor as a refuge for prosperous African Americans on
the outskirts of Birmingham. The place was cal ed Booker City—
after Booker T Washington. The African American church opened a
smal and struggling high school for black children, similar to the
Calhoun School in Lowndes County, on an elevated point three
miles from the center of the Prat Mines complex.
Five years later, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad recognized that
the acreage owned by the black school would be an ideal location
for a new mine. In return for thirty acres of property in another
location and $30,000, the church sold the property on which the
Slope No. 12 prison would soon be built. A year later, the
Methodists opened a new four-year institution for African
Americans, named Miles Memorial Col ege, in honor of a former
slave who became a famous church bishop after the Civil War.4
At the same time, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad built Slope
No. 12 and its prison compound. Connecting the mine and prison
to the company's coke ovens and industrial infrastructure was a new
railroad spur snaking along a ridge rising from Prat City's old
convict cemetery to the site of the then empty Booker City High
School.
The black Methodists there had struggled to keep their school
operating and its desks and teaching positions l ed. There was no
such di culty with the prison that succeeded it. Under the lease
U.S. Steel quickly signed with the state of Alabama, the company
could shift four hundred convicts from two other Prat Mines to No.
12. U.S. Steel also obtained leases on hundreds more county
12. U.S. Steel also obtained leases on hundreds more county
prisoners. Under a contract with Je erson County, the company
paid the local government nearly $60,000—equal to about $1.1
mil ion a century later—to acquire every prisoner arrested during
1908.5
Similar standing agreements were in place with twenty other
Alabama counties, set ing the prices for each laborer between $9
per month for Choctaw County and $28.50 for prisoners captured
in the state capital of Montgomery.6 New leases entered into by
U.S. Steel after it bought TCI were supposed to guarantee a steady
stream of convicts until at least the end of 1912.7
The supply of forced labor became even more critical as tensions
mounted between the coal-mining companies of Birmingham and
the local United Mine Workers organization—which had
aggressively organized more than ten thousand free miners in
Alabama. Convicts—who had no choice but to continue digging
coal under whatever circumstances the company demanded—were
crucial to maintaining operations during a strike or other labor
interruption.
Through the spring and summer of 1908, the number of men
purchased for use in Slope No. 12 steadily climbed—by August
reaching nearly six hundred prisoners taken from county sheri s
and just under four hundred from the state.8 Of the sixty men
delivered by Deputy Eddings in the twelve months before
Cot enham's arrest, nearly half were charged with "jumping"—or
riding a freight train without a ticket. Eddings's jail registry said
George Roberson was sent on a conviction for "assault with a stick."
Another black man, Lou Wil iam, was sold to Slope No. 12 for
adultery. John Jones had been sold for gambling.9
Al his life, Green had heard of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.
Every African American in Alabama had been told stories about the
vast prison mines at Prat City. For a generation it loomed over the
lives of black people, a mysterious hel in living earth buried
lives of black people, a mysterious hel in living earth buried
beneath a licentious mining boomtown. Men sent there for three
months or six months instead disappeared for a year, or forever.
The few men who straggled back to their homeplaces told of a
whole city of mines, where shafts crisscrossed the subterranean
world like a crazy quilt of streets with hundreds of underground
"rooms," sometimes nearly intersecting with the shafts of other
mines. Other mines named Flat Top, Coalburg, and Banner, owned
by di erent companies, cut from nearby camps into the fabulous
seam of bituminous coal coursing, four feet thick in some places,
through the low ridges of northern Alabama.
Like Prat City, the mines at Flat Top and Coalburg were packed
with black men forced underground at gunpoint. The others l ed
each day with white men paid by the hour who despised the black
convicts, partly out of the habit of despising African Americans but
more now for the crippling damage their presence did to the free
miners’ pleas for bet er wages and working conditions.
Sometimes the convicts laughed at how the free miners so hated
them, as if black laborers chained to their beds had chosen to be
there. It was another sign that most white people seemed to be
simply crazy when it came to the lives of black people. No sane
man who had ever visited Flat Top, with its two thousand
desperate black prisoners, or the slopes at Prat City, l ed with
1,500 emaciated African American laborers, black whipping guards,
and the white captains who wielded the lash as mercilessly as any
of the old slave masters, could believe such a thing.
Shortly after Slope No. 12 opened in 1907, arrangements were
made for a series of celebratory photographs for the company. At
the storehouse, convicts stand in bright white uniforms. The grassy
yard is pristine and dot ed with newly planted banana trees ready
to unfurl their long, wide leaves. The fence around the compound is
hidden in trees. But behind the barred windows, Slope No. 12 and
the other prison shafts at Prat were beginning a hel ish headlong
descent in the chaotic aftermath of U.S. Steel's abrupt takeover.
descent in the chaotic aftermath of U.S. Steel's abrupt takeover.
In February, three months after the merger, a wave of pneumonia
and tuberculosis swept through the prison miners, kil ing nine. In
March, six more convicts died of tuberculosis, including Roberson,
the Shelby County man convicted of "assault with a stick."
Nearly al the men thrown into Slope No. 12 shared the same
di cult background of deep poverty and th
e circumscribed
opportunities of their Black Belt origins. They came in hues every
man of the Black Belt could describe—deep dark like country night,
gingercake, the high yel ow of mulat oes, the sharp features of red
bone. They were farmhands mostly. Baptists and African
Methodists. Nearly al were the children or grandchildren of slaves.
Most knew the families who had once owned their kin. They al
knew no black man would ever see justice in the prisons of white
men.
Yet in the bowels of Slope No. 12, there was lit le more kinship
of skin than that. When Green arrived, nearly a thousand laborers
toiled in the same grueling rhythm. Transported deep into the shaft
on the same narrow gauge trams that would be used to carry out
the coal they mined from the soft bituminous seam, each man
carried a pick, a shovel with a short handle, a sledgehammer, and
two iron or wooden wedges.
Once deep in the mine, the convicts were parceled in pairs into
narrow "rooms" carved at right angles from the sides of the main
shaft under the seam of coal. Many of the rooms were more like
long tunnels—some as tal as four feet but many barely two feet
high and two feet wide. The circumscribed chambers extended
more than twenty- ve feet from the main shaft, forcing Green and
other miners to slide on their stomachs a distance ve or more
times the length of their bodies. The cavities were il uminated by
ickering lanterns hooked on leather straps around their heads.
Shaped like a smal teapot, a lantern held a reservoir of oil, with a
wick running through the snout to the flame.
Crouched or lying in the claustrophobic space, with no light other
than the feeble ame of his oil or carbide headlamp, Green slung
his steel pick in constricted sidelong arcs, shat ering the worthless
his steel pick in constricted sidelong arcs, shat ering the worthless
stone and rock below the coal. He drove wedges into the coal to
separate sections weighing a half ton or more. After enough slams
of the sledge, the huge slabs of coal cracked free, sometimes
unexpectedly for inexperienced convicts, landing in thunderous
crashes inches from the prostrate miners. When men worked
entirely beneath the coal seam, they instal ed wooden supports
cal ed sprags to prevent an unexpected col apse. Sometimes only
blasting powder—wrapped in newspaper to make simple
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