He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  Not much in the city suggested moderation. Bessemer was a city of extremes and stark contrasts. On most issues, especially race, no middle ground existed, no shades of gray—only black and white. Even Bessemer’s tiny two-color traffic lights gave no signs of caution, only red or green, stop or go.

  Living with the threat of retaliation and their lawsuit at a dead end, Caliph and Joseph Washington decided it was time to leave Bessemer. “Right after all of that stuff took place,” Caliph recalled, “we left.” The quickest way out of town, the brothers believed, was to join the army. Joseph was eighteen and clear to join, but Caliph at sixteen was too young. At five-foot-nine and a rugged 187 pounds, however, Caliph Washington easily convinced the enlistment officer that he was old enough to serve in the U.S. Army. He was well practiced at lying about his age since dropping out of school at fourteen to help the family earn more money. For two years he secured jobs at a bottling plant, a milk company, a tire plant, and a car wash—work usually reserved for adults.

  In 1956, with the Parsons incident hanging over him, Caliph Washington left Bessemer, for the first time, on a big bus bound for the U.S. Army Training Facility at Fort Jackson, near Columbia, South Carolina. For eight weeks, he went through basic training. He learned to walk, talk, think, and act like a soldier. He prepared for combat by completing the “baptism of fire” simulation, where trainees crawled through sand, barbed wire entanglements, and other obstacles while machine guns and artillery were fired overhead. With basic training completed, he took additional instruction in light vehicle operation and maintenance. Pvt. Caliph Washington was then assigned to the Twenty-Ninth Tank Battalion, stationed in Bremerhaven, West Germany. Years before, the Twenty-Ninth was one of the first tank units created at the beginning of World War II and trained personally by Gen. George S. Patton, who once observed that this group of men were the “most highly specialized bunch of killers this army has turned out thus far.”

  Ironically, for southern black men in the postwar U.S. Army, tours of duty in Germany provided opportunities to experience more freedom than they could back home. Ebony magazine reported that many black GIs discovered that “democracy had more meaning” there, and they were “finding more friendship, more respect and more equality.” Perhaps Washington enjoyed some of this freedom and the grown-up independence of army life, but he was not well suited for the command structure and strict discipline of the military.

  Immature and far from home, he often defied authority and was, on at least one occasion, insubordinate to an officer. He spent twenty-four days in the stockade in Germany and was brought before a board of officers who were to evaluate his less-than-desirable conduct. They concluded that it was “unlikely that he can be rehabilitated to the extent where he may be expected to become a satisfactory soldier.” The board recommended that Caliph Washington be discharged for “habits and traits of character manifested by misconduct.”

  On July 1, 1957, the army deactivated the Twenty-Ninth Tank Battalion in Germany, and the unit traveled to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, New York, where Pvt. Caliph Washington received a discharge under “other than honorable conditions.” Wearing his dress uniform, he then traveled to Alabama on a southbound Greyhound and arrived in Bessemer on Sunday, July 7, 1957. A crowd of family and friends gathered to celebrate his homecoming. It had been almost two years since the beating by Dick Parsons, and this was Caliph Washington’s first opportunity to return to Bessemer in fifteen months. The young soldier hoped his troubles with local police were over, but four days later, he was once again looking to escape Bessemer, Alabama.

  2

  A HELL OF A PLACE

  And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose

  a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace;

  and the sun and the air were darkened.

  —REVELATION 9:2

  A Bessemer street scene in the early twentieth century where Old Joe whiskey was a popular choice at local saloons.

  THE BESSEMER OF Caliph Washington’s youth was filled with thick smoke from iron and steel furnaces, rolling mills, pipe and foundry companies, mining operations, brick manufacturers, and railway freight car producers. The impenetrable, smoldering air obscured the sun and covered the town in a veil of soot and dinginess. The foul city of thirty thousand people rested in the southern end of a soiled six-mile-wide valley, next to a tired, overworked mountain of inferior-grade iron ore. All day and all night, the roaring inharmonious symphony of heavy industry was the song of iron and steel, which left Bessemer, as one observer wrote, “red-eyed with sleepless fires” and surrounded by “smoke-belching” industry.

  Bessemer’s grit and grime, however, went far beyond industrial smoke and soot. While most residents, black and white, went about their daily lives, a shadow city existed: edgy, hard-boiled, and dirty. As a local police officer once explained, “Illegal goings-on are wide open. It’s always been wide open, and corruption don’t start at the bottom.” In 1915, a magazine writer described the city as the “grim child” of the New South, “sturdy and honorably stained” with the sweat, violence, and soot that gave the central business district its distinct “smoke begrimed” appearance.

  Years earlier, Bessemer’s founder, Henry Fairchild DeBardeleben, believed this black smoke meant money—and lots of it. While searching for investors for his new city in the late nineteenth century, DeBardeleben proclaimed that “no stockholder will be allowed to come in who can’t make smoke . . . and the man who can make the most smoke will have the most stock.”

  An Alabama native, DeBardeleben was born on his parents’ farm in Autauga County on July 22, 1840. Following the death of his father, the young DeBardeleben became the legal ward of Alabama’s first major industrial entrepreneur, Daniel Pratt. Pratt, who made his fortune manufacturing and selling cotton gins throughout the world, imparted to his young ward his passion for business development. Combined with his abounding enthusiasm and natural intelligence, DeBardeleben emerged as the model of a New South entrepreneur following the Civil War. The young industrialist invested early in Birmingham’s iron ore-mining and steel-making activities and was hailed by newspapers as a “pioneering master” and the city’s own Christopher Columbus.

  In the 1880s, when DeBardeleben failed to acquire land to build new blast furnaces around Birmingham, he decided to carve a new city out of the piney woods in western Jefferson County and build his industrial complex around it. With persuasive skills known to be “fatal” to anyone with money in their pocket, he convinced a handful of individuals to invest a minimum of $100,000 apiece. “Here is where we are going to establish a young city,” he told his investors, pointing to a spot on a geological map between the Black Warrior and the Cahaba coalfields. It was near limestone deposits and within “gunshot” of the great “mass of red fossiliferous iron ores” on Red Mountain—it had all the elements necessary for iron and steel production. The spot under DeBardeleben’s finger was the hamlet of Jonesboro, a settlement of roughneck farmers on the old rocky road between Huntsville and Tuscaloosa.

  SOME SEVENTY YEARS earlier, the Creek War brought young men from Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, and the Carolinas to the Alabama wilderness to fight under the command of Andrew Jackson. In 1814, Jackson decisively defeated the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, then forced the tribes to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson, which ceded 23 million acres to the United States. The land that would one day become central Alabama was opened for settlement.

  Among the first whites to arrive in 1816 were a handful of people from South Carolina and Kentucky who settled along a muddy creek near the Old Huntsville Road. They cleared land, planted crops, propped up several hundred rickety logs, and named the place Fort Jonesboro in honor of their leader, a wild-eyed Indian fighter with “reckless courage,” named “Devil” John Jones. The hell-blazing nickname seemed to fit the man, the people, and the place. Jones grew corn, brewed whiskey, and raised hell with his neighbors—beating one so badly that the fellow sold
his land, packed his wagons, and moved twenty miles to the south to avoid contact with the roughhousing son of a bitch. By the time Jones moved on to settle elsewhere in the state, the entire valley that extends from Bessemer through Birmingham was called Jones Valley.

  Devil John Jones and many like him were the descendants of immigrants from Scotland and Northern Ireland—common people who brought to America a culture based on kinship, violence, honor, and hedonism. Historian David Hackett Fischer wrote that these settlers had a “penchant for family feuds, a love of whiskey and a warrior ethic that demanded vengeance.” Devil John and his fellow migrants brought this culture to the southwestern frontier, where the isolated pioneer lifestyle reinforced it. Journalist W. J. Cash once described these trail-blazing men as pleasure-seeking hell-of-a-fellows—southerners who were able “to stand on [their] heads in a bar, to toss down a pint of raw-whiskey at a gulp, to fiddle and dance all night, to bite off the nose or gorge out the eyes of a favorite enemy, to fight harder and love harder than the next man, to be known eventually far and wide as a hell-of-a-fellow.” In Alabama, Scots-Irish families who occupied the land near the “shanty” fort in Jonesboro often feuded over minor disagreements and never attended any community gathering, as one writer noted, “without breaking it up with fighting.” The land was poor, and so were the people.

  This area of the state, one Alabama politician pointed out during those years, was so forsaken and pitiable that a “buzzard would have to carry provisions on his back or starve to death on his passage.” But during the 1880s, Henry DeBardeleben boasted that his new town would become the greatest in all Alabama. “Life is one big poker game,” he once said, and the thrill of investment meant an opportunity to “savor the melodramatic and to dream of millions.” With over $2 million in capital investments, DeBardeleben set about building his new town. “There’s nothing like taking a wild piece of land all rock and woods,” he proclaimed, “and turning it into a settlement of men and women; bringing railroads in, making payroll, starting things going; nothing like boring a hillside through and turning over a mountain.”

  The stockholders proposed naming the town after Sir Henry Bessemer, the inventor of the process that made possible the mass production of steel. As the president of the Iron and Steel Institute noted in 1890, Henry Bessemer’s discovery changed the face of Western civilization, helping prevent the West from a “relapse into barbarism,” and it would lead the way to higher civilization in the twentieth century. “The name of Bessemer will therefore be added to the honorable roll of men who have succeeded in spreading the gospel of ‘Peace on earth and goodwill toward men,’ which our Divine Master came on earth to teach and encourage.” It was a high-minded legacy for a mean, barbaric start-up city in an area prone to violence.

  Founded on April 12, 1887, Bessemer, Alabama, its promoters boasted, had a future “brighter than any city in the South” and showed promise “without parallel in the history of American towns.” They touted the city as a burgeoning garden paradise. “Nature has done some of her most charming work here,” one optimistic early report noted, “and the region is ready for those finishing touches that are the work of the architect and landscape.”

  If you desire a home in an equable, healthy, attractive climate, in an unusually favored country with pure water, good soil, rich products, picturesque scenery, devoid of rugged winters as well as tropical summers, except from visitations of tornadoes or cyclones, or of epidemic diseases, or of unusual natural pests, you will find such a place or locality centering at Bessemer.

  Even though the area was prone to unpredictable storms, widespread illnesses (cholera, pellagra, tuberculosis), and mosquitoes as big as cottonwood blossoms, its boosters proclaimed Bessemer the “Marvel City,” a place where “home and prosperity” were within the grasp of the humblest and lowliest.

  Seeking the promise of a better life, it was the poorest folks in Alabama society, especially debt-ridden sharecroppers and tenant farmers like Caliph Washington’s family, who moved to Bessemer. Soon the local chamber of commerce promoted the city as having “labor in great abundance, skilled and unskilled, white and black, male and female, but all native born, content and efficient.” A constant stream of rural southerners poured into the city looking for jobs. “These people,” a Bessemer resident observed, “worked hard, lived hard, and in many instances died hard.”

  What Bessemer actually became was nothing more than an overgrown mining town with an affinity for violence and iniquity. Although the mine villages themselves had no “shot houses, or houses that sold whiskey,” one miner later recalled, “If they wanted to get drunk, they went somewhere else to get drunk.” And that place lay just outside Bessemer, at the three-mile limit on the city’s eastern border known as Whiskeytown. Every evening miners and steel workers, both black and white, poured out of their camps and mineshafts searching for sin there, and they found plenty. Out of some measure of necessity, entrepreneurship, and thirst, locals opened a dozen or so hooch houses in Whiskeytown. The tosspot area became a “notorious center” of liquor, prostitution, and criminal activities.

  The flood of rural men (single or separated from families) into urban areas for work and industry was an old story and always a recipe for violence and unrest. In Bessemer, Scots-Irish migrants carried with them an old streak of rural savagery into the vice-ridden boomtown and reveled in the sadistic violence that emerged as the city’s defining feature. “New arrivals from the countryside,” historian Pete Daniel concluded, “brought their penchant for violence with them; in many ways the South outdid the Wild West in the frequency of shootouts and general gunplay. Indeed, urbanization and adjustments to new routines throughout the country seemed to breed violence.” From the 1880s on, journalist W. J. Cash noted, some southerners found great pleasure in the “infliction of the most devilish and prolonged agonies.”

  Like other cities in the region, Bessemer grew too fast to provide safety or public services. At night, pedestrians walked dim lit streets at their own peril, as the risk of robbery, assault, or murder lurked in the darkness. As a local writer noted, “Murders, robberies, stickups, flimflam, pickpockets, gamblers, and other undesirable elements made it a dangerous place for a decent citizen to visit.” For a time, the area averaged one killing per night. “In many cases,” Bessemer police officer Lawton Grimes, Jr., wrote, “a human life was taken for no reason other than the excitement of taking a life.”

  Companies imposed oppressive controls and regulations, and security officers enforced strict prohibitions. And much to the chagrin of many locals, an 1874 state law prohibited the “sale, giving away, or other disposition of spirituous liquors, intoxicating bitters, or other intoxicating beverages” within three miles of the Jonesboro Methodist Church. But with crime, vice, and violence so widespread in Bessemer, police officers could do little to enforce the laws. The effort seemed so pointless that some of the lawmen participated in the city’s debauchery. A local newspaper reported that a “spectacle for the angels” occurred one evening when the chief of police was seen “indulging in a carriage ride” through the streets of Bessemer with the “Queen of Whiskeytown,” the city’s most notorious prostitute. In addition, when police officers entered the sin-filled area, they were often seen, one newspaper observed, “complacently sunning themselves in tippled chairs, feet elevated, and batons at rest.”

  Blind-eyed local boosters ignored these problems and praised the “guardians of the peace” in hopes of luring more workers to Bessemer. “No city in all the South,” a hyperbolic writer for the Bessemer Weekly noted, “can boast a police corps more efficient, reliable, and faithful; nor one better disciplined or more zealous and attentive in the performance of arduous and exacting duty.” In reality, with crime high and pay low, the city found few individuals willing to protect and to serve the citizens. Turnover in personnel was constant. In 1897 frustrated officials fired the police chief for “neglect of duty and cowardice” and replaced him with Thomas Benjamin Walla
ce, a former supervisor at the Alabama Insane Hospital in Tuscaloosa. Wallace worked for mental health pioneer Peter Bryce, who believed in a “moral treatment” to heal the mind through the creation of a normal environment (no physical restraints) that required regular work for able-bodied patients. Perhaps with that background, Bessemer leaders believed the new chief could curb the city’s pathological criminal culture.

  Wallace’s job got even tougher, however, when Bessemer politicians overturned the prohibition law that confined most illegal activities to Whiskeytown. Once the zoning levee was erased, alcohol, gambling, debauchery, violence, and murder flooded the city proper. The former police chief of Tuscaloosa, Louis Napoleon Ball, came to this marvel of a city not to bring law and order but to establish a “palatial pleasure resort.” Ball’s Bank Saloon, located at the corner of Second Avenue and Nineteenth Street—the central business corner of Bessemer—boasted “elegant fixtures, superb appointments, the best service, and the finest liquors.” Nearby, the three Nordman brothers operated the Palace Saloon. A newspaper noted that the “triumvirate of Nordmans” maintained a large clientele by serving only the finest liquors, beer on tap and in bottle, and all the most “modern drinks,” including new cocktails like the Sazerac and the Tom Collins. A few blocks away, the Bickart brothers operated the Metropolitan Bar, which enjoyed, as one writer observed, “a popularity and patronage exceptionally gratifying.” The Bickarts also distributed all products “known to the whiskey trade,” with names like Old Joe, Four Roses, and Three Feathers. Customers could order a finger of High Ball Rye or an “unexcelled extra pale” beer at a nickel a glass, twenty-five cents for a half pint, and a dollar for a quart.

  More than eighteen saloons operated in the Bessemer business district during these years, and most of them were infested with the rotten sins of gambling and prostitution. Lawbreaking stalked at the doorways of such evil, a resident complained, and made violent crimes “doubly sure and greater.” Gatherings of whiskey drinkers, fallen women, and cardsharps led to frequent bloodlettings. To minimize the violence occurring inside the ornate saloons, burly bartenders forced the ruckus out onto Bessemer’s streets, where ruffians brawled, punched, kicked, gouged, bit, sliced, stabbed, shot, and died in a stew of slag, mud, blood, and whiskey.