He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  Over thirty years after the bombing, in 2012, Aubrey “Snuffy” Garrett, who remained a key suspect, offered a different theory on who was to blame: it was George Barron who sent the bomb to Max Williams and tried to pin the blame on Snuffy Garrett. According to Garrett, Barron had his eye on the commissioner of public safety’s seat in the election of 1982, and by killing Williams and sending Snuffy to prison for the crime, he eliminated his top two contenders for the position. The investigation into the crime was conducted more like a “cover-up than an investigation designed to uncover the real culprit.” Nonetheless, Garrett chose not run against Max Williams in 1982, but George Barron did, and in the mind of Snuffy Garrett, that proved his head-scratching theory true.

  In the end, both Barron and Williams lost the election to another former Bessemer police officer, J. I. “Joe” Jones. An embittered Williams continued to hope that “someone would pay for this someday,” but no one ever did. The year following his defeat, George Barron, who was in poor health, died and was buried at Highland Memorial Gardens—a cemetery with the lush green grass of a well-manicured golf course. For months after the burial, according to Garrett, grass failed to grow over Barron’s grave, much to the embarrassment of the cemetery’s groundkeeper. It was later revealed that a member of Max Williams’s vice unit stopped by every evening to pay his respects to Barron by urinating on the grass.

  CONCLUSION

  THE SALVATION CLUB

  The trumpet sounds within-a my soul;

  I ain’t got long to stay here.

  —“STEAL AWAY”

  Reverend Caliph Washington returned to Atmore Prison to minister to the inmates.

  THE BLACK MAJORITY in Bessemer stood by and watched as the white minority power structure tore itself apart. Asbury Howard said blacks throughout Bessemer saw the May 2, 1979, bombing as nothing more than “white folks doing it to each other.” As the white political establishment crumbled during the 1970s and 1980s, Asbury Howard emerged as a pivotal leader in black political empowerment in the Jefferson County Cutoff. As the longtime president of the Bessemer Voters League, Howard fought for decades to end the repressive “understanding tests” and other restrictions on black voters in the city. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited those practices, and black voter registration boomed, opening the door for dramatic changes in Bessemer and other predominantly black municipalities around the state. Yet at the state level, rural whites continued to hold disproportionate power in the Alabama House and Senate. For decades, these representatives and senators balked at the idea of reapportionment based on population, leaving the composition of the Alabama legislature virtually unchanged since 1900. When mass growth in urban areas began to alter the demographic composition of the state, legislators maintained the system of inequality. The state’s urban residents, especially in Jefferson County, were notoriously underrepresented.

  In the early 1960s, a series of legal challenges to Alabama’s apportionment system worked its way through the court system and culminated in the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims. Although less than 25 percent of the Alabama population lived in rural areas, rural senators and representatives made up a majority of the state legislature. With votes in less populated rural areas having more weight than votes in urban areas, the litigants argued that Alabama’s method of apportionment violated the equal protection clause. Ultimately, the Supreme Court justices agreed and established the notion of “one man, one vote.” Writing the opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded, “An individual’s right to vote for state legislators is unconstitutionally impaired when its weight is in a substantial fashion diluted when compared with votes of citizens living in other parts of the state.” This opened an avenue for black political empowerment at the state level, but it took until 1970 before Thomas Reed and Fred Gray, the first two blacks since Reconstruction, were elected to the Alabama House of Representatives.

  Predictably, the state of Alabama continued to delay, defy, and obfuscate court orders regarding apportionment, but in 1972, a three-judge panel composed of Frank Johnson, Richard Rives, and Daniel Thomas forced the state to comply based on the “one man, one vote” doctrine. “This court [acted] only when confronted with totally inadequate legislative response to, or complete disregard for, its constitutional mandate.” A writer for the Montgomery Advertiser declared that the legislature was “the worst legislature in years—some say the worst ever.” Nonetheless, the judges’ reapportionment plan was implemented in time for the 1974 elections, and fifteen blacks won seats in the Alabama legislature, including U. W. Clemon, who became the state’s first black senator in a century. In the statehouse, voters in the newly created 49th District, which included the Bessemer Cutoff and parts of Tuscaloosa County, overwhelmingly elected Asbury Howard as their representative.

  During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Howard, the onetime Communist labor radical, carefully reinvented himself as Bessemer’s nonviolent civil rights statesman. “I’ve never been a Communist in the whole history of my life,” he said in 1968, and no one in Bessemer could truthfully claim that “I ever was.” Evidence, however, suggested otherwise. Even with a long record of violent confrontations (“meet fire with fire”), he explained in the 1970s that he embraced Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolence. “Dr. King said that . . . we should out-suffer that man that attacks us,” Howard added, “and that by not striking back we would work on his conscience.” The man who once believed that violent labor unrest and civil rights activism were one and the same now separated the two issues.

  Still, his colleagues in the Alabama House knew of Asbury Howard’s reputation, and one later commented that he was the “the closest thing to a Communist that you could ever find in Alabama politics.” But during the legislative session, Howard was subdued, neither sponsoring much legislation nor joining in many floor fights over controversial bills—even as the rural-versus-urban conflict grew increasingly volatile during the 1970s. But as the astute Alabama political writer Tommy Stevenson observed in 1982, every so often when the chamber was mired in a controversy or fighting over a bill, Howard would take the microphone and “in the booming voice of a tent evangelist” bring everyone in line with a “what-the-heck-is-going-on-around-here-anyway” sermon. “And in those rousing outbursts,” Stevenson added, “everyone can get a glimpse of the power of a man who has traveled a long, tough road to get where he is today.”

  Howard quietly won reelection in 1978 and continued to be cautious in his approach to representing the people of his district. His successes throughout his career, he argued, were due to “my pressing hard, fighting hard, but realizing that it’s going to take a long time to change things. If you think change is going to come overnight, you better stop fighting now.” In 1982, as the white establishment crumbled in Bessemer, he urged caution. “We’ve got to be a little patient,” he said, “[and] wait for things to change and time our actions right.” He won reelection again that same year, but several months later, the U.S. Justice Department approved a new plan to reapportion the districts to reflect ongoing shifts in Alabama’s population. The Alabama Democratic Party, which still dominated state politics, decided against holding new elections for the redrawn districts and appointed nominees for all the house and senate districts. Most of the sitting members of the legislature were renominated, but a few, including Howard, found themselves unceremoniously dumped by the party. In Howard’s place, the Democrats nominated Bobbie McDowell, a younger black activist politician whom Howard handily beat at the polls in 1982. As one political observer wrote, Howard had done nothing wrong to be so “ignominiously shoved aside by the movement he helped create.” The party had simply “bowed to the new political realities in giving the seat” to someone with energy and vigor. Asbury Howard returned to Bessemer and lived quietly until his death in September 1986.

  HOWARD LIVED JUST long enough to see dramatic changes in Bessemer’s political landscape. In 1983 and 1984, a group of black citizens an
d the U.S. Department of Justice challenged the legality of the “at large system” of electing the three city commissioners. They argued that this violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and “resulted in blacks having less opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.” As part of a consent decree in 1985, Bessemer officials agreed to change the city form of government from long-outdated city commission to mayor–city council in time for the municipal elections the following year.

  On August 3, 1986, blacks, who now made up 55 percent of voter registrations, went to the polls with the opportunity to elect a full slate of black candidates running for mayor and seats on the new city council. While Ed Porter was reelected for a fourth term, Bessie Pippens, a retired schoolteacher, became the first woman and first black elected to public office in Bessemer. “I would not like to dwell on my being the first,” she said at the time. “It means my job is going to be harder.” A few weeks later, three other black candidates—Quitman Mitchell, James McWilliams, and Thomas Tolbert—all won their respective runoff elections and gave blacks a majority on the new city council.

  In 1990, Ed Porter chose not to run for a fifth term as mayor—as blacks now made up 58.4 percent of the city’s population—opening the door for Councilman Quitman Mitchell to win election as the city’s first black mayor. Quitman said his goal was “to make sure this city runs hard, runs long, and runs fair.” Most of the whites gave up and moved away, so that by 2015, the proportion of white residents dropped to its lowest point since 1940, with blacks making up 80 percent of the population.

  But even with increased equality, the end of legal segregation, and black political empowerment, Bessemer remained what it always had been: a place with one of the highest crime rates in the nation; a city with such endemic poverty that many of its citizens had no hope.

  ALMOST A FULL century after she first appeared in Bessemer, Hazel the Mummy made her last visits to the city in 1994 and 1995. Her disappearance coincided with the fading of the old political order as the white establishment lost hope and abandoned the Marvel City. Nearly a century earlier, the notorious murderess had seen suicide as her only way out of the darkness of Bessemer. Hazel’s death illustrated the hopelessness many people, both white but especially black, felt in this gritty industrial town. Beyond the legend, the real story of her life was just as unnervingly tragic.

  In the days leading up to the Christmas of 1906, newspapers reported that a “carnival of crime” occurred in Birmingham and Bessemer. In less than forty-eight hours, the “tragedies were unusually fruitful,” with seven murders, two accidental deaths, one deadly assault (the victim was not expected to live), and two suicides. Among the dead was one Maggie Farris of Bessemer, who took her own life by drinking arsenic. The date, manner of death, and last name all pointed to Hazel. Her corpse was taken to Vermillion & Adams Furniture Store in downtown, where the owner William E. C. Vermillion, the city’s amateur undertaker, placed her in a coffin to await family to claim her body. But they never came. When her corpse mummified, Vermillion decided to recoup some of his costs by propping her coffin in a corner and, in carnival-style fashion, charging curious locals a dime to view the body.

  Yet, Bessemer’s leaders were unhappy with Vermillion’s mummy, and following a lengthy debate, the city council passed an ordinance in October 1907 that required the burial of all bodies soon after death. As the Montgomery Advertiser reported, Vermillion sold Maggie Farris, shipped her remains on the Alabama Great Southern Railroad to Meridian, Mississippi, and ended the ill feelings aroused by her presence in the Marvel City. By most accounts, Orlando Clayton Brooks, an elusive twenty-three-year-old traveling salesman and would-be entertainer, paid Vermillion $25 for the corpse. Soon after purchasing Ms. Farris, Brooks purportedly stored the body in Nashville while he traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, and searched in vain for the family of the mummified murderess. It was all a farce. No mass shooting of four police officers occurred on August 16, 1905, as Brooks claimed, or any other date in early-twentieth-century Louisville. Brooks simply invented the story to attract thousands of paying customers curious to see a mummy.

  In 1911, Brooks placed a classified advertisement in the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville inviting locals to come see the all-natural, nonpetrified, and mummified human flesh of Hazel Farris for 10 cents. In the years that followed, he joined several traveling shows and toured the country as a carnival barker for “Hazel the Magnificent.” During the quarter century following her death, Hazel Farris retained her youthful appearance, leading Brooks to ask prospective customers, “Is she dead or is she alive?” Hazel appeared to be a real-life sleeping beauty. When she was finally returned to Alabama, hundreds of citizens from Bessemer flocked to see what Brooks described as the “Great American Wonder” and an exhibit that helped scientists reclaim the lost art of Egyptian mummification. No doubt, Brooks wanted to make money from the American public’s fascination with Egyptian mummies—a captivation that led to the popularity of mummy films, plays, news stories, and literature.

  The most noteworthy of the latter was Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars. When the central character first viewed the unwrapped mummy, he proclaimed:

  Then, and then only, did the full horror of the whole thing burst upon me! There, in the full glare of the light, the whole material and sordid side of death seemed startlingly real. . . . I felt a rush of shame sweep over me. It was not right that we should be there, gazing with irreverent eyes on such unclad beauty: it was indecent; it was almost sacrilegious!

  Unlike Stoker’s fictional character, Orlando Clayton Brooks had no ethical misgivings about displaying Farris’s mummified body and justified his exploitation as a moral exhibit for the good of science and humanity.

  In 1917, Billboard magazine described Hazel Farris as a “mystifying attraction” and described Brooks as a “whirlwind wonder” on the entertainment circuit with Rutherford Traveling Shows. With his wife, Girlie “Alabama Blossom” Brooks, he performed three shows: the farcical play Why Smith Left Home, “Spidora” (an illusion featuring Girlie as a giant spider with a human’s head), and “Hazel the Magnificent.” For years, the couple traveled throughout the country, visiting hundreds of small towns with Hazel strapped to the running board of a Model T Ford. By the early 1930s, much like the ebullient roar of the 1920s, Hazel’s beauty faded as her body dehydrated and took on a macabre leathery appearance. Brooks now traveled alone in a gray Oldsmobile with his mummy still strapped to the car, but what become of his wife, the lovely Alabama Blossom, was unknown. “Hazel is an old established show,” O. C. Brooks wrote a few years later, “known to most all showmen and is such a wonderful drawing card and money getter that I can get on most any show.” He later estimated earning well over a million dollars on Hazel, but he spent it all over the years. “I have been . . . perhaps a fool with money. I GET IT and I know I CAN GET IT,” he wrote in 1942. “For that reason I won’t realize the value of it until it’s gone and the season ends.”

  In the years following World War II, age and alcohol caught up with Brooks, and his peripatetic travels with his self-enthroned “queen” grew less frequent. Destitute and living in squalor, he slept in an elevated bed above Hazel—his only possession of value. It was there that he died in his sleep in 1950. He left the mummy to Luther Brooks, a young nephew in Nashville who housed her in the family garage and displayed her from time to time in the 1950s and 1960s.

  In 1974, a few curious Bessemer residents “rediscovered” the legend of “Hazel the Mummy” and negotiated with Brooks to bring her back to the Marvel City as a fundraiser for a new “hall of history” to commemorate the town’s most renowned, and well-traveled, citizen.

  Her arrival that October coincided with end of Mayor Jess Lanier’s political career and the beginning of a period of unequaled discontent and upheaval in the city that would last for over a dozen years. For several years, each fall Hazel Farris returned to Bessemer, where
she witnessed the passing of the old white power establishment and the painful decline of a city that was once the fourth largest in the state of Alabama. Six years after making her final visit in 1995, Maggie “Hazel” Farris’s dehydrated corpse was cremated and mercifully laid to rest in Tennessee—an act that ended her strange mummified career as a sideshow attraction that began in Bessemer—the dark city where she took her own life and Bessemer stole her humanity.

  HUMAN LIFE REMAINED cheap in Bessemer, symbolized none more so than by the travails of a young black man like Caliph Washington. After years of residing in the shadow of the big yellow chair, where he almost “rode the lightning” to eternity, Caliph Washington emerged from prison with a purpose, vision, and Job-like faith. His journey and mission reflected the words of the old Negro spiritual: “My Lord, He calls me. He calls me by lightning. He calls me by thunder. The trumpet sounds within my soul.” It was as if he had been “called by lightning” to do God’s work as a minister to the poor, the abandoned, and the hopeless.

  He decided to invest his time in the lives of young black men and keep them from following the same path. In 1972, after saving up enough money from his vending job, he bought a mammoth fifteen-passenger Dodge Maxi Wagon van and drove through the most impoverished areas of Bessemer in search of those who were poor in spirit. When he saw black teenagers, he stopped and shared his redemption story and explained God’s love to young men who had little hope of escaping Bessemer’s relentless poverty. On one such excursion, as he drove near the Bessemer-Lipscomb dividing line—just a short distance from where he was arrested in 1957—he spied a teen playing basketball alone. He decided to stop the van and talk to him. The five-foot-three inch youngster was intimidated by the sight of this boulder of a man who introduced himself as Caliph Washington. The young man’s name was Alphonso January. The sixth of twelve children in a single-parent home, January was slight and sickly, just recently having outgrown his childhood asthma.