Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Her questions began with the most basic of human concerns. Why was the nineteenth-century system of silence—absolutely no verbal communication between inmates—still enforced here when other penitentiaries had lifted the ban on conversation? What did inmates eat? Why were no provisions for educational or vocational training provided? For which she received prompt correction: white men were allowed to have one book a week from the library. With general human ailments, not to mention accidents, she wondered where the hospital facilities were located and raised a brow when the warden said there were none. Conversation eventually wound to the Knox men. With the aid of Ona’s clubwoman friend, who worked for the court system, she had acquired the following:

  Claude Knox—arrested June 6, 1920, sentenced from Jackson County to serve nine years for burglary in the second degree.

  Charles Knox—arrested November 2, 1919, sentenced from Jackson County to serve eight years for obtaining property under false pretenses.

  Frederick Knox—arrested September 23, 1919, sentenced from Jackson County to serve life for rape.

  What her paper didn’t say was that the three men were each gainfully employed and had known no trouble either in their native Jamaica or in Kansas City until their fateful encounters with the KCPD. In the case of Claude, the charge of burglary was fiercely contradicted by neighbors who claimed that he was hauled off after a police officer attempted to write a bogus summons for the improper parking of his vehicle, a brand-new sea-green Cadillac roadster. More perplexing was the case of Frederick, accused of raping an older white woman. Folks along the Vine called Frederick “Freda.” Clearly, these arrests weren’t based on any real evidence. The warden responded that there were now twenty-four hundred men in his possession and that he could not be expected to know them by name. Only the most pathological could be identified by face and demeanor. When Ivoe asked about paperwork on the Knox men, whom she thought would be fine examples for her article, she was told no records were kept on Negro inmates. How then were Negro men ever brought before the parole board? The warden looked at his watch and said it would be a good time for her tour as he had work to attend to.

  The tour began in the room inmates were “dressed in”—T-shirts made of rough brown muslin, gingham britches, and wooden shoes made by other convicts. The guard charged as her guide asked if she wanted to take lunch with the inmates. He had brought lunch from home and she was a poor sap for not having done so herself. The sunshiny day was betrayed by the dining hall’s windows, full of dirt. Her tray of food contained one boiled egg, a slice of bread, and a bowl of cloudy soup. She skimmed the top of the gray water only to discover a cockroach doing the backstroke. While her companion ate a hearty sandwich and drank a Thermos of coffee, a family of insects she could not name marched across the table. She looked away only to see a rat scurry along the windowpane. The rule forbidding conversation was harshly enforced twice during the half hour. One man was hit with a wooden paddle, starting a trail of blood from his ear. Another had an iron collar placed around his neck.

  After lunch they entered a corridor filled with a frightful stench. The majority of the inmates were black. A light brown man with pumpkin-colored patches dotting his scalp where he had torn his hair out by the roots looked at her with scary, blank eyes. The inmate’s feeble attempt to walk was complicated by pants so stiff with dried pus they made a crunching sound as he struggled toward them. At his cell the stench worsened, a fact she attributed to the open lesions covering his emaciated chest. “Last stages of syphilis,” the guard reported. Where segregation might actually prove healthful it had no place. When she asked the guard if the pen took any measures to separate clean men from those with communicable disease he shrugged. “You think that’s something, the crazy are mixed in with the sane.” The stout convict before her had been sentenced to death until they learned of his mental illness, then his punishment was commuted to life imprisonment. From the look and smell of things, it would be a very short sentence. Cell after cell, forlorn faces looked out at her with livid hunger in the eyes. Some pleaded pitifully for help, others stood the distressing squalor with fortitude.

  In brown overalls with a black stripe down the seam, Claude Knox stank when ushered into the small room, where she was allowed to speak with him in the presence of a guard. “No amount of soap and water can cut it,” he said, embarrassed, soft. Claude had received two letters from Bunchee and was grateful to her for keeping an eye on him. “Coming from a house full of men, you’d think we would have that much covered.” He was grateful for a bed inside of the prison, as he had heard “last year it was so crowded inmates slept in the garage and outbuildings.” After three weeks inside, Claude knew some things: what not to eat no matter how hungry, which guards to obey at all costs (the guard in the room was not bloodthirsty). His oldest brother, Charles, kept his head low. His baby brother had died. At the morning call, two years ago, Frederick Knox had been slow to rise. A guard swore at him and Frederick swore back. They put him in the black hole. From hearsay, Claude said of the black hole: “No light. Rations of a teacup of water and three squares of bread are provided once a day.”

  “The black hole killed your brother?” Ivoe asked, for clarity.

  “No. Pity killed him.”

  For thirty-three days Frederick lived on the starvation diet. When he was released, people let him help himself to anything off their food trays. “Gorged himself for two days and died of a perforated colon.”

  Before leaving Ivoe handed the guard a package with stamps, paper, envelopes, and a little money. “For Mr. Knox and any man who wishes to write to me.” More letters, more money, she promised.

  On the train, Ivoe recalled the first year of Jam. How out of tune with the race her editorial voice had sounded. Basic civil rights were not contingent on excellence, nor integrity and moral virtue—with that logic thousands of whites were truly un-American. She felt ashamed. She brought her own brush to the picture America painted of her race, a picture that rendered her people a social problem even as they were chased down streets, hunted, and jailed. Instead of red-inking crimes committed against them, she had nursed a bad case of journalistic myopia.

  Vexed by what she had witnessed and agitated by an itch coursing down her spine, Ivoe shimmied hard against the train seat and broke into a silent cry. She unfolded the Weekly Clarion, published by the inmates and handed to her by a colored guard. The thought of the prison’s gloom, its sullen harshness, seized her despite the almost humorous tone of a poem by Convict #25818:

  Ten little convicts,

  Marching in a line;

  One failed to button his coat,

  Then there were nine.

  Nine little convicts,

  Bemoaning their fate;

  One spoke in the dining room,

  Then there were eight.

  Eight little convicts,

  Gazing up at heaven;

  One tried to scale the wall,

  Then there were seven . . .

  She gave up any effort at concentration at the Columbia station stop.

  Thoughts of Ona were derailed by an itch that followed no logical sequence: behind the left ear, the side of her big toe, above her belly button, on the right buttock. Maddening! A strange shiver went through her body. An intense itch seized her left hand. Or was it a bite? Upon close inspection she detected nothing. Three hours later the train’s engine died but her itching had new life. The sensation of pins pushing from beneath her skin racked her body. And still the occasional bite from an invisible foe. She followed the stream of passengers inside the station and stopped at the sound of her name. Irabelle threw a wave and called to her again, bouncing on tiptoe. Closer, she saw her sister had been crying.

  And who was the man standing beside her?

  The bell over the door of Muehlebach’s Apothecary chimed as Ivoe stepped into the sharp scents of orange and vanilla. She breathed in the h
eady combination and started down the aisle of elaborate cabinetry flanked with shelves of attractive bottles holding herbs. “A teaspoon of the calomel daily for a week and a few rubdowns with neem oil should stop the itch.” Ona had made her promise that on future trips to Jefferson City she would not visit inmate quarters. She had escaped with only body lice the first time but might not be so lucky the next. Leaving the store, Ivoe glimpsed the fanciful ironwork of the door and thought of her father.

  Papa’s return still felt like a dream. At the train station the man next to Irabelle was a phantom, for just as he had disappeared ten years ago there he stood—without rhyme or reason. The arm holding her valise jerked up and down like a nervous lever. Her voice made strange, guttural sounds as if she had forgotten how to talk; words crumbled like dry clay. Papa’s face balled up and he grabbed her, his chest shaking with sobs and laughter. May-Belle used to say that to know where a man’s been, all you had to do was pay attention to his walk. Papa wore a thousand miles: his shoulders sagged. The way he lumbered over Union Station’s marble floor like some tired mule was enough to tell her he’d been in a place where promises weren’t easily kept.

  Ivoe understood the makings of her womanhood to be her family, the first trip out of Little Tunis, Willetson, printing with Ona, the church newsletter, the fire, Jam. But it was her father’s return after her visit with Claude Knox, the horrid images of the Missouri State Penitentiary, a map of sewing pins, and the black box that brought her newspaper’s purpose into sharp relief. Papa’s return had given rise to important questions: What if the black man didn’t abandon his family with the frequency some in Little Tunis had accepted as “rule”? What if he was stolen like her father, incarcerated or killed? For as long as she could remember, men like Papa and Claude Knox had been easy pickings. A decade ago she had charted the exponential growth of convict leasing programs, but the Texas Prison Board was not alone. Lord only knew what kind of work the Kansas prison had extorted from Papa—for “stealing water.”

  .

  The clock read a quarter to ten. Ivoe gathered the copies of the Eagle, Amsterdam News, Washingtonian, and La Dépêche Africaine strewn across her bed. From Los Angeles to the East Coast to the Caribbean, the struggle continued. She glanced at the bedside clock, then at the photograph taken outside the newspaper’s office the day they hung out the sign: Ona’s arm was thrown over her shoulders, the other hand held on to the gray hat that had nearly blown off a second before Bunchee snapped the picture. The floorboards were cool to her feet as she patted around for her slippers, thinking of the morning ahead. First, the bank, then on to meet Junebug and Pinky before a meeting with the Kansas City Democratic Executive Committee. For the first time, Jam was endorsing a political candidate in that year’s election, Thomas Smith for mayor. Smith was the only respondent to letters she sent to every candidate asking his opinions on extralegal punishment and policies he might implement to end it. She had convinced Smith that his road to city hall was paved by the black ballot. Today she was meeting with the committee to discuss a night primary mounted specifically for the Vine district at her newspaper office. In return for black support, Smith promised to prioritize an investigation into the city’s police force and a pardon for Claude and Charles Knox, which she now planned to revise to a commutation of their sentences since a pardon implied guilt. She was eager to review this week’s edition of Jam, which featured an article on the latest victory for Timbo’s union (a nickel raise for every man in the packing houses), Irabelle and Plenty’s wedding announcement, and, on the back page, an ad for the twins’ barbecue franchise boasting the best sauce in the Midwest. First, she had letters to read.

  .

  “Better bring Bunchee or a wagon. You can’t carry it all yourself,” the postman had said the first week of October when a deluge of letters addressed to Jam on the Vine arrived from Jefferson City. Claude Knox’s letter was the spark that resulted in hundreds of incendiary letters from inmates that told of unwritten but enforced labor contracts and torturous punishments for failing to meet unreasonable work quotas. The idea to print a convict letter on the front page of every future edition was Ona’s. Still, disagreements over which prison news to share riled the two. Ona held that a column like “West Bottoms Black Man Sentenced for Trolley Robbery” (“David Green was sentenced to serve two to five years in the state penitentiary after he was found guilty of theft of goods from a streetcar. He will be incarcerated in the Jackson County jail until room is available at the penitentiary.”) could be cited as evidence in arguments supporting black criminal pathology. Ivoe insisted that the purpose of all prison stories was twofold: an illustration of the white hunt on black men and a constant reminder of what punishment lay in wait for black law-breakers. Every Negro wasn’t a saint; if he contemplated wrongdoing, the prison column might change his mind.

  Outside information on the Missouri State Penitentiary was scant, yet inmate letters began to tell a story about economics. Despite Missouri law prohibiting the sale of convict labor, the MSP was a great industrial plant that employed nearly twenty-four hundred inmates whose labor netted the penitentiary thousands of dollars. A singular case study: Claude Knox’s eleven hours of husbandry a day was worth $22.40 a week, yet he had not seen one red cent. The twelve hours of piecework Convict #21981 provided for Wolverman Manufacturing Company should earn about $2,200 in ordinary salary, a living wage for a year, but he had received the derisory total of $24.00 for his labor since his sentence began two years ago. Calculations from convict letters were her only proof of the prison’s violation, but they were the impetus for letters to the Missouri State Board of Managers, which oversaw the MSP, and to the Democratic Executive Committee calling for a review of the penitentiary’s finances. By now she was no stranger to the DEC, which had received hundreds of her letters demanding the removal of certain police offers and an investigation of the police board, to which blacks couldn’t testify to mistreatment and false accusations of crimes brought against them. Since the Red Summer of 1919, Jam had published more than forty articles in which she employed a tone of menace and the threat of violent resistance in response to the KCPD’s malfeasance and nonfeasance. It was now the official task of Jam to document the unlawful incarceration of black men, exposing the corruption of Kansas City’s police and the Missouri Corrections Department.

  .

  By the fall of 1924, Ivoe had found an ally in the prison chaplain John Hopkins. Hopkins’s complaints of inmate treatment had led to his removal from the chaplaincy post, after which he sought out a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, from whom he learned of the convict letter-writing campaign by Kansas City’s firebrand journalist, Ivoe Williams. His letters to her detailed all he had gleaned during his religious counseling of white prisoners about MSP’s contracts with the furniture factory, the license tag factory, and the three camps in Cole County where inmates quarried rock. Records of the inmate registry and any detail culled from memory he sent to Ivoe. Her editorials drew on this information.

  The front page of Jam now posed the question: “Was your friend or loved one unjustly incarcerated? Call HW-2161.” Inevitably, a little research here, fact-checking there, returned a sad verdict. More than half of the incarcerated black men had no criminal record, no evidence supporting conviction. As word of Jam’s cause spread, subscriptions reached new heights, from 2,161 in 1921 to more than 4,000 the summer of 1924. She kept her promise to the Knox men, refusing to leave their fate to the printed page. Public addresses on their behalf were written about and included in her editorials. The week before Thanksgiving, her grief and ire appeared in Jam’s headline: “For Black Men America Is Land of the Unfree, Home of the Jailed! Missouri State Politicians Fiddle While Thousands of Black Men Rot in Prison.” “Dear Reader, It is said that a still tongue makes a wise head, but if we continue to be mute we will be a nation without black men . . .”

  .

  The snow on the Vine was windswept, t
he buildings all looked so bleak. Even the sun refused to brighten the morning, deadened by a heavy, moist cold. A gust of wind howled down the block and through the skele­ton maples shimmying off their snow. Careful to dodge heavy branches sagged by ice that crackled, Ivoe pried at the knot of her scarf, flung it over her head and around her neck, tucking the ends inside her coat collar. The clouds may have blotted out the sun, but she withdrew her key joyfully, the way she had every day since Christmas 1917, when Ona had joined her for good. After seven years together, her need for Ona was outsized. No other could help her sweep aside logic and manage her feelings in order to drag the facts out into a light that shone such ugly truth: her sister’s face, the black box in Little Tunis, the black hole in Jefferson City, Papa disappeared from them for ten years—and those were just her experiences. Black America was running a race for justice it seemed hard-pressed to win. She hunkered into her coat, nearly bumping into a pair of men trudging out of the cigar shop next door to the newspaper’s headquarters and home.

  By some miracle the weather had not blown down the door, riddled with grooves and depressions as if it had been beaten by police clubs. What infraction had they devised against Jam this time? She tore away the paper pinned to the door:

  “Chancellor John M. Elliot today issued an injunction restraining Ivoe L. Williams, Negro, and any other parties from circulating Jam on the Vine, a Negro publication, in Kansas City or Jackson County. The injunction was granted at the insistance of Mayor Tom Pendleton. It was sought following receipt here of copies of the paper containing an account of the Wolverman Manufacturing Company. Jam’s reports were held to be false in their entirety and thought to promote racial unrest by the Jackson County court.”