Jimmy Fike

Littleton, Alabama

1911

The steel car accelerated down the track into the darkness. Down, down, and still down, with the only light flickering from the carbide headlamps some of the other convicts had lit on their canvas caps. Nobody spoke; at least nobody that Jimmy Fike could hear over the clack of the wheels on the rails, the banging of the car on its axles, the rattle of the shackles on their ankles, the clatter of the chains connecting the men’s shackles one to another. Jimmy struggled to maintain his poise but finally, overcome with a horrified awe as they descended still deeper into the earth, he said, to nobody in particular, “Where the hell are they sending us?”

“You got that exactly right,” said a voice inches from his ear. It was the man the others called Pap. Jimmy hadn’t realized anybody could hear him, but they were piled into this coal car like fish in a can and the chains didn’t leave much space between them, either. “Ofay saving money,” Pap continued. “He sending you directly to hell without the cost nor the bother of a hanging.”

Jimmy did not answer and he refrained from the shiver he felt: both at the cool damp of the underground air as the coal car slowed to a stop, and at the other man’s macabre words. In his nineteen years on earth he had never given much thought to what an ant colony looked like from the inside. Now, as he looked around the little shafts and tunnels and rooms leading away from the end of the track, he thought maybe he knew. He said nothing to Pap, though. Who knew what kind of man he was and what he would make of a show of weakness from Jimmy. Somebody pulled the pin on the u-bolt holding the car door shut and the prisoners spilled out on the wet, rocky floor.

“You’re with me, fish,” said Pap. Jimmy was reluctant, but he had little choice about it. The men were, after all, chained together. Pap began crawling through an entry that seemed too small for a possum and Jimmy followed.

“They keep us chained down here, too?” he asked. “Where they afraid we’ll run to?”

“Even chained there’s runaways down here,” answered Pap, wriggling through the tiny space. “Disappear down an unused shaft and nobody ever finds them.”

This was hard to credit as anything but a ghost story to scare the new convicts, so Jimmy didn’t respond at all. He shivered a little, though, at the thought of emaciated ghosts haunting the mine.

“You don’t believe me,” said Pap, reading Jimmy’s mind. “Boy, you will not live to see the light of a day other than Sunday. Men die from falling rock or they die from choke damp. They die from shackle poison or they die from consumption. But they all die.”

Jimmy knew what consumption was and he could easily imagine being crushed here by falling rock. But choke damp? Shackle poison? He was not going to let this Pap see him frightened or ignorant. He was not going to ask for an explanation.

“Right here,” said Pap. Right here? They had emerged from the tiny tunnel and were now lying side-by-side in a space just about long enough and wide enough for them but not even as tall as the pick handles were long. What was “right here”? Pap continued, “That there is the coal,” and he gestured with his pick. “We start breaking it off like this,” and, incredibly, he began chopping at the rock with the pick, swinging in a short horizontal motion while lying on his side.

Jimmy Fike could plow a field behind a team of bad-tempered mules. He could chop cotton with a hoe, or a tree with an axe. He could dig a ditch with a shovel, swing a hammer or a pick. He had learned all those skills from his daddy and he had worked from the time he could walk. But he had never imagined using a pick in an underground room so small that he couldn’t stand. Forget stand: he couldn’t even sit up in this room. Had the prison guards partnered him with an insane man? Pap just warned, “You better get swinging that pick, boy. You don’t want to find out what they have for you if you don’t make your weight.” So he did.

It was only a few weeks since Jimmy left his home in Oakmulgee. There was nothing there for him. When Jimmy was a little boy his daddy owned his own place. They had a few hogs; planted corn and greens and beans; and hunted the woods for deer. They even put in a few acres of cotton every year that they could sell for cash to spend in the store. But before Jimmy’s thirteenth birthday a white man named Cosby stole his daddy’s land. Jimmy didn’t really know how, but he had heard his parents talking about a bank loan, a corrupt judge, and court costs. They hadn’t been thrown out of their house, though. Daddy just had to pay rent now, on his own farm, to the thief that took it. And Cosby made them plant every square inch in cotton, his cotton, cotton that hungry children couldn’t eat and that Daddy couldn’t sell because the cotton factors and gin operators were all Cosby’s friends. It wasn’t a life that Jimmy wanted to follow his daddy into. Maybe it was Jimmy getting bigger, but it looked like his daddy was getting smaller year by year after he lost his farm.

And that wasn’t the only thing that made Oakmulgee seem hollow. Up to the age of twelve, Jimmy went to school every day at Mt. Olive Church. At least he went every day that Daddy didn’t need his help in the field. But then there was no more school, and not just because Jimmy had gotten too old. No, Perry County stopped giving money to the school and without that there was no money for a teacher. All the young chaps stopped going, too. No learning their figures so they could argue with the white men, said Pastor Mosely. No learning to read the word of God. But after lots of talk, nobody had an answer to the problem and the school remained shut. 

Then even the Oakmulgee Post Office closed. Daddy said the white men in Montgomery didn’t want a colored postmaster. It was a responsible federal job and it paid well and there were no white folks in Oakmulgee to take it. Hell, there wasn’t but one white for every four colored in the whole Perry County. But that didn’t mean the whites were going to let a Black man have a decent job. After that P.O. closed, though, Jimmy noticed families start to leave. Most said they were going to Birmingham, but a few talked about Chicago. A colored man could make a living there, they said. And Jimmy started to think about how he could get there himself. 

His daddy didn’t want to hear anything about it. Daddy had empty dreams about buying his farm back. How? They were getting deeper into debt to Cosby with every cheating settlement for every harvest. When Jimmy pressed him for details, Daddy just shouted at him: about Jimmy’s responsibilities to the family, about Jimmy’s obligations to him. “What do I owe you, old man?” he asked angrily one day, shortly after he turned nineteen.

Daddy stood up with an ash-wood plow tongue in his hand and asked, “Boy, you think you’re man enough that I won’t whoop you? If you do, then get out of my house.”

And that is exactly what Jimmy Fike did. As he walked to the county seat in Marion he calmed down, but did not change his mind. It felt like leaving was exactly what he needed to do. Daddy’s harsh words had just made it easier. Once he was settled and had his own place outside Perry County he could send for Daddy and them. The thought satisfied him.

Jimmy had been to Marion before, but they had always traveled by wagon. The walk was longer than he thought, so he slept in Cleveland Mills on the way, in the woods near the church. By the time he arrived in the county seat it was late the next morning and he was hungry, so he went to visit the home of a girl he knew there, Janie Williams.

She answered the door with a smile, but didn’t move to let him in, asking instead, “Jimmy Fike, why you look like you slept in them clothes?”

“Well, good day to you, too, gal!” he answered, hoping to shame her into a more hospitable reception.

It worked. “Come on in, Jimmy,” she said, stepping aside. “Let me get you some bacon and biscuits and you can clean yourself up.”

Over lunch they caught up on mutual acquaintances: who was doing what, who was doing who, and – most interesting to Jimmy – who had left Perry County. “How are you going to get a train ticket?” asked Janie.

“I just know I’ll figure something out,” he said. “I think I’ll go over to the depot this afternoon, keep my eyes open, and work out a plan. Thank you so much for this meal. It means everything. I don’t want to impose too much but do you think I could stay here with you tonight? Maybe a few nights?”

Janie put an angry look of mock exasperation on her face. “Why, Jimmy Fike, do you take me for a woman of low repute?”

He started to fumble for an apology before realizing that she was joking. “Thank you, Janie. Thank you for being a friend. Don’t think I’ll forget you when I’m settled in the city and start making a way for myself in the world.”

“I’ma hold you to that,” she said, and then shared another dimpled smile.

He helped her clean up the kitchen before leaving for the Gulf, Mobile and Northern depot on Washington Street, promising first to be back in time for dinner. There was no sign of any train, neither arriving nor departing, but as Jimmy studied the schedule posted over the door he noticed a little knot of men a short way up the tracks near a red brick tool shed. He didn’t recognize any of the faces, but he walked over to introduce himself and find out what he could about getting a train out.

As he got closer Jimmy noticed that the men were mostly young, not far from his own age. They eyed him suspiciously. He didn’t want to come across too country, so he refrained from waving and saying his name. He just nodded a hello as if he knew them. A tall, sharp-dressed man stared rudely, then, without removing his cigarette from the corner of his mouth, spat, “Who is this country-ass Negro?”

Jimmy Fike was no stranger to bullies, nor to folks who thought living in town – even a small, backward town like Marion – made them superior to the farmers out in the county. He knew how to deal with them, too. He put a smile on his face and continued walking until he was close to his questioner, uncomfortably close. He held his eye contact until the stranger took the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled… turning away from Jimmy’s gaze to do it. Then, having made his point, Jimmy answered, as if the man’s question had not contained an insult.

“I’m Jimmy Fike. I’m looking for a train out.”

“So are we,” answered the man, in a milder tone. “I’m Jesse Suther, but they call me Benny. This here’s Willie and Burke.” He gestured to the other two young men and each nodded in turn. “No trains today. We’re just enjoying a game of chance.” He opened his left hand to display a pair of dice. “Would you care to join us?”

No, Jimmy would not care to join them. He didn’t know them, didn’t want to show them the pittance of cash he was carrying, didn’t want to risk losing it to them: chance, cheating, or strong-arm didn’t matter. He was no rube. He just said, “I’ll watch for a while,” which carried the possibility that he might join later.

Jesse shrugged, took a long draw on his cigarette, and then switched the dice to his right hand. He rolled, got ready to shoot, and then froze. As did they all. Because behind them they heard a voice telling them all to do just that. And appearing from both directions in which they looked to run came armed white men, pistols drawn. Looking behind them, to the source of the order, they saw a third white man: husky, mustached, mid-forties, in a nicely-tailored, blue three-piece suit and a big, black J.B. Stetson beaver fedora. His silver Smith and Wesson .44 was still in its holster on his hip. Jimmy Fike knew him by face, but the Stetson and the .44 caliber revolver would have been enough to identify Perry County Sheriff C.W. Cox.

The man called Burke tried to run around the side of the tool shed they were caught up against, but one of the deputies clubbed him to the ground with his pistol. None of the others moved. Jimmy just hoped he could survive the next five minutes alive. After that… well, he was committing no crime by visiting a friend in town. He hadn’t boarded a train. He hadn’t gambled. This might turn out okay. He said nothing, though. Any explanation he offered was just going to be treated as backtalk.

Sheriff Cox had nothing to say to them after his initial instruction to freeze. He did, however, have more to say to his deputies. “Chain these cigarette dudes and lock them up. We’ll let Judge Prestridge sort them out in the morning.” And once he saw that his deputies had secured the four men, he walked away without another word.

Cigarette dudes? wondered Jimmy Fike, but he said nothing. He badly wanted to ask one of the deputies if there was a way he could let Janie Williams know that he would not make it to dinner, but he knew better than to say anything about that, either. He was shackled to one end of the chain holding them all together, so when one of the deputies kicked him in the ass and said, “Move, nigger!” he understood that to mean lead the coffle back up Washington Street to the red brick county courthouse. Slaves built it for the white men before the Civil War, Jimmy knew. His kin. On the way they passed plenty of local Black folk, all of whom looked away. No way to get a message to Janie, but maybe one of them would recognize him and let her know. They passed by the Military Institute and Judson College, two more places that thought the Civil War had never been fought, or – perhaps – that Alabama had actually won.

But they didn’t stop at the courthouse. They kept walking. A block past they made a right on Green and then a left on Pickens. There was another brick building, one that Jimmy hadn’t seen before. It was the county jail. Their shackles and chains were not removed. Nobody took their names or their photos or their fingerprints. They were simply brought to a cell where they were locked in together. The young man named Burke yelled for food for about an hour, but they were not fed. They did not even see a deputy again that day.

It was late the following morning when they were led, still in chains, back to the courthouse. The only defendants in the room were Jimmy, “Benny”, Willie, and Burke. There were no spectators. Sheriff Cox quickly dismissed the two deputies who brought them over. In a few minutes, with no ceremony, no “All rise”, they were joined by an old, bald-headed white man in a black robe. “Howdy, Judge,” said Sheriff Cox. Judge Prestridge, then. Jimmie felt that soon he would have the opportunity to clarify everything and get himself free.

The conversation, however, did not turn to criminal charges. Instead, Sheriff Cox said, “I got a telephone call from T.C.I., yesterday. The miners’ union caught them by surprise and they’re short of hands. Said they’ll pay $20 each.”

Judge Prestridge seemed to be especially interested in that number. “$20?” he asked.

“$20,” repeated the sheriff.

“How much do these boys have in their pockets?” asked the judge.

The sheriff shrugged and shook his head. “We didn’t bother to search them.”

“Okay, you,” the judge said, pointing to Jesse Suther and looking for the first time at the four young men in chains. “What’s your name, boy?”

“Abraham Washington,” said Suther.

Jimmy Fike quickly brought his double take under control. If either of the white men noticed, though, they showed no sign. Instead, Judge Prestridge banged his gavel and said, “Abraham Washington, I find you guilty of vagrancy. Can you pay a $5 fine?”

Suther smirked a little and took off his shoe. Out dropped a gold Indian head $10 piece. He shuffled as far as his chain would allow and placed it on the rail in front of the judge’s podium. The judge nodded and pointed to the sheriff who reached into his pocket and took out five silver dollars as change. The judge then added, “Court costs, $10. Jail room and board, $2. Deputy costs, $5. Have you another $12?”

Jesse Suther lost his smile. Sheriff Cox pocketed the gold and silver coins. The judge banged his gavel again and said, “Court costs, five months. Jail room and board, two months. Deputy costs, five months. I hereby sentence you to one year of hard labor to be served at a venue of the sheriff’s choosing. Next case!”

Jimmy Fike had attended elementary school for parts of eight years and he knew that what he had just witnessed was not a trial. Where was the evidence? Where was the testimony? Where was the deliberation? Where, for God’s sake, were the attorneys? But the judge was pointing to him now and it was time to speak up. “Your honor,” he said, “I am Jimmy Fike. My daddy is Henry Fike from Oakmulgee and we work for Mr. John Cosby.”

The judge stopped his gavel, which had been on its way down again. He turned to Sheriff Cox. “Is that old J.P. Cosby, who has the place on Dutch Creek?”

The sheriff shrugged again. “I can find out.”

“Do that,” said the judge. “We both have to be re-elected. Can’t do that if we’re stealing folks’s niggers.” Then he turned back to Jimmy Fike, banged his gavel and said, “Case postponed until such time as we can figure out if anybody gives a shit about you.”

Jimmy Fike’s shackles were separated from the chain and he was returned to his cell at the jail. He never saw Jesse Suther or the others again. 

Over the next few days he saw more young Black men come and go from the jail. “Young men” was an exaggeration really; most of them were no more than school age. Nobody was ever fed. He didn’t know what that meant for them, but the bacon and biscuits from Janie Williams’s griddle grew more and more delicious in his memory. He wondered if that would be his last meal on earth.

One day he was finally chained together with a group of five men who had been brought in the previous night and marched over to the courthouse. When the judge walked in, Sheriff Cox pointed to Jimmy and said, “This here is the nigger who says he belongs to J.P.”

Judge Prestridge snorted. “I finally caught him on the telephone yesterday,” he said. “Cosby said Jimmy Fike walked out on his daddy, talking about taking a train to Birmingham.” He laughed again and turned to Jimmy, “Boy, this must be your lucky day. I find you guilty of gambling, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. I hereby sentence you to 18 months hard labor. I also sentence you to six months for making us hold you so many days and for the cost of that telephone call. Twenty-four months to be served in the mines of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, so you will be going to Birmingham after all. We’ll throw in the train ride for free.” And down came the gavel.

Jimmy never exactly saw Birmingham. He was transported in an iron cage with the other five men who had been with him that morning at the Marion County Courthouse. And here he was, still chained, scratching with an iron pickaxe at a twenty-four inch coalface in a three-foot-high chamber with a man called Pap who seemed to take pleasure in forecasting Jimmy’s death.

Later that day he found out what Pap meant when he warned about not “making weight.” They loaded all the coal they dug into a steel car like the one they rode down in. At the end of their shift, hours after Jimmy had concluded that another minute of work would kill him, they pushed their car to a place where other miners’ had their own cars. They hitched them together and rode them back up to the mine entrance. There, another convict pushed each car onto a scale and called out a number to the watching guards. “Four tons!” “Four-and-a-half tons!” “Five tons!”

But when a slight, sickly-looking convict got a weight of three tons, two guards stretched him over his car. A third guard pulled down a three-foot-long strip of leather, wide as a razor strop, and tied to what looked like a shovel handle. Then he set about whipping the man. He whipped him as if he were trying to separate one part of his body from the other. He whipped him as if his place in heaven was dependent on putting somebody else in hell. The echoes of the prisoner’s shrieks reverberated from distant reaches of the mine shaft. And the guard didn’t stop. Nine. Ten. The flesh under the surface was a different color than the skin, much lighter. At first the blood seeped out, but then it began to flow in earnest. Sixteen. Seventeen. The guard, apparently too tired to continue the beating himself, now passed the strap to another.  Twenty. Twenty-one. The slight prisoner had stopped shrieking and lost consciousness. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. The two men holding the unconscious convict dropped him right where he was. He was not the only man whipped, either. Of the thirty-or-so miners at that weigh station, eight were flogged into bloody insensibility. Jimmy only escaped because it was his first day.

He learned over the next few days that the beatings were intended to increase tonnage. He learned that you couldn’t get to a weight and be satisfied. Once the guards knew you could make that weight, they expected more. And then more. The quality of the seam you were digging didn’t matter, either. The steel mills of Birmingham needed coal.

Jimmy learned what choke damp was one day when four men never returned from a chamber on his level. When he was sent in to pull their bodies out, he found them looking as peaceful as if they had simply gone to sleep. There had apparently been no warning because he guessed if there had been, they would have left immediately. He once experienced the rotten-egg smell of poisonous stink damp, too, and he did not stay to experiment.

He learned about shackle poison directly. The shackles made sores on his ankles. Those sores never healed and the swelling seemed to spread up his leg and down to his feet. In the bunkhouse he saw prisoners with more advanced sores. They seemed constantly to be either burning with fever or shivering with cold. Several died, and Jimmy had no idea whether they were returned to their families or whether there was a cemetery there at the mine.

He learned about rock falls early. The ceilings collapsed somewhere at least once a week. If the bosses thought there was still more good coal in the direction of a fall, they sent you in to clear the rock and the bodies.  If they thought the seam was played out, though, that was where the men remained, buried deep under the surface. No prayer. No final words. Pap had not been trying to scare him with ghost stories. This truly was hell.

Jimmy even learned what Sheriff Cox and Judge Prestridge had been talking about when they discussed a mine “union.” The revelation began one morning, as the convicts were being marched from their quarters to the shaft entrance before dawn. Jimmy saw a crowd of men, both Black and white, standing on the other side of the fence shouting. It was hard to hear what exactly they were saying, but they were really angry and he made out that they were calling him and the other convicts “scabs.”

He turned to Pap and started to ask for an explanation, but Pap only signaled him to be silent. He had a rule about not speaking in places where the guards could hear. It was only later, when they were a quarter-mile underground and squatting in a five-foot-high chamber with two others, that Pap began to answer his unspoken question.

“That’s the union.”

The word triggered something in Jimmy’s memory, but he didn’t place it immediately.

Pap went on. “The miners got together to get a higher pay. The company wouldn’t give it to them so they walked out.”

Jimmy couldn’t have been any more astonished if Pap had told him that all the white folks had magically turned into dry leaves and floated away on a breeze. There were miners who were paid for this work? There were miners who could walk off when they wanted? There were people who went underground by choice? There were – and this he struggled to formulate even as a thought – white men working alongside Black men in these mines? He was struck mute by these revelations.

But if Jimmy was too awestruck to comment, Riley and Thane were not. They were the other two men working the coalface with Jimmy and Pap. They were both from some place called Letohatchie in Lowndes County. Jimmy had never worked out if they were brothers or not. Like him they weren’t yet out of their teens. Like him they had been sent up here without trials, for the crime of not having a white man to speak for them. And it was this that set Riley off about Pap’s terse explanation of what they had all seen aboveground.

“What kind of fool Negro trust an ofay to have his back?”

“My question!” agreed Thane.

“I can’t speak on that,” chuckled Pap. “Maybe one of you men of the world has experience working freely alongside white men?”

Pap’s gallows humor must have escaped them, because it drew no reply. But there was more puzzling them about what they had seen and heard than just Black and white working together. “Why they yelling ‘scab’ at us?” asked Thane.

Pap had an answer for this, too. “Walking off a job only hurt the boss if everybody go. If you don’t stand up with your brothers, you’re a scab.”

This revelation shocked Jimmy back into the ability to speak. “They think we choose to be here?” he blurted.

The thought was so ridiculous it got the other three men over their anger and incredulity. They all began laughing. If anybody could figure a way to walk off this job, everybody would have done it on his first day. There was not much use in thinking about the meaning of this union. Still, Jimmy kept trying to remember what he had heard about it. What was it the sheriff had said to Judge Prestridge?

The shackle poison on Jimmy’s ankles got worse.  He could see streaks spreading up his legs toward his crotch, and they were tender and painful to touch. He was often weak and there were days that he could not make weight, so that meant whippings. It seemed like he couldn’t heal from those whippings, either. Sometimes he shivered with cold and sometimes he thought he was burning up. The scariest thing, though, was that no matter how much water he drank he seemed to have lost the ability to piss. Was Pap right? Was shackle poison going to get him before he finished his prison sentence?

No, it would not. Nor would choke damp, nor stink damp, nor rock falls, nor tuberculosis. It was fire damp, methane. One second all the prisoners were working. The next second a spark somewhere – miner’s lamp? steel wheel on steel track? shovel against rock? – set off an explosion of the methane gas that develops in pockets around a coal seam. The fireball spread through every corner of the mine. Some prisoners were blown apart by the shock wave. Others were incinerated by the flames. Some were just asphyxiated when the fire robbed every nook and cranny of its oxygen. And then there were those who were killed in the minutes after the fire by afterdamp, carbon monoxide poisoning.

Which took Jimmy Fike? Was his body blown to atoms by the explosion itself? Was he vaporized in the intense heat of the fire? Perhaps he simply fell peacefully asleep where he was working, as the fire elsewhere in the mine invisibly took his breath away. Maybe he choked, violently gasping for air. Who knows? His body was never recovered. His “grave” is the chamber where he and Pap were working that day, in a section of the mine the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company decided was insufficiently productive to bring back into use. One hundred twenty-eight prisoners died in the fire: boys as young as thirteen, men as old as twenty-eight. There were no marked graves for those who were removed. Their bodies were tossed into the mine waste.

Over the years Janie Williams tried to forget about Jimmy Fike, but she could never get over her suspicion of men. She saw how they could eat a big breakfast, promise to return, and then forget all about you. Jimmy’s daddy never forgave his son for abandoning him, either, although he held out hope until his dying day that Jimmy would return home so that he could have the satisfaction of cursing him and refusing to accept him back. Sheriff Cox was able to use the supplementary income he earned by selling young men to the steel company to send his own boys to Princeton University. One became a US Senator, the other a partner in an Atlanta law firm. And Judge Prestridge? He gained such a reputation for fairness and for knowledge of the law that he was appointed to the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. There is an endowed chair in legal ethics named after him at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa.