Chained in Silence

Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South

Talitha L. LeFlouria

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469622484
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

CHAPTER ONE

The Gendered Anatomy of “Negro Crime”

At the Rising Fawn prison mine, tucked away in the foothills of Dade County, Carrie Massie, “a sixteen-year-old Negro girl,” built her home in the depths of despair. The young woman’s ordeal began in 1882, when she was convicted of murdering William Evans, a well-known owner of a general store in the town of Summerfield near Macon, Georgia. On the night of the killing, Bill Carstarphen, a black man, heard groans emanating from the shop. He roused the neighborhood and convened a small posse to guard the store. When members of the crowd forced the door open, “a ghastly sight met their view.” Mr. Evans was lying on a bed in the rear of the building. His head was “crushed in as if by several blows of an axe, and the bed clothes fearfully saturated with this blood.”1

The small crowd combed every corner of the store looking for Evans’s assailant. Carrie Massie was reportedly discovered “hid away beside a pile of shucks. She was pulled out of her hiding place, and her apron and bonnet were found to be spotted with blood.”2 News of the murder spread swiftly throughout the community. A large mob assembled at the scene of the killing, and a proposition was made to lynch Massie. However, the “calm voice of a minister of the gospel was heard and the mob reluctantly abandoned the project.”3

Sheriff Wolcott escorted Massie to the county jail, where a reporter was standing by to collect a statement from the sixteen-year-old girl about the murder. “What made you kill him?” asked the journalist. “I didn’t kill him. I don’t know nothing about it . . . I ain’t killed nobody,” replied Massie. She went on to explain:

I went away from Macon last night on the train, and you can ask the conductor if I didn’t. I got off there at Summerfield, and I was going to see some people that I knowed. It was so dark and cold that I didn’t want to be out there in the woods by myself, so I goes to Mr. Evans’ store and knocks. Mr. Evans comes to the door, and I tells him that I want to come in and stay til morning . . . When the train came by [about three o’clock] I saw a man strike a match. I thought he was in the store all the time, and after awhile I heard the licks on Mr. Evans and heard him say “oh Lord.” Then I heard somebody on the outside, and I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. When daylight came I heard the crowd outside say they would kill the first person that came out of the store and I hid behind the shucks, and that’s all I know about it.4

Massie’s declaration of innocence fell on deaf ears. Recognizing the hopeless nature of her circumstances, she challenged authorities to “just do what you please with me—I don’t care.”5 Notwithstanding the fact that, prior to her indictment, she had never been accused (let alone convicted) of committing or conspiring to commit any act of violence, the young woman was forced to exchange her bloodstained dress for a striped one and to toil in Georgia’s ruthless convict lease system.

Carrie Massie’s ordeal is part of a larger story of black women’s suffering in the post–Civil War South. Freedwomen and their daughters’ lives were broadly circumscribed by racial hostility, violence, terror, poverty, and exclusion. The confluence of these menacing social and economic forces, combined with a predatory legal establishment, fostered a fertile environment for notions of black female crime to emerge. During this era, rising criminal delinquency, whether real or imagined, provoked a heightened degree of speculation and anxiety among white sheriffs, magistrates, politicians, anthropologists, criminologists, physicians, and “common folks” eager to diagnose and treat the universal cause(s) of Negro criminality.

The body of “Negro crime”—a wicked subcategory of race-based criminality—was first autopsied by white ideologues whose dubious conclusions exposed racial and gendered prejudices and a desire to create causal links between the Negro’s moral, mental, sexual, and biological “inferiorities” and his or her “inherent” predisposition toward delinquency. Although rhetorically and literarily centered, racist doctrine played an influential role in feeding white southerners’ mounting public obsessions over the proliferation of “Negro crime,” and it was a persuasive tool used to promote and rationalize the mass imprisonment of ex-slaves and their progeny after the Civil War.

During the same time that white “truth seekers” picked and probed to discover and authenticate a racialized basis for black criminality, African American social scientists such as W. E. B. Du Bois sliced through thick layers of fabricated data. They found that misdiagnoses of inborn criminal deviance and hereditary debauchery rested beneath what black intellectuals and reformers, including women, considered to be the true causes of Negro criminality: poverty; racism; lack of social, political, and economic opportunity; depraved social surroundings; and the consuming effects of “strong drink.” Even so, in the midst of this complex and protracted effort to expose the infectious root of “Negro crime,” poor working-class black women in Georgia desperately fought to survive and fashion their lives anew in the “empire state” of the New South.

At Freedom’s Gate

When freedom arrived on the front porch of the Turner Plantation in Wilkes County, Georgia, some slaves “rejoiced so they shouted, but some didn’t, they was sorry.”6 Adeline Willis personally decided “not to leave my white folks,” and, instead, opted to stay on the plantation as a servant. Across the way, in Twiggs County, Frances Willingham rejoiced: “I’se Sho’ glad Mr. Lincoln set us free.” But her joy soon turned to dismay when she measured the cost of freedom. Instead of striking out to the city and leaving the modest material comforts of the plantation behind, she “stayed on and wukked for Old Marster, cause dere warn’t no need to leave and go to no other place. I was raised up for a field hand and I ain’t never wukked in no white folks house.”7

In the aftermath of emancipation, the meanings of freedom held by Georgia’s four hundred thousand ex-slaves were multifarious. For some, freedom meant the ability to move about freely without the threat of the lash and the right to define the terms of one’s labor. For others, acquiring land, attaining access to education, gaining the privilege of political participation (for black men), exercising religious freedom, and reuniting with loved ones was of paramount importance. Forasmuch as slavery had done to break the physical ties of kinship, the deeper emotional ties formed between bondpeople persevered. Some placed advertisements in black newspapers in hopes of relocating family members. Others relied on word of mouth, or benefited from the compassions of Freedmen’s Bureau officials who supported their reunification efforts. But for most, freedom meant stability. The complexities, uncertainties, and expense of relocation acted like quicksand, suctioning freedpeople’s feet to southern soil.

During the postemancipation period, approximately 90 percent of African Americans remained in the rural South. Most former slaves worked as sharecroppers and tenant farmers on land owned by ex-planters, and they toiled desperately to eke out a basic living. In the countryside, a substantial number of freedwomen could be found working together with their spouses, digging, hoeing, and chopping in the fields, in addition to performing domestic duties—cooking, tending to children, sewing, laundering, or slaughtering livestock.8

Life for ex-slaves residing in rural territories was fraught with challenges. Poverty forced destitute freedmen and freedwomen into contractual agreements with ex-planters, many of whom were their former owners. Sharecropping provided a convenient labor option for landless freedpeople who did not benefit from the federal government’s failed plan of land redistribution.9 Those who opted to remain in the fields were paid in monthly wages or a share of the crop produced, and they were provided with shelter, seeds, tools, and other commodities essential to labor production. While the sharecropping system did not fill the void of independent land ownership, it did create a semblance of normalcy for black families and a basic opportunity for survival.

In Georgia, 80 percent of freedmen and freedwomen inhabited rural counties. Yet, a sizable percentage of married freedwomen that lived in farming communities abandoned fieldwork altogether to focus on the interests of their households, fulfill their maternal duties, and to elude the threat of sexual violence by detaching themselves from the immediate supervision of white men. By 1870, more than 60 percent of African American women residing in Dougherty County stayed at home.10 While, as a rule, black women in rural Georgia found agricultural work inescapable, some wives (when possible) entrusted their husbands with the business of tilling the fields and reaping a livable wage for their families. One Georgia newspaper reported in 1869, that “the freedmen . . . have almost universally withdrawn their women and children from the fields, putting the first at housework and the latter at school.”11

In chorus, white southerners aired their grievances over African Americans’ desire for family independence, and the tendency among wives and mothers to reject wage labor in favor of attending to their own families. These women were “taken from the field to the shanty, to live the lady,”12 much to the chagrin of planters, who bemoaned the loss of this valuable labor supply and bewailed the forfeiture of their long-standing authority over African American women’s working bodies. When female ex-slaves in Georgia “all but retired from the fields” in the mid-1860s, their withdrawal escalated white landholders’ fears about low agricultural productivity and black autonomy.13

Female sharecroppers getting their cotton weighed, Cobb County, Georgia, 1900. Courtesy, Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, cob013.

For freedmen and freedwomen who did choose to work the land, the sharecropping system retained the vestiges of slavery and perpetuated a system of racial subordination and forced labor that had existed before the war. The inability of black sharecroppers to meet their expected crop quotas, and satisfy their contractual obligations, resulted in bondage for those who could not leave the land until their debts were settled. To a large extent, the debt peonage system—a type of forced labor—restored hegemonic authority to white planters, giving them the legal power to purchase black farm labor from county courthouses.14 The policies set forth in the Mississippi Black Code (1865) were implemented in all the southern states, Georgia included. Every civil officer was granted authority to “arrest and carry back to his or her legal employer any freedman, free negro, or mulatto who shall have quit the service of his or her employer before the expiration of his or her term of service without good cause.”15 It was left to the county magistrates to decide whether the “alleged deserter shall be remanded to the alleged employer or otherwise disposed of.”16

On one plantation in Elbert County, Georgia, a freedman and his wife unknowingly “sold ourselves into slavery.”17 At war’s end, the man was asked by his former owner to stay on for one year and work for shares. He consented and was given $3.50 per week and a one-room log cabin on the property. In the same year, he met and married his fiancée, Mandy, who worked as a house-servant for the “Captain” and his family. The couple upgraded to a two-room shack, which made the sharecropper feel like “the biggest man in Georgia.” Overcome by his employer’s seeming generosity, he renewed his contract consecutively for four more years. By the fifth year, however, his manager had died and left the plantation to a son, “a senator,” who persuaded the fieldworker to sign a ten-year contract.

Shortly after signing the long-term contract, the sharecropper noticed that the senator began to assemble a long low-level shanty with rows of frames and stalls running through it. The structure, the man believed, would be utilized for holding horses. However, to his surprise, these were accommodations made for convicts who were hired to work on the farm alongside free laborers. In his words, “Nobody seemed to know what the Senator was fixing for. All doubts were put aside one bright day in April when about forty able-bodied negroes, bound in iron chains, and some of them handcuffed, were brought out to the Senator’s farm in three big wagons.”18

Six months later, a second stockade was erected and “twenty or thirty other convicts were brought to the plantation, among them six or eight women! . . . Most of the time the women who were peons or convicts were compelled to wear men’s clothes. Sometimes, when I have seen them dressed like men and plowing or hoeing or hauling logs or working at the blacksmith’s trade, just the same as men, my heart would bleed and my blood would boil, but I was powerless to raise a hand,”19 said the farmhand. He also noticed that “of the first six women brought to the camp, two of them gave birth to children . . . and the babies had white men for their fathers!”20

In his ignorance to the letter of the contract, the “Negro peon” consented to a lifetime of indebtedness and bondage. He and his associates gradually learned, “We could not lawfully break our contract for any reason . . . and, more than that, if we got mad and ran away, we could be run down by bloodhounds, arrested without process of law, and be returned to our employer, who, according to the contract might beat us brutally or administer any kind of punishment that he thought proper.”21 On the senator’s plantation, free laborers and convicts were expected t...