By Elena Carter

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys

-Allen Ginsberg

What do you want – a cliff over a city?

A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?

These people live here.

-Muriel Rukeyser

That Justice is a blind goddess

Is a thing we black are wise.

Her bandage hides two festering sores

That once perhaps were eyes.

-Langston Hughes

I.

These People Lived Here

We want a cliff over a city,

a foreland, sloped to the sea and overgrown with roses

box houses with picket fences,

trees full of flowers –

it’s good – but

here

a bird goes cryptic syllables as

eyes bulge,

heads loll forward,

necks twisted half-way round, faces pulped –

To live under this specter – nine boys –

from the dilapidated, two-story jail, from cell window,

heard mob of several hundred calling

for lynching –

On the train line between

Chattanooga and Memphis, spring, 1931,

a fight between white and black hobos, all

in search of a shorter breadline, a warmer place –

White boys kicked

off – two white women on board cry rape –

pulled off the train in Paint Rock, Alabama, near Scottsboro,

mob led by defeated white hobos, mere knowledge

of black men

alone

on train with white women enough

evidence

of guilt.  

Leadbelly sang “I’m gonna tell all the colored

people even the old nigger here,

don’t ya ever go to Alabama

and try to live.”

II.

Haywood Patterson, 18: The son of a sharecropper, Haywood Patterson was born in Elberton, Georgia in 1912. He could light a butt in the wind on the top of a moving boxcar. He knew when all the freights left and when they arrived. He knew all the nearby states, southeast to Georgia and down to Pensacola, Florida, north to Ohio, west to Arkansas.

He knew hunger.

He knew the smell of piss.

He knew fullness.

He knew cold.

He knew warmth.

He knew the wind.

He did not know how to read and write.

He started school at six or seven and made it to the third grade, but skipped class most of the time. He said: “In the death cell, I held the pencil in my hand, but I couldn’t tap the power that was in it.”

He knew odd jobs.

He knew how to be a brother.

He ate away from home as much as possible so the younger children could get fed. At fourteen he started to ride the rails. It was his hand that was stepped on by a white boy while he was hanging on the side of a tank car in 1931, the action that led to a fight that led to the train’s interception by a posse that led to the arrest and prosecution of the Scottsboro boys.

His friends were Andy Wright, 19, Roy Wright, 13, and Eugene Williams, 13. Andy and Roy had three sisters and could read and write a bit. Andy started school at eight or nine and made it to the sixth grade. He liked school, but had to drop out after his father died to help his mother take care of Roy and his youngest sister. Roy quit school to work in a grocery store and pal around with Andy.

When Roy looked at Andy, did he see a role model? Later, in prison, did he see his own sadness staring back?

Andy wrote from Kilby prison, “a person can be brave for a certain length of time and then he is a coward down. that the way it is with me. for It seem as though I have been in here for century an century.”

Eugene had been a dishwasher in Chattanooga’s Dixie Café. The day Haywood, Andy, Roy and Eugene hopped the freight going from Chattanooga to Memphis, it was Eugene and Roy’s first time away from home.

Clarence Norris, 19, Charlie Weems, 16, Olen Montgomery, 17, Willie Roberson, 16, and Ozie Powell, 16 had not been involved in the scuffle on the train. Clarence left home at fifteen to escape his father’s beatings. His father died of a heart attack a year later. Clarence remembered his father’s stories of slavery days. He remembered his father’s showing him his stub of a finger, which he lost to his master’s ax as punishment for getting up late one morning. He remembered the story of his aunt who had been killed by a hoe for resisting the overseer’s advances. Clarence also remembered fresh milk, butter, collards, mustard, turnips, tomatoes, corn, beans, okra, cabbages, potatoes, yams, and Sunday picnics behind Mount Olive Baptist Church. He remembered segregated breadlines. He went days without eating, got arrested for vagrancy and was forced to work on a chain gang. But he was not easily broken. The foreman came to him and said, “Every time the man next to you takes up a shovelful, you take up a shovelful.” When Clarence’s pace slowed, the boss threatened to take away his place. Clarence threw down his tools. He did not get the twenty cents that was owed him for his work.

Charlie Weems mostly remembered his dead sisters and brothers. Six of his seven siblings had died when he was still a boy. His mother died when he was four. By the time he got out of prison, could he still picture their faces? Had they never aged for him? Was he glad to have outlived them, though much of his life would be spent behind bars? Weems made it to the fifth grade before dropping out of school to work at a pharmacy to help his aging father make ends meet. He later lived with an aunt in Riverdale and worked on a farm in the spring, summer, and fall. In the winter he worked on a road gang. He left home for Chattanooga a few weeks before being pulled off the train. During his time in Birmingham Jail guards found him reading communist literature and fired tear gas at him through the bars of his cell, dragged him out of the cell and beat him with a gun. He couldn’t write or read for months. He wondered if he needed glasses because he still felt as if he had pepper in his eyes and was unable to see properly for a period of time.

Olen Montgomery, too, lived in the dark. Born in Monroe, Georgia, he began school at seven and quit after the fifth grade to work. He delivered groceries, worked for a construction company, and at a fertilizer plant. At sixteen, he was near-sighted in both eyes and going blind in one. He left Monroe for Memphis to find a better job that would pay for a new pair of glasses. During the arrest, the pair he had was broken. He did not get a new pair of glasses for two years. A visitor to Birmingham jail in 1933 reported that Olen could not “see a match stem in his own hand.” But he could hear the sound of the electric chair:

the z-z-z-z-z of the

electric current outside in

the death row here where

there are no buffalo herds wide and

dark as cloud shadows

moving over the prairie, no cowboys,

one-horse farms, pig feet, mud, gravel, bodies

hanging from trees –

it takes the shape of a stone

– the shape of nine stones –

tombstones

Clarence, Haywood, Roy, Andy, Ozie, Olen, Eugene, Willie, Charlie

in the cell

closest to the execution chamber

through the door

heard the z-z-z-z-z-z of the electric current, heard him die

hard.    They stuck

a needle through

his head to make sure.

Cemeteries

quiet enough to hear the grass grow, like to

think

peace, free, incarcerated no more, a better place

than Kilby prison

that’s for sure,             but what

is contained within this narrow space, a stone

is no person, dust cannot articulate

sadness, anger, once packed in balled-up, gummed-up

souls – the story as dead as the dead – or

supposed

to be – the tragedy either isolated or dismissed –

Uncharacteristic mishap!

that time (that one time)

when we lost our minds.

III.

March 3^rd 1931 the United States adopts

Star Spangled Banner as National Anthem –

March 4th – Jack Johnson, former heavyweight champion, age

53, is losing, sixth loss in a row – has enjoyed ten

years freedom since jail for transporting white woman across

state lines for immoral purposes in New York –

southern ministers recommend lynching –

Johnson married three times, three white wives, denied

passage on Titanic despite fame, unbeatable 1908-1915,

won “Fight of the Century” over James Jeffries,

outcome triggered race riots – Chicago –

23 blacks, 2 whites dead –

He said secret to success: eating jellied-eels and thinking

distant thoughts, but what he said was:

“I’m Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world.

I’m black. They never let me forget it. I’m black all right!

I’ll never let them forget it!”

At funeral (died car crash, North Carolina,

racing angry away from diner, refused to serve him) last wife Irene

said, “I loved him because of his courage. He faced the world

unafraid. There wasn’t anybody or anything he feared.”

Here comes Jack Johnson like he owns the town.

A lot of white Americans like to see a man

go down, like to see a black man down!

March 4, 1931 – he’s losing, sixth loss in a row –

 - I loved him because of his courage –

March 25 — Scottsboro boys arrested, tied to one another

with plow line, eyes downcast, slouching in overalls, grimy sweatshirts –

Dozens of white faces, mouths of rifles, pistols, shot guns

– twelve days later quick trial, volunteer lawyer,

sentenced to death, Alabamans lauded for due process,

a triumph that no one got lynched?

The night they were arrested, Olen Montgomery cried. Haywood Patterson laughed.

“He faced the world unafraid.”

2008 – resolution requesting George W. Bush to grant Johnson official pardon

does not pass senate – think distant thoughts, don’t stare back,

don’t call white women liars – “He faced the world unafraid.”

 Johnson was unbeatable until 1915

in Cuba, winning almost every round, tires in

the 20^th, knocked out in the 26^th by Kansas cowboy

Jess Willard, dubbed Great White Hope by

Jack London – rumors Johnson threw the fight –

(he faced the world unafraid?)

condition of being allowed to continue boxing:

lying on back during ten second count, he can be

seen shielding his eyes from the glare of tropical sun –

1915: also the year Birth of a Nation was released, in

its most memorable scene – Mae Marsh – silent film star

guppy-eyed and feather-haired, once mousy beauty

jumps to death as sinister ex-slave talks to her of marriage.

Mae Marsh, now insubstantial

image: you were actress, mother, daughter, wife –

You were the woman who would rather die than

be touched by a black man, you jump over that cliff –

You jump over that cliff again and again – your great scene –

Mae Marsh, was your blood as white as you were?

Birth of a Nation the first motion picture shown at the White House

Woodrow Wilson said it “wrote history like lightning”

used as recruiting tool for the KKK – last scene image of Christ –

“The gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace”

Noble Klansmen celebrate under Christ’s placid face.

Wonder if film stars actually die – more like flicker away –

Not like young prisoners unresponsive hulks in

electric chairs, not like sad-eyed prostitutes

shifting folds of skin:

no halo,

all bones and blood.

IV.

Victoria Price, 21-year-old prostitute

 let black men touch her, but

did she laugh to send young

black men to jail?

Later, did she cry?

Did she cry to remember

how mothers break, how dismal

children, grim-faced, take to the mills, age

of ten, earn just over a dollar a day –

keep wages low, only way for Hunstville’s

Margaret Mill to compete –

She worked the mills all her life, hard times

means getting laid off every other week, sold

her body to white and black

men alike, bought bread.         Was she ever a little bit in love?

World she roamed sick, sad, not so much as

a clean cot, wild sex in the paintbrush, did she remember

the taste of her mouth

before cocks leapt into her throat,

did she remember

her mother’s fall?        How often could she afford meat?

At what point did body’s grief

subside, did shame settle, did sullenness yet

self-assurance mark a boxy face, eternally

exhaustible, angry?

No milky pearls, but hobo jungles, a

seclusion of wan, papery leaves, firelight flickers,

legs open, buttock prints in dirt, these

mill-workers, this drab Victoria,  as bad as

niggers say social workers –

When she talked to reporters she had

new clothes furnished by Margaret Mill.

They listened to her with respect.

They shook her hand.

She said, “when I saw them nab those Negroes, I sure was happy.

I never had a break in my life.” “There were six to me and three to her.”

“Tore my overalls off.” “They all wanted their share.”

“Said ‘pour it to her, pour it to her.’”

“These Negroes have ruined me and Ruby forever.”

Sympathy in wide eyes, age-old

song of love –

Victoria, this drab Victoria,

they’d been pouring it to her for years,

now she’d pour it to someone else. 

what about her friend Ruby Bates, 17?

pretty without her glasses girl

follow-the-leader girl

hair parted to one side girl

tiny bow-shaped mouth girl

girl with shadowy eyes

girl self-conscious,

rigid-shouldered –

What did Ruby long for?

Later, Ruby would recant,

trembling, stand and face Victoria,

smart and sassy Victoria, who had

the courtroom laughing –

Did resentment convince her

to tell the truth?

Was she truly sorry?

She became a communist, faced death threats,

spoke clumsily at rallies, said

“if the people would all work together

 instead of against

each other it would help everybody.”

What did she long for?  

Ruby, breakable as ice, could have

been so easily forgotten, could have

sat so quietly on that train, no one

would have known she was there.

Victoria Price (left) and Ruby Bates (right)

But she was.

She could not escape that fact, even when she wanted to. A rival in love told her boyfriend that Ruby had been ruined by Negroes. Rudy confessed to him she had never been raped:

Jan 5 1932

Huntsville Ala

215 Connelly Ally

dearest Earl

i want to make a statement too you Mary Sanders is a goddam lie about those Negroes jassing me those police man made me tell a lie that is my statement because I Want too clear my self that is all to it if you Want too Believe ok. if not that is ok. You Will be sorry some day if you had to stay in Jail With eights Negroes you would tell a lie two those Negroes did not touch me or those white Boys i hope you will Believe me the law don’t. i love you better than Mary does are any Body else in the World that is why i am telling you of this thing I was drunk at the time and did not know what i was doing i know it was wrong too let those Negroes die on account of me i hope you Will Believe me my statement Because it is the gods truth I hope you Will Believe me i was jazzed But those white Boys jazzed me I Wish those Negroes are not Burnt on account of me it is these white Boys fault that is my statement and that is all I know i hope you tell the law hope you will answer

P.S. this is one time I might tell a lie But it is the truth so god help me

Was she truly sorry?

V.

The mothers of the Scottsboro boys had pooled sixty dollars to pay a county lawyer. After the first quick trial and conviction, they were bewildered to find white men at their doors. ILD lawyers offered to defend their sons. They were called dense, dumb animals for accepting ILD aid. The NAACP complained that they were humble folk who had “few opportunities for knowledge” and were therefore easily manipulated by the opportunistic Communists.

Lawyers from International Labor Defense (ILD) put on overalls, straw hats, and put straw in their mouths. Disguised, they went to Alabama to see the Scottsboro boys. They brought cigarettes and chocolate to the defendants. They talked about how race prejudice divided poor blacks and poor whites when, in reality, both races were enslaved by the moneyed elite.

 “I don’t care whether they are Reds, Greens, or Blues, they are the only ones who put up a fight to save these boys and I am with them til the end.” “If it weren’t for the reds and the mass protests of the workers, our boys would have died July 10.”

-Janie Patterson

When Ada Wright, Mamie Williams, Viola Montgomery, Ida Norris, and Janie Patterson traveled the country, raising money for their sons, they were cheered. They waved at crowds.

They were noticed. They went proud walking. They thought of their sons. They thought of burning meat. They dreamed of years past, when their sons were new and laughing, which is to say they dreamed of long-lost cities – if one even pictures

that, which requires previous

knowledge of opulence. No sweeping emeralds,

only dreams like last mouths, open cries

before thin-lipped resignation –

oh modest dream of living in peace,

how bruises weigh

heavy –

in the garden, cries, stooped over

vegetables, long days worked in white people’s homes,

washed, ironed, cooked, cleaned, farm work too –

Sons whose once tiny hands could barely fill a palm, soon

to dust – no, too benign a word –

soon to electric currents,

burnt skin, smells of meat but hearts still beat

as bodies slip away

out from under young men, so

meant for land and sun – could these boys have made lives for themselves?

Riding rails, eating away from home, so younger siblings could eat –

Weren’t their mothers already reconciled to their absence?

Reconciled to eating less, to sleeping cold,

to husband’s fists, to giving birth, to children dying?

Weren’t they used to it?

Were their children used to waiting in long lines for nightly soup?

Soup kitchens, shack

houses, dust storms, pea- pickers

in the rain, Filipinos in the lettuce.

At what point

had the starving child’s belly inflated?

What if,

balloon-like,

could float away stomach first, limbs

akimbo, little, froggy fingers splayed and

waving

goodbye to prisons of want!

Instead, bare feet skim dirt –

an inkling in shuddering skin,

in living meat they had a dream

full of brambles – dead children,

their appearance of being well-fed –

hard faces, black and white,

Pilipino, Chinese, Mexican –

Workers, farmers, Negro and white

The lynching bosses we must fight

Close your fists and raise them high

Labor defense is our battle cry

Scottsboro boys shall not die

Scottsboro boys shall not die

Workers led by ILD

Will set them free

Will set them free

Crowd outside Scottsboro courthouse, 1931

VI.

The ILD approached Samuel Leibowitz, the most famous defense lawyer in the U.S. apart from Clarence Darrow, to take the case. The son of Romanian immigrants who came to America to escape anti-Semitism, Samuel Leibowitz worked his way through college and law school at Cornell. He decided to go into criminal law, making a name for himself defending thieves and pickpockets. He soon began to take up cases of accused rapists, murderers, gangsters and corrupt cops. He defended the “Baby Killer” Vincent Coll, a gangster accused of firing machine guns at another gangster, who instead hit five children who were on the same sidewalk. The chief witness against Coll was an ex-convict and professional surprise witness, George Brecht. When Brecht testified that he made his living selling Eskimo Pies in New York, Leibowitz sent out for ice cream bars, distributed them to the prosecutor, judge, and jurors and then asked Brecht to describe the wrapper. He asked Brecht how he kept the ice cream cold in July. When Brecht admitted to never having heard of dry ice and insisted that the pies kept themselves cold, Leibowitz exposed his lies, found a probation officer who had known Brecht in St. Louis, and got Brecht to admit that he was an ex-con and a bought witness. Coll went free and was murdered shortly thereafter. A mainstream lawyer, Leibowitz did not sympathize with the ILD, but was convinced that the defendants were innocent and wanted to increase his renown. When he spoke with the ILD’s chief attorney, Joseph Brodsky, Leibowitz spoke assertively of his ability to “scratch the superficial layer of prejudice off the rock of decency in every human being, even in Alabama.” Brodsky replied that “You will be a sadder but wiser man when you are finished. We have been there and we know what we are talking about.”

Haywood Patterson and Sam Leibowitz

VII.

The Facts:

-Semen was found in both Victoria Price and Ruby Bates when a Doctor Bridges examined them; however, there were only small traces of sperm, which were already dead, left in both young women. How could six men have raped a woman and left so little a trace? How could all the sperm have died? Furthermore, the women’s respiration, pulse, and pupil dilation were normal and they seemed calm when Dr. Bridges examined them two hours after the assault. Price said she had been thrown onto jagged sharp rocks, but there were only a few small scratches on her wrists, which could have already been there. Leibowitz suggested that the night before the alleged assault, Price and Bates spent the night in a Huntsville hobo jungle with two men, Lester Carter and Jack Tiller, which would explain the presence of semen. Price denied meeting Carter and insisted that she and Bates had traveled alone. Carter insisted that he had intercourse with Bates and Tiller with Price. Dallas Ramsay, a resident of Chattanooga whose home bordered the hobo jungle that Price denied having been in, testified that he had seen Price and Bates near his home the morning of the day of the alleged rape. Price claimed she spent the night at the home of a Mrs. Callie Brochie. Leibowitz scoured Chattanooga and found no Callie Brochie. He suggested that Price had taken the name from a character in a short story from the Saturday Evening Post.

-During the trials at Scottsboro, Tom Rousseau, a clerk in Paint Rock who was part of the posse that pulled the boys off the train, testified that he had seen all of the defendants on one car. Ory Dobbins claimed he saw Price and Bates try to jump from the train to escape when the defendants dragged them back on. Lee Adams claimed he had seen a fight on the train. During the Decatur trials, Rousseau admitted that the defendants had been spread out across the front part of the train. Leibowitz used photographs to demonstrate that from where Dobbins said he was standing he could have seen only a small part of the train going by, which was passing quickly. Leibowitz asked him if he was sure he had seen a woman jumping from the train. He answered, “I reckon so. She was wearing woman’s clothes.” It had been a well-publicized fact that Price and Bates hadn’t been wearing women’s clothes. They had put overalls over their own clothes.

-After having been missing from her home for weeks, Bates dramatically re-appeared in the courtroom and recanted her original testimony.

-Leibowitz suggested that when the train stopped and Price saw the posse she feared she would be arrested for vagrancy or for being a hobo on a train in the company of Negroes. He argued that to save herself she decided to cry rape and Bates followed her lead.

-Leibowitz felt that on Dr. Bridges’ testimony alone he had enough to win the case. Haywood Patterson was tried first.

-In April 1933 Haywood Patterson was again convicted and sentenced to death.

“I ain’t done nothing but told the truth and nothing but the truth.”

“Scottsboro’s just a little place:

No shame is writ across its face –

Its courts too weak to stand against a mob,

Its people’s heart, too small to hold a sob.”

– Langston Hughes

VIII.

Northern reporters praised Leibowitz’s brilliant cross-examination of Victoria Price, but Southerners felt differently:

“One possessed of that old Southern chivalry cannot read the trial and keep within the law. The brutal manner in which Leibowitz cross-examines Price makes one feel like reaching for his gun.”

-The Sylacauga News

“The attacked girl states positively that these negroes assaulted her and her companion. Farmers along the road said they saw a fight between negroes and whites as the train passed along. The doctors positively say there were evidences of assault. The white boys were thrown from the train and their lives jeopardized. What better evidence was ever put up to a jury?”

-James Benson, Scottsboro Progressive Age

“Don’t you know these defense witnesses are bought and paid for? May the Lord have mercy on the soul of Ruby Bates. Now the question in this case is this: Is justice in the case going to be bought and sold in Alabama with Jew money from New York?”

-Wade Wright, Morgan County solicitor

“Seventy years ago the scalawags and carpetbaggers marched into the South and said: “The Negro is your equal and you will accept him as such.” Today, the reds of New York march into the South with a law book and again say, ‘The Negro is your equal and you will accept him as such.’ We will not!”

-The Jackson County Sentinel

During the trial, Mary Heaton Vorse of The New Republic overheard multiple people whisper, “It’ll be a wonder if Leibowitz gets out alive.” Belle Leibowitz began cooking all her husband’s meals, afraid that someone might try to poison him.

“If you ever saw those creatures those bigots whose mouths are slits in their faces, whose eyes popped out at you like frogs, whose chins dripped tobacco juice, bewhiskered and filthy, you would not ask how they could do it.”

-Samuel Leibowitz

“We have fought the good fight. We have kept the faith and will carry on. The nine innocent Scottsboro Boys will not die so long as decent men and women survive and there exists in Washington the Supreme Court of our land. It’ll be a merry-go-round, and if some Ku-Kluxer doesn’t put a bullet through my head I’ll go right along until they let the passengers off.”

–Samuel Leibowitz

You will be a sadder but a wiser man when you are done.

May the Lord have mercy on the soul of Ruby Bates

She had on a new

dress.

The jury smelled

the North on her,

called nigger lover, letters said

she ought to be lynched too –

what to do with a girl like this

hands limp at the wrist, meekly clutching purse,

scared, kitten-eyed –   but was it a kitten heart?

How many long nights did it take?

How long until you became strong?

But you were always strong, despite your quivering,

despite nervous, exaggerated southern accent –

you were strong with the warm, strong heart of the earth,

stronger than Victoria even –

you tried to make your strong millworkers’ hands

appear dainty. oh, consolation in a new dress!          

oh, dreams of studying stenography!

You were not dumb, as they said, you were not

articulate either –

You were shy, you were fearful, you were

kitten-eyed — You looked tenderly upon new shoes.

Did you look tenderly upon your victims?

Could you look at them at all?

But you campaigned with their mothers,

you timidly gave speeches –

You could have lived so quietly.

You were like a quiet room,

full of secrets and lies. 

If you had been born to another place, another time, another family,

would you have been born black, white, poor, rich?

Would new clothes have been such a rarity?

Could you have been a singer, dancer, stenographer, athlete, writer?

Would you have been valued?

Would you have worn pretty dresses and been admired?

Would you have been recognized as a lovely thing?

Would you have been recognized for being the lovely thing that you were?

She had on a new dress:

What better evidence was ever offered to a jury?

IX.

But Judge James E. Horton wondered. He wondered why Jack Tiller, Price’s boyfriend, present in the courtroom, had not taken the witness stand to deny Carter’s story. He wondered if it was plausible that nine teenagers could have raped two women in broad daylight on a slowly-moving train and then made no effort to escape. Tall and lanky, the fifty-five-year-old. Horton resembled Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Knight complained that his troubles with the judge began the moment the defense told him that Horton “looked like Abraham Lincoln.” However, before the trail began, Knight stated he thought Horton would make an “excellent” judge. Horton was a land-holder living in a small town called Athens. A planter, he insisted he was not politically-ambitious. He was described as “liberal, but only in the sense of putting the rules of the game above the desire to win.” His father had been a small slaveholder and served in the Civil War under General Daniel S. Donelson. His father married a woman named Emily, the daughter of John Branch, a governor of North Carolina and Secretary of the Navy under Andrew Jackson. When two black journalists approached the bench to thank Horton for the letters he had sent to help get them into the courtroom, he greeted them and shook their hands, albeit after a slight hesitation. Horton admitted that he went into the trial thinking the Scottsboro boys were most likely guilty, but the words of Dr. Bridges and his assistant, Dr. Lynch, made him uneasy. Lynch talked to Horton privately in the men’s room, telling Horton that he did not believe the girls had been raped. In Scottsboro, when Lynch had accused them of lying, the girls laughed at him. Lynch refused to testify. He had recently completed medical school and was just beginning to establish a practice; he knew if he testified he would never be able to return to Scottsboro. After the trial concluded, Horton reviewed the details of the case. On June 22^nd, 1933, he set aside the verdict and death sentence and ordered the Scottsboro defendants to stand trial a third time. By condemning a white woman who had accused a black man of rape, Horton had committed political and social suicide. The year after Horton overturned the guilty verdict in the Decatur trial, he was defeated for re-election. He never again served on the bench. On a campaign speech he scrawled a note to himself: “Yea Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make you Free.”

X.

Orville Gilley

Twenty-year-old Orville Gilley was a key witness in the 1933 trials of Clarence Norris and Haywood Patterson that followed Judge Horton’s decision to set aside Patterson’s earlier conviction. He was one of eight white boys involved in the fight on the Chattanooga train. A sexual partner of Price, he had been traveling with her and Bates. When the fight broke out, he was the only white who escaped being thrown off the train. When he tried to leap off the moving train he fell and was left hanging onto the side of a gondola in danger of being swept off as the train began to pick up speed. His life was in danger and Haywood Patterson pulled him back onto the car. But when the train was stopped in Scottsboro, Price and Bates feared that Gilley’s presence would get them charged with adultery or a violation of the Mann Act. The Mann Act prohibited the interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes.” The first person prosecuted under the Mann Act was Jack Johnson. In 1931, in the first Scottsboro trials, Gilley testified that a fight had occurred on the train, but mentioned nothing about witnessing a gang rape. Bates said that Gilley was initially reluctant to lie, but between 1931 and 1933, prosecutor Knight sent money to Gilley and his mother. In 1933, Gilley changed his story. Wearing a new pinstripe suit and shiny shoes, he testified that the rapes took place and that tried to convince the rapists to stop. During the trial, Gilley tried to charm the stern Judge Callahan. He was invested in convincing the courtroom that he was not an ordinary hobo. He called himself a “wandering entertainer, a poet of hotel lobbies, restaurants, and the streets.” He offered to share some of his poetry to the courtroom, but Judge Callahan cut him off, saying simply: “I don’t like poetry.”

XI.

Thomas E. Knight

Knight was born in Greensboro in 1891 and attended Greensboro’s Southern University. He enrolled at the University of Alabama, but left for the war in 1917. After fighting with Alabama’s 1^st Cavalry, he returned and took up law. In 1930 he was elected attorney general of Alabama. He was short, good-humored, and ambitious. His grandfather, William Knight, had fought in the Civil War. During Reconstruction William Knight served as sheriff and county commissioner, represented Hale County in the state legislature, and later served as a delegate to Alabama’s Constitutional Convention. The convention called for the use of literacy tests to enroll voters, the payment of a poll tax in addition to denying women the right to vote and outlawing interracial marriage. Thomas Knight wrote the majority opinion in Powell v. State, the decision in which the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the Scottsboro convictions. He argued against claims that newspaper accounts of the rape had aroused public opinion and made fair trials in Jackson County impossible. When, in 1933, defense attorneys sought to demonstrate that Negroes were excluded from Alabama’s juries, Knight decided to defend the jury system and lead the prosecution himself. He believed that the State of Alabama “has the right…to fix qualification for jurors.” During the second trial Knight suggested that Bates and Carter were liars who had been bought by the Communists. He asked Bates who had paid for the new clothes she wore as she testified. He re-read transcripts from the first trials at Scottsboro in which the scared young men, after being beaten, had turned to implicating each other. He asked Haywood Patterson if he had joked to fellow prisoners in Kilby how the girls had cried while he raped them (as a convict hoping to avoid the electric chair had just testified). Patterson answered, disgusted, “No sir, I haven’t mocked no girl crying, how could I mock them?” When Patterson countered, asking why he would have pulled Gilley back up on the train if he were about to rape Price, Knight told him to “stop talking except when you are being talked to.”  Patterson stated that he was framed in Scottsboro. Knight asked, “Who told you to say you were framed?” Patterson replied, “I told myself to say it.”

Knight died suddenly in May 1937 shortly after meeting to discuss a compromise with Leibowitz.

XII.

The Shooting of Ozie Powell

After Haywood Patterson’s fourth trial, the defendants were loaded into three cars to be transported back to Birmingham jail by a Sheriff Sandlin and Deputy Sheriff Blalock. In one car, Clarence Norris, Roy Wright and Ozie Powell were handcuffed together. In the days leading up to the trail, Ozie Powell, according to the others, had been sitting alone most of the time playing a small harp, occasionally jumping up and cursing. On the drive to Birmingham, Deputy Sheriff Blalock smacked Powell in the head for “sassing” him. Powell pulled a pen knife out of his pants and slashed Blalock across the neck. Sheriff Sandlin pulled the car over. Despite the fact that Powell, handcuffed to Wright, had his hands up and was now unarmed, Sandlin shot him through the head. The bullet entered the side of his head, penetrated the upper part of his skull and lodged itself an inch into his brain. Doctors estimated a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Powell’s mother, Josephine, three of his sisters, and his girlfriend drove from Atlanta to see him. Only his mother was allowed to see him. Doped up and on the operating table, when he saw his mother he sat up and then fell back into his pillow, crying. She asked him how he was and he replied “very well,” explaining that the pain had gone. But he added that he “done give up.” He was 21 at the time. He survived, but was never the same. Powell described himself as quiet, shy, and bashful, a hater of crowds, “as living without a definite goal in view.” He would move back to Georgia after his release ten years later.

XIII.

Allan Knight Chalmers

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1897, the son of and grandson of Protestant ministers, Chalmers began taking classes at John Hopkins University at the young age of 16. He played football and lacrosse, wrote for the school newspaper, and was earning an A average when he suddenly quit school to enlist in the army. He was rejected when his doctor discovered he had poor eyesight and a heart murmur. Instead he went to France where he served as a second lieutenant in the Second French Army. He had eagerly rushed into the war, but after ten months in the trenches he became a pacifist and returned home with the conviction that war was incompatible with Christ’s teachings. He graduated from Yale’s divinity school in 1922. In 1930 he was named pastor of New York’s Broadway Tabernacle Church, which had earlier been a center of abolitionism and social reform. Chalmers followed the Scottsboro case and formed the opinion that although Leibowitz’s defense was brilliant, Leibowitz hadn’t anticipated that being a Jewish lawyer from New York would make it difficult for him to obtain a fair trial in Alabama. The NAACP called on Chalmers to take on leadership of the Scottsboro Defense Committee when efforts on behalf of the Scottsboro boys had stalled. He negotiated the formation of the Alabama Scottsboro Fair Trial Committee. Thomas Knight insisted that they plead the remaining defendants guilty and he would make sure they would get only seven years. Andy Wright said, “I’ll rot in there till I die before I’ll say I did something I didn’t do just to get myself out of here.” After Knight’s sudden death, Chalmers continued to try to negotiate a compromise. He met Grover Hall, the influential editor of the newspaper The Advertiser. When Ozie Powell slashed Sheriff Blalock, Hall wrote an editorial praising the sheriff who had shot Powell in the head for his restraint. However, after talking to Chalmers, Hall began to urge the state to arrive at a “dignified compromise.” He urged the state to “lay down this body of death” and salvage Alabama’s reputation. Chalmers helped negotiate the release of eight of the nine defendants. He would go on to mentor Martin Luther King Jr. during King’s years at Boston University.

Allan Knight Chalmers 1897-1972

XIV.

July 1937

The state decided to drop charges on Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright. Roberson had been suffering from a venereal disease that would have made it painful for him to commit the crime. Montgomery was “practically blind” and sick. Williams and Wright were only thirteen at the time and because they had already served six and a half years, the state decided that justice had been met. When Leibowitz ran across the street to the jail to retrieve the freed men, Sheriff Sandlin, assuming the prisoners were on their way back to Birmingham jail, taunted Leibowitz: “Why don’t you get in there with your clients?” Minutes later Leibowitz and the defendants were escorted out of jail by state troopers, driven to Nashville, where they caught a train to Cincinnati then to New York. They were too excited to sleep, but rested a bit in Cincinnati. They went sight-seeing, saw a movie and went out to a restaurant still wearing their prison overalls.

In New York, the defendants were cheered onstage. Joyful, Leibowitz punched a hole through his straw hat and tossed it into the crowd. He said he wanted to get rid of some of the Alabama grime.

Eugene Williams, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Roy Wright with Leibowitz in Nashville day after they were released-July 25, 1937. Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Charlie Weems, and Ozie Powell remained in prison.

When they were freed, Roy Wright and Olen Montgomery visited labor leader Tom Mooney in jail. Mooney had been in San Quentin since 1916:

Mooney’s miner father coughed himself into oblivion

at the age of 36 – Death, when we

are dim-eyed and stopped, but not

this

unnatural heaving of lungs.

Ask about work and ask about pay,

they’ll tell you they make less than a dollar a day –

Mooney, oldest of three children,

joined Industrial Workers of the World,

worked on the presidential campaign of Eugene Debs –

“While there is a lower class I am in it;

while there is a criminal element I am of it;

while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Convicted, on perjured testimony, of planting a bomb

that killed seven people in San Francisco –

Mooney would spend the next 22 years in prison:

When will memory make us strong?

Oh you can’t scare me

I’m sticking to the union

Sticking to the union

Till the day I die

While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Oh you can’t scare me

Wright later told reporters he hated to leave Mooney standing there.

He knew what it was like to have visitors come and go.

XV.

Governor Bibb Graves

On October 28, 1938, Alabama’s new governor, Bibb Graves, who had led Chalmers to believe he would release the remaining Scottsboro boys, had Clarence Norris, Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems, and Andy Wright brought hand-cuffed into his office. He interviewed them and though the defendants told the truth Graves seemed not to like their answers. Haywood Patterson made a huge mistake in forgetting to leave his knife behind for the interview. The guards searching him on his way to the interview found it and claimed that Patterson would have killed the governor. Patterson, who had been serving time at the brutal Atmore work farm, argued that he had always carried it and that he had to carry it for his protection. When Patterson was taken back to Atmore, four guards gave him twenty-one lashes for carrying the knife. Andy Wright wrote Chalmers, saying “The governor just made a fool out of you all.”

Chalmers told Weems, Norris, and Wright that if they behaved well in Kilby they had a better chance of getting out. Despite fighting depression during the months after Graves broke his promise, they managed to do nothing to give the guards an excuse to bother them. Wright in particular struggled with depression and suffered from chest, back, and stomach pains. He was in and out of the hospital. Norris lost a finger in an accident at the mill in 1939. Wright, Norris, and Weems were disappointed again by the Pardon Board in February 1940, in November 1941, and in July 1942. By the end of 1942, Wright was complaining of kidney trouble. Norris had to have surgery to remove a tumor that had grown around his left eye. Weems kept to himself. Chalmers wrote them, saying that “conditions brought on by the war had destroyed what goodwill there was in the South.” There was no hope, he said, for consideration of their pardon applications anytime soon. Norris was caught fighting. As punishment he was made to drink castor oil, locked up in a hole, and kept there for ten days with only a blanket, bread, and water.  Wright and Weems, who had maintained good behavior, were paroled in August 1943. Norris followed in January 1944. Haywood Patterson was never paroled.

XVI.

Andy Wright, free at age 32

Andy Wright and Clarence Norris got out on January 8, 1944. Their parole officer found them jobs at Foshee Lumber Company, on the outskirts of Montgomery. They were paid thirty-five cents an hour and required to lie in company housing, sharing an eight-by-ten room, a bed, and even a pillow. They were charged seven dollars a week for the room, not including insurance and laundry. On their first day on the job, the foreman asked them: “Didn’t you have those women?” Wright quit his job, got married twice, left Montgomery in violation of his parole, and found a job as a grocery assistant. He kept this job for two years before he got into a fight with a white man, fled to Chicago, got picked up and sent back to Kilby prison. He was in and out of Kilby for the next six months, once charged with reckless driving after a truck accident on the job. He was constantly fired from jobs after people found out he was one of the Scottsboro boys. He complained, “Everywhere I go, it seems like Scottsboro is throwed up in my face. I don’t believe I’ll ever live it down.” He chased work back and forth between New York and Albany. When he brought his second wife to Albany, he discovered they had grown apart and the two couldn’t get along. In a fight one night he stabbed her. She wasn’t seriously hurt and he received a suspended sentence on the condition that he leave town. The sight of police triggered panic attacks. He complained about wearing the same cheap clothes he had worn when he was in Kilby. He later lied in Connecticut in the late 1950s. His date of death is unknown. He is buried in an unmarked grave next to his younger brother, Roy, in a small, unkempt cemetery in Chattanooga.

Roy Wright, free at age 20

After completing the “Scottsboro Tour,” traveling and promoting the innocence of the Scottsboro boys who still remained in jail, Wright enrolled in vocational school. He finished school, served in the army, married, and had a good job in the merchant marine. But in 1959, when he returned from a period of time at sea, he became convinced his wife was cheating on him. He shot and killed her, then himself. He was 41.

At what point do husbands become strangers?

Or were they always so?

Where did you work?

What were your favorite songs?

Any brothers? Sisters?

How many times had you been in love?

Were you ever raped?

Did anyone care?

Did you ever go swimming in the rain?

Were you happy?

What did it sound like, when you laughed?

What sounds did you make, when the knife burrowed into your flesh?

What were your last thoughts, bullet in the brain?

Did you think about your husband, your attacker?

Did you remember how you had met him?

Did you love him once?

Perhaps your last thoughts were of children or

the feel of moss underfoot, a song you once heard,

a meal you once ate –

In a small cemetery in Chattanooga,

where lie the graves of Roy and Andy Wright

the wind whispers through the weeds.  

Did the undertaker know that they were married?

Do historians weep for unnamed wives?

Haywood Patterson, free at age 36

At Atmore work farm, Haywood Patterson wore black snakes like necklaces, hunted poisonous ones, let half a dozen blue runners wiggle around in his shirt. His father and mother were dead, his mother having died of a stroke on her way back to Chattanooga after visiting him. After his mother died, he stopped believing in God. The wardens at Atmore hated him because he cursed whites. One of them sent another prisoner, an old friend of Patterson’s, to kill him. Patterson was stabbed twenty times, one of his lungs punctured. Eventually, he was transferred back to Kilby prison, where he was put in solitary confinement for two months after refusing to work in the mill. He was later assigned to work the cell block, where he swept, mopped, made beds, and carried out the dead. The only Scottsboro boy never to be paroled, on July 17^th, 1946, at dusk, he slipped away, drowned pursuing dogs in a stream, hopped a Pullman, made it to family in Chattanooga, and enjoyed a feast. At age 36, he drank his first beer. He met women, gave up men, had his story written by writer Earl Conrad. Alabama gave up its attempt to get him back in June 1950. In December he was involved in a barroom stabbing and sentenced to six to fifteen years for manslaughter. He died in the state penitentiary, of cancer, at age 39.

Eugene Williams, free at age 21

Williams dreamed of being a jazz musician. After his release, he moved to St. Louis where he had relatives and where he hoped to enroll in the Western Baptist Seminary. He lived a quiet life as a husband and father. His date of death is unknown.

Clarence Norris, free at age 32

Employed at the same lumber company as Andy Wright following his release, Norris left Montgomery in violation of his parole. He went to New York where he stayed with a Harlem attorney while he figured out what to do. The board sent him back to the lumber company. His boss taunted him about Price and Bates. He complained to his parole officer, Jack Lindsay. Lindsay, tired of his complaints, told the warden at Kilby that Norris wouldn’t work. The deputy warden arrived, drove Norris back to Kilby, and put him behind bars. He would not be eligible for parole again for two years. His wife Dora Lee, who used to visit him regularly, suddenly stopped. When Norris was granted a second parole, he discovered that Dora Lee was with another man. On October 1, 1946, he violated his parole and went to see his mother in Cleveland. They hadn’t seen each other in thirteen years. He got a job shoveling coal. FBI agents began dropping by his mother’s house, but they never found him. He worked in sweatshops, on loading docks, in warehouses. Leibowitz got him a job as dishwasher. He was arrested multiple times, once for gun possession, once for stabbing his girlfriend with a knife. In 1960, Norris married Melba Sanders, his third and final wife. They had three daughters, moved to Brookland, and lived quietly there where Norris worked as a vacuum sweeper at a warehouse. One day he called Alabama Governor George Wallace’s office and told his story: “I was arrested in Alabama in 1931 and sentenced to the electric chair three times. The governor commuted my sentence to life in prison. I was released on parole twice, once in 1944, and I broke my parole and went back to prison until I got out in 1946. I broke my parole again and have been free ever since. I want to know if Alabama still wants me.” Norris approached William Baxley, Alabama’s attorney general, who was known for prosecuting whites suspected of violence against blacks. Baxley pushed for a full pardon for Norris. In October 1976, Governor George Wallace invited Norris into his office, shook his hand, wished him a long life, and granted him a pardon. Norris, the last surviving Scottsboro boy, suffering from Alzheimer’s, died at age seventy-six in the Bronx Community Hospital.

Charlie Weems, free at age 28

Weems was paroled in November 1943 and walked out of prison with a bible in his hand. He left for Atlanta, where he took a laundry job the board had arranged for him. He lived quietly in Atlanta with his wife. His date of death is unknown.

Olen Montgomery, free at age 23

After completing the Scottsboro tour, Montgomery moved to Detroit where no one bothered him. He could not find work and had worn down his only pair of shoes. He spent nights sleeping in bus and train stations. In January 1940 he finally got a job as a laborer, working from four-thirty in the morning to eight-thirty at night for $7.50 a week. He moved to New York. On his second day back in New York he was robbed at knifepoint. He struggled with alcohol and was evicted multiple times. He moved to Connecticut where he found a job on a tobacco farm. He continued drinking, losing money, and fighting. He was ashamed of the only work he was qualified to do. Blind in one eye and walking with a limp, he wrote Dr. Chalmers: “I want to be man, and I want a chance in life. Something I have never hade.” He longed for time to practice his music. He longed for everything. His death date is unknown.

Ozie Powell, free at age 31

Powell was released from Atmore work farm in June 1946. He lived in Georgia. Because he suffered brain damage in the shooting, his memory was impaired. He had trouble speaking and hearing. His right arm and leg were weak, almost paralyzed. His death date is unknown.

Willie Roberson, free at age 22

After the Scottsboro tour, Roberson moved to New York, where he occasionally ran into Olen Montgomery. Roberson had steady work. Once, however, he was in crowded club in Harlem when a fight broke out. Although he was not involved he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. He wrote: “I am again a victim of almost inconceivable malignity and though I hartily dislike the role of myrter I have been cast in that role and it seems impossible to escape it.”  In 1959 he died of an asthma attack a week before Norris and Montgomery were set to visit him.

XVII.

Epitaph

“How long until we grow old again?”

-Clarice Lispector

“That’s what I wanted, I always wanted, I always wanted, to return to the body where I was born.”

-Allen Ginsberg

I.

Haywood Patterson

is still awake in his cold cellar hole –

Ozie Powell can hardly speak

his arms are weak, he can hardly move his feet

Willie’s wheezing, Olen’s drinking, Charlie blinks out

pepper – Eugene never became jazz musician

did Roy Wright ever become a good man?

Do good men murder their wives? Or

stab them as brother Andy did – but

Clarence Norris took a stand – Governor Wallace shook his hand –

Whatever befell Victoria Price, who emerged fat and balding,

to sue NBC for slander for television movie about Scottsboro?

Did she think about Haywood when she washed dishes?

Did she remember Ozie when she ate dinner?

Easy to talk about the depravity of an individual, easy to say

Victoria, you drab thing, how could you do it?

Ozie Powell was shot in the head by a man

and Ozie Powell was kept down by The Man

It’s a system, man, but

 Ozie Powell he was a man

with a bullet in the brain pan –

a bullet

is

not

a

system.

II.

It’s death at play and I sing it –

It’s keep revolution at bay and I say it

It’s they make less than a dollar a day and I’ll wail it:

this story of nine

who died forgotten

            in the wind-bent-weeds:

Governor Wallace: Mr. Norris, this is your pardon, your full pardon, on behalf of the state of Alabama, the board of pardons and paroles and the governor….

Clarence Norris: I have no hate toward any creed or color. I like all people, and I think all people accused of things which they didn’t commit should be free. I wish these other eight boys were around….

Chronology (from James Patterson’s Stories from Scottsboro)

1931

March 25-The fight on the train and the arrest

March 30-Jackson County grand jury indicts nine black youths for rape

April 6-7-Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems tried, convicted, and sentenced to death

April 7-8-Haywood Patterson tried, convicted, and sentenced to death

April 8-9-Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, and Andy Wright tried, convicted and sentenced to death

April 9-Trial of Roy Wright ends in a mistrial when some jurors hold out for the death penalty though prosecution only asked for life imprisonment

April-December-ILD and NAACP fight for control of the defense

1932

January-NAACP withdraws from the case

February-Ruby Bates, in a letter to a friend, denies that the defendants raped her

March-Alabama Supreme Court affirms the convictions

May-U.S. Supreme Court agrees to review Scottsboro convictions

November-U.S. Supreme Court reverses the convictions of Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Haywood Patterson, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Charlie Weems, and Andy Wright in Powell v. Alabama

1933

January-ILD retains Samuel Leibowitz

March-Judge Hawkins grants change of venue to Decatur, Alabama

March-April Haywood Patterson tried for the second time, convicted, and sentenced to death

June-Judge Horton sets aside Haywood Patterson’s second conviction and orders a new trial

November-December-Haywood Patterson tried for the third time, convicted, and sentenced to death. Clarence Norris tried for the second time, convicted, and sentenced to death

1934

June-Alabama Supreme Court affirms Haywood Patterson’s third conviction and Clarence Norris’s second conviction

October -Two lawyers charged with attempting to bribe Victoria Price, triggering a fight between Samuel Leibowitz and the ILD for control of the defense

1935

January-U.S. Supreme Court agrees to review Patterson and Norris’s convictions

April-U.S. Supreme Court reverses Norris’s conviction in Norris v. Alabama

November-Jackson County grand jury, with one black man on it, re-indicts the defendants

December-Scottsboro Defense Committee formed

1936

January-Haywood Patterson tried for the fourth time, convicted, and sentenced to seventy-five years. Sheriff Blalock slashed by Ozie Powell. Ozie Powell shot.

February-Allan Knight Chalmer’s first trip to Alabama on behalf of the Scottsboro Defense Committee

1937

January-Alabama Supreme Court affirms Haywood Patterson’s fourth conviction

July-Clarence Norris tried for the third time, convicted, and sentenced to death. Andy Wright tried for the second time, convicted, and sentenced to ninety-nine years. Charlie Weems tried for the second time, convicted, and sentenced to seventy-five-years. Ozie Powell pleads guilty to assaulting sheriff and  is sentenced to twenty years. Alabama drops charges against Eugene Williams, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, and Roy Wright.

1938

June-Alabama Supreme Court affirms Clarence Norris’s death sentence

July-Governor Graves commutes Clarence Norris’s sentence to life imprisonment

August-Alabama Pardon Board denies pardon applications of Haywood Patterson and Ozie Powell

October-Alabama Pardon Board denies pardon applications of Clarence Norris, Chalrie Weems, and Roy Wright. Governor Graves interviews the defendants.

November-Governor Graves denies pardon applications of all five of the remaining defendants.

1943

November-Charlie Weems paroled

1944

January-Clarence Norris and Andy Wright paroled

September-Clarence Norris and Andy Wright leave Montgomery in violation of their paroles

October-Clarence Norris is returned to Kilby prison

1946

June-Ozie Powell paroled

September-Clarence Norris, paroled a second time, leaves Alabama

October-Andy Wright is returned to Kilby

1948

July-Haywood Patterson escapes from Kilby

1950

June-Andy Wright paroled to New York. FBI arrests Haywood Patterson in Detriot. Michigan governor Williams refuses extradition request. Alabama abandons extradition proceedings.

1952

Haywood Patterson dies of cancer

1959

August-Roy Wright shoots and kills his wife, then himself

1976

October-Clarence Norris pardoned

1989

January-Clarence Norris dies

I relied heavily on historian James Patterson’s book Stories From Scottsboro, the PBS documentary Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, and transcripts from Haywood Patterson’s second trial.

References:

Page Two

Huddie William Ledbetter (1888-1949), known as “Lead Belly,” was an iconic American folk and blues musician who wrote several songs about newsworthy people and events. The lines at the bottom of page four are from his song “Scottsboro.

Page Eight

In Miles Davis’s 1970 album A Tribute to Jack Johnson the end of the record features an actor portraying Johnson saying: “I’m Jack Johnson . Heavyweight champion of the world. I’m black. They never let me forget it. I’m black all right! I’ll never let them forget it.”

The italicized section that begins with “Here Comes Jack Johnson like he owns the town” is taken from a song by alternative country singer Tom Russell.

Page Ten

The final title in Birth of a Nation asks: “Dare we dream of a golden day when the bestial War shall rule no more? But instead-the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace.”

Page Twenty

The italicized section beginning with the phrase “Workers, farmers, Negro and white” are the opening lines to the song “Scottsboro Boys Shall Not Die,” which was sung at protest rallies.

Page Thirty-Six

The phrase “They tell you they make less than a dollar a day” is taken from Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre, which recounts the Italian Hall Labor Disaster. Seventy-three men, women, and children, mostly striking mine workers and their families, were crushed to death in a stampede when an ally of the mine management falsely yelled “fire” at a crowded Christmas party. The italicized section beginning with “you can’t scare me” is from Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid.”

 negotiating the distance
between tablecloth and rim.

Then, as a lady
bug crawled on my bare
neck, I longed for
communication –

I had a vision:
In a big backyard         full of athletic collies
we gathered sour-grass, you and I

so wanted to tell you. Instead
attempted small talk, moved to pulling
puns from my repertoire.

You  confided in me your deepest desire,
which is to converse
        with an extra-terrestrial.

You longed for Venusians:
Blue animals that smelled of green
tea and had sticky toy hands.

Dream you had: Venusian named Leroy told you
you were beautiful.

You move so eye
but not at mine.

I want you to push that rim, but
I also want you to be able to look me in the eye.

How wounded we
longed for everything

Oh wounded we
were like heroes from old novels,
the kind that fondled their ladies’ gloves:

sensitive to touch.

Silently, you eat chicken salad.

I turn and turn in my cell like a fly
that doesn’t know where to die.

the day I

was quarried from the mountain, or

this hand, this scab, this lock of hair, but

evil spirits cut his life short like a

storm from the south

cuts a tender plant.

I love her

because she never cared for

splendid honors           so

the goddess who says:

“I am a crown upon the head of an honest man

and I confer grace to every exhausted soul”

is the one

I’ll follow        and I’ll

never surrender because I

prefer tombstones of butchers, bakers, servants, slaves –

may the earth not weight upon your remains

may the earth not weight upon your remains

those left-overs are fine with me and

mother’s dream lies down the pebbled aisle,

in a red house with blue shutters. there’s

a sort of cloud that cries crows, sits pretty

from a quiet room, grey as tea bags and

grandfathers…we had a simple dream

of living in peace, but this is still

peace compared to

lepers carting

their own flesh on skateboards, propelling

themselves with stub-hands and stub-feet or

broken men on all fours, weeping,

masturbating, dying – may the earth

not weight upon your remains –

and I thought why

not follow your bladder, pull your

tampon out – whatever. Be free!

Leave your home. Change your name.

Live alone. I dreamed of

vacant, countryside wanderings.

wanted to drift into the clouds,

where the blue sky would mother me, but

the dirt holds my narrow space.          

luckily,

the dirt holds my narrow space.

“One day I reached the summit of a mountain
and I felt something I had never felt before –
I felt so strong! I had a beautiful feeling of freedom. ”

Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, a military base .100,000 people, almost all civilians, died. Some eyeless, noseless, lipless lived on, looked space invader, bald play-do heads emphasized low-cut ears, entire faces seeming malleable, brow ridges without brows are Neanderthalesque, suits, dresses marked them male, female, how else to tell? There’s a human in there, there’s a human in there.

Harry Truman won an honorary degree from Oxford University. His memoirs were a commercial and critical success for Doubleday. He lived to eighty-eight, but he died.

Augustus commissioned the Pantheon to commemorate his victory over Mark Anthony. Was it he who hauled the coarse-grained granite? Near death, he said, “I found Rome of clay; I leave it to you of marble.” Whose hands laid the marble? Unremembered, unremembered, but they too walked the seven hills of Rome, admired the quiet cool surface of the Tiber, felt the wind and hot and cold, love and joy and death – more death than love and joy – brutal little wars fought and forgotten. Forgotten they died.

Augustus died to applause, but he died.

What about the Wampanoag and Pequot people? When the Plymouth pilgrims sat down to the first Thanksgiving dinner, none of them were invited. Eleven-foot walls surrounding the settlement kept them out. Nation building myths ensured they would be remembered, placed them at that feast, but they died, riddled with disease if not first massacred. People say what is it about Indians and alcohol, what genetic failings when the answer lies not in genes. Convenient, to say what’s natural, what isn’t – when few things are actually fixed –

But there’s certainty in the sadness of a tiny death.

The Great Gatsy tells of a mysterious green light, represents upper class aspirations, green the color of money, also the promise of new continents, but what room does the short-chinned homeless man have for dreams, parking his bike in front of Starbuck’s, singing songs in his head, dancing, swaying from side to side as if walking a ship’s plank, happy to get a free cup of coffee from a female customer in a sundress out to prove what a good liberal she is – when he dies, there will be no orations, no tears, a discarded bike, a man lying in his own urine on a bench, freshly dead, stiffening. An uninteresting tragedy, his loss a loss of functionality, nothing grander than that. No story written for him.

The pages of history, of literature, tell of big men. The powerful swell like distended stomachs, casting light bright as bombs. The average, those aspiring to average, look on, wait for their lives to begin, but they are living, also dying, their lives, undocumented.

Great men live in prose, poetry, song, film.

Where are our residences?

Hud at night, listening to the grass grow, remembering his dead brother, older brother, perfect brother, killed him, drunk-driving – now kicking at dust, hitching thumbs in jean pockets, shifting weight to one side, leaning against car, staring out at bleak nightscape with light, sun-stained eyes, eyes seeming hatred, indifference like surly smiles and dismissive waves, but there’s also need – yearning for father figure, age-old story….

 It’s easy to see Hud as Cain, naturally bad, butting heads with soft-hearted father who loved the pretty black cow with wonderful, twisted horns, who stooped over soggy hamburgers in the diner, who was given all the pearls of wisdom, stilted screenwriting, as in “it don’t take long to kill, not like it takes to grow.” We are expected to believe, unquestioningly, in his good-heartedness. When the man came to tell Homer that his cows had hoof-in-mouth, that he had to shoot them all, he thanked him for telling him personally, Homer as defeated gentleman crawling on his belly through the dusty roads of Claude, Texas and son Hud threatening to declare him legally incompetent, usurp control of ranch – this the real west, no heroics-land of people as tiny as anywhere, no more alive despite proximity to frontier and lightless night skies:

human connection as alleviating sadness inarticulate and packed in balled-up, gummed-up souls – when Hud apologizes to Alma for attempted rape, can’t understand why she’s leaving, amazed that she’d take it so seriously, amazed that he was the only man to have ever got rough with her – Homer says Hud just doesn’t give a damn about people, but such “blue-eyed likeability,” the Paul Newman cool, made all the kids want to be like him, but a dead brother’s memory and saintly Homer’s rejection (running to help dying father, trying to hold him, telling him he’ll be alright and all Homer has to say is accusation, that Hud waits eagerly for him to die) is the final break.

–once, Hud sat outside at night so long he could hear the grass grow, and it’s just too simplistic to say it’s a story about Hud driving everyone away because the world is so full of crap, a man’s got to get into it sooner or later whether he’s careful or not, and they drove him away too –

Later, video clips on youtube: Tony Perkins sings “The World is your Balloon,” “The Prettiest Girl in School,” “Moonlight Swim,” “The Christmas Song.” Unsettling, even bizarre, to see Norman Bates as functional human being, capable of walking among us, in theory, but also disappointing complacency, to sing silly love songs during the 60s! I’ll take Norman Bates with all his twitches and his smells of damp linen, a thousand Norman Bates to remind us of what we’d love to forget, to remind us that we all go a little mad sometimes.

Where is your body, Tiberius Gracchus?

the placid face of the Tiber as masking

such struggle: chairs collide, unfittingly,

with a face, crumpled body, folds

into itself beneath bloodied toga –

what did  justice matter to him, then, in those last, excruciating

moments – was is worth it? or did pain deaden

everything, numb to thoughts of the landless

soldiers who loved him, who returned from

foreign wars only to find they had no home –

were his last moments numb to still breezes,

only intense awareness of shivers in fingertips, earth

clutched in palms, welcome warmth of blood, before

obscurity– oh tragedy – no misconceptions here, no expectation

of plucked strings, lyres or lutes and endless fields, sunny and warm –

he loved them too much, the mark of a misanthrope to

choose external rewards of heaven over humans,

over the earth – they called him a tyrant and

beat him with chairs, like a dog. maybe his was a

self-conscious death, a brief moment, spent wondering

how he would be remembered as the blows became more and

more remote – more likely no time to think, only animal fear,

blood, and sweat smells so similar to urine then

only a black abyss. If the Tiber were a house it

would creak with age and stoop under the weight of memory,

instead serenely smiles on, minnowing over the spot where

Gracchus’ body was tossed, like so much trash, where, long ago,

bones, no longer his, became bright pebbles, later dust,

swept away in the shallows. Where is your body,

Tiberius Gracchus? Can I drink you in? Billions of years

from now, might a single air particle smack of you?

The end the same for us all. Tiny deaths are the saddest.

His was no such a death, but what of ours? How long

will we stand aside and watch our heroes die?

Matter never ends, only changes form.