Haywood Patterson: Scottsboro Boy

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Chapter 1

The freight train leaving out of Chattanooga, going around the mountain curves and hills of Tennessee into Alabama, it went so slow anyone could get off and back on.

That gave the white boys the idea they could jump off the train and pick up rocks, carry them back on, and chunk them at us Negro boys.

The trouble began when three or four white boys crossed over the oil tanker that four of us colored fellows from Chattanooga were in. One of the white boys, he stepped on my hand and liked to have knocked me off the train. I didn’t say anything then, but the same guy, he brushed by me again and liked to have pushed me off the car. I caught hold of the side of the tanker to keep from falling off.

I made a complaint about it and the white boy talked back— mean, serious, white folks Southern talk.

That is how the Scottsboro case began … with a white foot on my black hand.

“The next time you want by,” I said, “just tell me you want by and I let you by.”

“Nigger, I don’t ask you when I want by. What you doing on this train anyway?”

“Look, I just tell you the next time you want by you just tell me you want by and I let you by.”

“Nigger bastard, this a white man’s train. You better get off. All you black bastards better get off!”

I felt we had as much business stealing a ride on this train as those white boys hoboing from one place to another looking for work like us. But it happens in the South most poor whites feel they are better than Negroes and a black man has few rights. It was wrong talk from the white fellow and I felt I should sense it into him and his friends we were human beings with rights too. I didn’t want that my companions, Roy and Andy Wright, Eugene Williams and myself, should get off that train for anybody unless it was a fireman or engineer or railroad dick who told us to get off.

“You white sons of bitches, we got as much right here as you!”

“Why, you goddamn nigger, I think we better just put you off!”

“Okay, you just try. You just try to put us off!”

Three or four white boys, they were facing us four black boys now, and all cussing each other on both sides. But no fighting yet.

The white boys went on up the train further.

We had just come out of a tunnel underneath Lookout Mountain when the argument started. The train, the name of it was the Alabama Great Southern, it was going uphill now, slow. A couple of the white boys, they hopped off, picked up rocks, threw them at us. The stones landed around us and some hit us. Then the white fellows, they hopped back on the train two or three cars below us. We were going toward Stevenson, Alabama, when the rocks came at us. We got very mad.

When the train stopped at Stevenson, I think maybe to get water or fuel, we got out of the car and walked along the tracks. We met up with some other young Negroes from another car. We told them what happened. They agreed to come in with us when the train started again.

Soon as the train started the four of us Chattanooga boys that was in the oil tanker got back in there—and the white boys started throwing more rocks. The other colored guys, they came over the top of the train and met us four guys. We decided we would go and settle with these white boys. We went toward their car to fight it out. There must have been ten or twelve or thirteen of us colored when we came on a gang of six or seven white boys.

I don’t argue with people. I show them. And I started to show those white boys. The other colored guys, they pitched in on these rock throwers too. Pretty quick the white boys began to lose in the fist fighting. We outmanned them in hand-to-hand scuffling. Some of them jumped off and some we put off. The train, picking up a little speed, that helped us do the job. A few wanted to put up a fight but they didn’t have a chance. We had color anger on our side.

The train was picking up speed and I could see a few Negro boys trying to put off one white guy. I went down by them and told them not to throw this boy off because the train was going too fast. This fellow, his name was Orville Gilley. Me and one of the Wright boys pulled him back up.

After the Gilley boy was back on the train the fight was over. The four of us, Andy and Roy Wright, Eugene Williams and myself, we went back to the tanker and sat the same way we were riding when the train left Chattanooga.

The white fellows got plenty sore at the whupping we gave them. They ran back to Stevenson to complain that they were jumped on and thrown off—and to have us pulled off the train.

The Stevenson depot man, he called up ahead to Paint Rock and told the folks in that little through-road place to turn out in a posse and snatch us off the train.

It was two or three o’clock in the afternoon, Wednesday, March 25, 1931, when we were taken off at Paint Rock.…

A mob of white farmers was waiting when the train rolled in. They closed in on the boxcars. Their pistols and shotguns pointed at us. They took everything black off the train. They even threw off some lumps of coal, could be because of its color. Us nine black ones they took off from different cars. Some of these Negroes I had not seen before the fight and a couple I was looking at now for the first time. They were rounding up the whites too, about a half dozen of them. I noticed among them two girls dressed in men’s overalls and looking about like the white fellows.

I asked a guy who had hold of me, “What’s it all about?”

“Assault and attempt to murder.”

I didn’t know then there was going to be a different kind of a charge after we got to the Jackson County seat, Scottsboro.

They marched us up a short road. We stopped in front of a little general store and post office. They took our names. They roped us up, all us Negroes together. The rope stretched from one to another of us. The white folks, they looked mighty serious. Everybody had guns. The guy who ran the store spoke up for us:

“Don’t let those boys go to jail. Don’t anybody harm them.”

But that passed quick, because we were being put into trucks. I kind of remember this man’s face, him moving around there in the storm of mad white folks, talking for us. There are some good white people down South but you don’t find them very fast, them that will get up in arms for a Negro. If they come up for a Negro accused of something, the white people go against him and his business goes bad.

After we were shoved into the truck I saw for the first time all us to become known as “The Scottsboro Boys.” There were nine of us. Some had not even been in the fight on the train. A few in the fight got away so the posse never picked them up.

There were the four from Chattanooga, Roy Wright, about fourteen; his brother, Andy Wright, nineteen; Eugene Williams, who was only thirteen; and myself. I was eighteen. I knew the Wright boys very well. I had spent many nights at their home and Mrs. Wright treated me as if I were her own son. The other five boys, they were Olen Montgomery, he was half blind; Willie Roberson, he was so sick with the venereal he could barely move around; a fellow from Atlanta named Clarence Norris, nineteen years old; Charlie Weems, the oldest one among us, he was twenty; and a fourteen-year-old boy from Georgia, Ozie Powell. I was one of the tallest, but Norris was taller than me.

All nine of us were riding the freight for the same reason, to go somewhere and find work. It was 1931. Depression was all over the country. Our families were hard pushed. The only ones here I knew were the other three from Chattanooga. Our fathers couldn’t hardly support us, and we wanted to help out, or at least put food in our own bellies by ourselves. We were freight-hiking to Memphis when the fight happened.

Looking over this crowd, I figured that the white boys got sore at the whupping we gave them, and were out to make us see it the bad way.

We got to Scottsboro in a half hour. Right away we were huddled into a cage, all of us together. It was a little two-story jimcrow jail. There were flat bars, checkerboard style, around the windows, and a little hallway outside our cell.

We got panicky and some of the kids cried. The deputies were rough. They kept coming in and out of our cells. They kept asking questions, kept pushing us and shoving, trying to make us talk. Kept cussing, saying we tried to kill off the white boys on the train. Stomped and raved at us and flashed their guns and badges.

We could look out the window and see a mob of folks gathering. They were excited and noisy. We were hot and sweaty, all of us, and pretty scared. I laughed at a couple of the guys who were crying. I didn’t feel like crying. I couldn’t figure what exactly, but didn’t have no weak feeling.

After a while a guy walked into our cell, with him a couple of young women.

“Do you know these girls?”

They were the two gals dressed like men rounded up at Paint Rock along with the rest of us brought off the train. We had seen them being hauled in. They looked like the others, like the white hobo fellows, to me. I paid them no mind. I didn’t know them. None of us from Chattanooga, the Wrights, Williams, and myself, ever saw them before Paint Rock. Far as I knew none of the nine of us pulled off different gondolas and tankers ever saw them.

“No,” everybody said.

“No,” I said.

“No? You damn-liar niggers! You raped these girls!”

Round about dusk hundreds of people gathered about the jail-house. “Let these niggers out,” they yelled. We could hear it coming in the window. “If you don’t, we’re coming in after them.” White folks were running around like mad ants, white ants, sore that somebody had stepped on their hill. We heard them yelling like crazy how they were coming in after us and what ought to be done with us. “Give ‘em to us,” they kept screaming, till some of the guys, they cried like they were seven or eight years old. Olen Montgomery, he was seventeen and came from Monroe, Georgia, he could make the ugliest face when he cried. I stepped back and laughed at him.

As evening came on the crowd got to be to about five hundred, most of them with guns. Mothers had kids in their arms. Autos, bicycles, and wagons were parked around the place. People in and about them.

Two or three deputies, they came into our cell and said, “All right, let’s go.” They wanted to take us out to the crowd. They handcuffed us each separately. Locked both our hands together. Wanted to rush us outside into the hands of that mob. We fellows hung close, didn’t want for them to put those irons on. You could see the look in those deputies’ faces, already taking some funny kind of credit for turning us over.

High Sheriff Warren—he was on our side—rushed in at those deputies and said, “Where you taking these boys?”

“Taking them to another place, maybe Gadsden or some other jail.”

“You can’t take those boys out there! You’ll be overpowered and they’ll take the boys away from you.”

The deputies asked for their handcuffs back and beat it out.

That was when the high sheriff slipped out the back way himself and put in a call to Montgomery for the National Guards.

He came back to our cell a few minutes later and said, “I don’t believe that story the girls told.”

His wife didn’t believe it either. She got busy right then and went to the girls’ cell not far from ours. We all kept quiet and listened while Mrs. Warren accused them of putting down a lie on us. “You know you lied,” she said, so that we heard it and so did the white boys in their cell room. The girls stuck to their story; but us black boys saw we had some friends.

It had been a fair day, a small wind blowing while we rode on the freight. Now, toward evening, it was cool, and the crowd down there was stomping around to keep warm and wanting to make it real hot. When it was coming dark flashlights went on, and headlights from a few Fords lit up the jail. The noise was mainly from the white folks still calling for a lynching party. Every now and then one of them would yell, for us to hear, “Where’s the rope. Bill?” or “Got enough rope, Hank?” They were trying to find something to help them to break into jail, begging all the while to turn us fellows over to them.

Round four o’clock in the morning we heard a heavy shooting coming into the town. It was the National Guards. They were firing to let the crowd know they were coming, they meant business, and we weren’t to be burned or hung. The mob got scared and fussed off and away while the state soldiers’ trucks came through.

I was young, didn’t know what it was all about. I believed the National Guard was some part of the lynching bee. When they came into my cell I figured like the others—that we were as good as long gone now.

First guard to walk in, he was full of fun. He asked some of the boys, “Where you want your body to go to?”

Willie Roberson, he had earlier told one of the deputies he was from Ohio, but now he took this guard serious. He said, “Send my body to my aunt at 992 Michigan Avenue, Atlanta.” His aunt owned the place at that address. Others told false names, like people do at first when they’re arrested.

Charlie Weems, he had a lot of guts. He understood it was a gag. He said, “Just bury me like you do a cat. Dig a hole and throw me in it.” He understood the guard was funning, but the others didn’t. I didn’t very well understand it myself.

After the National Guards told us they were for us, I believed them. I told them right away where I came from, “Just over the state line, Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

I don’t tell people stories, I tell the truth.

I told the truth about my name and where I came from. I knew that was all right with my people, they would wade through blood for me.

And which they did.

Early the next morning we had breakfast. Then the National Guards led us out of the jail. We were going to Gadsden, Alabama, where it was supposed to be safer. Soon as we filed out of the jail-house another mob was there screaming the same stuff at us and talking mean to the National Guards. “We’re going to kill you niggers!”

“You ain’t going to do a goddamned thing,” I yelled back at them. That made them wild.

They sat us down among other colored prisoners at the Gadsden jail. It was the same kind of a little old jimcrow lockup as the one at Scottsboro. White guys, they were in cells a little way down the hall. We talked back and forth with them.

We waited to see what the Jackson County law was going to do with us. The Scottsboro paper had something to say about us. In big headlines, editorials and everything, they said they had us nine fiends in jail for raping two of their girls. The editor had come rummaging around the jail himself.

Then we heard that on March 31 we were indicted at Scottsboro. A trial was set for April 6, only a week away. Down around that way they’ll hoe potatoes kind of slow sometimes but comes to trying Negroes on a rape charge they work fast. We had no lawyers. Saw no lawyers. We had no contact with the outside. Our folks, as far as we knew, didn’t know the jam we were in. I remember the bunch of us packed in the cell room, some crying, some mad. That was a thinking time, and I thought of my mother, Jannie Patterson, and my father, Claude Patterson. I thought of my sisters and brothers and wondered if they had read about us by now.

What little we heard was going on about us we got from the white inmates. Some were pretty good guys. They saw the papers, read them to us, and the guards talked with them. These fellows, they told us the story had got around all over Alabama and maybe outside the state. They told us, “If you ever see a good chance, you better run. They said they’re going to give every one of you the death seat.”

I couldn’t believe that. I am an unbelieving sort.

Chapter 2

Came trial time, the National Guards took us to Scottsboro. We had to go down through the country from Gadsden to the county seat. We went in a truck. There were guards in front, at the side and behind. I never trusted these guards too much. They were white folks, Alabama folks at that, and I felt they could as lief knock us off as anyone else. State and federal and county law didn’t make much difference to us down there. It was all law, and it was all against us, the way we figured.

Got to Scottsboro and there was just about the same crowd as when we left—only much bigger. For two blocks either way they were thick as bees, bees with a bad sting and going to sting us pretty quick now.

The sixty or seventy National Guards, they got orders to make a lane through the crowd so we could get through. They had rifles, looked smart in their uniform. They could handle the crowd. When the guards formed a tunnel for us to walk through we heard the mob roaring what I heard a thousand times if I heard once:

“We going to kill you niggers!”

Later I found out why the crowd was so big. A “nigger lynching” might be enough to bring out a big crowd anyway, but this day was what they called “First Monday” or “horse-swapping day.” First day of each month the Jackson County farmers came down from the hills into Scottsboro to swap horses and mules and talk. They’d bring in their families and have a time of it. It happened our trial opened on the same day so the mountain people living around here had two good reasons to come to town—and there were thousands out. They were gathered around the courthouse square while we colored boys went into the courthouse. Near the courthouse was a brass band getting ready to celebrate either our burning or hanging, whichever it was going to be.

We boys sat there in court and watched how Judge E. A. Hawkins had a talk with a man named Stephen Roddy. Roddy said he was a lawyer sent in from Chattanooga to help us fellows. I had a hunch when I heard he was from Chattanooga that my folks and the Wrights had got wind of our jam and hired him. But I saw right away he wasn’t much for us. Hawkins said to him, “You defending these boys?” Roddy answered, “Not exactly. I’m here to join up with any lawyers you name to defend them. Sort of help out.” The judge asked, “Well, you defending them or aren’t you?” Words about like that. So Roddy said, “Well, I’m not defending them, but I wouldn’t want to be sent off the case. I’m not being paid or anything. Just been sent here to sort of take part.” Then the judge, he said, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to see you out of the case. You can stay.”

Now that was the kind of defense we Scottsboro boys had when we first went on trial.

Right after that Judge Hawkins put a local guy named Milo Moody, an oldish lawyer, to represent us. But he didn’t do anything for us. Not a damned thing. He got up and said a few words now and then: but he was against us.

After Moody was set up to be our lawyer, the trials went on. The courtroom was packed. Jammed in, the people were. Standing up in back and along the sides. Not enough seats there. Weems and Norris were tried together. I was tried separate. The rest were tried together. The trials and convictions went on for about two days. The jury kept going in and out of the jury room and coming back with convictions.

That was one jury that got exercise.

I was tried on April 7, the second day of the trials. Solicitor H. G. Bailey, the prosecutor, he talked excited to the jurymen. They were backwoods farmers. Some didn’t even have the education I had. I had only two short little periods of reading lessons. But these men passed a decision on my life.…

The girls I and the others were accused of raping I saw for the third time in court. The first I saw them was at Paint Rock when we were all picked up. The second was in Scottsboro jail when they were brought to our cell. And now in court. This time they were not wearing men’s overalls, but dresses. Victoria Price, the older girl, she was to me a plain-looking woman. Ruby Bates was more presentable.

Solicitor Bailey, he asked me questions. The way he handled me was the same way he handled all of us. Like this:

“You ravished that girl sitting there.”

“I ravished nobody. I saw no girl.”

“You held a knife to her head while the others ravished her.”

“I had no knife. I saw no knife. I saw no girl.”

“You saw this defendant here ravish that girl there.”

“I saw nobody ravish nobody. I was in a fight. That’s all. Just a fight with white boys.”

“You raped that girl. You did rape that girl, didn’t you?”

“I saw no girl. I raped nobody.”

Bailey, he kept firing that story at me just like that. He kept pounding the rape charge against me, against all of us. We all kept saying no, we saw no girls, we raped nobody, all we knew of was a fight.

The girls got up and kept on lying. There was only one thing the people in the courtroom wanted to hear. Bailey would ask, “Did the niggers rape you?”

“Yes,” the girls would answer.

That’s all the people in that court wanted to hear, wanted to hear “yes” from the girls’ mouths.

When Bailey finished with me he said to the jury:

“Gentlemen of the jury, I don’t say give that nigger the chair. I’m not going to tell you to give him the electric chair.

“You know your duty.

“I’m not going to tell you to give the nigger a life sentence. All I can say is, hide him. Get him out of our sight.

“Hide them. Get them out of our sight.

“They’re not our niggers. Look at their eyes, look at their hair, gentlemen. They look like something just broke out of the zoo.

“Guilty or not guilty, let’s get rid of these niggers.”

I went on trial about nine o’clock in the morning. Within two hours the jury had come back with a conviction. I was convicted in their minds before I went on trial. I had no lawyers, no witnesses for me. All that spoke for me on that witness stand was my black skin—which didn’t do so good. Judge Hawkins asked the jurymen: “Have you reached a verdict?”

“Yes.”

“Have the clerk read it.”

The clerk read it off: “We, the jurymen, find the defendant guilty as charged and fix his punishment as death.”

If I recollect right the verdicts against us all were in in two days. All of us got the death sentence except Roy Wright. He looked so small and pitiful on the stand that one juryman held out for life imprisonment. They declared a mistrial for Roy.

No Negroes were allowed in Scottsboro during the entire time. I didn’t see a Negro face except two farmers in jail for selling corn. One of the National Guards, he fired a shot through the courtroom window about noon of the day I was convicted. Later he said that was an accident.

On the night of the first day’s trials we could hear a brass band outside. It played, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” and “Dixie.”

It was April 9 when eight of us—all but Roy Wright—were stood up before Judge Hawkins for sentencing. He asked us if we had anything to say before he gave sentence. I said:

“Yes, I have something to say. I’m not guilty of this charge.”

He said, “The jury has found you guilty and it is up to me to pass sentence. I set the date for your execution July 10, 1931 at Kilby Prison. May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

The people in the court cheered and clapped after the judge gave out with that. I didn’t like it, people feeling good because I was going to die, and I got ruffed.

I motioned to Solicitor Bailey with my finger.

He came over. I asked him if he knew when I was going to die.

He mentioned the date, like the judge gave it, and I said, “You’re wrong. I’m going to die when you and those girls die for lying about me.”

He asked me how I knew and I said that that was how I felt.

I looked around. That courtroom was one big smiling white face.

All my life I always loved my own people. I like my kind best because I understand them best. When I was a young man in Chattanooga, before the train ride that ended at Paint Rock, I knew and loved Negro girls, Negro people. My friends were of black color. I knew them as fellow human beings, as good as all others, and needing as good a chance. It was never in me to rape, not a black and not a white woman. Only a Negro who is a fool or a crazy man, he would chance his life for anything like that. A Negro with sound judgment and common sense is not going to do it. They are going to take his life away from him if he does. Every Negro man in the South knows that. No, most Negroes run away from that sort of thing, fear in their hearts. And nine of us boys, most unbeknownst to each other, a couple sick, all looking for work and a chance to live, and rounded up on a freight train like lost black sheep, we did not do such a thing and could not.

I wouldn’t make advances on any woman that didn’t want me. Too many women from my boyhood on have shown a desire for me so that I don’t have to press myself on anyone not wanting me.

My mother and father, they lived together as husband and wife for thirty-seven years, honest working people. They had many children and they taught us to respect the human being and the human form.

I was also taught to demand respect from others.

Now it is a strange thing that what I have just said I never had a chance to say in an Alabama court. No Alabama judge or jury in the four trials I had ever asked me for my views. Nobody asked about my feelings. Those Alabama people, they didn’t believe I had any, nor the right to any.

Chapter 3

Back in Gadsden jail we could look outside and see where an old gallows was rigged up. Must have gone back to the slavey days. We didn’t like nothing at all about the place; we didn’t like our death sentence; and we decided to put on a kick. I said to the man who brought me a prison meal, “I don’t want that stuff. Bring me some pork chops.”

“Huh, pork chops?”

“Yes, pork chops. You got to get it. We’re going to die and we can have anything we want.”

All the fellows laid down a yell, “Pork chops!”

We crowded up to the bars. We put our hands out and shook fingers at him. We hollered, “Pork chops. Nothing else.”

This guy, he went down someplace and got the pork chops. He brought it to us. Just the food I wanted. I always liked pork meats. After we ate, still we weren’t satisfied.

The deputies and guards, they were scared of us now like we would make a jailbreak. Our heads were up against those checkerboard bars and we talked sharp.

The sheriff spoke to me because I was raising the most dust. He said. “Look here, nigger. See that gallows. If you don’t quieten down I’ll take you around to that gallows and hang you myself.”

I had a broom in my hand and maybe he wondered what it was or where I got it. He came up to the bars to take a look at what it was. I jiggled the broom in his face. The fellows laughed.

That was the last that sheriff could take by himself. He beat it downstairs to call Governor B. M. Miller to send in some National Guards.

They came in serious. The cell door banged open. They beat on us with their fists. They pushed us against the walls. They kicked and tramped about on our legs and feet. They beat up most of the fellows, but Eugene Williams and me backed up in the dark of the cell and escaped the worst part of it.

The state soldiers handcuffed us in twos. They had a big rope. They fastened the rope in between the handcuffs and bound us all together.

We laid up against the walls and against each other like that till night. We were in a quiet misery, unable to move around. When it was night we tried to sleep like that but we couldn’t. Morning came and we were still trussed to each other and tired. Day went on, no food, just laying there moaning atop each other; until it was seven o’clock in the evening.

The National Guards came up again. This time they had more rope. I said to the sheriff, “What you going to do, hang us?”

“I’d like to, goddamn your souls,” he said.

They roped us together tighter, then chain-gang marched us outside to a big state patrol truck they called the dog wagon. They tied us to the sides so we couldn’t make any break, so we couldn’t even move. One of the guards asked, “What you guys raise so much hell for?”

“We just don’t like that death sentence,” I told him.

The kid I was handcuffed to, he slept rough, and by the time we got to the city jail those handcuffs had swollen my wrists.

They couldn’t get the handcuffs off. They had to call in a blacksmith to get them loose.

They split up us Scottsboro boys so we couldn’t raise any more sand like we had at Gadsden. They put us in with other prisoners two or three to a cell.

About the middle of the night I was stashed into a cell with two other guys. One was called Box Car. He had burgled a boxcar and had a fifteen-year sentence. The other was a lifer. I was played out and fell on the bunk. One of the guys woke me. “Get up.”

I raised up and I looked at him.

“Did you bring my money?”

“What money?”

“Jail feed.”

I knew what this was, kangaroo business. I had a pair of shears under the mattress. I had brought it from the Gadsden jail. I just rested my hands on the shears and said, “I got nothing.”

This guy, he just kept insisting. Told me to get up. He wanted to see me. “If you don’t pay us kangaroo money you know what it means.”

“No, what it means?”

“It means we going to whup you.”

They asked for twenty-five cents. If I wouldn’t pay, it meant I would get twenty-five licks.

I raised up a little more and I said, “You can see me. In the morning you can see me.”

“Hey, where you say you from?”

“Scottsboro.”

“You one of them Scottsboro boys?”

When I told him yes he just gave right over, got tender. He felt sorry for me, brought me food and tried to give it to me. I was tired and I didn’t accept it. I laid down to sleep, thinking how the word “Scottsboro” touched them. That was when I first learned that this word would mean special favors in prison—and special torture.

Next day we were together again, all except Roy Wright, while they fingerprinted us.

Charlie Weems was chewing gum. The jailer, Dick Barnes, told Weems to spit the gum out. He refused to do it.

Barnes gave Weems a lick across the side of the head for that. Weems went down. When he got up he stood his distance from the jailer, a little quieter. Dick Barnes turned on me:

“You like ham and eggs?”

“I don’t like nothing.” I knew he was talking about the fuss we made at the other jail over pork chops.

“Patterson, I heard about you up in Gadsden ordering ham and eggs. You can get it here any time you want it. You love ham and eggs, don’t you?”

“I don’t love nothing.” He wanted me to say something so he could beat on me, but I didn’t give him the chance.

He changed tone, got serious. His voice dropped like from the high end of a piano to the low end, and he said, “We got your waters on to you here. Any time you fellows get funky we got your waters on here.”

Right away he showed us what he meant. Took us all down in the basement where they gave punishment. He looked at me and said, “Nigger, keep quiet. If you don’t behave …” He showed where you hang up by two fingers with your feet not touching the ground. There was a time limit they would hold you up that way.

It was supposed to frighten us and maybe it did scare some. I didn’t like it either. But I always protested when I didn’t like things. Down South I always talked like I wanted: before Scottsboro, during it, and since.

A few minutes afterward Barnes told a Negro trusty, “I sure like to be there when they execute these guys. You’ll smell flesh burning a mile.”

I asked the trusty, “How do you know they’re going to kill me?”

“That chair sure going to get you,” the trusty said.

I didn’t believe nothing like that. Two days later there was the first sign Barnes and the trusty might be wrong—and I might be right.…

Two guys from New York, head men from the International Labor Defense, brought us pops and candy and gave them to us boys in the visiting room. They were Jewish. Which was okay with me. I worked for Jews in Chattanooga. Did porter and delivery work and such for them and always got along well. They told us the people were up in arms over our case in New York and if they had our say-so they would like to appeal our case.

These were the first people to call on us, to show any feelings for our lives, and we were glad, We hadn’t even heard from our own families; they weren’t allowed to see us. But these lawyers got in.

About us nine boys unfairly sentenced, they said their organization was doing all it could to wake up the people in this country and Europe.

Jailer Dick Barnes, he came in and listened when these lawyers asked us whether we got the right medical treatment. They suggested to Barnes a doctor should be sent in. Barnes is the kind of a guy, if you are a Negro, you can read hate in his face and his voice. He said, “We got a doctor here. These boys don’t need any treatment.”

I wanted a doctor and I didn’t want the prison doctor. The prison was very filthy. It was making me sick, making us all sick. It was an old jail. The bed lice would get all over you; they would come up close to you to warm up. I said, “Yes, I want a doctor.”

Barnes said, “What do you want a doctor? We got any medicine you can name.”

“You have any medicine for these lice?” I asked. “One of them stole my cap last night.”

The lawyers and the fellows laughed.

After the visitors went Barnes said, “Nigger, you’re too smart. If you want to get along with me you just keep your mouth.”

Now we knew why we had been getting mail from white folks. The I.L.D., or the Labor Defense, as we got to call them, had been causing around the country. They had told people at meetings and in newspapers to send us letters and cigarettes to make it easier for us in jail. Mail from white people was confusing to me. All my life I was untrusting of them. Now their kind words and presents was more light than we got through the bars of the windows. The next few days the mail got heavier; and the prison officials were upset what to do. We had the money to get whatever we could buy at the jail commissary, and this outside pressure gave us guts. Me, at least. My guts went up so I could demand a bath which Jailer Dick Barnes promised but didn’t let me have. “You’ll get it Saturday,” he said. Saturday came and he put me off. “I haven’t got time to fool with you.” I got tight with him. “I got to have a bath!” That jacked up the other Scottsboro fellows and all together we raised hell for a bath. Barnes, he came back and let us out three at a time for showers.

Prisoners told me registered mail wasn’t supposed to be opened. I found out mine was being opened and even kept from me. I told the guards I wanted to have some words with somebody about it. A little old man named Ervin, he came around. “I got to okay your mail,” he said. “I have to look in the mail of all you Scottsboro niggers.”

That got me sore. “Now listen, don’t you open no letter of mine. If you do I’ll see what I can do about it.”

Ervin beat it off, and one of my cellmates said, “You can’t talk to him like that. He’s a chief warden.”

“I don’t care if he’s President Hoover.”

From then on, whenever mail came to me, Ervin, he would bring it himself. I opened it, Ervin saw me take out the money, then he’d read the letter.

It went on like that for many days until Barnes got to hate me. I kept after him; he kept after me. I had my own fight in me to begin with and now I had white folks fronting for me. One day he came up to my door and shook his finger at me and said, “I’ll have you sent to Kilby tomorrow.”

Sure enough, the next day, April 23, Barnes banged on the cell door and said, “Okay, sonofabitch, you and the other niggers get ready. You going to the death row in Kilby. You can’t take nothing with you either.… I hope they burn that black dick off of you first before they burn the rest of you.”

My cigarettes I gave away. Then I walked out the cell.

Outside the jail I was put in a private car, handcuffed to Willie Roberson. Guards were on each side and in the front seat.

That ride I can remember. It was my last good feeling of the outdoors. It was a fast ride for several hours, with the day getting warmer, the sun hotter. There was no talk, even between Willie and me. My eyes took in everything along the roadsides. It was spring, my favorite time of year. I was a tight guy who would not show people tears, but I felt the water behind my lids.

Willie and myself were the first to reach Kilby.

It was a bitter thing to see the door of Kilby Prison, what the free people of Alabama call “the little green gate.” Those walls looked so high and hard to get over. They were concrete. We could see guards in the shacks along the wall tops next to their machine guns. Barbed wire stretched on top of the walls all around. They took us in through steel gates.

Then, death row opened to us … a dozen cells facing each other, six to a side, and a thirteenth cell for toilet work.

Right off a guy in the cell opposite, he said, “So you’re from Scottsboro. Been reading about you guys. The papers in New York making a big fuss about it. The governor will insist you go now.”

“Go where?”

“To the chair … it’s right there.”

I tried twisting my neck and eyes out the front of the cell to see the death room: but it was just out of my sight.

Chapter 4

That guy opposite, they called him Gunboat, he kept talking. “Do you want a Bible to make your soul right?” He was holding up a little red book in his hands for us to see. “You going to die tonight, you know. You Scottsboros better get busy with the Lord.”

Willie Roberson, he was leaning up against the door with me listening, and he put a frown on. Willie got scared and excited and started talking about things. “You sure we going to die tonight?” he asked. We were both afraid. We didn’t know. Sometimes other prisoners, they heard about things before we did.

Another guy in a cell next to Gunboat’s was shaking his head from side to side like we should pay no mind to him. This fellow, name of Ricketts, called Gunboat a liar and said, “You fellows ain’t going to die tonight. Gunboat don’t know nothing about your case.”

Gunboat yelled out, “Them guys going to die tonight! Here, take this here Bible!”

Ricketts waved his hands and said, “Keep away from that thing. That Bible never did us niggers any good!”

I never had really read the Bible. Couldn’t read much anyway. But I was upset and leaned toward what Gunboat said.…

“You better take to the Bible. You got souls and you better clean ‘em.”

Ricketts put it different. “You ain’t got good lawyers, then you’re done for. You ain’t got white folks to front for you, then you’re done for. But leave that thing alone!”

“What you heard about us getting the chair tonight?” Willie Roberson asked Gunboat.

“I know. Don’t ask how I know.”

“You heard something?”

“The Lord tell me so.”

“Get that Bible across to me,” I said to Gunboat.

“Don’t take it!” Ricketts made a last try.

Gunboat, he tied a piece of wood to the end of a string and threw it over in front of my cell door. The Bible was on the other end and I started dragging it across to me.

Just then a tall, rawbony guard named L. J. Burrs saw Gunboat telegraphing the Bible to me. He stopped before our cell and said to Willie and me, “Pray, you goddamned black bastards. You’ll still burn anyway.”

“Hand me the book, will you?” I said to the guard.

“Q-o-h, you goddamned black sonofabitch. What you mean talking like that to me? Don’t you know to call me Captain, call me Boss?”

“I don’t call no one Captain. I don’t call no one Boss.”

“You nigger, you better get right with me before you get right with your Lord. You call me Captain when you talk to me.”

He made to open the cell door, like he might come in to beat on me, then he changed his mind. Instead he kicked the Bible under my door and said, “I fix you, Patterson. You the ringleader of all these Scottsboro bastards. We got your record. You going to reckon with me.” He walked down by the toilet.

I could hardly make out the words in the book. The little training in reading I had had I never much followed up. Never read no papers, no books, nothing. I did not know how to pronounce things, could not even say “Alabama” so you could understand me. I had to ask prisoners to tell me, and I would try and repeat it. Negroes called this way of speaking “flat talk.”

But the Bible felt solid in my hands. I found myself stumbling through the small printed words.

Pretty soon the other fellows came in. They put Weems and Andy Wright in one cell, Powell and Norris together, and Eugene Williams and Olen Montgomery in another cell.

Right off Gunboat, he started to work on all of them, telling them the juice was going on tonight, and to get right with the Lord.

Charlie Weems wasn’t easy to fool and he answered, “Aw, I know better than that. Our date set for July 10. They ain’t going to do it before. You’re a damned liar.”

The religious stuff got going, all up and down the death row, them that was there trying to convert those of us just arrived. You see, a man in the death cell, he clings to anything that gives him a little hope.

That kind of talk mixed with the guessing about whether we would die tonight or in July. It went all up and down the twelve cells. My cell number was 222. I told the others my cell number and they told me theirs. Cell number 231 was right next to the chair room and none of us Tennessee and Georgia boys in the Scottsboro case had that one.

Each cell was just big enough for a single cot. Sometimes, when it was crowded in the death row, like now, they would put up a double-deck bed. Then you couldn’t move around. One fellow would have to lay up on the bunk while the other could take about three steps forward and turn and take three steps back—if he was nervous and needed to walk.

White and black were in the death row, but mostly Negroes. Around us were desperate men who tried to question us about the Scottsboro case. They were killers, stoolies, and crazy guys. Some hoped to hear something they could carry to the warden so as to escape punishment for their crimes. They got nothing out of us. There was nothing to get out of us anyway. We just kept quiet about the case, all of us.

Night pushed into death row. I knew there were stars outside. The face of the sky I could see and remember clearly because I had looked at it at night all my life. I laid on the top bunk, in a way still feeling I was on a moving freight. Nothing was standing still. I was busy living from minute to minute. Everything was rumbling. I dreamed bad dreams, with freight trains, guards’ faces, and courtrooms mixed up with the look of the sky at night.