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ONE The Best Place on Earth

Way down in Columbus, Georgia

Want to be back in Tennessee

Way down in Columbus Stockade

Friends have turned their backs on me.

Last night as I lay sleeping

I was dreaming you were in my arms

Then I found I was mistaken

I was peeping through the bars.

‘Columbus Stockade Blues’ (traditional)

‘We don’t take just anybody as a member,’ said Daniel Senne, the Big Eddy Club’s general manager. ‘They have to be known to the community. It’s not a question of money, but of standing, morality, personality. And they must be people who conduct themselves well in business. Integrity is important.’

We were talking in the hush of the club’s sumptuous lounge, perched on deep sofas, our feet on a Turkoman rug, surrounded by antiques. With the seasons on the turn from winter to spring, the huge stone fireplace was not in use, but there was no need yet for air-conditioning. From the oak-vaulted dining room next door came the muffled clink of staff laying tables for lunch: silver cutlery, three goblets at every setting, and crisply starched napery. The club’s broad windows provided a backdrop of uninterrupted calm. Framed by pines that filtered the sunlight, a pair of geese glided across the state line, making barely a ripple. Behind them, across a mile of open water, lay the smoky outline of the Alabama hills.

The minutes of the club’s founding meeting were framed on the wall, a single typed folio dated 17 May 1920. On that day, ten of the most prominent citizens of Columbus, Georgia, led by the textile baron Gunby Jordan II, had formed a committee ‘to perfect an organization for building a suitable club at a place to be determined … for having fish fries, ‘cues and picnics’. A postscript added: ‘Arrangements will be made at the club for entertaining ladies and children.’

The Big Eddy’s buildings had expanded since that time, but were still on the spot the founders chose, a promontory at the confluence of the Chattahoochee River and its tributary, Standing Boy Creek. In 1920, before the river was dammed, the turbulence formed where the currents came together was an excellent place to catch catfish. Anyone who ate Chattahoochee catfish now would likely suffer unpleasant consequences, thanks to the effluent swept downstream from Atlanta, but the club’s location remains idyllic. Escaping the traffic that mars so much of modern Columbus, I’d driven down a vertiginous hill to the riverside, where I followed a winding lane along the shoreline, past grand homes and jetties. Before passing through the club’s wrought-iron gates, I pulled off the road to feel the warmth of the sun. The only sounds were birds and a distant chainsaw.

Senne and his wife Elizabeth, dapper and petite, spoke with heavy French accents. They had served their apprenticeship in some of the world’s more glamorous restaurants: London’s Mirabelle and the Pavilion in New York, at a time when its regular patrons included Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis, Salvador Dalì, Cary Grant and the Kennedys.

‘If you had told me twenty years ago that this is the place to be, I would not have believed you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘But it is. They are nice people, really down-to-earth.’

Membership was strictly limited to 475 families, Elizabeth went on, and applicants must accept that their backgrounds would be carefully investigated by the board. Even in summer, the dress code was strictly observed: a jacket and tie for men, and for women, ‘no unkempt hair or wrinkled pants’.

The rules served their purpose, Daniel said. ‘It’s a good community. People take care of you.’ Just as in the 1920s, the club could count many of Columbus’s most distinguished inhabitants as members: the leaders of business, and local, state and national politicians. Former President Jimmy Carter was an honorary member for life.

In the week of my visit in March 2000, another of the city’s more venerable institutions, the Columbus Country Club, had announced the admission of its first two African-American members – both of them women who worked for the public relations departments of local corporations. I turned to Daniel and mentioned this news, then asked: ‘Do you have any black people yet in the Big Eddy Club?’

He shifted his posture awkwardly. ‘No. Not yet.’ He looked appealingly at his wife. ‘We don’t have black members, because none have applied.’

Later that day, as the light was starting to fade, I sat on the veranda of a Victorian house on Broadway, in the heart of Columbus’s downtown ‘Historic District’, with George and Vicky Williams, admiring their profligate springtime flowers. The area had once been in steep decline, but years of careful restoration had made it again a highly desirable neighbourhood. The Williamses were the first middle-class black family on their block, but Vicky said they’d encountered little overt prejudice. ‘Most of them just leave us alone.’

George, some twenty years older than his wife, was a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, and since leaving the military had built up several thriving businesses. Vicky had a university degree and worked at Columbus’s huge commercial bank, CB&T. She had lived in Columbus all her life: attended its schools; socialised widely; watched its local TV news and read its newspaper, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. How important did she think the Big Eddy Club was in the way the city was run?

Vicky looked at me blankly. ‘What’s the Big Eddy Club?’

Columbus, population a little less than 200,000, is Georgia’s second city, 110 miles south of the state’s capital, Atlanta. Running across it is a racial fissure, a rift with an exact geographical position, its line marked by the east – west thoroughfare known for most of its length as Macon Road. With exceptions unusual enough to be noticeable, white people – about 65 per cent of the total – live to the north, and black to the south. No longer legally segregated, they will mingle at work and use the same stores and restaurants, but in general they do not mix in their social lives, or at home. This de facto segregation still divides other American cities, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. But in places like Columbus it tends to be more noticeable. One of its lesser implications is the fact that a well-educated, middle-class black family has never even heard of the fine dining club where their white counterparts take their families for Sunday brunch, marry off their daughters and hold their charity balls; a place where rich and powerful people relax in each other’s company. Unbeknown to George and Vicky Williams, their near neighbours included at least one Big Eddy member, a prominent lawyer.

Columbus stands amid the rolling granite landscape of what, before the boll weevil infestation of the early twentieth century, used to be Georgia’s cotton belt. In summer, the sun irradiates the city with a lacquered intensity for months on end, bringing with it a plague of bugs. Winters are pleasantly mild, although a shift in the wind can bring plummeting temperatures and even, occasionally, tornadoes. The city takes up far more room than its inhabitants need. Its low density has allowed them to cultivate generous, handsome gardens, and there are so many trees that viewed from above, from atop one of the hills on the eastern perimeter, it barely looks like a city at all, but an expanse of forest. At ground level, the foliage turns out to hide a sprawling hinterland of strip malls and snarling expressways, built to connect mazes of suburban subdivisions which on superficial inspection could be almost anywhere in America. Beyond the Victorian downtown enclave, anyone crossing a road on foot takes their life in their hands.

To the west, across the Chattahoochee, is Alabama, here represented by Phenix City, long a centre for gambling and illicit alcohol. In the 1950s the gangs of Phenix City took to murdering elected officials who were trying to clean it up, and it remains the only town in the United States where martial law has had to be imposed in peacetime. Some of those gangsters’ descendants now occupy positions of the greatest respectability in both Georgia and Alabama.

For many Americans, Columbus has a fame and importance out of proportion to its size. It was in his Columbus drugstore during the 1870s that the chemist John Stith Pemberton first mixed the ingredients for his patent soda drink, Coca-Cola. (That original formula is said to have included a stimulating ingredient which is missing from its later versions – cocaine.) To the immediate south of the city lies Fort Benning, the world’s largest infantry base, a place familiar to millions who have served in the military. Its short-haired inhabitants can often be seen in Columbus on weekends, in the dive bars and strip lounges on Victory Drive, a venue for occasional drunken shootings, and with their girlfriends at the motels clustered round the exit ramps on the road to Atlanta, Interstate 185. On my very first night in Columbus, I found myself in the Macon Road Days Inn, where some recent recruits had decided to hold a party in the room above mine. At 3 a.m. it sounded as if they were rounding off their celebrations by repeatedly throwing a heavy refrigerator against the walls and onto the floor. A few hours later, as I blearily went in search of breakfast, there were two used condoms, pale translucent jellyfish, on the concrete stairs.

In Oxford, my English home city, which has a population about two-thirds of Columbus’s, the Yellow Pages phone book entries under the heading ‘Places of Worship’ take up less than a page. In Columbus, they require fourteen, listed under a rich array of denominations: from ‘Churches, African Methodist Episcopalian’ to ‘Churches, Word of Faith’. There are five separate headings to cover the different varieties of Baptist, and seven for Methodists. In Columbus can be found many kinds of Reverend. At the fancy places, such as the imposing neoclassical First Baptist Church of Columbus on Twelfth Street, they are solemn men in silken robes. At the other end of the market is Eddie Florence, a former cop who turned to religion after a short spell in the penitentiary. Dominating his church, deep in South Columbus, on the day of my visit was a drum-kit and electric organ; the premises doubled from Monday to Friday as the office for Florence’s real estate and loans business. A plump, intense, beaming figure, he told me: ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had much opportunity to take out a mortgage from a man of God before?’

For many of Columbus’s citizens, whose behaviour, I learnt, was not always conventionally devout, Church and community are one and the same. If one only knew a person’s choice of place of worship, one would be able to assume much about his or her race, class and social standing. But Columbusites’ faith is no veneer. They give generously to charity, and their routine enquiries after one another’s health appear to express a genuine concern. As I rapidly discovered, their habit is to welcome strangers, even those armed with a notebook and difficult questions.

Its citizens may be oriented towards the world to come, but Columbus, according to Mayor Bob Poydasheff, with ‘its wonderful people and great climate, is simply one of the best places on earth – cosmopolitan but always neighbourly’. The city, states his website, is ‘in a period of unprecedented building and development, which is bringing our quality of life to new highs’. He enumerates its blessings: ‘[The] Chattahoochee Riverwalk, River-Center for the Performing Arts, Springer Opera House, Coca-Cola Space Science Center, Columbus Civic Center, our South Commons Softball Complex including a world-class softball stadium and much, much more.’

The economy, Mayor Poydasheff adds, is buoyant. For more than a century, Columbus has been quietly dominated by a small number of wealthy families. Gunby Jordan, who founded the Big Eddy Club, came from one of them. In 1919, two of these dynasts, Ernest Woodruff and William C. Bradley, bought the Coca-Cola corporation for $25 million. (In Bradley’s case, some of this money was originally derived from his father’s former slave plantation across the river in Alabama.) Their investment was to multiply several thousand times, and spread among their descendants, it has fructified Columbus. Bradley also founded the CB&T banking conglomerate. Its offshoot, the financial computing firm TYSYS, has been quartered since 2002 in a line of large, reflective buildings just north of the former textile district, and is the world’s largest processor of credit cards.

It is only in the south of the city, on the other side of its racial frontier, that the signs of twenty-first-century prosperity are less visible. There, the surfaces of the roads are potholed and pitted. There are junkyards piled with ancient cars, and meagre stores with signs done in paint, not neon. In the poorer districts, lines of low-rise public housing projects stand amid meadows of ragged grass, competing for space with wooden three-room ‘shotgun’ houses, whose squalor would not look out of place in Gaza or Soweto.

The clubs of south Columbus are different, too. The biggest, a huge, low-ceilinged cavern just off Victory Drive, belongs to the R&B singer Jo-Jo Benson, responsible for a string of hits in the sixties and early seventies, including a national pop chart number one, ‘Lover’s Holiday’. A big, bearded bear of a man, the day we met he was dressed in a vivid striped caftan. He showed me round the club and took me into his office, taking pains to check that the large-calibre revolver he kept in the drawer of his desk was still there. ‘This town is a trip,’ he said. ‘A lot of people don’t want to see you make no money or succeed. Coming here from Atlanta is like leaving earth and going to the twilight zone, or travelling back in time.

‘But this is the biggest, the nicest club in town, and I’m a public figure. A lot of people ask me why I stay. Well, I was raised in Phenix City, and more than that, I don’t want to go in for that big-city stuff – gangs and shit. At the end of the day, Columbus is a place to sleep, lay down and rest. Most of the time I don’t get no trouble.’

Benson led me out of the club into the parking lot, and asked me to sit in the passenger seat of his impressive grey sports utility vehicle. ‘I’ve got sound equipment worth thousands of dollars in here,’ he said. He opened the glovebox and removed an unmarked CD. ‘We recorded this last week. Ain’t finished with it yet.’ It turned out to be a romantic duet of heartbreaking sweetness and purity with another local singer, Ruby Miles. Jo-Jo’s music filled the car and brought to mind decades of Georgia gospel, blues and soul: Otis Redding, Randy Crawford, Sam Cook. For a moment he looked bashful. ‘You like it? Tell your friends.’

I made my first visit to Columbus to investigate what looked like a paradox. It was 1996, and the British newspaper that employed me, the Observer, had asked me to go to Georgia to write about the death penalty. My editors were intrigued by the fact that the state’s death row held two prisoners who had exhausted every possible appeal, but whose execution had been indefinitely delayed. The reason, it seemed, was that Georgia wanted to wait until after the Olympic Games, which were shortly to be held in Atlanta. In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, capital punishment had been abolished many years earlier, and the paper wanted me to try to find out why parts of America still found it so attractive.

I began by talking to defence attorneys in Atlanta. They all said the same thing: I should go to Columbus. While its overall crime rate was relatively low, since 1976, when a case from Georgia persuaded the US Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty, Columbus had sentenced more men to die than anywhere else in the state. By the middle of 1996, four had been executed, all of them African-American, and eight were still on death row. At least another twelve had been condemned by Columbus judges and juries, but had won reprieves in appeals. If one worked out the number of death sentences per head of population, Columbus was one of the most dangerous places to commit a murder in the whole of the United States.

A few days later I found myself in Columbus’s second tallest building, a harsh monstrosity in white concrete which would not have looked out of place in Stalinist East Berlin, the eleven-floor Consolidated Government Center. In front of a view across the river sat Judge Doug Pullen of the Chattahoochee Circuit Superior Court, which covers the city and five neighbouring counties. It had been a hot and languorous weekend, and I knew Pullen’s reputation: criticised for his record a few years earlier by Time magazine, he had told the local media that Time’s problem was that it had yet to discover glasnost, the new policy of openness pioneered by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and was still a ‘lovely pink colour’. Nevertheless, his lusty enthusiasm for capital punishment took me by surprise.

‘I would guess that your experience of seeing bodies splattered and mutilated is limited,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘Unfortunately, mine is not.’ A spreading, heavy-set man with round eyes too small for his face, he moved a little stiffly. ‘In all honesty, abolishing the death penalty would have a negligible effect on crime. But the effect on the American people would be horrific. It would be symbolic, like flag-burning.

‘We like to talk tough on crime, but we’re soft. And every time you get an execution, you get people picketing, saying it’s so cruel. Phooey. The first man I prosecuted for capital murder, even if he’d been executed on his due date, it would have been nine years to the day after he committed the crime. And then he got a stay, and all the anti-death penalty people went out dancing. In my view, there should be one appeal, and one only, then that’s that: homeboy goes.’

‘What about life without parole?’ I asked.

Pullen shook his head. ‘It’s a weak sister, my friend. A horribly weak sister.’

As we talked, a big, stooped man with unusually bright blue eyes entered the room without knocking. The two of them stood, whooped, and made high fives. ‘Meet Gray Conger, my successor as District Attorney,’ Pullen said.

‘We still on for that barbecue this weekend?’ Conger asked him. Pullen replied in the affirmative. Before Pullen became a judge, the two men had worked together as prosecutors for more than twenty years: Pullen had been DA, and Conger his assistant. That was the way things had been done for decades in Columbus, they explained: an orderly progression from District Attorney to Superior Court judge meant that four of the five judges then sitting had spent most of their careers in the prosecution office.

‘They’re friends of mine, and they employed me,’ Conger said. ‘But don’t get the idea that that means I get any advantages in court. All it does is give us a smooth transition when a new DA comes in.’

‘Why do you think the city has sent so many men to death row?’ I asked.

‘I just don’t know,’ Conger shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just that we’ve had some awful horrible murders around here.’

One thing he was sure of. ‘In deciding which cases to seek the death penalty, and in the way we work in general, race is not a factor. In the South in my time, over the last thirty years, there’s been the most amazing transformation. Southerners are very conscious of race. They go out of their way not to be accused of racial bias.’

Later that afternoon, Pullen took me in his battered Volvo down to Fort Benning, where he taught a class in criminal law and capital punishment to soldiers and police patrolmen. I still had no real idea why he was wedded so strongly to capital punishment, but there was obviously nothing confected about the strength of his feeling. ‘I love people,’ he remarked happily as we sped through the gates of the vast military base. ‘You can probably tell that. So if you hurt one of my people, I’m going to come after you.’

In the past, he said, he had received dozens of letters asking him to reconsider death sentences. ‘The strange thing was, they all seemed to come from Holland and Wales. Don’t think I can’t recognise an organised letter-writing campaign when I see it. I got news for you. My education puts me in the top 3 per cent in this country, but I couldn’t name a single city in Wales. Folks round here don’t necessarily care what folks in Wales think of them. I guess those letters came from Amnesty International or something. They should be concentrating on real human rights abuses, like in the Third World.’

Pullen’s class, in an echoing room easily big enough to contain his hundred students, was a bravura performance. ‘Let me give you a little insider tip,’ he began. ‘Our fine Attorney General, Michael Bowers, is planning to run for Governor.’

‘How do you know?’ someone asked.

‘Bowers made his intentions plain to me personally. When we met up recently’. Pullen paused, then winked: ‘At an execution.’

An Alabama state trooper, so fat he seemed almost triangular, asked how lawyers got to be judges. Pullen chuckled. ‘You may rest assured that anyone successful in defence litigation need not apply. At least not on the Chattahoochee circuit.’

After the seminar, Pullen took me to dinner in a barbecue restaurant downtown. As we consumed a small pork mountain, I asked him about one of the cases that had attracted those letters from Holland and Wales, a capital murder he’d prosecuted in 1976. The defendant had been a mentally retarded man named Jerome Bowden, an African-American aged twenty-four. The body of his victim, Kay Stryker, a white woman of fifty-five, was found in her house, knifed and beaten, several days after her death. Afterwards, the police searched the home of her sixteen-year-old neighbour, Jamie Graves, and found an old pellet gun, its butt stained with her blood, together with her jewellery. Graves admitted burgling her home, but claimed she was killed by his friend Bowden. In return for his help, he was sentenced to life rather than being given the death penalty.

Bowden soon heard the police were looking for him. He walked up to a squad car he saw in the street, and asked if he could be of help. He was arrested on the spot, and less than two months after the murder, he stood trial. Pullen’s case rested on Bowden’s confession. He tried to retract it on the witness stand, saying he hadn’t been in Stryker’s house at all, and that a police detective had promised ‘to speak to the judge’ to save him from the electric chair in return for his signature. At the start of the hearing, Pullen had exercised his right to strike prospective jurors, so removing all eight African-Americans from the panel and ensuring that Bowden was tried only by whites. They did not believe him, and found him guilty on the second day of the trial.

In Georgia, as in many American states, capital trials consist of two phases. The first is the ‘guilt phase’, when the jurors have to decide guilt or innocence; in the event of a guilty verdict, they will go on to the ‘sentencing phase’, when it becomes their responsibility to decide whether a murderer should live or die. Here Bowden’s attorney, Samuel Oates, begged the jury not to impose the death penalty, arguing that his client was of low intelligence and had a ‘weak mind’.

Pullen dismissed this suggestion, arguing that it had been cooked up ‘so someone can jump up and say, “Poor old Jerome, once about ten years ago his momma told somebody he ought to see a psychiatrist.” He is not a dumb man, not an unlearned man … He certainly knows right from wrong.’ In his view, Bowden was ‘a defendant beyond rehabilitation’, for whom death was the only possible sentence, because he had been sent to prison – for burglary – before. He held up a photograph of Stryker’s body. ‘How do you take a three-time loser who would take a blunt instrument and beat a harmless fifty-five-year-old woman’s head into that? You can look through the holes and see the brains.’

In the nineteenth century, slavery’s apologists had justified human bondage by equating black people with animals. Appealing to the jury to decree the death of a mentally retarded teenager, Pullen invoked this tradition: ‘This defendant has shown himself by his actions to be no better than a wild beast – life imprisonment is not enough. Why? Because he has killed. Because he has tasted blood.’ It would take courage for the jury to vote to have Bowden put to death, Pullen averred; much more courage than giving him a life sentence. But ‘it took more courage to build this great nation, and it will take more courage to preserve it, from this man and his like’.

Almost ten years later, in June 1986, Bowden had lost his every appeal, and his last chance lay with Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole. However, evidence had now emerged that Pullen had overstated Bowden’s mental capabilities. In fact he had an IQ of fifty-nine, and was well within the clinical parameters of mental retardation.

Bowden’s pending execution became a cause célèbre. The international music stars Joan Baez, Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed and Bryan Adams signed a petition to stop the killing, and sang at a protest concert in Atlanta. A flurry of last-minute legal petitions bought a few days’ stay of execution, but on 23 June the Pardons and Parole board decided that he had indeed, in Pullen’s phrase, ‘known the difference from right and wrong’ at the time of Kay Stryker’s murder. The following morning, Bowden was led into the death chamber, his head and right leg shaved. The prison warden held out a microphone to carry his last words to an audience of lawyers, reporters and officials.

‘I am Jerome Bowden and I would like to say my execution is about to be carried out,’ he said. ‘I would like to thank the people of this institution. I hope that by my execution being carried out it will bring some light to this thing that is wrong.’ His meaning was ambiguous, but most observers thought he was referring to his own electrocution. Then he sat down in the electric chair. There was a short delay when the strap attaching a leather blind to hide his face from the audience snapped, and had to be replaced. But when the executioner threw the switch, the chair functioned smoothly. Eighteen months after Bowden’s death, the Georgia legislature passed a new statute barring state juries from sentencing the mentally retarded to death.

Pullen told me he still slept easy over Bowden’s execution. ‘I never heard Jerome Bowden was retarded until Joan Baez had a concert in Atlanta and said he was retarded. Jerome Bowden was no rocket scientist, but he knew words like “investigation” and “detective” and was kind of articulate. On death row, they said he was a deep thinker in Bible class. He was fit to execute.’

When we left the restaurant, it was already late. The cicadas were out in force, their strange chorus loud enough to overcome the noise of the distant traffic. We strolled back towards Pullen’s car, the shadows of the historic district’s houses shifting under a blurry moon. Not far from the Government Center, Pullen stopped.

‘This is the site of the old courthouse. This is where they seized a little black boy and took him up to Wynnton, right by where the library is now. He wasn’t more than twelve or thirteen and they shot him thirty times. The son of the man who led that mob grew up to become a judge. Kind of interesting, isn’t it?’