The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

Soon, however, my status changed. Lucky for me, my jailers thought that the height of punishment would be to assign me to an all-black chain gang. “If he wants integration so bad, he’ll get integration all right. That son-of-a-bitch will have to work his time and his ass off on a nigger road gang.” When I heard this I felt like Br’er Rabbit: “Please, Mr. White Man, don’t make me face the humiliation of riding around this town and county on the back of a state truck on an all-Negro chain gang.”

  The only whites on my gang were me and the captain. The black prisoners welcomed me like a lost brother. They told me quietly that they had been instructed not to say a word to me but we found ways to communicate. The best thing that happened was that word got out in the black community that I was on the road gang. The movement people found a way to get advance information of where we would be working on a particular day and they would come by and wave, lifting my morale and that of the black prisoners. Suddenly our bunch was the most popular chain gang in Georgia history. Each car that came by would surreptitiously drop goodies for us—candy, toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, cotton handkerchiefs and bandanas, all highly prized items for men doing hard time on the gang. Smiling black faces would give us the thumbs-up after dropping our favorite cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and snuff. Soon our black gang had so much stuff that I started sneaking some of it back to the white cell block where I was still housed. That’s when I became a VIP in our little white hovel. The white guys started placing orders, “Can you get me a plug of Old Pork Twist chewing tobacco, I ain’t had none of that since I been in this hole, fourteen years. . . If you cain’t, try to get me some Black Maria plug. If you can do that then I can die happy.”

  Even my “Cap’n” loosened up eventually. One day my black gang was loading red dirt on a big dump truck way out in the middle of a field. The truck’s sides were so high that we were exhausted trying to throw the red clay high enough so that at least some of it would wind up in the truck. The wind was high along toward the end of March, and suddenly a skyscraper of a thunder cloud loomed up out of what had seemed like a blue sky. Before we could move, lightning was popping all around us. Knowing something about lightning in the middle of a huge field, we and the captain realized at the same time that we were in big trouble, us and the truck being the highest things for miles around. The first thing Cap’n did was lower his shotgun from its customary place sticking in the air over his slumped shoulder. He looked once at the truck, then shook his head as he turned and started trotting toward the highway across the open field. I looked ahead in the direction he was running and could barely make out the low profile of a lone cinder block building way over on the highway. I remembered passing it before, a flyblown redneck tavern. We looked at each other, dropped our shovels, and jogged off after the fat white man running with his head down and a death grip on the twelve-gauge shotgun in his right fist.

  We overtook the captain in short order and the younger black men of the gang strung out in a long file running for the protection of the building. I let my pace keep me at the back of the pack, closest to the guard, who was, by this time, thoroughly winded and wheezing loudly. He was not in work shape like us. As we neared the building I saw my black fellow prisoners disappear through a back door clearly marked, “colored.” It was raining in sheets now. Rain, thunder, and the lightning made it difficult for me to think. I wondered if I was supposed to follow the crew into the Negro section, or wait and see if the captain wanted me to go up front with the rest of the white people. I looked back to see if he would give me any indication of what he wanted me to do, but it was clear that he was still too far away to appreciate my delicate dilemma of Southern etiquette. So I said to myself, “They are the ones that put me here, so let them figure it out.” I ducked into the back with the rest of the Negroes.

  The moment I entered, I decided to play a trick on the captain. Sticking my head through the opening in the wall I said, very matter of factly, “Two six packs of Bud, please.” Without blinking the bartender hoisted two six packs up to the window, just as the captain puffed through the front door. “Zellner,” he bellowed, “get your ass out of that window and come up here with your own kind.” To the black prisoners he said, “Don’t y’all touch them beers.” When I reached the front of the road house, he was muttering about losing his state job, “Niggers drinking beer on a god-damned chain gang.” The story had a happy ending, though. Grateful to be alive, and not lightning-struck, Cap’n relented and gave each prisoner a cold one.

  I was on the chain gang about a month before I bailed out.

  12

  Criminal Anarchy in Baton Rouge

  In February 1962, in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, I had my first experience with police torture, Southern American style. SNCC Chairman Chuck McDew and I had been at our trial in McComb, Mississippi, and decided to take a bus to New Orleans with a stop in Baton Rouge. Dion Diamond, one of our SNCC field workers had been arrested and imprisoned there during student demonstrations at Southern University. Dion had left Howard University, had organized in Virginia and Maryland, had been a freedom rider, and had been arrested while working with black students in Baton Rouge. We planned to visit him, talk about his bond, and then head for New Orleans.

  Both Chuck and I had good contacts and friends in the Big Easy. Oretha Castle and her sister were leaders of the movement (Oretha would later marry my friend Richard Haley, who worked for CORE and who proved to be so steady and strong on the William Moore march in 1963). Dave Dennis, who in 1964 would organize for CORE in Mississippi, was from Louisiana and worked in New Orleans. He would make the impassioned speech at James Chaney’s funeral in Meridian following the murders that summer of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia. Tom Dent, the son of the Dillard University president, was one of our supporters and later wrote a great book about his travels to movement hot spots.

  We never made it to see our friends and eat and party in New Orleans. When our wheezy old bus smoked into Baton Rouge, Chuck and I took in the early evening scene. Even though it was still February the street were warm and swarming with people. As the driver wheeled us through the Negro district of town, we could see revelers inside the various night spots beginning their Saturday evening—glad to have made it through another week. Student demonstrations had roiled the local black campus. Chuck and I wondered aloud if the police wouldn’t take out their frustrations on some black skulls tonight.

  “Naw,” Chuck did his best imitation of the local boys in uniform, “these cracker cops hope these black dudes will drink up their anger and be ready for work Monday morning back at Mister Charlie’s plantation house.”

  I asked McDew not to call them that, “I am a cracker, too,” I said.

  “Shut up, Nigger,” Chuck snapped, “here’s the station, watch yo’ ass now.”

  That ended the discussion of calling white people names. We tried to inconspicuously check our bags in a couple of lockers. We didn’t know how long we could visit Dion, and we would need them handy for the last leg of the trip to New Orleans.

  As we left the Baton Rouge bus station, McDew hailed the first black person we saw and asked directions to the Parish Prison. Pulling his hat down over his eyes, the man said softly, “What business you got down there, man—you don’t want to be nosing around that particular area.”

  Chuck explained that we were going to see a friend about his bail, got the directions, and we set out. Along the way we talked about the fact that we didn’t have great news for Dion. We couldn’t raise his $7,000 bail, and he would have to sit tight until we did. We soon reached a stucco brick wall about twenty feet high, topped with sparkling concertina razor wire. The wall was washed in a searing white light. At the entrance to the prison, a small knot of police eyed us up and down while Chuck asked directions to the visiting area.

  “Ain’t no visitin’ area, boy. But you could ask the night duty officer over there,” one officer said pleasantly. Another offered,
“Turn left and go the end of the hall. He’s on the right down there.” Chuck thanked them, and as we headed down the hall I heard one of the cops say in a stage whisper, “What ever happened to ‘Sir’?”

  Now Chuck is a dark Negro and powerfully built—he was a star football player. So going down the hall I whispered a plea that he not let himself get provoked.

  The desk sergeant looked at us like we had descended from Mars, “You boys wants to visit who? If I ain’t mistaken that nigger is a stone trouble maker and besides, colored day is Thursday. Where y’all from anyway?”

  McDew introduced himself as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “Mr. Diamond works for us and I would like to discuss his bond.”

  The sergeant smiled an unfriendly smile, “And do you have the bond for Mister Diamond?”

  “No, I don’t. That’s what I need to talk to him about.”

  “Well, you can’t see him, I already explained that Colored day is Thursday and seeing as how tonight is Saturday, you ain’t going to see him.”

  While the desk man busied himself with papers I noticed the other policemen had moved from outside and were now slouching against the far wall taking everything in. Chuck asked if we could leave a message for Dion and would it be possible to leave him some supplies. The sergeant shoved a paper across the desk and said you can get these things but hurry up, this desk closes at nine o’clock.”

  We hurried to the nearest drug store where we got some paperbacks and toiletries. Walking back we saw a lot of patrol cars around the prison entrance and others with flashing lights converging from different streets.

  “What’s up?” Chuck wondered aloud. “I guess Saturday night in ol’ Baton Rouge must be heating up.” Thinking we’d soon be enjoying red beans and rice at Dookie Chase’s in New Orleans, we agreed that we felt especially sorry for Dion being locked up, facing unknown horrors.

  “We brought these back for Mr. Diamond—” Chuck had begun to say, when several cops the size of Green Bay linebackers descended upon us. One slung McDew into the brick wall and hissed in his face, “MISTER Diamond! Who you callin’ Mister, boy? You like Mister Diamond so much, you won’t mind going on in there with him and enjoying what he’s been enjoying.”

  They took McDew down the hall; I wouldn’t see him for about two weeks. Then they turned to me while the one holding me tried his best to break bones. “Put the cuffs on this nigger lover while I hold him real tight, you hear?” This was the beginning of a nightmare of brutality and torture. While they squeezed the cuffs on my wrist, cutting off all blood flow, I remembered our training and demanded to know what the charges were. Vagrancy, I was told. Knowing that pleading my case would mean nothing, I nonetheless mentioned, while being hustled down the corridor, that we had money and a bus ticket to New Orleans, and I wanted to make a phone call to my attorney.

  The no-neck cop who put the cuffs on so tight laughed and said to the other one, “We got ourselves a regular comedian here.”

  All Saturday night I was just one of the boys among the fifty or sixty inmates in the large cell block. When the bulls threw me into the lockup they had, mercifully, not said anything except here’s another vagrant. One of the guys commiserated with me. Looking at my crumpled suit and tie and my once-white shirt, he said in a midwest accent, “These local yokels will arrest anybody on the way through, charge them with vagrancy, and dare them to fight the charge. They know that nobody is going to appeal the eleven-day sentence. We just suck it up and remind ourselves to never, ever, darken the door of Baton Rouge again.”

  I liked the guy and the others in this small group. They didn’t seem to be Deep Southerners, or maybe they were a little higher class than the average robber or killer. I told them about getting off the bus and being arrested for vagrancy.

  A well-dressed man in a tweed jacket told me he had stopped to get a burger, walked to the edge of the street to check a route sign to be sure he was headed west on Highway 90 to Houston, and was grabbed by two cops, cuffed and brought to the lockup.

  When he protested that he had just left his car for a leg stretch and a burger, the officers said, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll send a wrecker for it. The storage, though, will cost you some money.”

  The well-dressed man said 90 percent of the people were in for vagrancy or loitering. “We have to stay eleven days while the sheriff spends twenty-five cents a day to feed us and pockets five dollars a day per man. Pretty good money.”

  They gave me some advice. “The heavy hitters here are housed in the back cells. They pretty much run things and we short-timers try to stay out of their way. Remember, don’t go back there; there’s no percentage in it.”

  As the newest man I was relegated to a smelly, stained, very thin and lumpy blue-tick mattress on the cold cement floor of the day room. Even so, being exhausted and emotionally wrung out, I slept soundly until a horrible battering woke me up. Two fat deputy jailers came down the prison corridor banging empty tin cups against the iron bars. Behind them in the bedlam trudged two black trustys pulling the food carts. Haggard, unshaven men emerged from the double row of cells behind the day room, lining up with their backs against the wall. In a high falsetto one of the jailers screamed, “Ain’t this your lucky day. Here’s your usual delicious breakfast soufflé—etouffé a la baloney, and,” he lingered over the word, “a special treat for you highly educated gentlemen, who can read, brand new hot-off-the-press newspapers!”

  He tossed in a stack as men began grabbing them. A buzz enveloped the day room as prisoners grabbed baloney sandwiches and lukewarm tin cups of coffee, staring at the fat Sunday paper. I could see the headline in World War II-sized type. Across the top of the front page were the words “CRIMINAL ANARCHY CHARGED.” Under it, the subhead read, “Two held attempting government overthrow.”

  The falsetto-voiced jailer, having given a moment for things to sink in, sang out, “Seems we have an important visitor amongst us. A sho-nuff dangerous commie,” glancing teasingly in my direction. “He’s a real criminal anarchist, whatever the hell that means, and something I do understand—a real live Yankee nigger lover. Read it and weep, gentlemen. I think you all know what to do, and welcome to it.”

  The jailers spun around together and clicked their heels before stomping off down the hall with the carts and the trustys in tow. I understood what was taking place and went quickly into survival mode, moving into the corner of the day room as far as possible from the back cells and closest to the disappearing cops. I was covered on two sides, and I would play it by ear to be as nonviolent as I could but to give up my life as dearly as possible. At the same time I was in need of seeing the whole article so I would know what the inmates were reacting to. I got some encouragement when the man from the night before, with a stricken face, quietly slid one of the papers over to my corner, whispering, “Better stay in that corner.”

  Before long a little dude with broken and badly blackened teeth sidled over and got in my face. Past martial arts training kicked in and I couldn’t resist shifting my weight slightly and backing one foot, hands hanging lightly by my sides. These shifts were not lost on the little street fighter and he actually backed up a half a step.

  Recall of what had happened in McComb slowly impinged on my consciousness—at least the detached feeling of observing things from a slight distance. I was calm but acutely aware of the struggle between my fighting history and the relatively new training in nonviolence. I wondered if Gandhi, King, and John Lewis expected us to be completely nonviolent even in prison.

  I had quickly read enough of the front page to know that my cellmates would be challenged to defend “the Southern way of life.” But as luck would have it, the hyperbole of the article might give me a degree of protection from the hoods, most of whom are cowards at heart. The indictment quoted in the paper said something like, “on or about the 19th day of February, 1962, SNCC members Charles McDew and John Robert
Zellner, did with force of arms attempt to overthrow the government of East Baton Rouge Parish, the State of Louisiana, and the United States of America.”

  My fellow inmates could be forgiven if they found themselves unable to decide if I was a pacifist or one tough dude—“force of arms,” and all that. I was soon surrounded by men demanding to know if I was the nigger-lover. I stood my ground in my corner, not having much choice. The little guy with the bad teeth, thinking he had mass support now did everything he could to get me to lift my hands. Not taking his bait, I survived the initial onslaught without being beaten.

  A couple of guys from our conversation the night before, which now seemed to be an age ago, brought another mattress to my corner. There, I held the mob at bay through the power of Zen. My tormentors often sat on the floor at a distance and described in vivid terms the castration that was in store for me if I so much as dozed in my corner. Displaying their cell-made shivs, the short guy shaved most of his arms and legs to show how sharp their weapons were.

  “This here,” he grinned, “will peel out yo’ nuts as slick as a whistle,” flourishing his blade in a quick circle. “Same as castrating a calf,” he chuckled.

  When I could no longer stay awake twenty-four hours a day, I began to allow myself to doze during the day so as to be wakeful at night, the most dangerous time. The inmate terrorists then, possibly with the advice of the jailers, began to douse me, in the face if they aimed well, with cold water. Sleep deprivation is an effective form of torture because the subject of the brutality, though showing no injuries, begins slowly to lose his mental faculties. The other method was to whack the bottoms of my feet with a broom handle that the jailer had conveniently left inside after the morning sweeping—in case I stretched out and dozed at the same time.

  Threats of castration, water torture, and sleep deprivation were the order of the days for me for about two weeks. Jim Dombrowski of SCEF in New Orleans found us a lawyer and I told him right away, “They’re not letting me sleep. I can’t take this for very long. I gotta get somewhere.”