From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  But my favorite psycho seminar of all involved the theory, somewhat popular at the time of Junior Cummings’s case, which theorized that your body shape determined your personality. There were said to be three basic types, with various possible combinations of the three: the mesomorph, the large-boned, heavily muscled athletic type with caveman characteristics who tended toward fat around the middle with age; then there was the ectomorph, a small-boned, lean type with a large head and large eyes who was intellectual, quick, and agile and often lived a long life; and the endomorph, a soft, round easygoing person who tended to like dessert and lack ambition.

  According to one letter-writer supporting Cummings’s plea for probation, Junior was a complex person. Although his career as a gun-toting lawman suggested a mesomorph, he also had a concealed ectomorphic side reflected in his desire to restore order in the officer’s attempts to subdue the inmate. But it was “obviously” the endomorphic side of Junior that was key to his personality and the most important element for the judge to consider in sentencing him. Junior’s soft, easygoing body type predisposed him to seek the easy way out of situations. He was simply acting out his primordial urges, in combination, and in no way intended to hurt anyone. His love of eating, and even more so his love for feeding others, showed his endomorphic concerns predominated in his personality structure.

  How all that entitled him to probation I couldn’t figure, but after Judge Keady’s crack about our barbershop quartet, I couldn’t wait to hear his comments on how the defendant’s endomorphic obsession with providing exquisite cuisine influenced his shooting a fat karate expert in the gut. Unfortunately, Judge Keady was very focused that day and ignored both subjects entirely. After a brief nod to his prior record of service, the judge said his conduct could not be tolerated and sentenced Junior Cummings to six months in federal prison. The fine folks in Marshall County had a going-away fish fry for Junior, where he insisted on doing the cooking himself. He even asked them to invite us, saying, “Those Oxford guys were just doing their job, and I’ll be back soon anyway.” Rather than turning him down, we asked the sheriff not to invite us and avoided any snub. When Junior was released a month early for good behavior, they held a big “Welcome Home Junior” parade for him in Holly Springs. Junior cooked the fish. We still didn’t attend.

  Getting the Blues on Parchman Farm12

  For over a century, Mississippi had only one prison, a giant sixteen-thousand-acre cotton plantation in Sunflower County known as Parch-man Farm after its previous owner. Everyone given a prison sentence in state court went there to serve it. Elvis Presley’s father, Vernon, did several months there for changing the amount on a $4.00 check from his employer for the sale of a hog. Freedom riders, civil rights protesters, and juveniles once joined hard-core killers and rapists on prison work gangs. For many years, convicts raised and cooked their own food. For most of its history, Parchman was totally segregated into black and white camps, with separate camps for women. Over the years it developed a reputation as probably the toughest prison in the nation. As in the classic song “The Midnight Special,” desperate inmates believed that if the rotating headlight from the midnight train from Chicago, the famed City of New Orleans, shone on an inmate, he would be released. The Illinois Central tracks ran right beside Parchman, as did the famed blues Highway 61, which also famously “ran right by my baby’s door.” Parchman is the classic heart of the Delta. To me the most enduring description of the Delta came from writer Willie Morris of Yazoo City:

  I recall the countless visitors I have taken through the Delta over the years. . . to the person, they were all struck by its brooding sadness, its physical power. . . To me the Delta is the Old Testament in its ageless rhythms and despairs—in the violence of its extremes, the excesses of its elements, the tension of its memory. The few who own this richest land in the world are among the wealthiest people in America, and the black laborers among the poorest. This land was in the words of one nineteenth-century traveler, “a jungle equal to any in Africa,” a dark impenetrable forest of towering trees and thick undergrowth, [full of] panthers, bears, alligators, giant mosquitoes and spiders and blue-backed scorpions, rattlesnakes and cottonmouths.

  Historian James Cobb calls it “the most Southern place on earth.” Novelist Richard Ford calls it “the South’s South.”13

  A good way to get a feel for what the Delta’s Parchman Prison was like when I first visited it in the 1960s is to watch the movie Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman as Luke. The actor who played the warden gave a very accurate picture of the prison atmosphere when he said with rich irony, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Parchman was just like that but on a much larger scale.

  While I worked at Legal Services, an inmate named Nazareth Gates sued the warden over the segregated and brutal conditions at the prison. When I clerked for Judge Keady in 1969, the Parchman case was already in full-throated litigation before him. Since it was essentially an equity case, with no jury, where the inmates sought not money but injunctions forbidding mistreatment, the judge had to make findings of fact, so he had me sit in and take notes on all the testimony. Another good way to get facts was to visit the place in person, which in law is called a view. We went to Parchman many times for views, visiting every camp from the intake building to death row. We ate what the inmates ate, watched guards on horseback direct their work in the fields, even saw a big sign on a door inside the black women’s camp saying how many lashes with a black leather belt a woman would get for a particular infraction. By the time we got there they said the “strap” or “Black Annie” was no longer used on women, but they kept the threat of it posted.

  We often had Sunday dinner with the warden and on other days ate at the canteen with the guards and trusties. I’m always amused when reporters spell the word “trustees” as if those inmates were some sort of board of distinguished citizens. As former governor Ross Barnett once famously said of one trusty who ran away while on release: “If you can’t trust a trusty, who can you trust?”

  The food was rich and southern and today would be called soul food because it was cooked almost exclusively by black women convicts who really knew how. Most of the cooks I talked to were in Parchman for having killed their “man,” usually a cheating husband or boyfriend. The white women’s camp seemed to be devoted mostly to sewing and was, in my experience, rather frilly and even cozy with curtains at the windows and little sense of the violence portrayed in kinky modern TV shows about “Women in Prison.” Most of the women back then seemed to have been convicted for helping their men commit some fairly serious crime in which their role was secondary. I felt at the time that they were the people who least needed to be there. Nowadays the women there are much rougher and seem more deserving of their status as inmates.

  Parchman had many unusual features, both real and imagined. It also had its own unique jargon. A “gunman” was not someone who carried a gun but the opposite, someone under the gun, that is an ordinary inmate. A trusty was called a “leg” because trusties had white stripes down the legs of their blue jeans. A “half leg” was a half trusty. One story that everyone believed was that a trusty guard could win parole, possibly even freedom, if he killed another inmate who was trying to escape. The rumor was that this unwritten rule resulted in many unfair revenge killings, but it certainly deterred escape attempts like those in “Cool Hand Luke.” Escape itself was nearly impossible since the brick, inmate-built blockhouses or camps were located deep within the prison grounds, which were surrounded by thousands of acres of flat cotton fields and swamps where you could be seen for miles and tracked by bloodhounds no matter which way you ran. Legend had it no one had ever escaped from Parchman for more than a few hours, which may well have been true.

  Another unwritten rule was that anyone who tried to escape would be punished on the spot by having the living hell beaten out of him, the degree of the beating depending on the trouble it took to catch him and the whims of the guards administering the
beating. The image of sadistic prison guards is a familiar one to most Americans, but when you get familiar with Parchman you realize it stands out for violence as much as Alcatraz or Attica. One legend inmates told me was that a guard over one camp followed a regular practice of having a dozen or so of his better inmates strip stark naked and stand in a row, then told them that the first one to get a full erection would get a weekend furlough. Many supposedly developed special fantasies just for those occasions.

  Parchman was also allegedly the first prison in America to allow conjugal visits for prisoners and had special little one-room shacks furnished with only a mattress on the floor so they could have sex with their “wives.” The practice was subject to much abuse and encouraged inmates to bribe guards with whatever they had to sleep with whatever woman they could persuade to come visit them. Women inmates were not given the same privilege. The conjugal visits allegedly started during segregation, it being believed then that black males were oversexed and were more manageable if given the hope of at least occasional sex. The white inmates complained long and loud about this practice and eventually gained equal treatment and access to their “wives.”

  There were other “good” sides to life at Parchman. Annual rodeos were highly popular, as were other regular forms of sport like basketball. But Parchman’s best talent was musical. Some of Mississippi’s best and least-known bluesmen and country singers went through Parchman but were largely unknown outside. Like everything else there, the bands were segregated by race with black bands and white bands, both of which were in big demand for “off-campus” concerts, which were rarely granted, but with Judge Keady we had the chance to hear some really talented inmate performers of both races.

  Corruption and brutality were probably no worse at Parchman than at other prisons like Angola in Louisiana or Cummins in Arkansas. While a student attorney with CRLA (California Rural Legal Assistance) in the summer of 1967, I once represented an inmate at San Quentin. For my money I’d rather have served my time in Parchman than San Quentin as far as safety was concerned. Of course people say California trends become our trends twenty years later, and certainly Parchman is far more violent now and its criminals far worse people than were their parents’ generation. Interested readers can get a full picture of life on Parchman Farm from Judge Keady’s several published opinions about it as well as from his unusual little book All Rise: Memoirs of a Mississippi Federal Judge.

  My own experience of Parchman was deepened when FBI agent Mike Beaver called me one day to report that an inmate had allegedly been beaten almost to death by a group of guards in the presence of both the warden and deputy warden. The inmate, Larry Floyd, the son of two Hattiesburg police officers, had been convicted ten years earlier, at age eighteen, of being an accomplice in a store robbery where the store owner was shot to death. His personal papers said he received two sentences, each for ten years, to be served concurrently, or “cc,” meaning only ten years in all. Everyone agreed that Floyd, a skinny 6’, 5” black kid, had been a model inmate. Not strong, he had submitted to the inmate code of violence and become effeminate, appearing homosexual. His job was a trusted one handling the money at a prison camp store or canteen where inmates could buy cigarettes and snacks and cold drinks, which were much in demand in the one-hundred-degree heat of Parchman.

  One day after he’d served nearly all his ten years, Floyd got a message to go to the office of Christine Houston, the lady who handled the paperwork for inmate releases. Mrs. Houston, with whom I had many dealings over many years, was to me the soul of Parchman. Hard as nails on the outside to bad guys and bullies, she was polite to everyone and always totally cooperative with me, bending over backward to get us the paperwork we needed, usually certified copies of convictions and prison records for use either for federal sentencing or to prove our defendants were convicted felons for whom it was a federal crime to possess a firearm. Mrs. Houston was compassionate with good inmates who followed the rules and with those she believed could be salvaged as human beings and make it on the outside.

  When Larry Floyd arrived at Mrs. Houston’s office that morning, she congratulated him on his imminent release. She was sure his excellent conduct would get him paroled. One can only imagine how excited Larry Floyd was. To their horror, however, when she opened his file to look at the judge’s actual sentencing order, she saw that Larry’s two ten-year sentences were not concurrent or “cc,” to be served side-by-side for just ten years, but were consecutive or “stacked,” as inmates called it. Larry Floyd thus still had a second ten years to serve. Christine Houston cried along with Floyd when she told him.

  Late that night the old broken-down car of a female prison guard left the farm. The male guard on duty was tired and indifferent and did not search the car as he should have, noting in his log only that the trunk lid bounced up and down, which should have caused a search, but the guard didn’t bother. Equally suspicious was the “female” driver, who wore lots of bright red lipstick and had a big, bushy Afro (actually a wig) the guard thought looked funny. In his log he noted drily that the driver was “the ugliest woman I ever saw.” It was Larry Floyd.

  It later came to light that Larry Floyd, despite his appearance, still liked women and was having sex with the female guard who lent him her car keys for the escape. Surprised he made it out the gate, and expecting a quick pursuit, Larry Floyd drove as fast as he could in the midnight darkness along the curving gravel roads leading away from Parchman. He had not driven a car in nearly ten years and within two miles missed a sharp curve and flipped the car over several times. Although bleeding both from the wreck and from cutting himself using a blanket to crawl over a razor-wire fence to get to the car, Floyd was able to walk away from the wreck.

  Knowing the guards would learn first thing in the morning that he was gone and would be out with horses and hounds looking for him, Floyd ran for hours in the cold, swam the narrow Sunflower River back and forth several times to throw off the dogs, and just before sunrise took shelter in an abandoned tenant shack which was in the process of being torn down. He hid under a pile of old boards, but it did not take the dogs long to find him.

  Unfortunately for Floyd, his sudden decision to escape could not have come at a worse time. A committee of the state senate was visiting the prison that very morning to check on security conditions, and a rare escape was the last thing the wardens and guards needed. It was also the first day of dove hunting season, and they had planned to take the senators hunting later in the day. The pressure was thus great to capture Larry and to make an example of him. When the dogs had tracked Larry to his hiding place, the officers dragged him out, and in the presence of both the warden and deputy warden, began to kick and beat him fairly severely—in the usual way. After several minutes a voice, whom no witness ever agreed to identify, said, “That’s enough.” Floyd was handcuffed behind and thrown in the bed of a pickup on top of a roll of barbed wire. As he lay on the wire, one guard walked up to him and smashed him in the face with his walkie-talkie, gashing his lip and eye. Not to be outdone, a veteran supervising guard, Captain Terry Lynn Winters, pulled out his .357 Magnum revolver and slammed it into the back of Floyd’s head, apparently with the metal sight at the end of the barrel hitting bone on the back of Floyd’s head. The officers then drove Floyd back to Parchman with several riding on the back of the pickup. Halfway there, one officer told the driver, Col. Fred Childs, to stop, saying that Floyd was “spurting blood” from a gash on the back of his head. After briefly considering dropping him at the scene of the wreck to bleed to death, cooler heads among the guards prevailed and they drove Floyd to the prison hospital.

  The prison doctor, John Dial, sewed up the gashes on Floyd’s head and face and photographed the cuts covering his body. The officers told Dial he’d hurt himself wrecking the lady guard’s car without a seat belt. This much of the story had come to FBI agent Mike Beaver who got it directly from a mysterious, secretive source inside the prison. At first we thought the CI mig
ht be an outraged officer, but soon learned it was an inmate who wanted us to move him to a safe jail and give him a sentence reduction in return for his information and testimony.

  His written messages were literate and anonymous and it took us weeks to identify him. Finally Mike Beaver pieced together enough clues to figure out that our mysterious CI was none other than an inmate trusty working at the firehouse, with access both to a computer and to the best and most reliable prison gossip. His name was Bill, a former private detective who was in Parchman for killing, in a fit of rage, former veteran defense attorney Billy Jordan of Columbus. Jordan, an old and friendly former adversary of ours had been shot down dead by a shotgun blast in his own driveway after a dispute over a fee.

  With these facts in hand, Mike and I contacted the Civil Rights Division in Washington. Until then we’d always had very positive experiences with them, contrary to what several other U.S. Attorney’s Offices had said regarding ambitious, inexperienced “hairy-legged female militants out to get every police officer around.” I’d had just the opposite experience, getting only highly competent professionals with lots of experience and good judgment and good supervision. Mississippi was, after all, considered the most challenging territory in the country for civil rights prosecutors, and they’d never sent us a rookie. Later that would change.