I wheeled around and decked him. Then, like a crazed animal, I lit into the other guard. The provost marshal called for more help. It took six of them to subdue and pin me to the floor. His office was a wreck. When I finally quit struggling, he walked around his desk and stood over me, “That minister botched it! Now I’m going to baptize you!”
“Fuck you! Fuck all you good-soldierin muthafuckas! I didn’ ask to cum in this muthafucka! This ain’ my muthafuckin home like it is yours! Wudn’ for the Gotdam Army, you couldn’ make it! You’d starve to death, muthafucka!”
“Get him up and get him out of here! Take him and put his ass in the wet tank. We’ll see what that does for your soul!” They picked me up and carried me. When we got to the doorway, already spread-eagled, I braced my feet against either side of it and pushed back with all my might, causing all of us to fall backwards to the floor. The provost marshal was fit to be tied. “Get him the hell out of my office! Now!”
The guards dragged me to the back of the compound where the provost marshal stood unlocking the door to a metal shed. Inside was the “wet tank,” a four-by-four-by-six-foot steel cylinder made like a huge hot-water heater. It was a torture chamber replica used in commando training exercises to teach resistance and familiarize soldiers with enemy torture techniques in the event of capture. For unruly discipline problems such as myself, it was a torture treatment the Army inflicted on its own.
“Take off your clothes and throw them over here!” the provost marshal ordered. As I was undressing, he told a guard, “Go back to my office and get one of those folding chairs. Look in the bathroom and get that scrub brush and bring it out here too.”
The guard left in a trot. When he came back, “Give Private Sample that brush,” the provost marshal directed. After he handed it to me, the provost marshal told him, “I want you to sit in that chair next to this door. Any time you don’t hear him scrubbing in there with that brush, use your rifle butt and bang on the door. Don’t want him to get too much sleep,” he wisecracked. Unlocking the cylinder door, “Get in there!” he yelled and shoved me inside.
All I got to see before the steel door slammed shut was the drain hole in the center of the round steel floor. It wasn’t soundproof, but I barely heard the provost marshal tell somebody, “Okay.” In a matter of seconds water gushed up through the drain. I heard somebody climbing on the metal ladder attached to the cylinder. The submarine-type lid opened at the top and the provost marshal poked his head inside. As the water eased up over my feet, “How do you like that?!”
Looking up at him, “Fuck you in yo ass!”
“You better get used to standing on your toes because the water’s going to keep rising until I see you bobbing up and down,” he shouted as he watched the water filling the cylinder. At the rate it was coming in, soon it was up to my neck. When it was a little above my nose he yelled, “Shut it off!” leaving only enough space from the lid to barely keep my nose above water.
“Start using that brush, NOW!” and he elslammed the lid. While bobbing on tiptoes, the last thing I saw was the scrub brush float past my eyes. With only a two-bit size hole in the bolted-down lid as a meager air supply, this was a stand-up coffin, black inside and suffocating.
The force of the lid crashing down jarred the cylinder, causing the water to splash wildly. I knew I was going to drown. With my mouth clamped shut, I poked my finger into the air hole to steady myself and used my other hand to still the water’s motion. The guard outside the door didn’t hear me scrubbing, hit the door with his rifle butt and the water splashed again. This was the scariest shit I’d ever been in, even scarier than that time I was hanging onto a freight train and had to let go. All I could do was bob, spit back water, curse the provost marshal, and scrub that fucking wall.
Every evening after dark they drained the cylinder and I was fed. The provost marshal saw to it that the cylinder was refilled to the same height as before. I didn’t even want to fart a bubble and cause a ripple. I had to sleep, that’s all there was to it. On tiptoes, I raised my nose as close to the air hole as I could get it and used my finger to hold on. I tried to sleep, but each time I dozed and lowered my head, my nose touched the water and jolted me awake. The guard would hit my finger with his rifle butt, and I’d quickly pull it inside.
Orders were not to talk to me, period. I lost all track of time. My eyelids felt like they weighed a hundred pounds apiece, and that cocksucker sitting outside the door wouldn’t let me close them. He banged on the door, making the water slosh around, and nearly drown me whenever he didn’t hear the scrubbing.
To hell with this! I grabbed my nose with one hand and the brush with the other, then sank to the bottom. I put the brush under my foot and rose back to the top, gasping for air. Bobbing on tiptoes as easily as I could and dragging the brush under my foot, I braced myself against the wall and scrubbed the floor. Foot going without disturbing the water too much, I got a nod or two as I floated suspended, hands stilling the water, until my head got heavy and took a nose dive.
The water began to recede. Somebody was unscrewing the lid on the sewage fruit jar. I could barely see the hands reaching in to pull me out. Two guards marched me to the shower area. After showering, I was issued clean fatigues and ushered to the provost marshal’s office. “How’d you like it in the wet tank, Private Sample? Think you’re cooled off enough?” he asked, then took a long suck on his pipe. After getting no response, “Guard!”
The guard entered immediately, “Yes, sir!”
“Take Private Sample and put him back in the compound.”
“Yes, sir!” Motioning at me with his carbine, “Let’s go!”
The cells were open and empty because the work details were still out. I stripped naked and let the sun warm my wrinkled body. Lying on my bunk half-asleep, I heard the front gate open and the prisoners coming in. That’s when I knew it was about five thirty. As soon as Vasquez entered he smiled at me and said, “Say man, you made it back,” flopping on his bunk. “Gettin baptized twice in a row, you sure oughta be saved,” he quipped. “I told you about playin around with the Headman, didn’t I?”
“I don’t wanna hear that shit,” I replied while putting on my fatigues.
“I thought they drowned you, man.”
“They damn near did. Whut day is it?”
“Wednesday, you wuz in there ten days.”
Stockade stay over, I was back with my company. With one Summary and two Special Court Martials under my belt, two and a half years later I had 150 days “bad time” (lost time in the stockade) to make up before I could get discharged. But, with a lot of help from Top when the time came, I managed to somehow slide out of there with a good discharge.
In 1952, not quite six months after being discharged, I was standing before a judge, “I sentence you, Albert Sample, to two years in the State Pen” for burglary …
Chapter 9
inside the inferno
… and violated parole.
I was sent back to serve the six months remaining on the two years. In 1956 I was sentenced to twenty years for robbery to run concurrent with the thirty I got for robbery by assault. My mind was racing as the transfer truck, “Black Betty,” slowly backed inside the gates of Retrieve, one of the twelve prison units comprising the Texas Prison System.
This was it, “the burnin hell,” the place that “gits yo heart right” I heard so much about when I served time at the Clemens Unit. Retrieve, formerly an all-white prison unit, had been repopulated a few years previously with the worst, most incorrigible black cons that were in the prison system. Most were multi-recidivists serving heavy-duty sentences. That measly two years I pulled on Clemens was just a drop in the bucket compared to this new thirty year package I was breaking the seal on in this plantation prison hulled out of the cotton-growing farmland fifty miles south of Houston.
While unloading off the back of the black van, I looked up and saw the numbers inscribed above the redbrick archway. 1934 leaped out at me. This
widow maker was born during the Depression just like me. What a coincidence, I thought, that was the same year I got “busted” for the first time when Emma went to jail for bootlegging. Going to jail was fun and games back then, but as I stepped into this bastard world of the prison system, I knew growing up with Emma and the time I served on Clemens were just boot camp for what I was facing now.
Inside the building, there were four separate “tanks” on the lower level and one on the upper level across from the inside picket post. It was late morning and the field hands were still outside working. The tanks were empty, except for the building tenders.
The guard who brought the six of us in hollered up to the inside picket guard, “Boss, open up them Number 3 and 2 tanks. Put half uv these nigguhs in each one uv ‘em.”
I looked up and saw the soles of the guard’s shoes as he walked around in the metal-caged picket overhead. He threw the levers opening the tank doors, “Awright, you first three nigguhs,” pointing us out, “git in that Number 3 tank. Rest uv you git across the hall in Number 2.” After we were inside the Number 3 tank, the picket guard hollered, “Got three new uns comin in Ol’ Bull!”
As the broad-shouldered building tender walked toward the front of the tank, the long piece of chain hanging from his belt rattled noticeably. “Got ‘em, Boss,” Bull hollered while the door was clicking shut. He told us our bunk and locker numbers, what time we’d be fed, and when the lights went out. Then he laid down the tank “laws,” “Ain’ gon be no loud talk an no two nigguhs settin on no one bunk. Don’t nobody git offa yo bunk at nite afta count time til you holler alley boss, an gits a OK.”
When he said that “alley boss” part, it reminded me of the time I was five and had a bad cold. Emma carefully measured out two spoonfuls of castor oil into a cup with a little squeezed orange juice. As I was putting the cup up to my mouth, I pleaded with her not to make me take it. Just the smell was making me nauseous. She told me I’d better drink it and forget about the smell.
I turned the cup up and swallowed it, but it wouldn’t stay down. I immediately vomited all over the kitchen floor. She grabbed me by my hair and pressed the butcher knife she used to half the orange against my throat. She held it so tight it cut the skin.
“Pick up that bottle an drank ever bit uv it an you bet not waste a drop. If you utter, I’ll pull yo Gotdam peckerwood head off!” I gulped down the rest of it. She ordered me to get on my cot and “stay there.”
In a very short time I needed to go to the outhouse. Since I wasn’t supposed to get up, I hollered into the kitchen, “Emma, kin I go outside to do-do, please mam?” My life hadn’t changed much. Here I was having to get permission to take a shit again.
I tuned back in to hear Bull saying, “When dey rangs dat bell, be ready ta git y’all’s asses outta dis tank.”
Despite my color and size, he didn’t hassle me. With that acquired jailhouse look recognized in any prison that says “don’t fuck with me,” I entered Number 3 tank to spend the next thirty years. Bull knew if he started some shit, one of us would die; he saw it in my eyes. I didn’t care how big the motherfucker was. When he fell, somebody else had to tote him. I had been in tanks with sharks before and I knew how to swim among them and not get bit.
The tank had three double deck rows of bunks with twenty bunks each, and one with twenty-five. Bars that ran from the floor to the ceiling separated Number 3 tank from the one adjacent to it, Number 4. At the front of the tank was an old-fashioned barber chair with silver painted lockers lining the front wall. In the back were a six-sprinkler shower stall, a urinal, and a long, eight-faucet face basin which doubled as the tank’s drinking fountain. Instead of a mirror an elongated piece of stainless steel hung above it. And a row of eight doorless commodes (with those old-timey wooden seats regulating the flushing) faced the front of the tank.
About thirty minutes later, the field workers came in for lunch. They were wet and muddy. Our clean, white clothes tattletaled we were new arrivals. Some made snide remarks as they rushed for the back to wash up, “Y’all won’t be so priddy an white afta dat bell rangs.”
Within a few minutes, the picket guard pulled the tank door levers and Bull hollered, “Les go eat!”
The Number 3 and 4 tank (eastside) cons single filed into the messhall along with the cons from the westside tanks (Number 1 and 2). I quickly scanned the messhall hoping to see someone I knew, but didn’t. After passing the steam tables, we sat eight cons to a table. While we ate, the building tenders slowly walked up and down the aisles—overseeing. No talking allowed, and fifteen minutes to eat.
When the messhall emptied and we returned to the tanks, the picket guard hollered down, “All you ol’ new nigguhs, cum on up to the front,” as he opened the Number 2 and 3 tank doors. The six of us stepped out into the area underneath the inside picket. The captain who was waiting there ordered us to line up against the wall. He sized us up and I knew my light complexion made me stand out like a sore thumb against the blackdrop of the other five.
He told the first two men who were both bigger than me, “Ketch that Number 3 hoe, an you ketch that Number 5.” I learned on Clemens that the higher the squad number, the better off you were. Judging my size against theirs, I figured I’d probably be put in Number 7 or 6 at least. I was in Number 12 utility squad on Clemens mending fences and putting in culverts, and had never done field work.
I was next, “You ain’t all that big,” he said stepping in front of me, “but you wuz big enuff to rob them folks. Got you sum big time this time, didn’ you?”
“Yes suh.”
“Well, I’m gonna put yore yaller ass whar you kin start doin sum uv it. You ever been baptized, nigguh?”
“No suh,” I lied.
“Welcome to the burnin hell. You fixin to git baptized in fire. When that Number 1 hoe cums out, you ketch it.”
Back on the tank one of the cons said, “Man, Cap’n Smooth put you in a bad muthafucka! All them nigguhs is wild. An the lead row nigguh they got, Ol’ Road Runner, runs wide open all day long. An Boss Deadeye is a sho nuff number one driver. You betta be ready to hit th’ door runnin!”
Another added, “Boss Deadeye gon have a field day wit that lil’ ol’ nigguh.”
The turnout bell sounded. I tensed, knowing in a few seconds I’d be off and running into a brand new world.
“Lemme have ‘em, Boss,” shouted Cap’n Smooth, who stood at the back door.
“Number 1!” the inside picket boss hollered down, opening all of the lower tank doors.
The Number 1 hoe squad cons from all four tanks ran at full speed down the hall like a herd of buffalos. Cap’n Smooth counted us as we fled out the back door into the winter chill. Bosses on horseback were waiting (eight of them), all with their shotguns and their pistols, sitting there looking like death. “Got twenty-seven uv ‘em, Boss,” Cap’n Smooth hollered.
The boss with the patch over his eye rode up behind us and answered loudly, “Thas right! Ol’ Road Runner, y’all git sum grubbin hoes an shovels.”
By the time we got to the hoe rack, I was out of breath. I reached for a hoe and a con snatched it away from me, “Thas mine, man!”
I reached for another and a different con grabbed it, “Gimme dat, man!”
When I got the same “Thas mine” bullshit on my next grab, “Man, fuck you!” I hollered. “These things b’long to the Gotdam state!” I ended up with a broken shovel with half a handle and half the blade missing.
As we left the hoe rack running behind Road Runner, Boss Deadeye rode at our heels, yelling, “Gitcha Gotdam asses offa this yard an on that turnrow [narrow roads that separate the acres in the field]. Go ‘Head!”
It didn’t take much to figure out why they called the lead row man “Ol’ Road Runner.” He was tall, skinny, and extremely long legged. He walked so fast the rest of us ran and trotted to keep up with him. His long “drag step” with his feet never leaving the ground made him look like he was walking on a pair of skis.
Boss Deadeye stopped his horse and started yelling, “You nigguhs ketch in heah an start diggin up them tree stumps. Git ever bit uv them roots outta thar.” I began shoveling dirt like a salamander around one of the huge stumps. Even with one eye, Boss Deadeye quickly spotted my shovel-handling ineptitude. “Ol’ new nigguh, cum heah!”
I stopped digging and dropped my shovel. I walked to within ten feet of where he sat astride his horse, and pulled off my flop-down hat. EVERYBODY knew this “rule.” I learned that much on Clemens.
“Whut’re you doin out heah ‘thout sump’n to wek wit?”
“Thas all—”
”Shet yore Gotdam mouth! Aw, I know you thank you good as a white man. Yore kinda nigguhs don’t aim to do much wek. Ain’ use to it lak them black uns is. Whar you cum frum nigguh?”
“I’m frum Longview, Boss.”
His next question, “Whut color is yore ol’ mammy?”
Before I knew it, I told him she was white and my daddy was a colored man. I saw it in his one eye, he didn’t like my answer worth a damn. Angered, he spat tobacco juice at me but missed.
“You know whut nigguh? You ‘mind me uv a big pile uv yaller shit.” Some of the cons in the squad started snickering. “Frum now on, I’m gonna call you Ol’ Shit-Colored Nigguh. When I call you that, you betta answer me.” Leaning forward in his saddle, “Do you unnerstand that nigguh?”
“Yes suh, Boss, but that ain’ my name.” A hush fell over the squad.
“Why you Gotdam impudent, shit-colored mawdicker!” He spurred his horse and tried repeatedly to hit me with the knotted end of the big rope tied to the horn of his saddle. Avoiding him and his horse, we went around and around. Finally, he gave up. Thoroughly aggravated, “Gitcha Gotdam ass back over yonder an git ta wek!”
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