Later, a con began to sing in the squad working next to ours. Another con urged him on, “Blow it outcha soul, nigguh.” As the singing grew louder, I realized the cons in the next squad were cutting trees and hitting their axes in rhythm with the song. I listened to them and kept on digging.
We dug stumps and we dug stumps until, “Dere it is, it’s in da air!” Cap’n Smooth, who sat on a horse up ahead, had raised his hat, signaling that the work day was over. We rushed to line up behind Road Runner for the long run back to the building. I was on the back row in the squad right under the nostrils of Deadeye’s horse. Each time he snorted, he blew cold slobber on my back. He nudged us with his big head to keep us all bunched up and in line. I soon learned that if a con lagged behind while working or walking, he would bite the shit out of him.
Boss Deadeye yelled, “You nigguhs betta git on to that house. Go ‘Head!” Road Runner laid his ears back and took off. He left us struggling to catch up as we trotted wearily behind him with the other seven squads behind us.
On the yard we stopped by the hoe rack to put away our tools, then took off again for the backgate. Boss Deadeye rode over to the outside picket and dismounted. He hung his pistol and shotgun on a hook tied to the end of a rope and the backgate picket boss pulled his weapons up into the picket. We stood at the backgate entrance behind Road Runner, eagerly awaiting the signal from Boss Deadeye to “go ‘head.”
Instead, he walked over to the side of the squad, evil eyed me and said, “Ol’ Shit-Colored Nigguh, cum heah.”
I didn’t move.
Cap’n Smooth came out of the small building beside the backgate. Deadeye walked toward him, “Cap’n, I got a ornery ol’ nigguh in my squad that laks to play deaf.” Then he yelled, “Ol’ new nigguh, git yore Gotdam ass over heah.”
I stepped out and the rest of my squad went through the backgate. Cap’n Smooth told me, “Stand over yonder,” pointing toward the other side of the backgate. I was the first con cut out that evening.
Waiting by the gate, I saw all the other squads. Each one stopped at the backgate and waited for the “go ‘head.” They rushed through, stopped midway in the yard, stripped, and were searched. By the time the last squad went through, five of us were standing outside the fence waiting.
After the backgate boss searched us and we had our clothes back on, Cap’n Smooth marched us into the building hallway. He yelled up to the inside picket boss, “Hand me down five pairs uv cuffs, Boss.”
My turn came. I didn’t drop my head and lower my eyes the way the others had done when he spoke to them, and he didn’t like that. “Put yore Gotdam arm down thar on that floor, nigguh.” I got on my knees and placed my right arm on the floor. He took my right wrist and clamped the cuff on tight, then stomped it on even tighter. He backed me up against the iron bars that separated the messhall from the inner hall. With one cuff clamped on my right wrist and my back against the bars, he looped the unclosed cuff through the bars above my head. Then he told me to fold my left arm above my head while he clamped on the other cuff. When he finished, I was left hanging with my toes barely touching the floor. “You swoled up nigguh, but I’m gonna unpuff you.”
After an hour or so, a couple of the cuff hangers started groaning. I bit my lip to keep from crying out too. I thought about what that lying boss told the captain, “All this nigguh’s dun all day long is look up in the sky an count birds. Cap’n, I had to beg this nigguh to git him to go ta wek.” The pains shot through my arms; I dug my teeth deeper into my bottom lip until I tasted the blood inside my mouth.
When the bell rang for supper, none of those who made it in would even look at us and kept their eyes straight ahead as they filed past to enter the messhall. As I smelled the food and listened to their spoons scraping the tin pans behind me, I thought about those big, thumbtack-size butter beans I passed over at lunch and wished I hadn’t.
After “count time,” nine o’clock, the lights were dimmed inside the tanks and the hours crept by. I sure had to piss, but the con hanging next to me told me, “We git to piss when they lets us down. If you piss in yo britches, thas anutha hour.”
“How long will they leave us hung up here?” I asked.
“They lets us down in time to eat an git ready to go to work.”
Along about hour six, one of the hangers began moaning louder and louder, violently jerking and pulling against his cuffs. He frantically wiggled and twisted his body around until he was facing the bars. Using his feet to push against them, he reared back, pitching, straining and pulling as hard as he could. Realizing he couldn’t get loose, he bit into his wrists as if they were two chocolate éclairs, gnawing away like a coon with its foot caught in a steel trap.
The blood-splattered con hanging next to him pulled as far away as he could, hollered and yelled for the picket boss. Looking down from his perch, the picket boss ordered the turnkey, “Run git a bucket an dash sum water on them two crazy nigguhs down on the end.” The dousing worked; he quit mutilating his wrists and contented himself to moaning and groaning out the night like the rest of us.
I was wide awake the whole time. Finally, the dim lights were turned back to bright. The picket boss handed down the cuff keys to the turnkey, who unlocked us from the bars. After the cuffs were removed, my arms dropped, my hands dangled limply, and my swollen wrists throbbed like a bad toothache.
The picket boss opened the door to my tank and I headed straight for the back to take a piss and get a drink. I barely sat on my bunk before one of the building tenders shouted, “Les go eat!” That walk to the messhall past the bars I had just hung on all night wasn’t fast enough for me. I didn’t want to look at that place of pain either. As I passed the steam table, I pointed to every food item on it.
Oh my God, here we go again, I said to myself when the turnout bell rang. “Lemme have ‘em, Boss.”
“Number 1!”
We tore down the hall. The last man out the door got kicked in the ass by Cap’n Smooth. “Got twenty-seven uv ‘em, Boss!”
“Thas right, Cap’n.” Then, “Go ‘Head! Git offa this Gotdam yard!”
We were low flying as we followed Road Runner down the turnrow. How could he possibly be in such a big hurry to get back to digging stumps? Every stride keeping up with him was torturous. When we reached the edge of the bottoms, it was like following a bloodhound. He headed straight through the woods to the same stumps we were digging around the day before.
We started working. The other cons in the squad shied away. They surmised that I was on the boss’s shit list after yesterday’s episode. I dug around a stump by myself and managed to dig it out. I knew I couldn’t just stand around, so I got in a hole with a crew and started digging. Nobody said a word as we dug and dug.
There was a slight drizzle when we left the building. Now, icy pellets dropped. Thirty minutes later, it was sleeting heavily and Cap’n Smooth knocked us off. When we got to the turnrow, Boss Deadeye made us take our brogans off so we wouldn’t “be a-wearin ‘em out in the mud.” We tied our shoelaces in a knot and hung the shoes around our necks.
The slick turnrows were like walking on wet glass. While we slid and half fell across the mud, that damned Road Runner with his barefooted ass was making two ski tracks straight down the middle of the turnrow. To stay on my feet, I walked in his tracks the way trucks follow trucks down a muddy road.
This time after the strip search, I made it back to the tank. Once inside the building, we tried to crowd through the tank door at the same time. The two on-duty building tenders yelled, “You nigguhs, throw dem muddy clothes on dese sheets,” which they had spread on the floor in the front of the tank. “Don’t y’all be slangin dat fuckin mud all ovah dis Gotdam flo!”
Freezing my balls off, all I wanted was to get to the shower. I had so much mud clogged between my toes, my feet looked like I was wearing a pair of grayish-black flippers. So far, coming in the building first was the only good thing about being in Number 1 hoe squad. After the shower, I h
urried to my bunk and put on the dry clothes the building tenders had placed on it. Picking up and delivering the field workers’ clothes from the laundry was one of their main duties.
The hard walking and shovel had my body aching all over. My palms and feet had blisters stacked on top of blisters. After I ate lunch, it was back to my bunk. For the first time since I arrived yesterday morning, I saw the full deck, all eighty-five of us together. I recognized the ten Number 1 hoe squad members in the tank, but saw no other familiar faces.
The tank was beginning to sound like the Cotton Club in Longview on Saturday night. Cons were laughing, bullshitting, grab-assing, and acting like they were having the time of their lives. None of them even looked tired, and I was near exhaustion. Hanging on the cuffs all night took it out of me. I heard some guys bragging about who was the fastest worker, and who had the toughest bosses. The field work and the bosses were the general topic of most of the conversations.
The tank activities got into full swing. Several radios, each on a different station, were blaring. Some cons were setting up cigarette rolling operations, some were getting out their cards and dominos. Dice shooting wasn’t allowed because “nigguhs git too loud shootin dice.” A few cons were diligently striking and blowing out wooden matches to glue together to make lamps and jewelry chests, leaving the air with a heavy smell of phosphor.
Everybody seemed to have an outlet. Some guys were reading the Bible, while others wrote. The con in the bunk across from mine was using a tin snuff can with holes punched in the top to sand and scrape the calluses on his feet. Three separate quartets were singing in the back near the commodes, and one con was sitting on the ledge above the commodes beating “bongos”—tin buckets.
Two or three card games were in progress on the back bottom bunks, out of the sight of the picket boss. They played for cigarettes and Bugler tobacco in lieu of money. I sure wanted to get in a game, but since I had no cigarettes to gamble with, I couldn’t.
I got in the shave line at the front of the tank. “Ol’ Crip,” the barber, was built like a question mark with a hump on his back. One leg was shorter than the other, causing him to limp and walk like the hunchback of Notre Dame. He shaved cons and squabbled incessantly when too many got on the waiting bench. He acted irritated with each “customer” who sat down in the barber chair, and swished his razor like Zorro. When a freshly shaved con got up out of that chair, he was both bloody and lucky. Nobody dared squawk with Crip while he held a razor so close.
My turn came. Reluctantly, I eased into the chair and lay motionless when he let it back, and said not a mumbling word while he ripped his dull razor across my face. After that, I knew I had to make preparations to get my own shaving gear, but quick! I went to the back of the tank and splashed some water on my face, looked in the blurry stainless-steel “mirror” and couldn’t see shit. But I didn’t need one to know that I, too, displayed Crip’s battle scars.
All of our heads were clean as cue balls. I had been scalped right before I left the Walls in Huntsville and sure hated to think of Crip with those Triple “O” clippers on my head. Those hickeys and scars on the bald heads in the tank were reminders of his heavy hand.
Besides a razor, I needed a toothbrush and a box of soda. Hoboing around, I learned to make it with the bare basics. I knew the only way I was going to scuffle up on some cigarettes to buy my toiletries was to get in a card game, somehow. I knew how to “deal” cards almost as well as I could “rollll” the dice. I sat down on one of the back bunks to watch the card game and was sitting there about an hour when one of the building tenders called out, “Ol’ Cotch Tom, cum on up to the front!”
He looked around at me and said, “Hey man, stop my hand for me til I cum back.” He was gone about half an hour and when he returned, he commented, “The bosses didn’ want nuthin, jes fuckin wit me.”
I had won eighteen packs of cigarettes in his absence, and he gave me half. That was my start. When the game broke up about fifteen minutes before the chow bell rang, I was a winner again with twelve “decks uv squares,” three packs of Bugler, and five sacks of Bull Durham. When I got off the con’s bunk that I’d been gambling on, I felt obliged to give him a couple of packs for “wear an tear.” At least I established one thing, I knew how to play cards. Word circulated in the tank, “That lil’ nigguh kin play.”
After returning from supper, I got in the commissary line when the picket boss called it out. Even though I had no cho-cho book (script coupon book used in place of cash with denominations of one, five, ten, twenty-five, and fifty cents issued to those cons whose relatives sent money for them to the Inmate Trust Fund), I was in a position to barter at the commissary. I swapped one pack for a toothbrush, two for a razor and blades, and three for a lock for my locker.
When I got back to the tank, I asked Cotch Tom how I could scrounge a box of baking soda. He told me, “See Big Filet Mignon when he cums in frum the kitchen.” With a name like that, it wasn’t hard to spot him. He came in the tank soaking wet with sweat, funky as an old goat, and had a towel draped around his neck to wipe his face. I put in my order and paid him a pack.
I walked to the front of the tank where some cons were playing dominos. I was standing there watching when Cotch Tom came up and stood beside me. He asked if I wanted to take the next down. I nodded. We waited for our turn since we were the next partners to play, and held our down until it was almost bedtime. The game had provided me the opportunity to get to meet some of the tank residents and establish another thing, I was a damn good domino player too.
The call went out, “Y’all git on ‘em. Count time.” I got on my bunk and awaited my first bunk count time on “the burnin hell.” The lieutenant rushed into the tank counting two rows at a time as he walked briskly down one alleyway and up another. Big George, the other daytime building tender, was supposedly counting right behind him. After they made the final turn in the last rows of bunks, Big George had a confused look on his face.
When they reached the front of the tank, the lieutenant hollered up to the inside picket boss, “Eighty-four uv ‘em, Boss.” The boss acknowledged that he was right, and added that one was in the hospital. Big George looked relieved. The lieutenant entered Number 4 tank, repeating the process, and across the hall into Number 1 and 2 tanks.
Then he went upstairs. Number 5 tank upstairs (eastside) housed the trusties, cons with “jobs” who work without supervision. The auditorium (westside) bunked fifteen white cons that were kept segregated from us. The prison system hid them at this all-black unit for protection. Most were ex-policemen who would have been killed if sent to one of the units housing white cons, but they were safe here.
We remained quiet and on our bunks until the head count was over. “Count’s clear!” came the shout after the lieutenant, inside picket, and turnkey completed their calculations. All 415 of us, the figure I saw on the count board located on the wall at the bottom of the stairs, were accounted for. The switch was thrown to dim the lights in the tanks to about a 20-watt bulb’s worth. Activities were at a standstill and we settled in for the night.
It was hard to fall asleep and I had to piss anyway. “Alley, Boss,” I hollered. Several seconds later, I got his OK. I walked about midway down the alley and heard a catcall whistle. I turned my head and looked straight into the eyes of the whistler. “Whut you got on yo mind, man?” I asked him.
He grinned and asked belligerently, “Whut diffunce do it make?”
Forty, the “night alley” (night building tender), was in back cleaning up and overheard our conversation. He yelled up the alley, “Y’all betta git down on dat bullshit. An Ol’ Rag you betta take yo ass to sleep an let dat new nigguh ‘lone.”
I continued on my way toward the back. Rag whistled again, I didn’t stop. I knew my future in the tank was on the line. I walked over to the row of commodes and picked up half of one of the broken wooden seat lids. I concealed it beside my leg and walked back up the aisle. When I was even with his bunk, I sm
ashed him on the head with the edged side.
He hollered like a stuck pig—couldn’t whistle anymore—and struggled to get out of my reach. I hit him with the flat side, right above his ear. That lick sounded like somebody fired a .22 pistol in the tank. He fled down the alley to the back with me in hot pursuit.
Forty rushed up to us and blocked my pathway, “Say man,” he said without malice, “don’t hit ‘em no mo. Lemme hannel it.”
I stopped. Forty went over to Rag and looked at his head. Then he hollered up to the picket boss, “Got one comin out, Boss. Needs to go up to the hosspital an see Doc Cateye.” He followed Rag to the front of the tank.
When they got to the door, the boss looked down from his lofty perch, “Gotdam, Ol’ Forty, whut happened to that ol’ nigguh?”
“Wudn’ nuthin, Boss. He jes had a nightmare an fell off his bunk.”
Seeing all the blood on Rag’s head, the boss, apparently an old-timer on the job, quipped, “I thought that nigguh slept on one uv them bottom bunks.”
“Yes suh, Boss, he do.”
“He musta dreamt he fell off a fuckin skyscrapah,” the boss said as Rag made his way upstairs to the hospital.
The following morning the sleet was still coming down and we didn’t turn out. As soon as we returned from breakfast, the card and domino games got started pronto. Cotch Tom was busy in the back setting up a card game on one of the back bunks. While I sat on my bunk trying to catch a name here and there, the tank door opened to let Big Filet Mignon back in after his breakfast shift. A little later, he walked over and handed me the box of soda. I went to the back and brushed my teeth, then got my cigarettes out and got in one of the card games.
It amazed me that so many cons in the game knew little or nothing about gambling and were just killing time. With that advantage it was easy to get away with cheating, so occasionally I stole a card or two. I was deeply involved in the game when Big George yelled out, “All you ol’ thangs, cum on up heah to da front an unlock dese lockers. Git ready fo shakedown!”
Racehoss Page 19