A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger
below. I ain’t jokin’—Bratton, Old Judge McElroy, all of ’em, and thank Jesus I still here. Three people you put your trust in: Jesus, the Lord, and yourself. Trust no man.”
Parchman occupies forty-six square miles of snake-infested bayous and flatlands in the Yazoo Delta, which stretches along the Mississippi River from Vicksburg to Memphis and east to the Chickasaw Ridge. Parts of the farm were blessed with rich alluvial soil known as “buckshot” that ran up to fifty feet deep, and other parts were so swampy and tangled that they had turned back Union troops toward the end of the Civil War. The prison had no fence around it because it was too big and no central cell blocks because the inmates were distributed around the plantation in work camps. Every morning at four thirty, the inmates were woken up by a bell and marched out to the fields, where they worked from sunup until sundown. The plowing was done by mule, and the picking was done by hand. At dark the men marched back to the work camp and ate a dinner prepared by other inmates. Every work camp had a vegetable garden and livestock pen, and the inmates subsisted almost entirely off what they could grow and raise. After dinner the lights were turned out and the men went to sleep, and at four thirty the next morning it started all over again. There were men who passed their entire lives that way.
Flogging was the primary method of enforcing discipline at Parchman and was not officially banned until 1971. A leather strap known as Black Annie was used liberally on anyone who would not work, anyone who disobeyed a direct order, anyone who displayed anything approaching impudence. An escape attempt merited something called a “whipping without limits,” which—since there was virtually no medical care at Parchman in the early days—was effectively a death sentence. Inmates also died in knife fights, died in their bunk beds of malaria and pneumonia and tuberculosis, and sometimes just dropped dead of heatstroke in the fields. It was the closest thing to slavery that the South had seen since the Civil War.
The result of this relentless brutality was that Parchman was almost completely self-sufficient—and extremely profitable. In addition to growing food to eat and cotton to sell, the inmates also maintained a brickworks, a sawmill, a cotton gin, a sewing shop, a slaughterhouse, a shoe shop, a machine shop, and a thirty-man carpentry crew on the farm. During Roy’s time Parchman was turning a profit of around a million dollars a year, mostly from cotton sales. In the interest of high production, conjugal visits were allowed for the black inmates, and every Sunday wives and prostitutes were brought out to the work camps. As one camp sergeant explained to an investigator in 1963, “If you let a nigger have some on Sunday, he will really go out and do some work for you on Monday.” The wives arrived by train on weekends, and the prostitutes lived in one of the administrative buildings. The inmates met their women in a rough shack they called the “Red House” or the “Tonk,” and were limited to forty-five minutes at a time. If they went over forty-five minutes they lost their conjugal privileges for two weeks.
Regular inmates like Roy were called “gunmen” because they worked under the eye of mounted guards who carried .30–30 Winchester rifles across their knees. The guards were called “trusty-shooters” and were chosen from the prison population; they were usually the most violent inmates who had life sentences and nothing to lose. They wore wide-striped uniforms with the stripes running vertically, and the rest of the inmates wore uniforms with the stripes running horizontally. They were called “up-and-downs” and “ring-rounds,” respectively. In the odd logic of the prison world, the same act that put a shooter in prison in the first place—murder—could also win his release. When the gunmen walked out into the fields to begin work, the shooters drew a “gun line” in the dirt and sat up on their horses and waited. If a man set foot over the gun line, the shooter shouted a warning and then shot to kill. The same was true if the convict got closer than twenty feet to a shooter or failed to wait for permission to cross the gun line in order to relieve himself. A shooter who killed an escaping convict was often rewarded with a pardon from the governor and released from prison. In a state that had no parole laws until 1944, it wasn’t a bad deal.
The violence in Parchman was so extreme—and the inmate population so disproportionately black—that it is hard not to see the entire Mississippi penal system simply as revenge against blacks for the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Three years before Roy was locked up, two fourteen-year-old black boys were executed by the state of Mississippi for murdering a white man; the boys had been indicted, tried, and convicted all in less than twenty-four hours. And as Roy was chopping cotton in Parchman’s dusty fields, another terrible scandal was unfolding. In 1945 a black man named Willie McGee had been arrested for raping a white woman named Willametta Hawkins in the small town of Laurel. McGee, an extremely handsome man who had a wife and four young children, was arrested for the crime and held incommunicado for a month before being tried and sentenced to death. The jury had deliberated two and a half minutes to decide his fate.
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