Jailhouse Jitters and Then Some
It was day 15 and I was the last one left. The policy was to get local folks out first from whatever bail was raised, and then SNCC staff or volunteers like me, even if someone’s family or friends from up north earmarked their bail. This made sense to me. The kids busted with me had a lot more to lose than I did. Still, I felt apprehensive being by myself. If I let my imagination run wild, it could be kind of scary. No one was here to cover my back.
Elmer, the head trustee, a wizened, bent over old white man who was missing an eye, liked to get a rise out of us from the get go with tales of the old days when the boss jailer would take a troublesome nigger out fishing and somehow come home with plenty of fish and one less problem inmate. They always mysteriously fell out of the row boat and drowned. That particularly eerie story didn’t bother me much at first because a good catch on a weekend fishing trip meant fried trout for Sunday supper. Now it started to loom heavy in my thoughts.
“Say boy,” Elmer said while picking up my dinner tray, “I hear they’re gonna ship you out to the farm because you been here too long. The Sarge says if you ain’t outta here in few days, you gonna be earning your keep picking cotton with a bunch of nigger hating crackers. The Captain out at the farm he don’t like freedom fighters either.. If he don’t give you a whippin’ hisself, he’ll let some of those white trash Ku Kluxers do the job. You gonna get your ass kicked, or some horny guys gonna get your ass one night. Ha, ha.”
I didn’t think his joking was funny. During my six months as a guard at San Quentin State Prison, I had learned a lot about jailhouse rapes and beatings. Convicts would also taunt me from their cells while I made my nightly rounds – me alone with 1,500 inmates and only a flashlight and a whistle. “Hey pretty boy, I’d sure like you for my bitch” or “You’ll be one sore assed kid when I get through with you.”
I knew my fears weren’t likely to come true with all the national attention on the South and after the murderers of Cheney, Goodman and Scherner last summer. But the
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spotlight on Bloody Selma hadn’t stopped the Klan from beating Reverend Reeb to death on the street just a few blocks away from where we were meeting. This was still the Land O’ Cotton – vicious and unpredictable. I remembered stories told around the Freedom House about white civil rights workers who were never quite the same after doing some time alone in Parchment Penitentiary or some other southern penal cesspool.
I woke up early the next day, uneasy about being the last of the Mohicans in a Mississippi jail. A cold breakfast of lumpy porridge and a burnt piece of stale, dry toast did nothing to raise my spirits.
Not much to do, but daydream about my girl, Aubin, a real steak sandwich, and getting out of this stinky steel closet. I thought moving around might help, so I started pacing my eight by eight pen like a caged tiger singing, “I’ll overcome fear ‘cause I want my freedom. I’ll overcome jail ‘cause I want my freedom.”
The door swung open: “Hey boy, you finally got a letter.” Elmer waved it in the air with a silly grin.
“Just give it to me and stop screwing around.”
It was in a pale blue envelope. I recognized Aubin’s handwriting. My first and only letter. It couldn’t be any better, coming from the woman I loved. I gently opened it, heart racing with excitement.
“Dear Michael,
“I hope everything’s going well with you. Jail sounds terrible. I have been doing a lot of soul-searching. As I sit in my room in Piedmont and think about you behind bars, caught up as always in some movement, I realize we live in two different worlds. You’re a good person and I respect you. But it’s just not going to work for us.
Good bye, Aubin.”
The first document I encountered about Natchez was the mind blowing deposition of the beatings Bill Ware received from the police on a short visit home from Minnesota in 1963 .” 30 stitches were required in my mouth and gums, my front tooth was broken, two others were deadened, and two lowers were jarred loose and knocked in. I spent the night in jail nude from the waist up on an iron frame with no mattress or pillow or blanket where I remained for the rest of the night in pain. I was found guilty and spent 30 days in jail before I could get an appeal not having any money for bail.” His crime, refusing to buy gas after they prevented him from using the whites only bathroom. His beating because “ you’re a difficult nigger.”
“Close your eyes. Open your mouth. Have a good trip.” I felt a little object on my tongue. I swallowed and thought too late now.