Pardon me if I am slow. It was a long time ago but I still remember things well. Sometimes it just takes longer than it once did. I live in Kansas City now. I was able to work long enough as a machinist at an industrial plant here to draw a pension and with my Social Security check I donÕt live too bad. It is not the best part of town but nobody bothers me. My wife died three years ago but I am not lonely. Most days I just sit on the front porch and read the paper or a magazine. Someone will always come along to chat and fill up my day. A nurse comes by once a week to check on me but it is really a waste of time, I get along fine. I doubt I will die while the nurse is here, and if my neighbors did not see me for more than a couple of days, they would come looking for me. I have a little garden in the summer and putter around the yard to fill up my time. I like the autumn but I know winter will soon be here and I will have to move inside, away from the street and its vitality. I look forward to the nurse coming in the winter to chat a minute. She is a pretty thing and a man never gets too old to admire a beautiful woman. I watch the news at 10:00 p.m. and am thankful that I am old and donÕt have to deal with a world that I donÕt understand. At 10:30 I go to bed and I pull down my socks and look at the shackle scars on my legs. A daily reminder that I once was a resident of Tucker Prison Farm in the Delta of southern Arkansas.
In Arkansas in the 1930Õs, inmates were contracted out to local farmers to do their hard labor, and the house bulls got to keep the proceeds. It was hard being in prison for stealing to feed yourself while you knew the bulls were stealing worse than you ever had and they werenÕt even hungry. But life was hard then, both in prison and out. They kept our legs shackled all the time to keep us from running but our hands had to be free to work. I guess they figured the fattest bull could catch a man with his legs tied together. We slept in an old building on the prison ground, dormitory style. I guess it would have caused more problems but when men work from sunup to sundown hoeing cotton, they are too tired to do much more than eat and sleep. We worked six days a week and then on Sunday they would march us out to the parade grounds to hear a Sunday sermon. Then after the sermon we would have the best meal of the week. A little beef from the farmÕs cattle to go along with the usual bread and soup. In the afternoon we could play cards or shoot the bull, but a lot of the guys just rested, trying to keep their bodies from being completely broken down. A lot of them wore down to nothing and the bulls would tell the families the man had died from unknown causes and they would bury the body in a potterÕs field on the east side of the farm. Every workday they would wake us before dawn and feed us some mush and then load us into an old cattle truck to take us across the Arkansas River to the farm we were going to work at. If you tried to call off sick, they would lash you or give you the Tucker Telephone, an old crank generator from a telephone that they would wire to your testicles and give you a good shock.
Mulehead Johnny was a half-wit sharecropper from Sheridan with a bad limp. He was a pretty easy mark for both the bulls and the inmates. If the bulls wanted to know something, they would bring Johnny in and give him the lash or the telephone until they got what they wanted. Then Johnny would probably get a beating from the inmates who had caused the problem when he got back. The bulls' methods were more than most men could take, much less a simpleton like Johnny who could not even write his own name.
Black Jack was a big buck and smart also. He was probably about six foot, two inches and his arms and upper body rippled with muscle. He was a big man and capable of bullying most of the other inmates, but he didnÕt. He had a loud infectious laugh rising up from deep in his belly that made you like him. He wasnÕt differential to white people, as so many colored people were back then. He came to Tucker Farm about three months after I did for the same crime that most of us were there for. The crime of being hungry in the 1930Õs.
James Carroll was a big old brute of a man from Newton County that could kick, gouge and fistfight about as good as any man, and he had a horrible temper to boot. Most of us gave him a wide path; he was such a brute and a bully. He had been making Pruno and selling it for money or favors or whatever he could get out of it from the other inmates. The bulls caught wind of it and took Mulehead Johnny in to find out what was going on. The bulls probably werenÕt mad that Carroll was making the stuff. Probably just mad that they werenÕt getting any of the proceeds. They took Johnny in and he spilled his guts and then the bulls came out and got Carroll and tied him to a bed frame, stripped off his shirt and gave him the lash. After Carroll gathered his wits, he came for Johnny, but Black Jack was standing in front of his bed and caught his big roundhouse right with his left forearm, gave him a blow to the belly and then caught him with both hands on the back of the head. Carroll lay in a heap and Johnny had no more trouble from him after that. Jack got a lashing for it but he never said a word. It is funny that a black man would show compassion for a white man, since the black man seldom got any compassion from white men back then. The rest of us remembered what Jack did that night and respected him as long as he was there.
They had been taking us across the river in the old cattle truck for about a week to hoe cotton. Most of us were pretty sullen in the morning with the thought of a day hoeing cotton in the hot sun sucking the life out of us. But Jack was in a good mood as usual. It was a Monday I believe, after our day off. Shortly after we had left the farm, Jack reached down between his legs and unclipped a link on his shackle chain and his legs were free. Someone told me later that he had rubbed the chain against the metal bed frame at night for a week until it wore a hole in the link. He crawled on his belly to the front of the bed of the truck where the bulls had left an old tire, inner tube and hand pump. They didnÕt hire bulls based on intelligence. I suppose a snitch might have alerted the bulls that Jack was loose, but he knew he would not get a beating from the rest of us, as we liked Jack. Jack lay on his back and took that hand pump and pumped up that old inner tube. When we crossed the bridge over the river, Jack jumped out of the truck and went over the side of the bridge with his inner tube. We didnÕt say anything and we were nearly a quarter mile down the road before the bulls noticed there was an empty seat. They turned us around and drove back to the bridge where we could see an inner tube floating downstream, still within range of a good marksman, but they didnÕt hire bulls based on their marksmanship either. They took their rifles and fired at the inner tube, but never got close, all the time yelling. About the time the inner tube got out of range of even an excellent marksman, Jack pulled himself out of the water and settled his butt in the inner tube and waved goodbye to the bulls. They started shouting and firing again but Jack waved again and kept on floating away. Mulehead Johnny gave a cheer and a bull hit him in the head with his rifle butt. It bloodied him up good but he lived. The bulls claimed they had shot Jack and made a big show of dragging the river for his body but never found anything and they couldnÕt use the dogs, as there wasnÕt any way that they could get on a trail. I knew Jack had people around there and I hoped they would help him. The bulls finally said he was dead but his body was lost.
Rita the mail lady came this morning and knocked on my door. She always knocks to let me know the mail is there. I got the mail and looked through it. I never pay any attention to the ones that are typewritten unless it is a check. But I always perk up when I see one hand written. This one had my name and address on it but no return address. Inside I found only an obituary cut from a Detroit Newspaper. It read as follows;
ÒJohn Quincy 'Jack' Jenkins died yesterday in Detroit. Mr. Jenkins was a Mason, a member of the Missionary Baptist Church and retired from the Ford Motor Company. He was born on an unknown date in Southern Arkansas. Preceded in death by his lovely wife Lucille, he leaves behind children Jack and Charlene and five grandchildren. He often told his closest friends that he had once been an inmate in a southern penitentiary but unlike most prisoners, whose time drags by, his time just floated away. Still he never had a desire to go back.Ó I chuckled and thought about all of the chaos I read about in the newspaper. But in the 1930Õs, when men were put in a desperate situation, it did not matter what color your skin was. Maybe we just have too much time on our hands these days.
© Kevin D. Burgess