We started before sunrise and went at it till dusk. I’d arrived in the hottest part of the summer, and we’d be dripping sweat before the sun even cleared the trees. By the end of my first few days I was as eaten up with sweat rash as every man in camp. Dinner came out to us in a truck—beans and rice and cornbread, now and then some greens, once in a while some pork. Supper back in camp was the noon leftovers.
During my first few weeks in Camp M, I would come in from the fields so tired I’d sometimes lie down to rest for a minute before stripping off my filthy skunk suit and going to the showers—and next thing I knew I’d wake up mudcaked and stinking, feeling like I couldn’t breathe, my heart thrashing, the morning bell clanging in the dark.
Angola was set on an oldtime plantation of that name. It was a most serious prison with no need of stone walls. Some sixty miles north of Baton Rouge, it was bordered on three sides by a long meander of the Mighty Mississippi and on the fourth by the Tunica Hills—a lay of land naturally isolated and perfect for its purpose. It covered nearly twenty thousand acres of forest and swamp and marshland and fields of sugarcane.
We were housed in various and scattered camps, and as bad as it was in the white ones, everybody knew it was worse for the coloreds. I was put in Camp M, one of the smallest, with only about eighty men, and the most remote. It stood between a cypress swamp and a cane field. A narrow corduroy road ran through the swamp and out to the levee more than a mile away.
There were only three freemen on the place—the captain, his foreman and his clerk. The guards were convicts, most of them doing long stretches for some crime of hard violence. They wore khakis instead of stripes and carried .30-caliber carbines or twelve-gauge double-barrels with buckshot loads. Out in the field, they’d keep an eye on us from the shade of the trees and left it to the pushers to keep us working. Pushers wore khaki too, but they were unarmed. They moved along the line and made sure we never slacked off—“flogged the dog,’’ as they called it. If a con gave a pusher any backsass, the pusher called for a gun boss to come deal with him. They were the most hated men in camp, the pushers, and they lived in the guard barrack for their own safety.
Besides the guard barrack, which had its own mess, there were three convict barracks, each one run by a floorwalker, a trusty who bunked in the barracks storeroom behind wire walls that let him keep watch on things. The captain lived in a big clapboard house with a screened front porch and a backyard vegetable garden and henhouse, and the foreman and clerk shared quarters in a sidehouse. There was a mess shack, a stable for the mules and where the camp’s two trucks and two long flatwagons were kept, a tin-roofed laundry without walls, a toolshed, and a pen of large tracking hounds that went half crazy with snarling at anybody in stripes that came near them. There were three sweatboxes and a whipping log.
Camp M covered about ten acres. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence twelve feet high with rolls of barbed wire along the top. A guard tower stood at each corner, and the tower bulls had high-powered rifles.
I never got a letter from Buck or Russell and I never wrote to them. They had told me the hacks opened every bit of convict mail, going out and coming in, no matter how much they might deny doing it. So never write to anybody you did business with on the outside, and never expect to hear from any of them. That was one of the rules they taught me in case I ever took a fall.
They’d also told me that if I ever found myself in the joint some hardcase was sure to try me soon and in front of everybody so they could see what I was made of. When the guy braces you, they said, get right to it without any talk. I hadn’t been there two weeks when it happened. The lights had just come on one morning and I was sitting on my bunk when one of the camps’ daddy hardcocks, a big redhead named Garrison, snatched up my shoes and dropped a raggedy pair in their place, saying he was making a trade and I could swap with the next newcock to come in.
He was ready for me and clubbed me on the face with a shoe as I came up off the bunk at him. I hooked him in the belly and over the eye and he went on his ass. He scrabbled up quick and swung wild and I hit him twice on the ear and he went down again. He was back up on one knee when I gave him one to the jaw with all my shoulder behind it and he hit the floor on his face, out cold.
I threw his shoes down the aisle and retrieved mine and put them on. I figured I was headed for the sweatbox for sure, but the floorwalker, a trusty named Gaylord, walked on by like he hadn’t seen a thing and said for us to get outside and form up. I found out later that he had it in for Garrison and was glad to see him get cooled.
A couple of Garrison’s pals brought him around and helped him up and out to formation. His ear looked like a bunch of red grapes. His jaw wasn’t broken but over the next few days he’d have a devil of a time eating. I’d jammed a couple of knuckles on my hand but at least it wasn’t broken. Most people have no idea how easily you can break your hand on somebody’s head. It’s why they invented boxing gloves.
As we went out to formation some of the cons were grinning at me. “Ain’t this boy something,” one said. “A regular Dempsey.”
“Dempsey, hell,” said another. “Tunney’s more like it.”
And from then on, Tunney’s what they called me. None of the cons would try me again, not even Garrison, who would tell me I had a hell of punch and then let me be, like all the rest of them.
The pushers were a different story. They rode me hard from the very first day, cursing me, ordering me to work faster. I’d set my jaws tight and keep hacking at the cane and if I ever said anything it was only “Yeah boss, working faster.” But as the days became weeks they pushed me harder still. Sometimes they’d hit me across the back and legs with a stripped cane stalk and it was all I could do to keep from going at them with my cane knife. I’d have to remind myself over and over of everything Buck and Russell taught me.
Still, word had it that the captain wanted the cop killer to earn a whipping and a day in a sweatbox, to get an early taste of what was in store for him if he tried getting tough in Camp M. Some of the cons told me he wouldn’t let the pushers ease up on me till I was punished. It was no secret why I was there—every con’s crime was common knowledge in the camp. They said I was lucky the gun bulls were convicts too, because they didn’t have it in for cop killers like freeman guards did. A cop killer in a prison with freeman guards was real likely to get shot dead “while trying to escape.”
I figured the sooner it happened the sooner the pushers would quit riding me, so the next time a pusher hit me with a stalk I snatched it out of his hand and cut it in two with a swipe of my cane knife and flung the stub in his face.
The cons around us laughed and one said, “Do that to his fucken neck, Tunney.”
The pusher hollered, “Trouble here!” but the gun bosses had been watching the whole thing and were already on their way.
I spent the rest of the day in leg shackles, trying to dig a six-foot hole in the soft muck beside the bayou, a swarm of mosquitoes feeding on my face and neck. The hole naturally filled up with muddy water as fast as I shoveled it out, but that was the idea—it was a job that couldn’t be done, no matter how long and hard you went at it. After a couple of hours, I hadn’t managed to do much except dig a small pool of muck up to my shins.
One of the gun bulls came over and said, “How you like your new job, hardcase?”
“It’s a Sisyphean ordeal,” I said.
That took the smirk off his face. “You watch your fucken mouth, boy,” he said.
When we got back to camp at dusk, the field boss made his report and the captain sentenced me to thirty lashes and a day in the box.