Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love

by Thomas A. Tarrants

  I was sentenced on November 27, 1968, in Meridian. I returned to my cell, where I awaited my transfer to the Mississippi State Penitentiary—or Parchman prison, as most people called it. I knew where I was going, but I had no idea when.

  December 13, 1968, was a cold and overcast day in Mississippi. Around lunchtime, the jailer told me to get ready to leave. After hurriedly packing the few things I had, I was taken out of my cell and handcuffed to a chain that was wrapped around my waist. Five other men, three white and two black, were similarly chained. I was added to the line of chained convicts.

  We were taken downstairs to a prison station wagon used for transporting prisoners. The station wagon was specially equipped with wire-mesh screen covering the windows and forming a barrier between the driver and passengers. But because I was among those being transported, the Mississippi Highway Patrol had taken special measures to prevent my being rescued—or assassinated.

  An entire convoy of Mississippi Highway Patrol cars escorted this prison wagon, leading our vehicle and following behind. Our speed was seldom less than eighty miles an hour. As we passed certain checkpoints, additional cars were waiting to relieve those that had been accompanying us. The gray skies added to my gloominess as we left Meridian. I said very little to my fellow prisoners.

  The prison convoy proceeded north through the rolling hills around Philadelphia, Mississippi, as if on a tour of recent racial violence. It was here that Wayne Roberts and other Klan members had kidnapped and murdered the three civil rights workers: Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. From Philadelphia, we headed north to Kosciusko and then west toward Greenwood, the hometown of Byron De La Beckwith, who had been tried twice (with hung juries both times) for the murder of Medgar Evers.

  Near Greenwood the terrain began to flatten out into the Mississippi Delta, one of the most fertile farming areas in the United States. I had never been to the Mississippi Delta until that day. As I looked at the passing fields, I felt a deep despair. All I could see were miles and miles of barrenness. Stark brown cotton stalks, already stripped by the pickers, dotted by a few white bolls of cotton that had been missed. Ramshackle shanties—often unpainted, with trash, weeds, and broken-down cars and appliances littering the yards—offered a sharp contrast to the occasional stately plantation-style home surrounded by well-manicured lawns and expensive cars in the driveways. The thousands of acres of cotton fields and soybeans belonged to the Delta farmers and planters who lived in these elegant houses. The field hands, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers occupied the shanties.

  We drove across the Delta, with its fading remnants of the Old South juxtaposed with the new era of enormous, mechanized farms profiting from economies of scale. During the growing season this would all be green and lush under blue skies. But in mid-December it just looked brown and dead and gray. I felt as if I were approaching the outermost edges of the earth, as if I would soon be cut off from civilization altogether.

  We reached Parchman, about ninety miles south of Memphis, Tennessee, just before dark. Unlike most prisons, which are compact, filled with cells, and surrounded by high walls, Parchman was a penal farm sprawling across eighteen thousand acres. It resembled a military reservation more than a prison.

  Parchman was established in 1901. Its mission was to house and work state prisoners. Inmates worked the fields, growing cotton, soybeans, vegetables, and other crops, with the goal of making an annual profit for the prison. Military-style, barracks-like compounds were situated at various points on the farm. Prisoners were segregated by race. Each “camp” housed an average of 100 to 175 men. The large brick buildings contained two open dormitories, a kitchen, a dining hall, and bathing areas. Outside was a four- or five-acre yard large enough for football, baseball, and basketball. A twelve-foot, heavy-duty, chain-link fence topped with barbed concertina wire surrounded each camp. Guard towers stood on each corner.

  The convoy drove past a brick guard station at the prison entrance, then proceeded down a two-lane, blacktop road called “guard row.” On either side were frame “shotgun” houses, built in the 1930s, one right after another about a hundred feet apart. Here the guards and other employees lived in a sequestered community largely untouched by time and modern society. In some families, multiple generations had worked at the prison. I noticed how the windows and doors were decorated for Christmas with lights—red, green, yellow, white, and blue.

  But for me, this season of joy would bring only depression, because I could not be part of celebrating Christmas now or for years to come. I felt a deep pang of anguish as I recalled the many happy Christmases I had spent at home with my family in Mobile during my preteen years. I don’t think I’ve ever felt a greater sense of aloneness and hopelessness than when we entered the prison grounds.

  A little more than a mile down guard row, we reached the prison hospital, a large, old, one-story, red-brick building surrounded by a tall fence and guard towers. The gate was swung open just long enough for us to drive through, and then a guard locked it shut again. We were now securely in Parchman prison, long known as one of the worst in the United States. Hard labor and harsh conditions had been the norm since its founding. Farming in the blazing hot, smothering humidity of Mississippi summers and its chilling, wet winters was the lot of most prisoners, the vast majority of whom were black. Brutality was employed as needed to keep prisoners in line, and there was no recourse, even in the courts.

  All new prisoners were processed at the hospital and given a medical exam. The six of us were led in chains into the reception area. The door was shut and locked behind us by the sergeant in charge of the hospital as well as the receiving officer. He was an abrupt person who said little, but when he spoke there was no doubt who was in charge. Our chains and handcuffs were removed.

  We were ordered to line up side by side, strip naked, and put our clothes in a pile in front of us. Then we were made to assume various postures in order to permit a visual inspection. We even had to show the bottoms of our feet. Once the sergeant was satisfied that no one was concealing contraband on his person, we were each issued underwear, towels, three pairs of jeans, and three khaki shirts. Next, we were told to put on our new prison clothes. Everyone except me had all his hair cut off. Was it an oversight? Or perhaps a favor from someone who approved of my racist views? I never understood why I was spared this part of the induction ritual.

  For supper, we were directed to the dining hall in the back of the hospital. The food was surprisingly good, much better than in the Lauderdale County Jail. There was fresh milk, meat, bread, and vegetables. After supper we were given blood tests and a routine physical examination and then placed in the sick ward of the hospital.

  Later that night, after my own processing had been completed, I was taken to the maximum-security unit, or MSU, known as “Little Alcatraz.” I had assumed I would remain at the hospital with the other prisoners pending assignment to a camp. However, because of my notoriety, prison officials were taking no chances with me. They didn’t want me to escape. They didn’t want anyone to kill me either. The MSU was the safest place for me.

  It was a well-lit concrete, brick, and steel building located in a flat, barren area surrounded by its own twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire and tall, brick guard towers on each corner. It looked sinister and forbidding. It represented isolation, even from the prison itself. When we reached the entrance to the compound, the huge electric gate slowly rolled open, closing again as soon as our car entered. We were now in what could be described as a fenced-in box. A hundred feet beyond the entrance was another gate. Once the guards placed their guns in a depository, the second gate opened and we were allowed to pass through and into the grounds.

  The MSU building was a long, one-story, red-brick structure with a low, flat roof. The entrance was in the middle of the building, dividing it into two wings, east and west. A row of barred eighteen-inch windows ran the length of the building just below its roof line. Access to the building was through an electronicall
y operated door of heavy steel grating. This opened into an office and central control area that separated the two wings. Each wing had two cellblocks. Solid steel doors led into the cellblocks on either side of each wing.

  I was taken into the receiving area and again made to strip naked. But this time I was also made to spread my legs apart and bend over for further inspection. All my newly issued prison clothes were taken, and I was given a set of long underwear and a blanket. I was then escorted by staff and trusties to cell 13 at the very end of death row, which was a cellblock on one of the wings. I got an eerie feeling as I walked down the cellblock corridor with men looking out at me from each cell as I passed. We stopped near the end. Slowly the cell door rolled open, and I went inside. Then it shut with a solid, foreboding clang. There I stood, with the gas chamber and all its horrors as my neighbor.

  The cellblock consisted of a ten-foot-wide corridor about a hundred feet long, beginning with a double shower stall and followed by thirteen cells, one after another, opening into the corridor. Each cell was a concrete cubicle approximately six by nine feet with gray steel bars across the front and a sliding door operated from a control panel at the entrance to the cellblock. A six-inch-thick, concrete wall separated each cell. The building’s narrow row of windows ran the length of the cellblock along the top of the corridor wall across from the cells. The upper half of the walls was painted white and the lower half light green. The floor was plain concrete. Seven or eight incandescent 150-watt light bulbs were spaced along the corridor ceiling.

  Although this was death row, only five of the men actually had death sentences pending. The others were ordinary prisoners who had to be locked up for their own safety or because they were escape risks, both of which were the case for me.

  The other three cellblocks in the maximum-security unit were used for safekeeping or punishment. Before my arrival at Parchman, officials were reported to have sent prisoners they regarded as disciplinary problems to the MSU. Here they would be locked in a cell without a mattress or cover—only a bare steel bunk, commode, and face bowl. In those days, the starvation diet, reserved for hard cases, consisted of two meals a day: a cup of coffee and two biscuits with sorghum molasses for breakfast and a one-inch square of corn bread and one teaspoon of black-eyed peas for supper. Especially troublesome individuals were placed in “the dark hole,” a six-foot-square cell, completely enclosed, and pitch dark when the door was shut. They received only water and a slight food ration. Toilet facilities were built into the floor and consisted of an eight-inch hole level with the floor, which could be flushed by a button on the wall.

  Although officials had largely phased out harsh discipline of unruly prisoners by the time of my incarceration, there were still occasional reports of what could be considered excessive punishment. The inmates on the cellblock where I was housed had been there for years and told me stories of what it was like in the “old days.” During the winter, officials might use a garden hose to spray everyone down until they were soaking wet, then open the windows and turn on the powerful overhead exhaust fan. The effect of the strong draft of cold air on wet bodies was highly effective. A few hours of this treatment would quiet down even the hardest and toughest of men. During the summer, the technique was reversed. The exhaust fans, which normally ran day and night during the summer, were turned off. The hot-box effect then served equally well to subdue the unruly.

  In some cases, officials and trusties would even enter the cells of certain “hard cases” and beat the men down with blackjacks, a type of weapon consisting of leather-enclosed metal with a strap for a handle. They would give a strong laxative to others and handcuff them to the bars of their cells with their hands stuck so high up on the crossbars that they had to stand on tiptoe. Once the laxative took effect, it was an extremely miserable situation. Every time a man was sent to the maximum-security unit for punishment, his head was shaved before he was taken to his cell.

  These things were common until about the time I came, in 1968. As late as 1964, men were regularly whipped with “the bull hide”—also called “Black Annie.” This was a leather strap one-quarter of an inch thick and about six inches wide and four feet long. Usually ten hard licks would be administered to the naked buttocks of a man while four trusties held him down, one on each arm and leg. The “hide” was dreaded by all and could tame anyone.

  Fortunately, the official policy of the new superintendent, Tom Cook, discontinued corporal punishment. Some of the hard-line, old-guard officials still tried to use these methods occasionally but could rarely get away with it.

  There was often conversation among the prisoners along the cellblock. Not long after I had settled down in my cell, the man in cell 12 told me that he was being held for “safekeeping.” He had previously been in prison in Louisiana. He asked my name and where I was from. He then passed the word to the others in the cellblock. Everyone knew about me, of course, because they had been reading the newspaper and listening to the radio. They treated me like a celebrity. Word had spread that I was a top Klan terrorist who had shot a policeman (with a submachine gun, no less) in a wild gun battle. They were surprised to discover that I was quiet, reserved, and aloof. And unlike some, I didn’t talk about my crime.

  Of the five men with death sentences, three were black and the other two white. The remaining six who were there for safekeeping were evenly divided racially. They were housed on death row because they had escaped or were in protective custody. One fellow was a psychiatric case and was awaiting transfer to the state mental hospital. Another had escaped and been recaptured. Another had informed on someone and had to be locked up for his own protection.

  I was confined to my cell twenty-four hours a day—as was everyone else on death row. Twice a week we were allowed out for fifteen to thirty minutes to shower and shave. It was a very restrictive existence. The cell itself was a drab, dismal place, reminiscent of a stall in a dog kennel. The concrete walls were covered with graffiti—names of those who had been in the cell and the dates, curse words, lewd comments, maxims, and so forth. The commode and face bowl, once white porcelain, were dull, stained, and dirty. A dirty mattress lay on the steel-frame bunk, and a large, heavy quilt provided warm covering. Otherwise the cell was as bare as the smooth concrete floor.

  In a short time, I realized that boredom—with nowhere to go and nothing to do—was one of the worst aspects of this type of prison life. It is a very difficult adjustment for a normal, energetic person. My activities were limited to talking, reading, and thinking, all of which grew old quickly. I could not help but do a lot of thinking. This produced frustration and despair or self-pity, as I thought back on my earlier life and how good it had been in comparison to what I was now experiencing. Simple things that I took for granted when I was free now appeared to me in a very different light. Something as simple as going to the grocery store seemed a wonderful thing compared to sitting in a six-by-nine-foot cell. I wished that I had never gotten myself into such a terrible situation. Why couldn’t I have found a different way to help the Cause, a way that wouldn’t have gotten me into prison? But it was now too late. I was reaping what I had sown. But my commitment to the Cause was undiminished.

  To temporarily escape from the unpleasant reality of their cells and their boredom, prisoners listened to music on small portable radios and absorbed themselves in reading material—usually westerns and murder mysteries.

  When you are locked up, little things you once took for granted become much more important. And nowhere was that truer than with food. The sameness of daily meals only increased the boredom. Breakfast, served at about 6:00 a.m., consisted of either hotcakes, bacon, oatmeal, and molasses or eggs, grits, sausage, biscuits, and peach preserves, with all the milk and coffee one could drink. The afternoon meal, served around 3:00 p.m., usually consisted of pork or beef in some form, corn bread, canned vegetables—such as turnips, Irish potatoes, yams, beans, or squash—a dessert, and milk. Various fresh fruits and vegetables were also s
erved in season. But the menu changed little.

  My stay on death row was short, lasting less than two weeks. No doubt it would have been much longer had it not been for an incident that occurred about ten days after my arrival. On December 23, 1968, three days after my twenty-second birthday, I was in low spirits when superintendent Tom Cook and two chaplains, Rev. W. D. Kirk and Rev. Selby McManus, came in to give everyone a Christmas gift and hold a brief service. They had been in the cellblock only a few minutes when one of the inmates began heatedly shouting. He and others were angry about what they felt was the low quality of the meals being served at Parchman.

  A few minutes later, I heard sounds of porcelain shattering against the bars and out in the corridor. In an angry rage, one of the men had somehow kicked his toilet loose from the wall and was throwing the broken pieces at the warden and chaplains. Others immediately followed his lead as the warden and chaplains fled to safety. A few minutes later, smoke began filtering down the corridor from mattresses that had been set afire with the matches the men used to light their cigarettes. The guards quickly activated the powerful ventilator system and flooded the cellblock with water. This brought the would-be riot under control.

  About an hour later, after the fury had subsided, the sergeant in charge of the maximum-security unit walked down the corridor to assess the damage. All but three toilets in the cellblock had been destroyed, broken up, and used as missiles.

  When the sergeant came to my cell, he saw that it was intact and orderly. I had not participated in the riot. Even if I had known about the grievance and the intended protest (which I did not), I would not have taken part. Such an effort was absolutely futile and hadn’t the slightest chance of producing any positive gains. Besides, I had never been one to follow the herd. In addition, I had been raised to respect older people and those in authority and was basically pro law enforcement. My defiance of authority started when they began to enforce desegregation and civil rights laws, which I saw as un-American.