11

 

Working On the Chain Gang

 

I came into the SNCC office early on a quiet Sunday morning on December 10, 1961. I was in Atlanta for a few days and eager to finish the plans for my next road trip to Southern campuses. Sometimes I approached a campus cold, with no contacts, but work was slow that way. A contact on campus or in the community saved a day of sitting around a coffee shop ferreting out the odd “liberal” or “concerned” student or faculty. Two names constituted a veritable network.

I didn’t expect anyone to be in the SNCC office but there was James Forman—sweeping again, the executive secretary of our organization, pushing a broom. He looked up as I entered the cramped office. He usually wore a suit—always the same one; the cliché “rumpled” would have been a compliment to Jim’s suit. Having grown up in a Southern Methodist minister’s house, one of five boys, with a schoolteacher mother, I was acquainted with the look of a suit of clothes that could barely keep up appearances.

With a gleam in his dark brown eyes, Forman extended the broom toward me. I accepted it, familiar now with his routine. “You may be a hero to the New York literati,” he laughed, “but here in Atlanta this morning, you ain’t nothing but a poor-ass SNCC field secretary. Everybody got to do his time on the broom. Keeps us humble. And since you’re white, you need to sweep a lot.” It was exactly like the first time we met a few months earlier.

“Ain’t no ‘shit work’ in SNCC, it’s all just work,” Forman repeated one of his favorite sayings, sat down in front of the typewriter, and adjusted a stencil. His eyes betrayed, as usual, a generally amused expression. I remained so aware of his qualities—intelligent, opinionated, and prone to argue strongly for his position, he also possessed an acerbic wit and a disarming sense of humor. And as I had learned, he was endowed with immense physical courage and coolness under fire—a steady resolve that saved lives on occasion.

I pondered again what my recent college mates would think of me now, being handed a broom by a black man to sweep a cluttered office full of broken furniture. I wondered what would amaze them more—the part about me sweeping or having a black boss? How many Huntingdon College magna cum laude graduates, I thought, took jobs wielding a broom at the behest of a Negro superior?

As Forman began banging on the typewriter, he asked casually, “What you doing today?”

I told Forman I was making some calls and lining up some contacts before heading toward Texas. When he didn’t say anything, I continued, “I thought I’d hit Alabama, northern Mississippi, and maybe stop at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville on the way over. Anne Braden’s got a couple of names for me there.”

“How about going down to Albany?”—he pronounced it All-benny like they did in southwest Georgia—“They’ve been having a hard time getting started but now things are going to happen and Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon need help. We are going to have a little freedom ride.”

I must have looked like I’d been hit with an ax handle. Jim looked me dead in the eye. “I know you need to go on the road and that you have to get to those campuses sooner or later, since that’s what the five thousand dollars is for, but . . .”

“Sooner or later?” I said, thinking of the grant that the Southern Conference Education Fund had made to SNCC for my campus traveling. My job was to contact white Southerners and introduce them to the movement and try to explain what was happening. I had marched in McComb a few months before, where I was beaten, nearly lynched, and then thrown in jail, in order to become a part of what I was reporting. How could I explain the sit-ins and freedom rides without being a part of the action? In SNCC, one’s commitment was sometimes measured by the extent to which one’s body was on the line in the toughest places.

“Several people are going, man, and I just thought you might want to go along. You know that Interstate Commerce Commission ruling was supposed to take effect last month. Look, I would not tell you to go. . . but we do need you. We want to make it pretty close to half black and half white. You remember that Sherrod came to McComb to help us out the day you and Moses and the rest were tried in front of Judge Brumfield? Now we need to help him out—we’ve been working on it about a week and we are going today.”

“Today?”

“I already got the tickets. We’re going down this afternoon on the Illinois Central and we’re going to integrate the train and Chief Laurie Pritchett’s white waiting room.”

“Who’s we?”

“Besides you and me, there’s Tom Hayden; Joan Browning, one of our white volunteers; Lenora Taitt from Spelman; Norma Collins, our office manager; and Wyatt Walker not only advanced me the money for the tickets, but also said Bernard Lee—‘little MLK’ himself—can go along to represent SCLC. Oh yes, we’ll have international coverage on this freedom ride; Per Laursen is riding with us. And Casey Hayden will be going along as our designated observer.”

Per was a Danish journalist writing a book on the civil rights movement in the American South to be called Grace and Grits. Laursen filed stories from time to time with various European news outlets.

“Europe,” Jim was saying, “is more interested in us than these so-called newspapers down here, or in this country, for that matter. If we can blow the lid off Albany, we’ll get attention. We may have gotten our asses kicked in Mississippi. Hell, Herbert Lee was killed in McComb and that got six inches in the New York Times. But if we do this right, Zellner, we can kick ass in southwest Georgia. Okay?” I was still skeptical.

”You really should do it. I’ve called in our plans to the SNCC folk in Albany—when we’re arriving and so forth. Sherrod and them will have a crowd at the train station, and when Chief Pritchett orders us to leave the waiting room, we’ll just leave. There’s nothing he can do, and we will have proved our point that the government is not enforcing the ICC ruling for integrating transportation facilities. You’ll be back here in a couple of days ready to go back on the road. Nobody is supposed to get arrested. Try thinking of yourself as our secret weapon, a Southern white cat with stories of how SNCC is destroying segregation in the South. Run around the block, pack light, hurry back and be ready to go. Go! Here they come.”

I ran past Tom, Casey, and Per Laursen as they entered the office.

Tom and Per looked like they were going on safari. They were obviously ready to be arrested if necessary. Their knapsacks, no doubt, contained the regulation toothbrush, toothpaste, Kleenex, and a book to read. Casey was dressed in style, as always since, as Jim said, she was to be the “observer.” Observers were not supposed to attract attention; they avoided arrest so as to report to the press and headquarters.

I was still housed in the Negro Butler Street YMCA, around the block from the Auburn Avenue SNCC office; I paid fifty cents a night. Rent was cheap because I didn’t spend many nights in Atlanta. I threw some things together—enough for a few days. I had already picked up the SNCC habit of keeping a toothbrush and a good paperback with me at all times, never knowing when jail might come, and a benevolent jailer would let you keep one or the other, or sometimes both.

Back at the office the mood was festive. Everybody acted as though making an integrated foray into enemy territory was the jolliest occasion imaginable. Lunches were packed and everybody checked to see if their “jail clothes”—khakis, jeans and work shirts—were in order. We weren’t supposed to be arrested, but everybody remembered trips with James Forman that ended in the hoosegow.

The train crew scowled at our integrated group, and the conductor asked us to move. When we refused, they let it pass. Most sane people were competent to segregate themselves, they seemed to think. Leave this crazy group alone and when they are gone, life in the South will revert to its quietly segregated correctness. It will be okay as long as the other passengers don’t get the idea that they can henceforth sit where they please. Most of our group slept or read, and some gazed at the Georgia countryside as it drifted by. I sat on the right side next to the window cradling a stack of student newspapers from around the South. I planned to scan them for evidence of any stirring of enlightenment on Southern campuses. I was pessimistic.

Per Laursen relieved me of this duty by taking the aisle seat, whipping out his reporter’s notebook and asking me to fill him in on Albany. I suggested he talk to Forman since I knew very little except what I’d heard about the place. But Forman was dozing so Per asked me why SNCC was putting all of its staff into Albany. I filled him in as best I could. The staff had been together for only a short while, I explained, though most were experienced jail veterans seasoned in the sit-ins of 1960 and the freedom rides earlier in the year. The group had jelled when fifteen of the most experienced freedom fighters decided over the summer to become full-time organizers.

Brenda Travis, age sixteen, Hollis Watkins, nineteen, and Curtis Hayes, age eighteen, had helped with Bob Moses’s voter registration campaign. This led to Herbert Lee’s murder in Liberty, Mississippi, and was followed by the Klan and police terror in McComb, which had welded SNCC together, hardening everyone’s resolve to become professional revolutionaries.

Sherrod and Reagon, now patiently building the Albany movement, had both been involved during the summer in Mississippi. Our main “adult” advisor, Ella Baker, had counseled us to return to McComb as soon as we could rest a bit and lick our wounds and bruises. In all our discussions concerning the work in the Albany area, we had constantly reminded each other of the importance of digging in for the long haul. If the bad guys got the idea that a few days of violence and brutality could rid their area of those “Snickers and Slickers,” we would never be able to organize in the rural South, the location of the vast majority of black people. We did not intend to be run out of southwest Georgia the way the Klan thought they had chased us from southwest Mississippi.

I reminded Per that all the SNCC people were not involved in Albany. Moses, SNCC Chairman Chuck McDew, and the others were still in jail in McComb. James Bevel and Diane Nash had just gotten married and were continuing the SNCC project, Move On Mississippi (MOM). Marion Barry, John Lewis, Julian Bond, and others were carrying on their duties. We were headed toward Albany because Forman thought our organizers in southwest Georgia deserved a shot at their dream—the total mobilization of a Deep South community to end all forms of segregation. And they had been successful so far, not just in mobilizing the young people but in building a community-wide movement. The kids took the lead in going to jail; now the adults were stirring. When children get involved, many parents tend to follow. I ended my monologue saying I was particularly interested in the work because Charles Sherrod was determined to prove that white organizers could function in even the riskiest field work. Albany was an example of our commitment to organize in a way that was consistent with our goal of the “beloved community.”

I began stuffing papers in my bag. Per said, “Wait, I’ve got more questions.” The train slowed and he looked outside.

“Okay, later,” I said.

The train pulled into Albany’s Union Railway Terminal. Casey Hayden gently shook Forman awake and he was delighted to see his idea of the freedom ride working. He was often surprised when plans worked the way they were supposed to. After waking Jim, Casey discreetly exited from a different train door. Nobody in the terminal building looked like passengers. They looked like cops and there were lots of them, and they had allowed in only two SNCC people, Charles Jones and Bertha Gober, along with A. C. Searles from a local black newspaper.

Seeing our SNCC comrades made the occasion feel like a homecoming. I remembered Charles Jones from McComb, his gorgeous bass voice singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.” Bertha Gober, an undergraduate from Albany State, wrote one of our freedom songs, “We’ll Never Turn Back.” During the march in McComb we had sung her haunting, aching melody “. . . we have hung our heads and cried, cried for those like Lee who’ve died . . .” She and another Albany State student, Blanton Hall, had helped spark the Albany movement by being arrested in the white waiting room of the Trailways bus station at the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Police occupied the white areas in the terminal, and Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett, dressed in a starched white shirt and sharply creased blue pants, came over to us and asked us to leave the station.

Forman asked, “Does that mean that this facility is segregated?”

“It means,” the chief’s voice rose sharply, “I’m ordering you to move on or be arrested.”

We moved quickly, Bertha Gober and Jones steering us toward the white exit into bright December sunshine where we were soon surrounded by cheering people from the Albany movement who had been waiting for us in front of the terminal. They shouted approval of our test of Southern hospitality on Georgia’s trains. Pritchett reacted like a cat when the mouse is getting away. He had not counted on us leaving when he barked his order. About to board the cars and vans waiting in front of the terminal, our integrated group was becoming too much of an affront to the tightly segregated Albany society.

Had we managed to get into the various cars and leave for the Shiloh Baptist Church where we were to attend a mass meeting, our plan would have worked. Just as it looked like we would get away, Pritchett’s temper got the best of him. He shouted, “Officers, move out!” and, to us, “Don’t move! You’re under arrest.”

They grabbed and stuffed us into police paddy wagons and eleven of us broke into song, waving like we’d just won a big election. Along with eight of us from Atlanta, they arrested Charles Jones, Bertha Gober, and Willie Mae Jones, another Albany State student. The civil disobedience phase of the Albany movement was underway with a bang and a song. On the way to the Albany jail Bertha and Charles led off with a deafening chorus of “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” The metal walls of the paddy wagon reverberated with a new verse, “Ain’t gonna let Chief Pritchett turn me around . . . . “

There was a mass meeting at Shiloh Church that evening, and an estimated two hundred people attended—some who had witnessed our arrest, and relatives and friends. The songs were reportedly incredible and we realized later that the Shiloh meeting was part of the recognition of Albany as a lasting monument of freedom music and singing. We missed it all, because we were downtown being fingerprinted and charged with disorderly conduct, obstructing the flow of traffic, and failure to obey an officer, before being processed into Pritchett’s jail. I would become well-acquainted with a variety of Albany detention facilities over the next few months.

We had not been disorderly, we had not obstructed the flow of traffic, and we had not failed to obey an officer. We used an interstate transportation facility as the Interstate Commerce Commission ruling intended—in a nondiscriminatory manner. The grudging new ruling had been purchased in Birmingham and Montgomery with a lot of blood and suffering amid burned buses and broken heads. The federal order integrating interstate facilities, ironically, had to be wrung from a reluctant John F. Kennedy and his supposedly tough attorney general brother Bobby. JFK had been elected because large numbers of black voters, mostly in the North, had left the party of Lincoln for the Democrats in the 1960 election. We in SNCC were willing to concede that his little brother might be tough on aging communists and certain labor leaders, but he was not tough on Southern racists. To the Kennedy administration, the recently promulgated ICC rules of the road were for international consumption only; they were tools in the cold war, not weapons for the fight for democracy in the Old South.

President Kennedy had protected his Democratic hindquarters in the South by appointing known racists as federal judges. His first appointment was one of the more egregious examples, that of Harold Cox, former college roommate of Mississippi Senator James Eastland, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Eastland had told Bobby Kennedy that if JFK would give Cox a federal judgeship, then Kennedy could have Eastland’s vote to confirm Thurgood Marshall’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. On the bench, Cox was a disaster. He once referred to some black witnesses as a “bunch of chimpanzees,” and he routinely said “nigger” in open court. His rulings, unsurprisingly, often failed to enforce civil rights and Constitutional protections.

Police Chief Laurie Pritchett and those who ruled Albany, Georgia, and environs, did not intend to charge us with violating their segregation laws, just their Southern sense of order. Segregation laws could be challenged with the nominal support of the U.S. Justice Department. Maintaining law and order, however, was a local matter, allowing President Kennedy to congratulate his friend James Gray, owner of the Albany Herald, on the fine job of law enforcement being done in southwest Georgia. Gray was a racist carpetbagger from Massachusetts, who had married into Southern money and power.

The threads connecting past, present, and future were becoming apparent. The freedom rides of the spring, (where I had observed the aftermath of the Montgomery massacre with the Durrs, writer Jessica Mitford, and my Huntingdon college mates) had resulted in the ICC ruling that the Albany students, and now, we, were testing. The ruling had taken effect on November 1. In Albany our organizers had managed, in only two months, to construct a movement powerful enough to capture the imagination of the nation and the world; these SNCC operatives were veterans of the bloody freedom rides. The Albany movement would become the model for later upheavals in the South such as Birmingham and Danville, Virginia. Another thread connecting Albany to the past was the similarity to the federal reaction in the freedom rides.

The bargain that the Kennedy brothers struck with the governor of Mississippi was that the freedom riders would not be killed (as they expected to be) when they got off the bus in Jackson. This would avoid the black eyes that America, the land of the free, the home of the brave, was sustaining throughout the “un-free” world. How could the United States lead the free world with apartheid so visible in the American South?

In exchange, then, for sparing the lives of the integrated interstate travelers, the state of Mississippi could quietly arrest the freedom riders, trucking them directly to Parchman Prison farm in notorious Sunflower County, home of James Eastland, where they could be punished out of sight of the world press. Never mind that the state was enforcing unconstitutional segregation laws.

The deal that covered Albany was made during the 1960 presidential campaign when Governor Ernest “No, Not One” Vandiver gave his support to Kennedy in exchange for a promise that Kennedy would never send federal forces to enforce desegregation. As long as Chief Pritchett and his law didn’t “brutalize” the demonstrators, at least not in public, he could do violence to citizens’ democratic rights to his heart’s content. The federal government would not interfere. At the end of the first phase of the movement in Albany when Martin King bailed out of jail—and bailed out of Albany contrary to his pledge to share Christmas dinner with the hundreds of movement prisoners—Mayor Asa Kelly announced that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had called within the hour of that afternoon’s truce to congratulate the city “for preventing an outbreak of violence.”

While being fingerprinted and mug-shot for Mayor Kelly’s jail house rogue’s gallery, I thought about the propensity Southerners have for displaying sweetness in the daylight while creating hell in the cell. What would we find in the jails that were being prepared to receive us? The fat little cop who took my prints smirked while praising me for knowing the fingerprinting procedure. “You’ve done this before, ain’t you? I sure appreciate the way you roll that finger for me. People who ain’t done it before will oftentimes smudge the paper.” He grinned like a mule eating briars, “You done it right the first time.”

I didn’t say anything. At this point I didn’t have a lot of jail experience, but I remembered from our training workshops the danger of being too friendly with police. They often played variations of the good cop/bad cop routine to see what they could learn. The lawmen in Mississippi, I recalled, had alternated between threats and being just a good ol’ boy curious about how a nice Southern gentleman like myself got mixed up in “all this.” Another ploy I learned in McComb—a cop would whisper that another was a “bad ass,” telling me to come to him if there was trouble.

All jails are different. Now it was comforting to be with friends. In Mississippi I had been the only white person arrested and it was my first time in jail. I had been terrified in Mississippi, especially when my own lawyer said he was worried that I would not make it through the night. Here in Albany I had a chance to be the experienced one, telling Tom Hayden and Per Laursen what to expect. This happy state didn’t last, however; Tom bailed out to fulfill a speaking engagement for Students for a Democratic Society. Forman thought it was a good idea because Tom would spread the word about Albany the way he had with the campaign in Mississippi when he wrote a pamphlet called “Revolution in Mississippi.”

I supported Tom’s leaving because I had recently been asked to serve on the SDS national executive committee and I wanted closer ties between the organizations. SDS could help focus national attention on our work in the deep South, and SNCC could continue to inspire northern students to revolt and organize. Publicity would help us raise much-needed money.

Per stayed in long enough to see how it was so he could write about Southern jails, and he and Joan Browning were bailed out late Monday in time to attend a mass meeting. I decided to honor SNCC’s policy of jail, no bail. If I believed in the principle of noncooperation with evil, it didn’t make sense to court arrest and then get out on bail as soon as possible. Besides, if the ruling class of Albany and its hired hands, the police, cooperated, it would be possible to organize the first mass jail-in of the rural South. I would remain in jail for a while.

After arraignment I was placed in a large cell block with the general white prison population. One of the first things you learn about jails is that they are run by the inmates, not the authorities. Another thing that seems more or less constant is that there is usually one prisoner who is the leader or boss of the jail—not always the strongest or toughest one, either. Usually it is a man who is intelligent, serving a long sentence or sentences for a nonviolent crime.

In the Albany jail the leader was a slender man named Shug. He reminded me of a cross between Popeye and Art Carney playing Norton on “The Honeymooners.” He talked out of the left side of his mouth and had a disconcerting habit of looking slightly past your head as he talked, like he was watching someone behind you. A three-time loser, the man was a safe-cracker and proud of the fact that he made his living with his brain, not his brawn.

Shug took to me right away. I had expected hostility from the white inmates, most of them Southern. Surprisingly there was not much recognizable anger directed towards me. I found out that Mr. Shug—that’s what all newcomers were told to call him—had interceded in my behalf. Mr. Shug had been pointed out to us while Tom and Per were still in with me. Not long after they left, Shug, eased over toward me holding out a cigarette—a high compliment from anybody in jail, where the two most common drugs, alcohol and tobacco, are worth more than money.

This particular Lucky Strike was even more of an honor, coming from the Man himself. Shug wanted to know how much money I was making in my line of work. He had always been confident, he told me in a whisper, that he was the smartest guy in the jail. Incarcerated for years, he knew the men inside out, especially the long-timers. Now he claimed he was not so sure he was the most intelligent man in that jail. Listening to me talk, he said he could tell two things. One, I was educated, and two, he was pretty sure I was a Southerner. That was what made him ask about my salary.

“You must make an awful lot of money.”

“No, not really.”

“Well,” Shug said, “what do you call not a lot? It may sound like an awful lot to us poor sons of bitches in here.”

I told Shug it would not sound like a lot to him or anybody else in the jail. People are often surprised, I said, to find out how little we can get by on.

“I bet,” Shug said. “Look, I’m a safe-cracker, and pretty good at it. That’s how come I run things around here. Guys in here could tear my head off, but they’re not as smart as me. That’s why they let me be in charge.”

I could see he was desperate to clear up a puzzle for himself. To change the subject and also because I was curious, I asked him about an old man who walked about the cell block all day in a shuffle, always the same rate of walk, never taking a step longer than six inches. Shug said you could always tell a man who had spent a lot of time on the old chain gangs. “That man was on the chain for more than thirty-five years, he went in as a teenager for murder and he’ll never take another step in any other way than that, six inches at a time. That man was shackled day and night for almost forty years. He’s still shackled to that chain, only now you can’t see it.”

Now he tried another tack. “I know it doesn’t look like I’m any good at robbing safes, what with me being in here and all, but you would be surprised if I told you how much money I’ve handled in my life—the times I’m not in here, you know. Like I say, I’ve been very successful at different times, but I bet I’ve never even dreamed of the money you are making, doing what you are doing. Am I right?”

When I told him again that I barely made enough to get by on, he seemed to get exasperated. “Look, Bob, is it okay if I call you that . . .? You don’t have to tell everyone else in here. Just tell me in confidence. I won’t tell nobody. This is one professional to another. Now how much is it, if you don’t mind? You got to be making millions. No person in his right mind would do what I’ve heard you are doing if they weren’t making millions.”

It looked like I had to tell him, so I said that I made exactly what every other SNCC field secretary makes, ten dollars a week.

“I understand,” Shug whispered, “that you have to put out that cock-and-bull story for mass consumption, Bob. But this is Shug you are taking to. You don’t expect me to buy such a story. You got to be making more than me, that’s what’s driving me crazy. How much is it worth to do what you are doing? It don’t make sense. You could get killed. These guys in here would beat the shit out of you except I’ve told them you are making a killing. Hell, now they are not even mad at you. But I got to know how much you are making. I don’t even have to know where it is coming from. If it is Moscow gold, that’s your business, but don’t hand me this ten-dollars-a-week business. Bob, don’t insult my intelligence, please!”

I assured Shug that I was a member of SNCC out of conviction and I believed that segregation was bad for people. Black people and white people.

“You can get convicted,” Shug said, “and I’m not going to let you off the hook. I’ll just keep trying till I find out how much money you’re making. Then I’ll know whether or not it’ll be worthwhile changing my line of work.

In the following days and weeks Shug kept talking to me. He said he was still trying to figure out if he was the smartest one in that jail. The more I professed to make ten dollars a week, the more Shug figured I was making millions.

On the first Saturday night in the joint a controversy broke out about whether I should get an allotted share of the hooch that was brewed weekly in our cell block. The prisoner cooks, trustys, would “steal” corn meal and raisins from the pantry, add a little sugar and copious amounts of warm water, and let it ferment into a reasonable facsimile of beer. A five-gallon bucket served as a vat. All week each prisoner would listen to its gurgle and fizz while the aroma promised a Saturday night break in the deadly monotony. One glass of that green, warm homebrew and no inmate need worry about irregularity. It would go through you, Shug grinned, “like grease through a goose.”

Shug settled any argument by explaining that everybody got his share as long as he obeys his rules. “Bob here, obeys my rules like everybody else, so he gets his share. Anybody don’t like it, take it up with me.”

December days were passing, and I heard that Dr. King was leading a prayer march on the 16th. He was arrested along with 250 demonstrators, and I thought—not bad to spend Christmas in jail with Martin Luther King Jr. But he was released on bail as part of a settlement with Albany officials, and I spent a sad holiday, enhanced by missing a big New Year’s Eve celebration.

I was supposed to go to New York for a party at Harry Belafonte’s house, and the great singer Lena Horne was going to be there. I was to talk about Albany and McComb, and I was very excited about it all. I had been to New York only once, when I graduated from high school. In SNCC, we never knew when fame might be burnished by missing events because of untimely arrests. People at Belafonte’s party could have talked about the fact that Zellner “was missing in action.”

After the first go-round in Albany, in February 1962 I got a taste of prison Louisiana-style. Chuck McDew and I were charged with criminal anarchy and stayed in jail there until early March. I then came back to Albany for trial in city court. Charles Sherrod was sitting in the white section with Tom and Casey Hayden and me. The deputies smacked him across the face and dragged him to the back of the courtroom to the colored section, so naturally the Haydens and I and a couple of the other white defendants got up and joined Sherrod in the black section. Then we were all dragged out of the courtroom and slammed roughly into an elevator where the bailiffs and the cops proceeded to kick our asses good. My jail life changed dramatically after that because we were all convicted. Most of the freedom riders bailed out to await the appeals process, especially since we were sentenced to hard labor. It was March by now and starting to heat up, so working on a Georgia road gang did not appeal to anyone. I had never served time on a chain gang before so I decided to begin serving my sentence. There would be time later to bail out so my conviction could be appealed.

I learned that jail conditions, not very accommodating before, deteriorated dramatically after conviction. Before, we were “technically” innocent. Now that I was definitely guilty of violating the sacred laws of Georgia, I was remanded to the custody of the High Sheriff for punishment. This consisted of being thrown into a dark cell with a dirt floor where the only light filtered under the large wooden door or down from a naked light bulb twenty feet off the ground. The “cell” measured no more than about eight feet by ten feet and housed between twelve and fifteen men. This seemingly impossible feat was accomplished by stacking the beds against opposite walls, six bunks high. The high-status criminals occupied the top-most bunks because it was quieter way up there, and the only way to get to one’s bunk was to use the lower bunks as a ladder. The single electrical cord in the top of the cramped cell also served as a way to heat up a cup of instant coffee, tea or soup. Inmate electricians rigged a tin Prince Albert tobacco can as a heating element. The can was split in two and held apart by rubber cut from an inner tube. The pieces of metal were hooked to the bare copper wires of the light cord. When lowered into a mug of water, electricity arced between the halves, bringing the liquid to a boil. Add instant coffee, tea, or split pea soup, and voila!—it’s what’s for dinner. When cooking was going on, our cubicle was dark except for an occasional match lighting a cigarette or sparks from the cooker. At night, after a hard day on the road it was easy to see who ranked at the bottom of the pecking order: me. I reached the electrode last; if I could stay awake that long.

Soon, however, my status changed. Lucky for me, my jailers thought that the height of punishment would be to assign me to an all-black chain gang. “If he wants integration so bad, he’ll get integration all right. That son-of-a-bitch will have to work his time and his ass off on a nigger road gang.” When I heard this I felt like Br’er Rabbit: “Please, Mr. White Man, don’t make me face the humiliation of riding around this town and county on the back of a state truck on an all-Negro chain gang.”

The only whites on my gang were me and the captain. The black prisoners welcomed me like a lost brother. They told me quietly that they had been instructed not to say a word to me but we found ways to communicate. The best thing that happened was that word got out in the black community that I was on the road gang. The movement people found a way to get advance information of where we would be working on a particular day and they would come by and wave, lifting my morale and that of the black prisoners. Suddenly our bunch was the most popular chain gang in Georgia history. Each car that came by would surreptitiously drop goodies for us—candy, toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, cotton handkerchiefs and bandanas, all highly prized items for men doing hard time on the gang. Smiling black faces would give us the thumbs-up after dropping our favorite cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and snuff. Soon our black gang had so much stuff that I started sneaking some of it back to the white cell block where I was still housed. That’s when I became a VIP in our little white hovel. The white guys started placing orders, “Can you get me a plug of Old Pork Twist chewing tobacco, I ain’t had none of that since I been in this hole, fourteen years. . . If you cain’t, try to get me some Black Maria plug. If you can do that then I can die happy.”

Even my “Cap’n” loosened up eventually. One day my black gang was loading red dirt on a big dump truck way out in the middle of a field. The truck’s sides were so high that we were exhausted trying to throw the red clay high enough so that at least some of it would wind up in the truck. The wind was high along toward the end of March, and suddenly a skyscraper of a thunder cloud loomed up out of what had seemed like a blue sky. Before we could move, lightning was popping all around us. Knowing something about lightning in the middle of a huge field, we and the captain realized at the same time that we were in big trouble, us and the truck being the highest things for miles around. The first thing Cap’n did was lower his shotgun from its customary place sticking in the air over his slumped shoulder. He looked once at the truck, then shook his head as he turned and started trotting toward the highway across the open field. I looked ahead in the direction he was running and could barely make out the low profile of a lone cinder block building way over on the highway. I remembered passing it before, a flyblown redneck tavern. We looked at each other, dropped our shovels, and jogged off after the fat white man running with his head down and a death grip on the twelve-gauge shotgun in his right fist.

We overtook the captain in short order and the younger black men of the gang strung out in a long file running for the protection of the building. I let my pace keep me at the back of the pack, closest to the guard, who was, by this time, thoroughly winded and wheezing loudly. He was not in work shape like us. As we neared the building I saw my black fellow prisoners disappear through a back door clearly marked, “colored.” It was raining in sheets now. Rain, thunder, and the lightning made it difficult for me to think. I wondered if I was supposed to follow the crew into the Negro section, or wait and see if the captain wanted me to go up front with the rest of the white people. I looked back to see if he would give me any indication of what he wanted me to do, but it was clear that he was still too far away to appreciate my delicate dilemma of Southern etiquette. So I said to myself, “They are the ones that put me here, so let them figure it out.” I ducked into the back with the rest of the Negroes.

The moment I entered, I decided to play a trick on the captain. Sticking my head through the opening in the wall I said, very matter of factly, “Two six packs of Bud, please.” Without blinking the bartender hoisted two six packs up to the window, just as the captain puffed through the front door. “Zellner,” he bellowed, “get your ass out of that window and come up here with your own kind.” To the black prisoners he said, “Don’t y’all touch them beers.” When I reached the front of the road house, he was muttering about losing his state job, “Niggers drinking beer on a god-damned chain gang.” The story had a happy ending, though. Grateful to be alive, and not lightning-struck, Cap’n relented and gave each prisoner a cold one.

I was on the chain gang about a month before I bailed out.