In February 1962, in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, I had my first experience with police torture, Southern American style. SNCC Chairman Chuck McDew and I had been at our trial in McComb, Mississippi, and decided to take a bus to New Orleans with a stop in Baton Rouge. Dion Diamond, one of our SNCC field workers had been arrested and imprisoned there during student demonstrations at Southern University. Dion had left Howard University, had organized in Virginia and Maryland, had been a freedom rider, and had been arrested while working with black students in Baton Rouge. We planned to visit him, talk about his bond, and then head for New Orleans.
Both Chuck and I had good contacts and friends in the Big Easy. Oretha Castle and her sister were leaders of the movement (Oretha would later marry my friend Richard Haley, who worked for CORE and who proved to be so steady and strong on the William Moore march in 1963). Dave Dennis, who in 1964 would organize for CORE in Mississippi, was from Louisiana and worked in New Orleans. He would make the impassioned speech at James Chaney’s funeral in Meridian following the murders that summer of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia. Tom Dent, the son of the Dillard University president, was one of our supporters and later wrote a great book about his travels to movement hot spots.
We never made it to see our friends and eat and party in New Orleans. When our wheezy old bus smoked into Baton Rouge, Chuck and I took in the early evening scene. Even though it was still February the street were warm and swarming with people. As the driver wheeled us through the Negro district of town, we could see revelers inside the various night spots beginning their Saturday evening—glad to have made it through another week. Student demonstrations had roiled the local black campus. Chuck and I wondered aloud if the police wouldn’t take out their frustrations on some black skulls tonight.
“Naw,” Chuck did his best imitation of the local boys in uniform, “these cracker cops hope these black dudes will drink up their anger and be ready for work Monday morning back at Mister Charlie’s plantation house.”
I asked McDew not to call them that, “I am a cracker, too,” I said.
“Shut up, Nigger,” Chuck snapped, “here’s the station, watch yo’ ass now.”
That ended the discussion of calling white people names. We tried to inconspicuously check our bags in a couple of lockers. We didn’t know how long we could visit Dion, and we would need them handy for the last leg of the trip to New Orleans.
As we left the Baton Rouge bus station, McDew hailed the first black person we saw and asked directions to the Parish Prison. Pulling his hat down over his eyes, the man said softly, “What business you got down there, man—you don’t want to be nosing around that particular area.”
Chuck explained that we were going to see a friend about his bail, got the directions, and we set out. Along the way we talked about the fact that we didn’t have great news for Dion. We couldn’t raise his $7,000 bail, and he would have to sit tight until we did. We soon reached a stucco brick wall about twenty feet high, topped with sparkling concertina razor wire. The wall was washed in a searing white light. At the entrance to the prison, a small knot of police eyed us up and down while Chuck asked directions to the visiting area.
“Ain’t no visitin’ area, boy. But you could ask the night duty officer over there,” one officer said pleasantly. Another offered, “Turn left and go the end of the hall. He’s on the right down there.” Chuck thanked them, and as we headed down the hall I heard one of the cops say in a stage whisper, “What ever happened to ‘Sir’?”
Now Chuck is a dark Negro and powerfully built—he was a star football player. So going down the hall I whispered a plea that he not let himself get provoked.
The desk sergeant looked at us like we had descended from Mars, “You boys wants to visit who? If I ain’t mistaken that nigger is a stone trouble maker and besides, colored day is Thursday. Where y’all from anyway?”
McDew introduced himself as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “Mr. Diamond works for us and I would like to discuss his bond.”
The sergeant smiled an unfriendly smile, “And do you have the bond for Mister Diamond?”
“No, I don’t. That’s what I need to talk to him about.”
“Well, you can’t see him, I already explained that Colored day is Thursday and seeing as how tonight is Saturday, you ain’t going to see him.”
While the desk man busied himself with papers I noticed the other policemen had moved from outside and were now slouching against the far wall taking everything in. Chuck asked if we could leave a message for Dion and would it be possible to leave him some supplies. The sergeant shoved a paper across the desk and said you can get these things but hurry up, this desk closes at nine o’clock.”
We hurried to the nearest drug store where we got some paperbacks and toiletries. Walking back we saw a lot of patrol cars around the prison entrance and others with flashing lights converging from different streets.
“What’s up?” Chuck wondered aloud. “I guess Saturday night in ol’ Baton Rouge must be heating up.” Thinking we’d soon be enjoying red beans and rice at Dookie Chase’s in New Orleans, we agreed that we felt especially sorry for Dion being locked up, facing unknown horrors.
“We brought these back for Mr. Diamond—” Chuck had begun to say, when several cops the size of Green Bay linebackers descended upon us. One slung McDew into the brick wall and hissed in his face, “MISTER Diamond! Who you callin’ Mister, boy? You like Mister Diamond so much, you won’t mind going on in there with him and enjoying what he’s been enjoying.”
They took McDew down the hall; I wouldn’t see him for about two weeks. Then they turned to me while the one holding me tried his best to break bones. “Put the cuffs on this nigger lover while I hold him real tight, you hear?” This was the beginning of a nightmare of brutality and torture. While they squeezed the cuffs on my wrist, cutting off all blood flow, I remembered our training and demanded to know what the charges were. Vagrancy, I was told. Knowing that pleading my case would mean nothing, I nonetheless mentioned, while being hustled down the corridor, that we had money and a bus ticket to New Orleans, and I wanted to make a phone call to my attorney.
The no-neck cop who put the cuffs on so tight laughed and said to the other one, “We got ourselves a regular comedian here.”
All Saturday night I was just one of the boys among the fifty or sixty inmates in the large cell block. When the bulls threw me into the lockup they had, mercifully, not said anything except here’s another vagrant. One of the guys commiserated with me. Looking at my crumpled suit and tie and my once-white shirt, he said in a midwest accent, “These local yokels will arrest anybody on the way through, charge them with vagrancy, and dare them to fight the charge. They know that nobody is going to appeal the eleven-day sentence. We just suck it up and remind ourselves to never, ever, darken the door of Baton Rouge again.”
I liked the guy and the others in this small group. They didn’t seem to be Deep Southerners, or maybe they were a little higher class than the average robber or killer. I told them about getting off the bus and being arrested for vagrancy.
A well-dressed man in a tweed jacket told me he had stopped to get a burger, walked to the edge of the street to check a route sign to be sure he was headed west on Highway 90 to Houston, and was grabbed by two cops, cuffed and brought to the lockup.
When he protested that he had just left his car for a leg stretch and a burger, the officers said, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll send a wrecker for it. The storage, though, will cost you some money.”
The well-dressed man said 90 percent of the people were in for vagrancy or loitering. “We have to stay eleven days while the sheriff spends twenty-five cents a day to feed us and pockets five dollars a day per man. Pretty good money.”
They gave me some advice. “The heavy hitters here are housed in the back cells. They pretty much run things and we short-timers try to stay out of their way. Remember, don’t go back there; there’s no percentage in it.”
As the newest man I was relegated to a smelly, stained, very thin and lumpy blue-tick mattress on the cold cement floor of the day room. Even so, being exhausted and emotionally wrung out, I slept soundly until a horrible battering woke me up. Two fat deputy jailers came down the prison corridor banging empty tin cups against the iron bars. Behind them in the bedlam trudged two black trustys pulling the food carts. Haggard, unshaven men emerged from the double row of cells behind the day room, lining up with their backs against the wall. In a high falsetto one of the jailers screamed, “Ain’t this your lucky day. Here’s your usual delicious breakfast soufflé—etouffé a la baloney, and,” he lingered over the word, “a special treat for you highly educated gentlemen, who can read, brand new hot-off-the-press newspapers!”
He tossed in a stack as men began grabbing them. A buzz enveloped the day room as prisoners grabbed baloney sandwiches and lukewarm tin cups of coffee, staring at the fat Sunday paper. I could see the headline in World War II-sized type. Across the top of the front page were the words “CRIMINAL ANARCHY CHARGED.” Under it, the subhead read, “Two held attempting government overthrow.”
The falsetto-voiced jailer, having given a moment for things to sink in, sang out, “Seems we have an important visitor amongst us. A sho-nuff dangerous commie,” glancing teasingly in my direction. “He’s a real criminal anarchist, whatever the hell that means, and something I do understand—a real live Yankee nigger lover. Read it and weep, gentlemen. I think you all know what to do, and welcome to it.”
The jailers spun around together and clicked their heels before stomping off down the hall with the carts and the trustys in tow. I understood what was taking place and went quickly into survival mode, moving into the corner of the day room as far as possible from the back cells and closest to the disappearing cops. I was covered on two sides, and I would play it by ear to be as nonviolent as I could but to give up my life as dearly as possible. At the same time I was in need of seeing the whole article so I would know what the inmates were reacting to. I got some encouragement when the man from the night before, with a stricken face, quietly slid one of the papers over to my corner, whispering, “Better stay in that corner.”
Before long a little dude with broken and badly blackened teeth sidled over and got in my face. Past martial arts training kicked in and I couldn’t resist shifting my weight slightly and backing one foot, hands hanging lightly by my sides. These shifts were not lost on the little street fighter and he actually backed up a half a step.
Recall of what had happened in McComb slowly impinged on my consciousness—at least the detached feeling of observing things from a slight distance. I was calm but acutely aware of the struggle between my fighting history and the relatively new training in nonviolence. I wondered if Gandhi, King, and John Lewis expected us to be completely nonviolent even in prison.
I had quickly read enough of the front page to know that my cellmates would be challenged to defend “the Southern way of life.” But as luck would have it, the hyperbole of the article might give me a degree of protection from the hoods, most of whom are cowards at heart. The indictment quoted in the paper said something like, “on or about the 19th day of February, 1962, SNCC members Charles McDew and John Robert Zellner, did with force of arms attempt to overthrow the government of East Baton Rouge Parish, the State of Louisiana, and the United States of America.”
My fellow inmates could be forgiven if they found themselves unable to decide if I was a pacifist or one tough dude—“force of arms,” and all that. I was soon surrounded by men demanding to know if I was the nigger-lover. I stood my ground in my corner, not having much choice. The little guy with the bad teeth, thinking he had mass support now did everything he could to get me to lift my hands. Not taking his bait, I survived the initial onslaught without being beaten.
A couple of guys from our conversation the night before, which now seemed to be an age ago, brought another mattress to my corner. There, I held the mob at bay through the power of Zen. My tormentors often sat on the floor at a distance and described in vivid terms the castration that was in store for me if I so much as dozed in my corner. Displaying their cell-made shivs, the short guy shaved most of his arms and legs to show how sharp their weapons were.
“This here,” he grinned, “will peel out yo’ nuts as slick as a whistle,” flourishing his blade in a quick circle. “Same as castrating a calf,” he chuckled.
When I could no longer stay awake twenty-four hours a day, I began to allow myself to doze during the day so as to be wakeful at night, the most dangerous time. The inmate terrorists then, possibly with the advice of the jailers, began to douse me, in the face if they aimed well, with cold water. Sleep deprivation is an effective form of torture because the subject of the brutality, though showing no injuries, begins slowly to lose his mental faculties. The other method was to whack the bottoms of my feet with a broom handle that the jailer had conveniently left inside after the morning sweeping—in case I stretched out and dozed at the same time.
Threats of castration, water torture, and sleep deprivation were the order of the days for me for about two weeks. Jim Dombrowski of SCEF in New Orleans found us a lawyer and I told him right away, “They’re not letting me sleep. I can’t take this for very long. I gotta get somewhere.”
So they put me in one of the cells in the general cell block. It had a wall on one side and three sides were bars from ceiling to floor. I might be away from them so they couldn’t kill me, but they would still throw water on me, or they would take shifts and poke me with a broom handle through the bars. So the psychological torture continued.
I saw the lawyer one more time and told him I could not hold out much longer. After he left I didn’t know if my plea had done any good until a couple of jailers showed up and said to get my things, I was being transferred. I smiled at the notion of “gathering up my things.” I had a single item. Except the clothes I had worn for over two weeks, I possessed a tattered cowboy novel I’d been given by one of the good guys in the cell. I cherished that book, having read it several times.
Trudging down the gray prison hallway with the guards, one in front the other behind, I was still somewhat apprehensive. Any change from the tortuous conditions I had endured for two weeks was certainly welcomed, but I was suspicious that the “authorities” had any intention of making life more bearable. The risk, I decided—no matter what, was worth it.
I thought I had died and gone to heaven when, rounding a corner into a short corridor just off the main guard desk, I spied the hand of my dear friend Charles McDew protruding from a tiny opening in a solid steel door. Passing by I heard him whisper, “My brother, thank you, God!”
Afraid to speak, for fear of jeopardizing a chance to be close to my brother and friend, I was glad when the guards shoved me into the next tiny cell, slammed the door and disappeared. Listening for their retreating footsteps, I heard a whisper from the next cell, “Zellner, I thought you were dead!”
“I’m okay,” I lied, about to break into tears. “A little worse for wear, for sure, but still here. How you doing?”
“Hot!” Chuck hissed. “You’ll see soon.”
“What do you mean, and why are we whispering?
“Never mind that now,” McDew replied, “but look across this little hall. See that fire extinguisher hanging on the wall?”
“Yeah, I see it, why?”
“Well, if you give me a minute, I’m gonna tell you. We got plenty of time, don’cha think? See that shiny silver plaque on the side of the extinguisher facing us?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you hillbilly, if you look close you can see my face reflected in its shininess.”
“It’s hard to see,” I said.
“Wait, I’ll stick my hand out this little slit. Maybe you’ll see the movement?”
“I see it,” I shouted, “I can see you, Chuck!”
“Shuuuush, if you keep hollerin, they”ll come back and take you back where you been. But first they gonna whip yo’ ass till it won’t hold shucks. They whipped the last one in that cell something pitiful when all he did was speak to me, and he was white, too.”
McDew was doing that white accent thing he does.
“By the way, where you been?” he asked.
“In holy hell,” I said. “I been staying with the white people . . . I’ll tell you about it later. Hey, Chuck, can you see me in the fire extinguisher?”
“Of course, I can see your face, ofay. You can see mine, and I can see yours—but yours is so ugly I can’t remember why I wanted to see it in the first place.” He was clearly delighted.
“If you keep talking in that fake Southern accent, they going to come back, and it won’t be me they be whippin’,” I said. In addition to bantering with him, I spontaneously burst into song. I was so happy to be here next to Chuckie. Happiness didn’t last long, however.
“Is your cell getting hotter?” I asked Chuck.
“Getting? What you talking about? My cell ain’t getting hotter, it’s been hot.”
I touched his wall and involuntarily jerked my hand back, “It feels like an oven,” I gasped.
“Feels like? It IS an oven. Don’t you realize that yo’ poor ignorant peckerwood ass has been thrown in the sweat box?”
“The what, Chuck? I can’t take much more of this, man. How long you been in there?”
“I been in here ever since the night me and you were captured by these Nazis, how long do you think I been in this hole?”
I tried to cheer him up. “Let’s talk about something else and take our minds off of it. You got anything to read?” I asked.
“To read!” Chuck whispered in a soft scream, “Bob, you really know how to hurt a guy. I have a candy wrapper. If I read the bleeping wrapper one more time, I promise you I will go stark raving, homicidally mad!”
“Oh,” I said.
“And you?” Chuck asked in his best sarcasm, “What’s in your library today? What did you check out?”
“Well, I have a book,” I said.
“You have a WHAT!!”
“I have a book.”
I told him that an inmate had slipped it to me when I was in an isolation cell in the center of the cell block. I kept it hidden as much as possible and the guards had not seemed to notice when they brought me down here. I told McDew that I had practiced a lot of magic in my short life and I had a way of hiding something in plain view. “Obviously, you didn’t notice the book either, when I came in.”
“Zellner, could you spare me the magic and the hiding and just hand it over to me.”
“And how am I going to do that, genius? Maybe yo’ magic is stronger than my magic.”
Silence. “Don’t rush me, I’m thinking.” McDew said.
“Take your time. Like you said we got plenty of time. And see, like I said, talking about the book took our minds off the heat. Right?”
He then suggested that while he was thinking, I could tell him about the book. “Tell me everything from the very beginning. What’s the book about anyway? Is it fiction, what?”
I explained that it was fiction and not a book I would normally read but that it had been a godsend and I considered it to be very valuable in the circumstances . . .
I told him the title was Riders of the Sawtooth Range.
“Cowboys? Great, just what I need, cowboys!”
“I told you it wasn’t something that I would . . .”
“Okay, okay, go ahead . . .”
“Well it’s about these two cowboys way out on the . . .”
“Sawtooth range . . .”
“ . . . Sawtooth range herding cows and they have to make expense reports before they can get any more money for grub, etc.”
I told Chuck that the whole point of the story, it seemed, was that neither of them could read or write or at least they couldn’t spell. McDew opined that they were a lot like me. I asked how he knew about my spelling and he reminded me that he was the chairman of the organization and who did I think had been reading my reports.
“Oh, never mind,” I said.
I went on to explain that one of the cowboys, Clyde, the smart one, had suggested that they copy some of the words off the stuff they already had like the can for kerosene, which of course said, “kerosene.” Another that they were able to lift was chewing tobacco because that’s what it said on the tobacco pouch. The only other one they managed was on the note the boss had left them with which clearly stated “be sure to itemize each item you list in the ‘Miscellaneous’ category.” The funny part was the weekly expense account they had to leave at the trading post for the boss.
“That’s the funny part?” Chuck asked helplessly. “Okay, but don’t give away the ending. I’ll save that till I get my hands on the book itself.”
“Have you figured that out yet?” I asked hopefully. “How I get this treasure over to you?”
“No, now that you had to go and ask . . . But go on.”
“Well there’s not that much more,” I said. “But it sure takes one’s mind off this goddamned heat,” watching more sweat drip on the The Riders of the Sawtooth Range.
Chuck was suddenly very serious, “Z, are you drinking a lot of water?”
“No, why?”
“Man, you’re more ignorant than dirt! Doncha know you got to drink water like you never ever drank it before, if you expect to get out of that hot box over there alive and in your right mind?”
“Why?” I asked, suddenly aware of a powerful thirst.
“Because, by the time you feel thirsty, it’s too late, you will never be able to catch up. I take a sip of this hot spit they call water, running out of my drinking fountain-slash-wash basin, once a minute whether I want it or not. Ain’t you ever been in a sweat box before?”
“McDew,” I said, “how am I supposed to know about these things? This is only the second time in my life I have been in jail, as you know, if you have been reading my reports as you say you have,” I finished lamely. Now I was drinking water like my life depended on it.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m drinking.”
“See that you keep it up,” Chuck advised. “The best thing these fascists can hope for is for you to pass out from the heat and they will find yo ass too late—so sad. By the way there’s a trusty here, a Louisiana brother, who has tried to be friendly. I don’t exactly trust him as far as I can throw him, but he is bringing me some salt and—”
“He’s bringing you some salt?” I replied, trying to sound interested. I was suddenly deathly tired and I noticed I had stopped sweating. I was drinking water now like there was no tomorrow, but I could not quench my thirst. I saw a blurred vision on the black wall of a tall glass with fog on the outside, ice cubes floating on cool spring water with a sprig of green mint. I felt somewhat faint and Chuck’s voice was slowly receding but I could still hear him talking . . . something about salt.
“—and next time he brings me some salt, I will ask him to give you some and you can hand him the book and he will pass it over to me.”
“What has salt got to do with anything?” I managed to whisper. We were still crouched at the tiny slits in our cells, clinging to the first genuinely friendly contact either of us had had for weeks.
“Salt, you crazy cracker, is what’s kept me breathin’ for two weeks and will keep you alive. You can’t sweat like this and live without salt; yo’ brain can’t take it.”
I vaguely heard McDew giving me a lecture on electrolytes and how African Americans had adapted over the years to hard labor in hot climates and that’s why it was so important for me to be sure to take my salt and drink plenty of water because poor-ass white boys like me could not take this heat like black men, blah blah blah . . .
I remember the last thing I tried to say to McDew was not to get his hopes up about the book, especially the ending, because there were several pages missing in the back and it was hard to tell how many.
“Man, you had to tell me that. Why didn’t you just wait for me to find out?”
“I didn’t want to disappoint you,” I mumbled. “And, besides, you can have fun making up your own endings. I made up a whole bunch.”
“Swell,” Chuck mimicked my accent, “Just spare me your endings and let me make up some of my own—WHEN I GET THE BOOK! Okay?”
“Okay,” I said before slipping to the floor.
After a while I realized I was lying on the floor which was slightly cooler than the air above. I could hear Chuck’s faint voice calling my name, telling me to put my face at the bottom of the door and breathe the air from the corridor. He kept asking if I was all right but I could not muster the energy to answer. A while later I heard McDew hissing loudly, “Here they come, can you believe this?”
Loud banging began on what seemed to be the door of his cell and a harsh male voice said, “Wake up in there, nigga, you got visitors, now you watch yo mouth and be nice to these little girls. This here, ladies, is our black communist Jew, and in a minute you’ll see our white communist.”
I heard giggles. Big Voice bragged, “You might say we have with us today a black Red and a white Red, I don’t know which one smells the worst, don’t you get too close now, you hear?
In the hall I heard a girl’s voice demanding, “Hey, say something in communist.”
“Always willin’ to oblige, ma’am,” Chuck replied in his best fake Uncle Tom voice.
“No, I’m serious say something in communist—you must speak the language.”
“Okay, how’s this? Kish mir ein tuckus!”
Throughout this interchange I was beginning to breathe again so I lifted myself back up to the slit in my door and peered out. I didn’t speak Yiddish but I was pretty certain that my friend Chuck had just told the little white girl to kiss his ass. It did seem to satisfy everyone. As they turned to my cell the little girls in school uniforms were laughing, “He said something in communist! Yeah, I heard him, “Kish mi . . . something. I never heard communist before.”
“One of his names is ‘Zellna,’” lectured Big Voice, “sounds communist to me, and one of the commies tryin’ to raise both their bonds calls himself ‘Mister Dombrowski.’ I don’t know ’bout that black one, maybe his real name is McDooski.”
The children were losing interest so Big Voice directed them on down the hall saying that the crazy people were even more interesting than the communists.
In the cell right across from us, I learned, they kept mental patients, and they were naked, with excrement all over the place. We were on the psycho ward and the punishment block.
Chuck was telling me about the poor souls across the hall, often on the way to or from some mental institution, for overnight or a week. I was still woozy from my introduction to the hot box. Chuck promised me I would “get used to it.” I did not think so. I lay on the bare steel of the bunk for a while and finally gave up and transferred to the concrete floor, the first I had ever felt that was hot.
Late in the afternoon, as far as I could tell because here in the hole there was no daylight to be seen, Chuck hissed another warning, “Somebody’s coming, Z, get the book ready.”
I soon heard a hurried whispered conversation. The new voice was unmistakably Creole, a real Louisiana sound. A light-skinned Negro looked through my slot and pushed in a small golf-ball-sized cloth bag, tied at the top with brown string, and whispered, “My man ova heah axed me to give you this. He still got some. You got sumthin fo me?”
“Oh yes, I almost forgot, and thanks for the salt.” I shoved the book through the slot. In my haste, and because the slot was tight, the front cover ripped off. The back one was missing already so I hoped it wouldn’t make much difference. I passed the cover through after the man had taken the body of the book. I breathed a prayer that Chuck would get it all right; it meant so much to him.
When he left I heard nothing, Chuck was so absorbed in the book. After a long while I ventured a whispered question to McDew.
“How you like it? I asked.
“Like what?”
“The book,” I said hopefully, “how you liking the book?”
“Don’t play with me, what the hell you mean ‘how I like the book?’” Trouble and concern mounted in his voice. “You didn’t . . . Ain’t no book showed up over here . . . Is the book gone?” He wailed.
“I gave it to the man like you said, didn’t you tell me to get the book ready? I was ready—the man gave me the salt, and I gave him the book. He didn’t give it to you?”
“Nooo,” Chuck moaned, “I knew he was no good. Why did I ever trust that no-count. Bob,” he said, “never trust a trusty!”
Every time I realized that Chuck was in the cubicle next to me, I was so happy, I began to cry. Sometimes, we would sing freedom songs, and it drove the guards crazy—at one point I swear they turned up the heat to the point we could not raise our heads from the bunk. Soon, I was beginning to break under the pressure of the heat while Mc Dew begged me to hold on. He thought I was killed in McComb. Now he was afraid I would never make it out of Parish Prison. After a while, I told Chuck, “I can’t take it anymore. I’m gonna start screaming.”
“See if you can take it a little longer, because otherwise they’re gonna really hurt you.”
“At this point, I don’t really care if they kill me.”
“What about me? Those Visigoths might kill me, too.”
“Too bad.” I said taking a deep breath.
“Wait up just a minute, you never told me about the book. If you insist on getting yourself killed, you might as well tell me the story of the book. It might take your mind off the heat and besides you lost the book when I told you to be careful.”
“You told me?” I sputtered. “Exactly whose genius idea was it to give it to the trusty in the first place?”
“Will you just tell me the bleedin’ story and then go kill yourself?” McDew pleaded.
“Okay,” I said, the teacher in me coming out, “Let’s review.”
“Review hell. We don’t need no review, just get on with it. The two ignorant cowboys can’t make out an expense account—like you. You make up the worst expense accounts I have ever read . . . but never mind, tell the story.”
I told Chuck that the book was divided into twelve chapters, one for each week the cowboys spent on the range and each chapter ended with a copy of the expense account they left at the trading post for the boss at the end of the week. The expense account for the first week said: 1. chewing tobacco 25 cent; 2. kerosene 75 cent; 3. miscellaneous 770 cent.
The second week, I said, I think I remember they shot a coyote. That box of shot pushed the miscellaneous category up so the expense report read: 1. chewing tobacco 25 cent; 2. kerosene 75 cent; 3. miscellaneous 870 cent. The next week there was no unusual activity so the expense report read . . .
“The same,” Chuck guessed.”
“The next week . . .”
“Nothing much happened.”
“Right,” I said.
“Zellner, does anything ever happen in the godforsaken book, if you can call it that?”
“No,” I replied, “It’s just that kind of book.”
“Who would ever write such a book and what fool would ever read such a messed-up book?”
“You were very interested in reading it.” I reminded him.
“Screw you, Zellner.”
“Oh wait, I left out the good part where the smart one has sex with an Indian girl.” McDew perked up. I now had his undivided attention.
“Why didn’t you tell me that part, asshole?”
“Wait,” I said, “Maybe it was the dumb one. The book said he was really good looking, blond, blue-eyed, that sort of stuff . . .”
“I don’t care which one it was, just tell me about it. What about the girl, what did she look like? At this rate, I might as well go back to my candy wrapper. I still got it, you know.”
“You better hold on to it,” I said. “I was lying about the Indian maiden.”
“There’s no girl! Zellner, screw you.”
I felt bad about holding out hope for Chuck when there was none, but the back and forth about The Riders of the Sawtooth Range had kept me from screaming for another hour or two.
Eventually I did start screaming until they came. They just said, “No, your time is not up yet. Then I would scream some more. Finally, they opened the door and pulled their guns. “We’re gonna kill you,” the two ugly guards yelled.
I said, “That’ll be a relief to me. You gotta kill me or let me out of here—both of us, because as long as I can scream, I will scream.”
Finally, they let us go take a shower, but even that was part of the torture. They said, “We understand you’ve had enough. You don’t have to go back in there. We’ll put you in a regular cell. You get to take a shower every day. Everything is going to be different.” They brought us to the shower, and when they took us back they put us in the sweat box again. The heat was turned up even higher, it seemed.
We were in the sweat box for the rest of the time. We were in jail about thirty-five days before SCEF raised bail for Chuck and me, but we had to leave Dion behind. McDew and I were indeed tortured, but Dion suffered a worse fate. He was repeatedly brutalized during the fifty-nine days of his original sixty-day sentence. SNCC then bailed him out just before his sentence was up, because if you serve your entire sentence, there is no appeal. His case was appealed over a couple of years, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to review it. This was unusual, because we usually won once we got into federal court. So Dion’s conviction in Louisiana was upheld, and the state agreed that if he would turn himself in to the Baton Rouge court, he would get credit for time served, they would suspend the remainder of his sentence, and he wouldn’t have to go back to jail. Instead, when his lawyers brought him back, the Baton Rouge authorities captured him and put him in the same torture cell for sixty more days.
Some of us think that these folks who did things to us are like war criminals, and many of them are still alive. A few are being brought to justice now in high-profile cases. I used to think that maybe they led miserable lives themselves, but I really don’t think they ever drew an uncomfortable breath. Like Medgar Evers’s murderer Byron de la Beckwith later said, “Shooting that nigger was no more painful than my wife having labor pains.”
Much later, at the bus station in Mobile, I ran into one of my fellow prisoners—the nice man in the tweed jacket. Our seats were back to back and he turned to me and said, “How’d you like the East Baton Rouge Parish Jail?”
We shared stories and I learned the secret of how I survived Baton Rouge. It turned out he was one of my angels. First of all, he reminded me of their bringing me mattresses and telling me to make sure to stay in a corner near the front. He said that there were two or three people who were determined to watch my back and try to minimize attempts to hurt me, and they did it the whole time I was there. Then he said, “I am curious about one thing, though. You remember that first little guy who came up to you—with those blackened teeth? You wouldn’t have had a moment’s trouble if you had just knocked the daylights out of that little son of a bitch. We all knew you could have.”
I had to explain to him that I was doing my best to be nonviolent in the tradition of SNCC, the group I worked with.