I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!

IV. A Decision to "Run Out

C H A P T E R IV A Decision to Run Out WAS exhausted mentally, physically, and spiritually, and soon fell asleep. I thought I had been asleep about five minutes when I was awakened at 3:30 by the building chain being pulled through my ring. Each day was an exact duplicate of the one preceding it. Only some nights more of us or fewer "got the leather," as it was called. The dirty filthy "stripes" would stick to the wounds on the buttocks and cause inflammation and torture. And that is what a chain gang is for, torture! Torture every day. Any idea of reformation, any idea of trying to innoculate ideas of decency, manners, or good and right thinking in the convict, is prohibited. All the convicts get is abuse, curses, punishment, and filth. In a few weeks all are reduced to the same level, just animals, and treated worse than animals. I did not wash my hands and face, or comb my hair or change my clothes until Saturday, when we got a bath. A piece of borax soap about as large as a package of chewing gum was given to each convict to bathe with, and a clean suit of "stripes." I traded a square plug of chewing tobacco for a shave. 56 l A "Decision to Run Out 57 Tobacco is rationed twice a week—a plug of chewing on "Wednesdays and smoking tobacco on Saturdays. Personal hygiene or cleanliness was impossible. Cleaning your teeth was out of the question entirely, except on Saturdays or Sundays. Sunday we were all locked in the building; but we were allowed to rest until about eight o'clock. This rest on Sunday morning was the only comfort one could find on the chain gang. Less than twenty per cent of the prisoners could read, so reading matter was scarce, and time to read scarcer, it being limited to Saturday evenings and Sundays. So much for the Fulton County chain gang as it was then in 1922. What it's like now, I don't know. I take my oath that I have described it exactly—but mere words can never convey the true conditions as they were, the utter hopelessness and torture the convict suffers. I have been in three different chain gangs. (140 counties of the 161 counties in Georgia have them). State convicts are leased to these counties for their board and keep, with the County Warden in absolute command. Conditions are almost identical on all, asI found out later. So many prisoners died from the beatings they received that Governor Walker of Georgia was obliged to abolish the leather in 1923 to still the national agitation against this medieval brutality. The chain gang is simply a vicious, medieval custom, inherited from the blackbirders and slave traders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and is so archaic and barbarous as to be a national disgrace. There was a saying on the chain gang, and it ran as follows: 53 I Am A Fugitive "Work out"—meaning make your time. "Pay out"—meaning purchase a pardon or parole. "Die out"—meaning to die—or "Run out"—meaning to escape. I pondered on these four means of release. I had been a soldier and suffered torture and taken chanceswith my life for my country. Such studied torture as this, however, was too much for me. Death would have been a welcome relief. And so I pondered more and more each day. "Work out" was out of the question. Six years of this and I would return to society a worthless, defeated creature, unhuman and inhumane. "Pay out." By listening to the conversation of the native Georgians and old-timers, I found that $2,000 was the average price with which to "pay out" or buy freedom. And even then the convict must first serve a year. My parents had no $2,000 and Fd be free or dead in less than a year. That I knew only too well. Not that I wanted to cheat justice. I leave that to the reader. If I had been sentenced to one year—which under the conditions of the chain gang and the extenuating circumstances of my crime, would have been plenty—I would have tried to make it. But sixyears—that was plain vengeance and also complete destruction. "Well," thought I—"Die out." I'll "Die...