arrived by train on weekends, and the prostitutes lived in one of the administrative buildings. The inmates met their women in a rough shack they called the “Red House” or the “Tonk,” and were limited to forty-five minutes at a time. If they went over forty-five minutes they lost their conjugal privileges for two weeks.
Regular inmates like Roy were called “gunmen” because they worked under the eye of mounted guards who carried .30–30 Winchester rifles across their knees. The guards were called “trusty-shooters” and were chosen from the prison population; they were usually the most violent inmates who had life sentences and nothing to lose. They wore wide-striped uniforms with the stripes running vertically, and the rest of the inmates wore uniforms with the stripes running horizontally. They were called “up-and-downs” and “ring-rounds,” respectively. In the odd logic of the prison world, the same act that put a shooter in prison in the first place—murder—could also win his release. When the gunmen walked out into the fields to begin work, the shooters drew a “gun line” in the dirt and sat up on their horses and waited. If a man set foot over the gun line, the shooter shouted a warning and then shot to kill. The same was true if the convict got closer than twenty feet to a shooter or failed to wait for permission to cross the gun line in order to relieve himself. A shooter who killed an escaping convict was often rewarded with a pardon from the governor and released from prison. In a state that had no parole laws until 1944, it wasn’t a bad deal.
The violence in Parchman was so extreme—and the inmate population so disproportionately black—that it is hard not to see the entire Mississippi penal system simply as revenge against blacks for the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Three years before Roy was locked up, two fourteen-year-old black boys were executed by the state of Mississippi for murdering a white man; the boys had been indicted, tried, and convicted all in less than twenty-four hours. And as Roy was chopping cotton in Parchman’s dusty fields, another terrible scandal was unfolding. In 1945 a black man named Willie McGee had been arrested for raping a white woman named Willametta Hawkins in the small town of Laurel. McGee, an extremely handsome man who had a wife and four young children, was arrested for the crime and held incommunicado for a month before being tried and sentenced to death. The jury had deliberated two and a half minutes to decide his fate.
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