lbeth1950https://nutsrok.wordpress.comNow that I'm done with the bothersome business of workday world, I am free to pursue my passion, capturing the stories I've loved all my life. The ones you'll read on my blog are good old Southern stories, a real pleasure to relay. Here in the South, we are proud of our wacky folks. I've preyed shamelessly on my family, living and dead, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, often changing the names to protect the innocent and not so innocent. My mother illustrates my blog. I come from a rollicking family of nuts, hence the name of the blog Nutsrok Enjoy.
I was tantalized by the occult when a child, Naturally, since I was raised by a good Southern Baptist mother, I was deprived of as much supernatural exposure as Mother could manage. Fortunately, Daddy’s mother was extremely superstitious.
It goes without saying, Mother would never contradicted her to her face. Sometimes when Mamaw had a gaggle of grandchildren running wild around her, she’d launch into a ghost story, usually purported to be true. The wild grandchildren would immediately settle down at their mother’s knee to listen, enchanted and big-eyed with belief
Mamaw petrified us with tales of ghosts, spirits, deranged ax-murderers, boogermen, and bodies found in wells, totally unconcerned about the nightmares she was inspiring.
As soon as she could, Mother initiated damage control. “There are no ghosts or Boogermen!”
To this day, I don’t know why Mother took that stand, considering the good effect fear of ghosts and the boogerman had on those wild kids. Mamaw knew exactly what she was doing.
I was at the grocery store. Maybe it was a case of being at the right place at the right time, but still….
So what happened? Well, the stuff that the woman wanted was on the very top of the shelf, she tried to “whack it down” with her cane. Instead, they went back behind, way out of reach. Well, this guy asked her “Ma’am? Which one did you want?” She pointed it with her cane.
This guy (taller than both of us but still short), climbed up and grabbed (she wanted 2) and using one hand to try to bend over to give her two cans, lost his balance, and he grabbed the first thing he could, I was wearing a tank top, so he grabbed my tank top and my bra, ripping it as he lost his balance (but I broke his fall by “catching him”).
By this time the Store Meat Manager (he saw what happened), rushed over. The guy was fine, but the first thing he said was
“OOPSIE MA’AM, I DIDN’T MEAN TO POP YOUR BOOBY!”
I had to pull my tank top up (he broke my bra and the upper right side “strap” of the tank top), using my arm to hold “what’s left of it” to cover my boob!
Meat Manager, he was red-faced and pulled me over behind the display rack (canned goods) and ordered an employee to grab something. It was a spare t-shirt, size XXXL, with the store and the slogan saying ‘I’VE GOT THE BIG MEATS’
REALLY? I am sorry but customers and a couple of other employees who saw this guy almost crashing to the floor… were cracking up!
That same guy, he wasn’t hurt, but he was still embarrassed, pulled out his wallet and a bill folded up into my hand and he left the store (leaving his few items behind). I thought maybe it was $5 or $10 to replace the bra and tank top. I really didn’t need it, so I just put it in my shorts pocket and totally forgotten about it.
FAST FORWARD: I didn’t put those shorts on for a long time, I wore them for about 2 hours, and just folded them up and put them in the drawer. Once winter was over, we were all going to go fishing, I pulled those shorts out and there was the bill, still in my pocket, and I laughed – couldn’t believe I had forgotten it, but when I opened it up, it was a $100.00 bill!
I could and should organize my writing. I am totally spontaneous plunging headlong into whatever is on my mind. That works just fine except it leaves me with a mass of material that I have intentions of getting in a book. I will prioritize organization.
Despite not getting a one fot Christmas, I was obsessed with learning to ride a bike. In case you didn’t know, kids with bikes aren’t interested in sharing them. I couldn’t just borrow an hour of “bike time.” I felt sure that the hard part was getting my hands on a bike, not the learning part.
Finally, my hopes were realized. My dad decided to visit an old Navy buddy. Conveniently, the family had three boys in my age range, each with a bike. I was in heaven. There was a bike available to me at all times. I didn’t waste the opportunity. I’d push a bike alongside a fence, or porch and push off. In my frantic determination to learn, I could actually ride by to evening of the first day. I spent the remainder of that trip in non-stop riding.
My parents were impressed that I’d learned to ride. My success made me even more desperate. The following Christmas, I actually got a bike! It wasn’t the blue Schwinn Spitfire I’d been hoping for but a perfectly adequate used bike with a new paint job and new tires. I was ecstatic! It was a bike! I felt like I’d been given wings.
By the time I was in second grade, it seemed like all the town kids had bikes. I was wildly envious of them parking their bikes as I stomped off the bus like the clodhopper I was. Fortunately, bikes were off limits on the playground so I didn’t have to feel deprived about that.
Of course, as Christmas approached, I started in on Mother. I knew just what kind of bike I wanted, a blue Schwinn Spitfire. A realist, Mother let me know I definitely wouldn’t be getting a bike.
“Can’t Santa bring me one?” I asked.
“No, parents have to help pay for the things Santa brings. We don’t have the money.”
That cleared up all my questions about Santa Claus. I wanted to stamp my foot and say “Darn!” but I knew better.
PHOTO BY WILLIAM P. GOTTLIEB, LIBRARY OF CONGRESSHuddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, pictured here performing at the National Press Club ca. 1938, didn’t need to sing his way out of prison—just to wait for time off for good behavior.
The Louisiana State Penitentiary is so infamous it doesn’t even need to use its real name: the prison is almost universally known as Angola, after one of the four plantations on which it was built. Over its century-plus of operation, Angola has come to occupy a complex place in the state’s history and culture, with myths and misunderstandings weaving themselves into the true stories of the prison’s history. Here, we present thumbnail clarifications of three of the most commonly repeated inaccuracies about Angola’s history. (The well-known, horrific stories of Willie Francis, who survived the electric chair only to be taken back and executed a few months later, and the prisoners who cut their own Achilles tendons in protest of conditions at the prison do not appear below, because these stories are true.)
The name Angola was given because of the origin country of many of the enslaved people who worked the original plantation.
This is inaccurate for a number of reasons. Angola, on Africa’s southern Atlantic coast, was a major source for slave traders, but as part of the Portuguese Empire, it tended to supply enslaved laborers to Brazil, also a Portuguese possession, with North American shipments restricted primarily to Charleston and Savannah in the years after the American Revolution. Even given the possible importation of enslaved Angolans to Louisiana though, the legal transatlantic slave trade was quashed in the early 1800s, with the US Congress legislating a total ban on international slave trading in 1808. Plantation owner Isaac Franklin did not purchase the properties later consolidated as “Angola” until the 1830s, by which point the American slave trade, in which Franklin made his initial fortune, was essentially all domestic. Franklin referred to one of his plantations as Angola, though Angora, an old rendering of Ankara in Turkey, also shows up in contemporary records; both names reflect a trend of naming plantations after faraway lands, real or imagined. (Franklin also owned Killarney, a neighboring property named for a town in Ireland, and Loango, a plantation presumably named for the major slave trading port located in what is now the Republic of Congo.) By 1880, surviving documentation all reflected the name “Angola” familiar today.
Lead Belly sang his way out of prison.
The story speaks to Louisiana’s conception of itself: whatever sins we may commit, our love of music unites us—and redeems us, to an extent. The legend goes that Huddie Ledbetter, universally known as Lead Belly, was incarcerated at Angola but sang so movingly to the governor, or sang in the governor’s presence, or wrote such a beautiful song, that O. K. Allen pardoned him. Repeated in contexts as august as Dr. John’s patter introducing the cover of Ledbetter’s “Goodnight Irene,” often cited as the song that melted the governor’s heart, this story is so widely believed that it’s the one thing people know who know nothing else about Lead Belly.
Alas, the truth is significantly less poetic: Ledbetter got time off for good behavior. Louisiana law provided for prisoners who had behaved in accordance with prison policies to be released early, with the important caveat that if they reoffended within the state, they would have to finish their commuted sentence for the first crime before beginning any sentence for the next. Ledbetter’s was one of six commutations signed on July 20, 1934, and one of 179 in the whole year, for crimes including murder, manslaughter, shooting at a dwelling, and carnal knowledge—such commutations were common enough to be essentially routine. Lead Belly’s music, cherished as it is, didn’t soften a governor—but it didn’t need to.
Outlaw and jailbreaker Charlie Frazier was welded into his cell.
Charlie Frazier was the most common of the various names under which one of the most prolific outlaws of Depression-era Louisiana was arrested—and the one associated with another Angola myth. Frazier, a stick-up artist in the Bonnie and Clyde vein, was a key figure in a 1933 jailbreak that shocked the Angola and Louisiana powers-that-were. This jailbreak did lead to the first cellblock being built at Angola, with the new Red Hat building (named for the red-painted straw hats worn by inmates) serving as a stricter adjunct to the barnlike dormitories that had housed all inmates before the escape. While Frazier was ultimately captured in Texas and slung into one of the new cells in 1936, it wasn’t welded shut for the simple reason that Frazier had to be taken to trial in St. Francisville for charges related to the deaths of Camp E Capt. John Singleton and foreman James W. Fletcher, Angola employees, and trusty guard Arnold Davis, all of whom were killed in the jailbreak. Newspaper reports and Frazier’s prison record reveals that he was almost immediately put back in the “red cap line,” at Camp E, from which he had escaped in 1933. Capt. C. C. Dixon, a long-time employee whose descendants also worked at the facility, was remembered as the only person Frazier would speak to after his rearrest; Dixon never corroborated the lurid but unlikely detail of the welded cell. For men used to the dormitories, the cells may have felt welded shut, but the jailers never literally threw away the key.
Marianne Fisher-Giorlando is a professor emerita at Grambling State University and the outside researcher for the Angolite, the inmate-edited and -published magazine of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Chris Turner-Neal is the managing editor of 64 Parishes.
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
When I’m writing, I spend more time thinking about the past. That’s where most of my stories originate. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the future. I do what I need to ensure the best future but I don’t have a lot of control over what comes.
Nutsrok 