The phone rang one day. Without introduction, I heard the familiar, deep voice of one of my son’s friends. “Miss Linda, is that story about the pony true?”
“Yep!” The last thing I heard was gales of laughter as I hung up.
If you are the sensitive type, skip this story.
Many years ago when my son was young, we were hauling a load of tree trimmings to the landfill. As my husband backed the truck up to unload, I spotted a dead pony, bloated with all four legs stuck up in the air. Without thinking, I said, “Hey, John. Do you want a pony?”
Of course he said, “Yes!”
“Well, there’s one right over there!”
“Wahhh!!!!!”
I swear it was not intentional. Sometimes I think there is a disconnect between my brain and my mouth!
Growing up way,way in the country the last place bordering a game reserve, the nearest neighbor a mile away, I was always aware we didn’t live in the sticks, but I hoped to someday. The woods were full of wild pigs, deer, coyote, foxes, alligators, a few black bear, snakes, birds, and a plethora of other wild creatures. It wasn’t a great idea to go stumbling around in the dark out there, especially without knee-high boots, a pistol, and a light.
It was not uncommon for hunters to come walking up to our place, any time of the day or night, reporting being stuck in the deeply rutted roads and off-road areas of the reserve, muddy, fatigued, and bedraggled, desperate for help in getting out of a mud hole. Daddy or my brother sometimes cranked the tractor, bounced them back to their disaster, and pulled them out. It could take quite a while and was a lot of work. More often than not, if they had no cash, they left personal property to be redeemed when they came back with cash.
One morning about daylight, visitors of a different type came walking up, a teenage couple who’d gone parking and gotten stuck. The girl explained, they’d spent the night in the car, afraid to walk out, thinking a bear might get them.
I was amazed. Her father must have been nothing like mine. There wasn’t a bear big or bad enough to warrant getting caught spending the night in a parked car with a boy. I’d have faced a dozen bears rather than Daddy with a story like that!
My mother often said, “If you have kids, you can’t have anything else.” Well, she was wrong. We had a new toilet seat. After installing it, Daddy looked around, stared us down, and threatened. “I’d better not see anybody’s initials on this seat!” Where did that come from? I’d never heard of anybody putting initials on a toilet seat.
I went about my business, that toilet seat and initials, foremost on my mind. I wrote LDS in my “Night Before Christmas” book, LDS in the sand under the big shade tree, scooped up some mud and wrote LDS on the dog house. Still unsatisfied, I heated the ice pick on a stove burner and burned LDS on a green Tupperware tumbler.
Feeling strangely unfulfilled and restless, I couldn’t think of a thing to do. Billy was off somewhere playing with Froggy. Mother and the baby were taking a nap, so if I stayed in the house, I had to be quiet. I slipped in the kitchen to see if there was any Kool Aid miraculously left in the pitcher. No luck. Dejected, I went to the bathroom.
There it was calling to me, pristine in its unblemished beauty. The new toilet seat!!! I sat down, my bare bottom luxuriating in its cool smoothness. I got up, locked the door, and turned the seat up. Making sure no one was looking through the window, I got Mother’s eyebrow pencil out of the medicine cabinet and wrote LDS in tiny letters where no one would ever see it. Terrified, I erased my crime. The finish was dull from pencil smears. My heart pounded! I was caught! I got tissue and buffed it off. Thank goodness the shine was back. Relieved, I sat on the side of the bathtub to catch my breath. A nail fell out of my pocket and clattered to the bottom of the tub. Never has the devil so possessed a soul. Grasping the nail, I scratched BRS, Billy’s initials, on the toilet seat. Horrified, at the enormity of my crime, I tiptoed past the room where Mother and the baby still slept. By this time, Billy and Froggy had gotten back. We were throwing mud balls at each other when I heard a shriek from the house. “BILLY RAY SWAIN!! You come here this minute!” I didn’t need to go in to know what was wrong. I heard “Spat! Spat! Spat!” and in a few minutes he was out, still snuffling.
“What happened?”
“Mother whooped me for putting my initials on the toilet seat. I told her I didn’t know how to write but she said, ‘Who else would put your initials on the toilet seat?’ “
How long could it be before she found the Tupperware?
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!
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.
I got a bright shiny, red tricycle like this one might have looked the Christmas of 1953. My older sister got the big kid version. It had a gigantic front wheel and step for an additional rider. That was fortunate, since in the manner of three-year-olds everywhere, I carelessly abandoned it where I finished riding, right behind the back tire of Daddy’s truck.
Of course, he backed over it, destroying it. Naturally, it scared the pudding out of him. In the manner of 1950’s parents, he wore my behind out for scaring him and making him ruin my tricycle. That was a wasted lesson. He’d already demonstrated what a truck did to a tricycle. To make it worse, the smashed tricycle lay near the front gate for a while before hitting the trash.
Fortunately, my sister let me ride behind her all over the yard. When she was otherwise occupied, I appropriated it and propelled it like a scooter. I remembered my previous lesson and didn’t park it behind Daddy’s truck.
In the prosperous days before my parents indulged begetting, we got bigger Christmas gifts. One memorable Christmas, I got a Radio Flyer Red Wagon, my second set of wheels. I convinced my parents to let me bring it to my uncle’s house on Christmas Day. My cousin and I got one unforgettable ride down a steep gravel road narrowly missing plunging into a deep creek before it occurred to my parents to set limitations on its use.
Fortunately, my precious red wagon wasn’t damaged.
I used to hear that phrase a lot when I messed up as a kid. “You’re gonna have to pay for your raisin’.” Truer words were never spoken. At ninety-six, my mother lives quite happily in an independent living apartment. Well, she should be happy. She has friends, eats three meals a day in the dining room, has her apartment cleaned, and her laundry done. The only thing she does is make her bed.
This morning, I picked Mother up at nine am for her doctor’s appointment. I drooped her off right at the entry, parked the car, and escorted her to the office, got her seated and checked in.
“How long till they take us back?” she asked.
“Probably not long.” I told her. “We’re a few minutes early.”
“I hope not.” she grumbled. “It’s cold in here.”
They called her in at nine-thirty on the dot, her appointment time. “Right on time.” I said. “That’s good.”
They weighed her, took her to a room, and checked her vitals. A very nice medical assistant took her medication list and history. “I’ll be back to take you for a scan. she told Mother.
“I hope she gets right back. There’s no point in keeping me waiting. What else does she have to do?” Mother complained.
The woman was back in seven minutes. “I’m sorry you had to wait. I had two ahead of you.” she explained. She took Mother’s arm, carefully walking her to the scan. I relaxed, looking forward to checking my email while Mother was occupied. It seemed like they were back in less than five minutes.
“I’ll tell the nurse you’re ready.” the assistant said.
“How long will that nurse be?”Mother queried before the door closed.
“I don’t know. You saw the office was full. Maybe it won’t be too long. “ I said.
“They ought not to book so many.” She was kind of crabby. I reminded her she only has this big check up yearly and has to have a lot done. Last year we were here three hours.
“It will take as long as it takes. We’ll go to lunch when we’re done.” I reminded her.
“I’m already hungry. Oh yeah. I have to take my medicine!” She dug through her jacket and pants pockets fruitlessly. “Dern, I don’t have it. What’s gonna happen if I don’t get it on time? I’ve never been late before.”
That was news to me. I could have sworn we’ve been through this dozens of times.
“Mother, look again. I’m sure you have it. There it is! You can get a cup of water when the nurse comes in.” No such luck. I had to ask for a cup of water.
We waited. Mother fussed. “Where is that nurse? Did she go off to lunch and leave me waiting?” Mother is not usually fussy but she was wound up today.
“Mother, they have a lot of staff here. I’m sure they don’t go off and leave you waiting. They’ll be here when they get here. We just have to wait.” I tried to sound patient.
At eleven, the nurse saw Mother,and broke the news it would be a short wait till she could see the doctor as well as have an xray and go to lab. Mother smiled sweetly. When the door closed, I braced myself.
“We’ve been here forever. I’m ready to go!” She spouted.
“Well, we can’t till we’re done.” I told her. By noon we were out the door. Can you imagine how many times Mother lived through this scenario with five children?
The phone rang one day. Without introduction, I heard the familiar, deep voice of one of my son’s friends. “Miss Linda, is that story about the pony true?”
Nutsrok 