Pain, Death, and Silence in Texas Prisons in the 1930S

‘A DARK CLOUD WILL GO OVER’

Pain, Death, and Silence in Texas Prisons in the 1930s

ETHAN BLUE

Risk managers and health officials in the sist; because, in a very real sense, all Texas Texas Department of Criminal Justice prisoners suffer from the injury of being today record a category of injury under caught in-between. Their expulsion from the curious title ‘Caught In-Between’. the ranks of citizens has led to their social There are a great many others, whose expendability. No longer are they among meanings are more evident: Slips, Trips those whose lives are protected by the and Falls; Chemical poisoning; Struck state, but they are not dead, either. For them, caught in-between becomes a state By/Against; Over-Exertion; Aggressive 2 Behavior. ‘Caught In-Between’ is defined of being. as ‘a pinch point type injury that involves The history of legal punishment tells a mashing or squeezing’, including ‘caught troubling story of the centralisation of in a door, between pulley, door shut on physical pain and death across a spectrum foot, etc’. Prisons, of course, are full of of medical and disciplinary practices. In these pinch points. Spaces are opened only the twentieth-century United States, penal to be sealed, passages are created with the death drew upon two distinct historical express purpose of shutting them again, currents. One was the legal execution for locking off prisoners from the rest of the crimes against morality, property, the world. Automated doors open and close, person and the sovereign, which origin- gates slam shut. Hydraulic pistons are un- ated in early modern Europe and took root forgiving. Unsurprising, then, that a hand, across colonial America. The second was a foot, or a life might be crushed — caught the social death of racial, chattel slavery in-between.1 in the American South.3 After the Civil In previous years, injuries specified as War, the legal status of the prisoner joined caught in-between would have been both currents into a new form of living known simply as accidents — a catch-all death: Ruffin v Commonwealth (1871) ruled that the prisoner is ‘a slave of the state. He category that hid as much as it told of how 4 a person was injured or killed. The new is civiliter mortuus’, civilly dead. When differentiation of ways of listing injuries the state retracted — or never extended parallels the ongoing modernisation of — its guarantees of the protection of life Texas prisons, and their techniques of risk and property, biological death was always management. Despite such markers of a short step away. Postcolonial critic progress, injuries, illness and deaths per- Achille Mbembe described this existence

5 Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 2. 2007 as living in a death-world. His description the South, prisoners died by means that of necropolitics, the inverse of the Foucaul- ranged across a medical, legal and illegal dian notion of biopolitical sustenance of spectrum: from state sanctions like capital citizens’ lives, is applicable to incarcera- execution to diseases like tuberculosis; tion: ‘kept alive but in a state of injury, in from ‘accidental’ drowning to gunshot a phantom-like world of horrors and in- wounds; from inmate stabbings to sun- tense cruelty and profanity’.5 stroke. Some were listed as ‘natural’ deaths Texas is a good place to explore pain by prison officials, others as violent illegal and death in American punishment, and killings, others still as executions fully the 1930s, seen by many as the birth of approved by the state. the modern American state, are a good But the line between these kinds of time to do so. Despite widespread poverty death was not always clear, and decisions during the Great Depression, the 1930s as to where it was drawn were subjective. held real promise. American liberalism In fact — and this insight extends beyond made great strides under Franklin the prison — there is no such thing as Roosevelt’s New Deal, which expanded dying of ‘natural causes.’ Death is a condi- the regulatory-welfare state to protect tion of life, but belief in death from ‘natur- American citizens’ lives from economic al causes’ is based on an understanding of crisis. These benefits were not evenly dis- nature as a pre-cultural, non-political, state tributed, however. White male industrial of being. All lives, and their ends, are in- workers gained the most, while white variably shaped by cultural practices, the women and people of colour, who worked power relations of which are always histor- in domestic or agricultural labour, ical, and always political.8 When three garnered far fewer protections; neverthe- black men died on a single day from ‘the less, important gains were made.6 Equally heat’ on Clemens State Farm in 1930, the promising, lynch violence was finally dis- Texas Prison Board determined that these appearing across the South, and the deaths could not have been prevented: Southern convict lease system went into ‘The evidence show[s] that the utmost care a legislated 50-year remission. These were was taken to prevent these unfortunate material benefits of the New Deal order. circumstances, and that the death of these three men is not the fault of the employees Yet even granting that liberalism’s un- 9 equal benefits were structured by race and of Clemens State Farm.’ In extant records, gender, the New Deal had a still darker the deaths were caused by ‘heat exhaus- underside. Non-citizens, including hun- tion’ rather than human actions, and un- dreds of thousands of Mexican nationals, fortunate circumstances, as uncontrollable were expelled from the nation in what one as the weather. scholar called a ‘twilight zone between These black men’s death from ‘heat voluntary and forced migration’.7 Prison exhaustion’ at everyday labour under the populations also dramatically expanded, state’s care reveals the prison’s function a condition made more dire by a prolifera- in institutionalizing a zone of indistinction tion of capital executions. Within growing between life and death for those marked carceral institutions, and particularly in as criminal.10 It also reveals a shift from

6 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’ nineteenth-century to twentieth-century with the many forms of social, civil, and modes of state formation. In the nineteenth biological death behind bars, and with century, racist lynch violence bolstered what activist-scholar Dylan Rodríguez has the relatively weak state. Twentieth-cen- identified as a ‘logic of death’ in imprison- tury criminal justice differed in crucial ment. Such reconsideration must acknow- ways, but nevertheless continued to ledge prison abolition, rather than just guarantee a new racial and economic or- death penalty abolition movements.13 der. While the modern state might protect Yet, it is hard to know a great deal and extend subjects’ lives in innovative about death. It is a difficult subject under ways, it would also permit degrees of any circumstances, ‘for dying is the exper- death for unruly and racially degraded ience of slipping beyond the social world criminals, as crucial Others to the category of affects and signification’.14 Death in of the citizen. prison is doubly inaccessible because so Too often scholars have treated lynch much is deliberately hidden. Even for violence, incarceration and capital punish- those inside, death, and its threat, enforces ment separately. The most common period- a veil of silence. A black Texas prisoner isation of lynch violence, which begins in once explained that just talking about how the 1880s and ends in 1930, is a symptom someone died might be dangerous. of this tendency, and meshes with the You actually can't tell how nothing progressive story of the arrival of the happened. You got to go on the modern liberal state.11 Charles J. Ogletree, side with them if you want to live Jr. and Austin Sarat’s recent From the a long time … Lynch Mob to the Killing State does well to stress the connection between nineteenth- You may be cuttin' wood and they century lynch violence and twenty-first- say, 'He was cuttin' wood and a century legal execution, yet analyses cap- tree fell on him.' All the rest of the ital punishment as if it exists in isolation guys say, 'How'd he get killed?' from other carceral forms. Artificially de- Say, 'He was cuttin' and got coupling lynching, ordinary punishment, trapped by a tree.’ and the death penalty has allowed many You can never tell. Things I actu- scholars to neglect a broader critique of ally seen here and things that actu- prisons. Ogletree and Sarat write, ‘Today, ally happened — you got to lie, capital punishment is the new “peculiar you got to lie. You tell just how it institution” in American society’, implying happened, a dark cloud will go that capital punishment, rather than the over you, and nobody never know mass carceral system of which it is a part, what became of you. You runned 12 is the genealogical descendant of slavery. away. 'Did he get away?' 'Yeah, he I disagree. It is but one element within the got away.' necropolitical regime of American incarcer- He got away in a shallow pit grave ation and its central role in modern and somewhere, in them woods some- late-modern state formation. In order to where. Ain't nobody can come fulfil their broader political and conceptual aims, death-penalty scholars must reckon

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back here and tell a report but teenth and early twentieth centuries. them. So that's the way that goes.15 White men, anxious about their patriarch- al authority in the postbellum world (and You never can tell. Because this man un- this was exacerbated by economic crises), derstood that in prison, he controlled attempted to crush the possibilities of neither violence nor truth, nor even his black political participation and reproduce own life. And to speak against the ‘truth’ the slave-like conditions and clearly- violence imposed was to risk death itself, defined racial/gender hierarchies of earlier and have that ‘dark cloud … go over you’. generations.16 When accused of raping Violence, in its many forms, made its own white women, African American men were truth in the Texas prison, and death im- lynched in massive and horrifically violent posed a lasting silence. events, spectacles that blurred the line If the late-nineteenth-century lynch between legal and illegal execution. Public mob proclaimed the ‘truth’ of white (male) officials commonly participated in illegal supremacy in public spectacles that tor- lynch mobs and racial violence in the late tured and flayed bodies, mainly black nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. men’s, the ‘truth’ of death in the modern Similarly, black men ‘saved’ from mobs Texas penal regime was a crushed silence, were frequently railroaded through a a tubercular wheeze, an occasional gun- ‘legal’ trial and then put to death.17 shot, or the whine of an electrical generat- Lynch violence in the late nineteenth or pumping current through a legally-re- and early twentieth centuries coexisted strained body. Neither these sounds nor with capital punishment across the South. these sights were the terrorist spectacles Until 1923, county sheriffs meted out of lynch violence, but they nonetheless capital punishment in Texas. As with signalled a new mode of racial and class lynch mobs, sheriffs hanged the con- hegemony and a new state formation. demned in a public spectacle in the county JURIDICAL INDISTINCTION of conviction. Texas was slow to eliminate this public ritual, and to bring it behind the ‘civilised’ walls of the prison system.18 Texas has a long history of legal and extralegal execution, and it draws on numer- As the culture and economy of indus- ous sources. The mid nineteenth century trial capitalism and the aesthetics of mod- was a period of colonial warfare and expan- ernity took hold across the South in the sion, and violence against Native Americ- early twentieth century, advocates of local ans and Mexicans at the hands of Texas and bloody lynch justice — particularly Rangers frequently took the shape of an for alleged sexual attacks by black men on extralegal posse or a lynch mob. When a white women — lost sway to the boosters member of a white settler community viol- of northern investment and the critics, ated local customs, they, too, could be black and white, of Southern backward- 19 dispatched at the end of a rope and with ness, lawlessness, and insularity. After an impromptu trial, if with a trial at all. such notable black activists as W. E. B. Du Yet the best-known form of lynch violence Bois and Ida B. Wells railed against what was the racial terrorism of the late nine- they identified as the barbaric lawlessness

8 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’ of white lynch rule, new Southern elites Texas, the prison population swelled from with ties to Northern capital relented and 5,000 prisoners in 1930 (itself cause for moved against the previous generation’s much concern in prison Annual Reports) lynch violence. By the mid-1920s, Texas to crisis levels of 7,177 in April 1939, belatedly followed many other states by making the Texas Prison System one of both centralising its legal executions and the largest in the country.22 In the same curtailing extralegal lynching, thus incor- decade, capital sentencing rose nation- porating some element of white ‘lawless- wide, peaking in 1935 when 199 people ness’ into the modernising state. This were put to death. Then as now, Texas move had two key components: by denig- was a national leader in lethal punishment. rating working-class whites as the ‘rabble’ The 20 men who died in Huntsville’s responsible for white lynch violence, new electric chair in 1935 made up 10 per cent elites displaced responsibilities for lynch- of all executions for that year, and Texas ing (in which political elites participated), accounted for seven per cent of the na- while also playing on emergent concep- tion’s total executions between 1930 and tions of ‘white trash’ as a racially-polluted, 1942 (148 of 2,065 total executions).23 Yet criminal type.20 the electric chair was just one of many As the state mechanism for execution ways to die in this new regime, which, modernised to limit the threat of white like lynch violence before it, meshed ele- mob disorder while guaranteeing white ments of legality and illegality, and neglect rule, so too did the Texas Prison System and cruelty. adopt an industrial apparatus for killing. Jesse Jones’s experience presents a case After 1923, condemned criminals would in the indistinction between legal and ex- be executed at Huntsville, and electro- tralegal killing across the early twentieth cuted rather than hanged.21 There would century. In 1906, Waco authorities arres- be neither the festival of violence that ac- ted Jones, an African American man, for companied a mass spectacle lynching, nor the murder of his employer, a Jewish were vigilante killings acceptable. Instead, storekeeper named Mat Block. The Sheriff death came to prisoners through the anti- explained how he obtained Jones’s confes- septic administration of justice, via the sion: ‘When I was talking with the defend- penitentiary and capital sentencing. Tex- ant we gave him some whisky; also told ans developed a sensibility that would him we would protect him from the mob.’ modernise the practice of execution by Keeping Jones awake all night, the Sheriff centralising it in the state, and this, in the told Jones ‘there was a crowd gathering end, effectively absorbed white mob dis- downtown [that] contained too many men order while transforming the mechanisms for that time of night’. Thus promised of white male supremacy and class hege- protection from a torturous death at the mony. hands of the mob, Jones confessed, and Indeed, the new prison regime was so was convicted, despite the two witnesses effective at these tasks that in the Depres- who claimed to be with him at the time of sion, unprecedented numbers of people the murder. He was hanged in downtown were either imprisoned or put to death. In Waco before a large and approving crowd.24

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This sort of (white) community approv- earlier. Forced confessions, produced un- al, and the overlap between vigilante and der tortures directly replicating lynch vi- formal justice continued well into the olence, could be used in a range of of- 1930s, particularly when black men were fences. The conditions an East Texas the accused. Bob White, also African county jail inmate described in a letter to American, was arrested in Conroe, just Governor Ferguson again showed the lack north of Houston, for the rape of a white of distinction between extralegal lynching woman on 10 August 1937. White denied and legal criminal justice: involvement in the crime. He claimed he’d I am writting to you to let you been farming at the time of the attack, and know how the prisoners in the argued that the casts of the attacker’s Nac'doches County jail is treated. footprints — used as evidence in the trial They put you in jail on supsician — did not match his own feet. Neverthe- and they try to make you confess, less, the victim identified him as the attack- hang you up by the neck and er. Material from his case file describes his whip you with a club and their treatment in the county jail: pistols, take them out of jail at That night and the three nights night, carry them to the woods, following the subject was taken to whip them unmercyful, one whips the woods near Livingston and them the others hold their gun on beaten senseless. On the fourth them. night, he was suspended from the The writer continued that ‘City and limbs of trees by chains tied County Officers, Curl Butler High Sheriff[,] around his wrists until he fainted. Jack Eaves Debuty[,] Pat Patterson debuty This treatment was administered [and] City Marshall’ all participated. for the purposes of obtaining a Surely he knew he was in a weak position confession.25 to make a request to the Governor, but The ‘treatment’ was successful, and White nonetheless demonstrated optimism in the signed his ‘X’ on the confession. Later, possibilities of the law when he requested however, White appealed his conviction, that the Governor went through a second trial and appeal, investigate the way they are and was in the process of jury selection treated the poor colored people in for a third trial in June 1941 when W. S. jail and in Nac'doches … please Cochran, the victim’s husband, shot him look into this letter and try to rid dead. Cochran, a large landholder in the this town of such cruel treatments area, was charged with murder, but soon … released on $500 bail. One week later, he was acquitted. The Conroe Courier reported From a prisoner in jail that are 27 ‘general satisfaction’ over Bob White's getting these treatments. 26 death. Nevertheless, the 1930s did see the success- Confessions weren’t just coerced over ful curtailing of lynch violence, and the rape and murder charges, for which men glimmerings of modern trials and due would have been lynched a few years process in Texas. Lynch violence de-

10 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’ creased, but incarceration, accompanied farms scattered south of Houston. Tuber- by the rapid expansion of legal execution, cular prisoners were brought to Wynne quickly took its place. Farm, which, in 1941 was updated to give ‘first-class attention’ to these infirm pris- MEDICAL DEATH, VIOLENT oners, and also modernised so ‘that no DEATH contact is had between these patients and the non-tubercular inmates’.31 The con- In the late nineteenth and early twentieth struction of new buildings and increasing centuries, the most sophisticated medical medical segregation guided physicians to- facilities available in the Texas Prison ward a progressive narrative that touted System were at the Huntsville ‘Walls’ the always-improving medical care avail- Unit, though investigations lamented that able in the prison. This narrative wasn’t these were antiquated and inadequate.28 entirely without merit: indeed, many in- In this era, doctors employed by the prison mates likely received medical attention were to make weekly tours of the numer- that would have been unavailable to them ous farms where prisoners, leased to prior to incarceration. That many services private and state farmers and railroad may in fact have been unavailable to the builders, lived, worked and died in condi- population at large bespeaks the social tions that were both putrid and violent. maldistribution of health, in which medic- As the convict lease system fell into public al resources benefited wealthy whites dis- disrepute and free-world wages dropped proportionately while neglecting poor low enough to make the lease undesirable, blacks, Mexicans and whites, rather than the state assumed control of those farms, the beneficence of the prison system.32 but medical care on these scattered sites As the prison system assumed moral remained inferior to that available at the 29 care and fiscal responsibility for inmates, Walls. It should come as little surprise the state, like slave owners of a previous that white inmates, particularly young and era, sought to ensure a healthy and able- compliant whites, benefited from the bodied population. As a result, inmates greater medical care available at the Walls, who fell ill at the farms now were more and that black, Mexican, and disobedient likely to be sent to the hospital at the white inmates suffered disproportionately Walls, rather than to suffer while still from medical neglect on the prison farms working on a prison farm. The goal, how- where they harvested cotton, corn and ever, rarely stated outright but clear sugarcane, from sunrise to sunset, all year enough from many Annual Reports’ finan- long. cial statements, was that the ill might be- Over the course of the 1930s, the pris- come well enough to return to work on’s medical system became increasingly chopping cotton or canning prison-grown sophisticated. A new hospital at Huntsville vegetables, and thus offset the costs of was completed in 1935, to the high praise their incarceration. 30 of prison administrators who built it. By the middle of the decade, then, as In 1941 the hospital at the State Farm In- the ill were congregated for treatment dustries Unit was ‘equipped as a modern there, most deaths at ‘The Walls’ were due institution’, to serve inmates at prison

11 Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 2. 2007 to illnesses rather than fights or gunshots. inadequate compared to the Medical De- After the new hospital at Huntsville was partment of our Texas Prison System’.35 completed and as inmates from much of A dubious, if flattering, choice of compar- the scattered prison system were sent isons. there, death at Huntsville, or at the nearby Prison medical records consistently Wynne Tubercular unit, came slowly. It differentiated between kinds of death.36 crept up in coughs and wheezes, from Prison health officials were curious about meningitis, and malignant lumps explained the distinction between death from too late and chest infections treated inef- coronary thrombosis, cardiac failure, and fectively or too slowly. aortic insufficiency, the better to adminis- As a result of the more efficient transfer ter the lives of the imprisoned — so that of ill inmates to Huntsville across the dec- they could return, in the ideal world, as ade, most of the dying done on other farms productive rather than enervated citizens. and in other units came from heat stroke But the more salient distinction for prison and overwork — from accidents and ‘acci- authorities was between violent and non- dents’, from sudden heart attacks, from violent death, between death at the hands stabbings or beatings by inmates, or being of another, and death from ‘natural shot by guards. Death became somewhat causes’. Yet the difference between the less frequent on the farms. But it could two is a political difference, and this is a come suddenly, literally as a lightning key point. Though prison officials saw strike, a falling tree, or as an old grievance sunstroke as a disease, an alternative argu- and a knife in the side. It could come ment is that sunstroke, or the more medic- mysteriously, as ‘accidental asphyxia’, the alised ‘thermic fever’ was a violent death, cause of which is lost in the records. Pris- differing only from legal execution in that oners on farms could expect some delay those who died from it were not, in fact, before being recognised as sufficiently ill sentenced to die. They were worked to to deserve transfer to Huntsville, and in death in the Texas sun, driven by the lash that time could suffer greatly from medical and the guards' hopes to have a bumper neglect: G. B. Butler’s 11 August 1939 crop of cotton or sugarcane, and to help transfer from Clemens Farm, ill with jaun- finance the running of the prison itself. dice, to the New Unit Hospital, came too 33 While sunstroke, thermic fever and its late. He died there three days later. That variants were common ways to die — as same year, even the expanded Huntsville was pneumonia — tuberculosis proved to hospital was running at near full capacity, be the second-most-likely cause of death a ‘condition’ diagnosed by prison officials for Texas prisoners between 1930 and as ‘caused by more transfers from the 1941. Indeed, tuberculosis was second farms to Huntsville Hospital for treat- 34 only to legal execution itself. While nearly ment’. Yet officials still found reason one-fifth (18 per cent) of inmates who died for self-congratulation. In 1940, Dr. Butler in Texas prisons in these years were put proudly reported to the Prison Board that to death in the electric chair, 15 per cent ‘the Medical Departments of the recently of the dead succumbed to tuberculosis in visited prisons in Arkansas, Mississippi, one form or another. Yet death from and Louisiana are, as a whole, obsolete and

12 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’ tuberculosis proved to be no more of a breaks.39 The concern inmate nurses ‘natural’ cause of death than capital pun- showed was remarkable, because it was ishment or thermic fever. Just as Texas perhaps more common for inmates to fight juries and District Attorneys pushed for than to offer comfort. capital sentencing based on the sex and Indeed, Texas prisons sustained a race of the accused and the victim, tuber- world of nearly-universal antagonism that cular morbidity and mortality were deeply made mutual support hard to achieve, and implicated in the Southern political eco- harder still to maintain. In fact, prison nomy. Diet and living conditions were key authorities institutionalised intra-prisoner indicators of death or survival for people 37 violence in a practice known as the infected with tuberculosis. The specific ‘building tender’ system. Building tenders demography of those who died in prison were permitted to carry clubs and dirks, of tuberculosis is unavailable, but the and had what might be called ‘officially conditions of overwork, crowded and unofficial’ sanction to maintain a brutal dilapidated housing characteristic of black order based on sexual violence and fear.40 life in the Jim Crow South meant that Due in no small part to this system and the African Americans were dramatically dominating hierarchies it supported, overrepresented among those who suffered overtly violent pain and death were all too from tuberculosis, and these conditions common. Violence was rained down by were exacerbated behind bars. According guards on prisoners, by prisoners on each to Samuel Roberts, approximately one- other, and by prisoners onto their own quarter of Americans who died from bodies. Between 1930 and 1941, 11 per tuberculosis in 1929 were black. Poor cent of Texas prisoners killed died of whites across the South also suffered from gunshot wounds, and five per cent were tuberculosis, but the largest Texas cities killed by other inmates — stabbed, showed a dramatic racial disparity in the clubbed, or by some other means. For pain and death of illness. In Houston and people whose lives were deemed valueless Dallas, pulmonary tuberculosis mortality by society — indeed, they held the legal rates for non-whites in 1935 were roughly status of the dead — life was cheap. In the twice the white rates (with 67.5 whites prison context, violence became linked and 127.5 non-whites per 100,000 dying with masculinities, and violent hyper- in Houston, and 35.2 whites and 84.9 non- 38 masculinity became one form of currency, whites per 100,000 in Dallas). along with cash and tobacco, operating At the Wynne Tubercular farm, the across subaltern prison economies and Huntsville Walls unit and elsewhere, in- hierarchies. When folklorist Bruce Jackson mates played key roles in caring for the interviewed long-time black prisoners in sick and the dying. Inmate nurses were Texas, they described times when there sometimes even rewarded for their service, ‘was a lot of killing’, and not just by with time deducted from their sentences guards. Much violence came ‘over petty and awards of meritorious conduct, partic- debts, petty thefts, money, hustling ularly in their treatment of inmates suffer- money to gamble’.41 ing from communicable diseases, such as spinal meningitis or during flu out-

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Indeed, the alienation of incarceration stood the social devaluing of prisoners’ led to a great deal of the bloodshed that, bodies, a process to which prisoners were a generation later, Frantz Fanon would hardly immune.45 How else are the many identify as fratricidal. Building on Fanon, injuries that prisoners did to themselves literary critic Adam Gussow makes the intelligible, as they cut Achilles tendons, case that black and white southerners and severed fingers and hands? Prison transferred violence done against them- doctors treated 20 self-inflicted arm frac- selves (structural, symbolic, as well as tures in 1940 alone.46 Prisoners injured material) against their peers, and that this themselves to avoid work in the fields, to was a troubling act of personal empower- be sure, but also to control their own ment when violence against those in posi- bodies, even through pain and destruc- tions of structural power seemed im- tion, in situations of radical disempower- possible.42 ment, in situations that warped the idea of agency developed by social historians If killing, for some, became a twisted 47 form of empowerment, suicide, for others, of the past 30 years. The line between became an escape.43 In such a death- state-sanctioned punishment, and self-de- world, being shot by a guard could have struction blurred in the modern penal re- been a kind of release. It is impossible to gime. know the motivations of the dead, but Though Cecil Davis didn’t slash his common sense in prison folklore holds that wrist or tie a noose from a bed sheet, it if a prisoner is tired of living, an escape appears that he did commit suicide.48 The attempt will guarantee their death. Johnny 33-year-old Davis was serving a two-year Cash's song ‘The Wall’ describes a prison sentence on the Retrieve Farm, dedicated inmate who tried to escape, knowing that to white men over 25-years-old of ‘inter- no one had survived an escape attempt mediate’ security risk and rehabilitative before: ‘The newspapers called it a jail- potential. break plan, But I know it was suicide, I Slightly more than a week after his ar- know it was suicide.’ In Passed On, her rival, Davis tried his first escape. On 24 literary history of black dying, Karla F. C. July, he worked with Hoe Squad #9 near Holloway reflects on her son’s death while the Retrieve Club House. At around 9:30 attempting to escape from prison, and she in the morning, he looked directly at Cap- places his life in the long history of Afric- tain Brown, in position on horseback be- an American life — and death — in es- hind the squad, and told him, ‘Captain, I capes from historical or contemporary 44 am going, you can kill me if you want to.’ forms of unfreedom. Davis dashed into the cane patch, and the There is more than a grain of historical nearest guards tried to shoot him but truth to the idea that death, and even self- missed. Captain Brown, on horseback, mutilation, could become an escape from overtook Davis after about 300 yards. He the tortures of prison life. Prison doctors talked to Davis for 20 minutes, and con- like W. B. Veazy expressed surprise about vinced him to return. On the way back, ‘the apparent disregard the average inmate Davis reportedly told Brown ‘You might has for his health’, but Veazy misunder- as well kill me, I'm not going back … I’m

14 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’ not going to do this time.’ Reflecting on spend two years at Retrieve, inmates' the day to investigators, Brown tried to testimony begged questions. The majority explain just how difficult the trip back to of inmates gave pointedly nondescriptive the building was: ‘You don’t realize how answers to Mrs. Teagle’s questions. After hard it was getting him back to the build- receiving numerous answers of ‘No’ or ‘No ing and him talking that way to me.’ M’am’, she asked: ‘You men don't do much On his return, a visiting physician ex- talking. Why?’ Eddie Canonico responded, amined Davis. Dr. Blair concluded: ‘There ‘I came to do my time and give no trouble’, isn't anything wrong with him. It seems though trouble to whom is ambiguous. C. to me like he just wanted to run off.’ Be- B. Bland's answer was more than simply cause the doctor found no mental or unresponsive: ‘I had rather not make any physical problems, he prescribed a univer- statement, but at the same time I am not sal cure: Davis ‘needed to be put back to casting any reflections on Captain Miller work’. Davis was allowed to watch the [the Retrieve Farm Manager] personally, picture show, and promised Captain but for my own safety, since I am trying Brown that he wouldn't try to escape to secure my release, and for other reasons, again. That night, Brown warned him, I had rather not testify.’ The reasons for ‘You had better not run anymore because not testifying are unclear — perhaps he somebody might kill you. I gave you your didn’t want to imply guard misconduct life today.’ On the Retrieve Farm, Davis’s for fear of reprisal, or perhaps he didn’t life was not his own. For Captain Brown, want to challenge prisoners who may actu- riding hard after an escaping prisoner and ally have intended to harm Davis, as Davis convincing him to return was difficult reportedly told Miller. Yet these were lost work. It would have been easier to kill to the historical record when the dark him. cloud came over, and died with Davis on that hot July evening. Davis ran the following day. Brown shot him dead. LEGAL EXECUTION In her report on the investigation, Prison Board member Charlotte Teagle Just a month after Cecil Davis’s death, determined that the killing of Cecil Davis Florence Murphy, a black man convicted was very much justified. In fact she com- of rape, was executed. Unlike Davis, mended Captain Brown ‘for his patience Murphy’s death was planned well in ad- and good judgment in getting the prisoner vance, and carried out in Huntsville’s back to the building under such trying electric chair, under the supervision of conditions’ the day before he killed him. numerous state officials. Though few wit- She concluded that Davis was ‘in a very nesses saw Cecil Davis die, his death was depressed state of mind’ or was perhaps duly recorded in the 1940 Annual Re- ‘mentally unbalanced’, but that, in either port.49 Florence Murphy’s was not. case, ‘he placed himself in [a] position to Curiously, despite the long list of ail- be killed’. ments and treatments that prison doctors While the evidence of the report clearly offered, only once in the years between indicated that Davis would rather die than 1929 and 1941 did Texas prison doctors

15 Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 2. 2007 record ‘legal execution’ as a cause of death. the condemned were considered to be un- Even then, in 1931, only one of the 10 ex- der the jurisdiction of the county and dis- ecutions was recorded. This was not due trict courts rather than the state. Indeed, to ignorance. Prison doctors participated Texas counties paid $25 to the state for in legal executions, placing a stethoscope the use of its cells and execution facilit- on the steaming chest of the man strapped ies.51 into the electric chair, and announcing the 50 Together, these facts represent a link time of death. While legal electrocution between the traditions of lynch violence was the most common cause of death in and modern state execution. W. Fitzhugh Texas prisons in the 1930s, no Annual Brundage argues that the history of Reports mentioned this ultimate state lynching needs to be analysed at the local sanction. Along with the invisibility of level, in order to assess the complex local executions behind prison walls came a power struggles and structures that went stark historical silence over those con- into this horrific form of racial violence.52 demned to death. Yet even in this admin- State killing left the hands of local sheriffs istrative silence we can find continuities and disordered mobs, becoming central- between the local ‘justice’ of lynch mobs, ised in state institutions, but capital cases assumed by a more powerful state. were tried and sentences handed down at On an administrative level, condemned the local level, by local district attorneys prisoners existed in a bureaucratic nether- and judges who, like local elites a genera- world between the local, county-level re- tion earlier, were players in political tributive justice of the lynch mob and the struggles and power dynamics in which state-level mechanisms of punishment and race, class, the fear of crime and the ‘pub- execution. Though they lived and died at lic’ sanction of revenge played key roles. Huntsville and under the state-level prison This local exercise of justice bridged the system, in most regards, the condemned transition from the lynch era to state exe- existed at the local county level. It was cution. only in 1924 that the state of Texas began Yet the most concrete connection performing executions; prior to then of- between lynch violence and capital pun- fenders were executed by sheriffs in the ishment came at the discretion of local counties where people were sentenced. It judges and juries, and for cases in which may have been due to the tradition that they pressed for execution rather than a the condemned only arrived in Huntsville lengthy sentence. Rape, and particularly one month prior to their execution date, the alleged rape of a white woman by a that they were in a liminal space between black man, consistently drew the local the injured and the dead — encapsulated municipalities’ harshest legal wrath. The precisely in the name ‘the death house’. probability of a black man being executed Their names were not recorded in the for rape was vastly higher than the prob- convict ledgers and indices; these were ability of a white man on the same charge. the record books of those living in prison, Indeed, black men were between five- and not those dying there. Nor was capital 10-times more likely to be executed for punishment discussed in meetings of the rape than white men, and this reached the Prison Board. At this bureaucratic level,

16 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’ high point toward the end of the Depres- behind’.56 As the condemned ordered sion, when black men were almost 20- their last meals, they frequently placed times more likely to be put to death for orders for five bowls of ice cream, six rape than whites. Furthermore, men ex- pieces of pie, and so on. This wasn’t simple ecuted for rape were far more likely to be gluttony or a final sensory inundation. convicted and sentenced in east Texas, the Many ate last meals with gusto, others region where slavery’s roots were deepest, didn’t touch the food. Rather, these extra and where most lynching took place.53 pieces of pie went to the other prisoners in the death house. It was part of the LIFE IN THE DEATH HOUSE community made among the nearly-dead, among men who knew, almost to the By all accounts, life in the death house was minute, when they would die.57 grim. Its nine cells looked onto ‘the long Fear and apprehension and the last mile’, a hallway that ended at a grey, memories of home and of crimes must have solid steel door. The electric chair, known been thick in the death house. As else- to all as ‘Old Sparky’, was behind that where in the prison system, music proved steel door, in a small, low-ceilinged 54 to be a powerful way for inmates to ima- room. A guard was always on duty on gine other times and places than the walls this, the ‘death watch’ shift. that surrounded them. Country singer Though surely there was much anti- Merle Haggard's mournful ‘Sing Me Back pathy among the condemned, some sense Home’ poignantly intermingles music, of final camaraderie was in evidence memory and penal space. It tells the story among the black, white, Mexican, and of a prisoner on his way to his execution Native American men who spent their final who asks a fellow inmate to ‘Sing me back days there. African Americans, though, home, Before I die.’ Haggard served time were the largest number of those sen- in prison, but he could hardly have known tenced to die. Of the 191 men executed that the events his song described literally from 1929 to 1942, 107 were black (56 per took place in the Texas death house, dec- cent), 63 were white (33 per cent), 20 were ades before he wrote it. Mexican (11 per cent), and one was Native 55 Paul Mitchell, a white prisoner who American. J. F. Hogan, a white man played harmonica, spent time on the Texas convicted of murder in Hidalgo county, Death Row prior to having his sentence spent 57 days in the death house prior to commuted. In Mitchell's words: the commutation of his sentence in 1934. In Hogan’s two months in the death house, I played a mouth organ quite a bit two men were put to death: as he said, ‘a then, and one of the men took a couple of Negroes; I don't remember their fancy to ‘Chicken Reel’. He asked names.’ Yet while Hogan was on death me to play it for him when his time row, ‘about four o'clock one evening when came — said he wanted to go one of the Negroes was going down that down with that tune ringing in his night, we sort of held court on the Row, ears. I thought it would be easy, and the Negro willed all his personal be- but … well, at midnight he came longings to the other boys he was to leave by and shook hands with me. I

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had the harmonica in my hand. He death, when the speed of decay and ex- tried to say goodbye-but he just pense of embalming demanded a quick, if kind of choked up. Then he poin- unsympathetic, notification. Rosie Wilson ted to the mouth organ, and I received a telegram about her son, John- began playing … and he began nie. To say that the message is succinct is walking toward that little gray to put it mildly: door. Mister, that was the hardest Rosie Wilson, Colored, piece I ever played in my life! And it kept getting harder! Then, when Beckville, Texas. it was over, I threw my harmonica Johnnie Wilson died last night into the corner and both sides flew eastham state farm weldon Texas off of it. Now I never play ‘Chick- advise by Western union immedi- 58 en Reel’ anymore. ately whether you want remains While condemned prisoners found solace your expense. in song and in each other, they also found H E Moore, Chief Bureau of record solace in religion, and had frequent visits and from prison chaplains. Most prisoners who Identification Texas Prison Sys- died were not religious men (in 1929, one tem.61 of the rare years when this statistic was kept in the Annual Report, 28 of the 52 Letters were more predictable in the who died listed no religion59 ), but it is case of an execution, when the death was easy to imagine that as their last days ap- planned well in advance. Prisoners' famil- proached, some inmates had a change of ies received form letters from the warden, heart, and used their final hours in spiritu- informing them that they needed to ar- al pursuits. Religious officials saw the range for the removal of their family death house and the hospitals as fertile member’s body after execution. If they ground for their harvest of souls. Certainly could afford the expense, a mortician questions of the afterlife pressed more ur- would pick up the body and return it to gently for those on death row than else- the family. A 1941 letter explained: ‘If you where in the prison system, and chaplains intend to claim the body, please have the tried to fill this need. Indeed, the Catholic undertaker advise this office by letter im- Reverend Hugh Finnegan felt his most mediately. If you do not wish to claim the important service was among the con- body, burial will take place in the Prison demned. There, he said, his work’s bene- Cemetery here in Huntsville with full fits were ‘most evidently manifested’. He Christian rites.’ And to set the family at was thankful to provide real consolation ease — as much as possible, under the in the Death House.60 circumstances of state execution: ‘[P]lease rest assured that everything possible is ON PECKERWOOD HILL being done to make your brother's last hours as happy as is possible under such After a prisoner died, his family received conditions, and the Prison Chaplain is in 62 word from prison officials. It may have constant attendance.’ been the terse telegram of an unexpected

18 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’

Yet many prisoners’ families could not funeral services for the men who afford to claim their remains, and were died in the hospital and were bur- less fortunate than Johnnie Wilson, whose ied in the prison cemetery. The mother sent for his body. One of Elmer funerals of the men from the Pruitt's parents responded to the warden’s Wynne Farm have been held at the letter: ‘Many thanks to you for the inform- cemetery of that farm, as that unit ation. It is my desire to claim the body of has no chapel nor any suitable my hopeless son, but I am unable, finan- place for services.65 cially, to bear the expense.’ Pruitt, a black C. E. Garret, who tended to the spiritual man convicted of murder in Henderson wellbeing of white Protestants in the ‘up- County, was executed 30 May 1937 and per sector’ of the prison system, oversaw presumably buried at the state cemetery some 29 burials in 1940 alone.66 in Huntsville, known to inmates as Peck- erwood Hill.63 These meagre services were hardly the grisly mass spectacles of death at the hands Indigent prisoners, and this was not an of the lynch mob. Indeed, almost no one inconsiderable number, might hope for a would be there to witness the death, burial suit to be provided from the prison, however it happened, or the burial, as well as a coffin. The suit was almost wherever it took place. If they did witness certainly sewn by women prisoners at the it, as was the case with Cecil Davis, they Goree Farm, who made all of the work spoke about it only reluctantly. But it was clothes worn in the prison, and the dis- also different from the post-Reconstruction charge suits worn by prisoners who were lynch mob because during the depression, fortunate enough to walk rather than be poor whites, now understood as ‘white carried out, and luckier still than those trash’, joined African Americans and who never left. The coffins, too, were Mexicans at Peckerwood Hill: imprisoned, likely made in the prison carpentry shop. in the main, for property crimes, but also If inmate carpenters could build ‘Old rape, murder, and assault; dead from Sparky’, it stands to reason that they could medical neglect and from overwork, from build a few dozen rough coffins each hatred and electrocution. This new regime year.64 was far different from the lynch mob, but Prisoners whose families couldn’t or if this was progress, it was the kind de- wouldn’t claim their bodies were seen to, scribed by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: then, by prison officials, and the prison ‘It moved not like an arrow but like a chaplains oversaw their burial. This, too, boomerang, and if you were poor, black, was a vital part of their role in the prison. or both, it was best to have a steel helmet The matter-of-fact tone in Annual Reports handy, because it could come back and belied a deeper sentiment in this Chap- knock you down.’67 lain’s ministrations: * * * In cases where the electrocuted In his history of lynch violence in the men were not claimed by their rel- American South, historian W. Fitzhugh atives, I have conducted their fu- Brundage has cautioned against seeing neral services; I have conducted clear continuity between lynch violence

19 Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 2. 2007 and forms of modern criminal justice. turned across the past century, but still While acknowledging the racism of more casts its shadow unequally across the land. recent prison systems, Brundage writes that ‘no legal lynching could convey the NOTE full, frightful symbolism of white supremacy that lynching by seething mobs had The author would like to thank Caro- once conveyed’.68 This is undoubtedly lyn Strange, Patrick Timmons, Wende true. But white supremacy remained, Marshall, Samuel Roberts, Jeremy transformed, arguably more thorough in Martens, Giuseppe Finaldi, Paul Lucko, its institutional banality than in earlier, Kenneth Aslackson, Karen Soldatic, Janaka more visible versions. In a perverse sense, Biyanwila, Alisa Garni, George Robertson, the lack of frightful symbolism bespoke Sarah Bourke, and Shae Garwood for their the complexity of the new system.69 And insight and support. Research and writing when linked to the racial code of ‘crimin- were funded by the Carter G. Woodson ality’ rather than biological race, it existed Institute for African American and African in more subtle ways that grew harder to Studies at the University of Virginia, and identify, and even more so in the wake of a University of Western Australia Research the Civil Rights movement and the end of Grant. the legal basis of segregation and disenfran- chisement.70 Modernity would offer ENDNOTES Texas criminal justice officers — now 1 black and white, Native American and Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Administrat- ive Review & Risk Management Division, 'Risk Mexican — a more sophisticated form of Management Statistics', http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/ white supremacy, which Americans in the adminrvw/adminrvw-risk-mgt-definitions.htm. Ac- post-Civil Rights era have yet to challenge cessed 13 March 2007. 2 successfully in the ways that Du Bois and On zones of indistinction between life and death 71 for certain categories of humans — in this case, Texas Wells did in their era. Like the white prisoners — see Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: supremacy of previous generations and of Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans Daniel Heller- the lynch mob, this manifestation was Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); also Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned deeply implicated in the social formations Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime of the New Deal order and, now, late (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). modernity. The panics of the 1890s saw 3 Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American gruesome waves of lynch violence coupled History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), esp. p.54. Also, Orlando Patterson, Slavery with the convict lease system; the crises and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, of the 1930s saw the massive expansion of MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). prison systems and legal execution. Since 4 Ruffin v Commonwealth (1871), quoted in James the 1980s, both prison populations and W. Marquart, Sheldon Ekland-Olson, and Jonathan R. Sorensen, The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle: legal executions have seen a steep and Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923–1990 (Austin: vengeful rise in the at times slow, at times University of Texas Press, 1994), p.16. rapid, infliction of death, in the newest 5 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans Libby manifestation of white supremacy.72 The Meintjes, Public Culture, Vol. 15 No. 1, (2003), p.21. Italics in original. dark cloud it casts has shifted, roiled and 6 Steve Frasier and Gary Gerstle, eds, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton:

20 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’

Princeton University Press, 1989), Linda Gordon, that limitations on the death penalty have, in fact, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History strengthened the elements that remain. This is not of Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University to argue for the retention of the death penalty but, Press 1998); Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Mother- rather, to expand the abolitionist critiques to the hood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 level of the prison itself. See the opening panel of (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). the Harvard Law School’s conference ‘From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty 7 Leo Grebler, Mexican Immigration to the United in America’. The panel is available as a webcast at States: The Record and its Implications. Mexican http://www.charleshamiltonhouston.org/EventDe- American Study Project Advance Report 2 (Los tail.aspx?Id=100004. For an important critique Angeles: Division of Research, Graduate School of within death-penalty literature, see Timothy V. Business Administration, University of California, Kaufman-Osborn, ‘A critique of contemporary death Los Angeles, 1966), p.25. Quoted in David G. penalty abolitionism’, Punishment and Society, Vol. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, 8 No. 3, (2006), pp.365–83. On prison abolition, see Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p.73. Seven Stories Press, 2003); Angela Y. Davis and 8 My thoughts are indebted to geographer Ruth Eduardo Mendieta, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Wilson Gilmore’s definition of ‘racism’ as ‘the state- Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploit- Stories Press, 2005); Joy James, ed., The New Aboli- ation of group differentiated vulnerabilities to pre- tionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary mature death’. See her ‘Race and Globalization,’ in Prison Writings (Albany: State University of New R. J. Johnson, Peter J. Taylor, Michael J. Watts, eds, York Press, 2005), ‘Introduction’; and Rodríguez, Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, Forced Passages. 2nd ed (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), esp. p.261. 14 Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico 9 8 September 1930 Meeting of the Texas Prison (New York: Zone Books, 2005), p.16. Board. Texas State Library and Archives Commission 15 Quoted in Bruce Jackson, ed., Wake Up Dead Man: (hereafter TSLAC), Documents of the Texas Prison Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Cam- Board, Minutes and Meeting Files, June bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p.3. 1927–December 1941, Box 1998/038-8, Folder: Minutes, August–November 1930; also, Annual Re- 16 William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching port of the Texas Prison Board, 1930, ‘Mortality Stat- Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, istics’, 7-D. 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 10 Agamben, Homo Sacer. 2004); Arnoldo de León, They Called them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 11 See W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), pp.90–2. South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: 17 Marquart, et al, Rope, p.2; David Garland, ‘Penal University of Illinois Press, 1993), among others. Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture 12 Charles Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat, ‘Introduc- Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America’, Law and tion’, From the Lynch Mob to the Killing State: Race Society Review, Vol. 39 No. 4 (December 2005). and the Death Penalty in America (New York: New 18 See Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital York University Press, 2006), p.14. David Garland’s Punishment and the Transformation of American Cul- The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in ture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago 1989); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Press, 2001) offers a more comprehensive model of Birth of the Prison, trans Alan Sheridan (New York: penality embedded in broad social formations, and Vintage, 1979); Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Deadly symbiosis: When the prison Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New and the ghetto meet and mesh’, Punishment & Society, York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Banner, Vol. 3 No. 1, (2001), pp.95–133, also argues for a more The Death Penalty. comprehensive analysis of contemporary carceral systems. 19 Brundage, Lynching in the New South; Grace 13 A thought experiment is instructive: if the death Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Se- gregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage penalty were abolished tomorrow, to what extent Books, 1998). would life change for the more than two million disproportionately poor and non-white inmates of 20 On the racialisation of ‘poor whites’ into ‘white American carceral systems? Might prison systems trash’ in this period, see Neil Foley, The White actually (and perversely) be reinforced through the Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas reform and elimination of this practice? Hugo Bedau Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California recently came close to this critique by suggesting Press, 1998).

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21 Just after midnight on 8 February 1924, the first Board, Minutes and Meeting Files, June day the electric chair was used, five black men were 1927–December 1941, Folder Jan–Sept 1940, TSLAC. put to death. Marquart, et al, Rope, pp.13–6. 36 Yet even this knowledge was thick with new 22 These numbers seem quaint by today’s standards, forms of power. Interpreting Michel Foucault, Sharon but were alarming in the 1930s. See the individual Patricia Holland argues that medical dissection and Annual Report of the Texas Prison Board, from 1929 the development of pathology signalled a more to 1942 (hereafter Annual Report); also Ethan Van thoroughly invasive state and knowledge of the dead, Blue, ‘Hard Time in the New Deal: Racial Formations in order to better regulate life. See Holland, Raising and the Cultures of Punishment in Texas and Califor- the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity nia in the 1930s’, PhD, University of Texas at Austin, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p.30. 2004. 37 Samuel Roberts, Infectious Fear: Politics and the 23 See Marquart et al, Rope, Appendix B; also, Bur- Health Effects of Segregation in the Urban South, eau of Justice Statistics, ‘Number of persons executed (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in the United States, 1930–2005’, available online at forthcoming), ‘Introduction’. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/ex- 38 Ibid., p.49. etab.htm. Accessed 17 April 2006. 39 See, for example, the 5 May 1941 Prison Board 24 Quoted in Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching meeting, which ruled that six prisoners would be Culture, pp.172–3. given 90 days credit on their sentence for treating a 25 From the file of Bob White, #220, quoted in prisoner with spinal meningitis. Documents of the Marquart, et al, Rope, p.62. Texas Prison Board, Minutes and Meeting Files, June 1927–December 1941, Box 1998/038–8, Folder Nov 26 ‘Negro Bob White Killed in Courtroom Tuesday’, 1940–May 1941, TSLAC. Conroe Courier, 12 June 1941, in Marquart, et al, Rope, p.62. 40 I develop this analysis in ‘Hard Time in the New Deal’. See also Albert Race Sample’s memoirs, Race- 27 6 July 1933 letter, Governor Ferguson Box hoss: Big Emma’s Boy (New York: Ballantine Books, 301–491, Folder 15, TSLAC. 1984). 28 See Report of the Penitentiary Investigating Com- 41 Quoted in Jackson, ed., Wake Up Dead Man, p.9. mittee, 1910; and Report of the Penitentiary Investig- Conversely, effeminate masculinities also operated ating Committee, 1913, archived at the Center For as form of social capital in subaltern prison econom- American History (hereafter CAH), University of ies, and allowed ‘queens’ to avoid direct violence by Texas. claiming an ‘effeminate’ male sexuality. See Carolyn 29 Paul Lucko, ‘Prison Farms, Walls, and Society: Strange, ‘Pain and Death: Transnational Perspect- Punishment and Politics in Texas’, 1848–1910, PhD, ives’, Radical History Review, Issue 96, (Fall 2006), University of Texas at Austin, 1999; Robert Reps pp.137–50; also, Blue, ‘Hard Time in the New Deal’, Perkinson, ‘The Birth of the Texas Prison Empire, Ch. 4. 1865–1915’, PhD, Yale University, 2001; Matthew J. 42 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963); the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University Adam Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern of South Carolina Press, 1996). Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago: University 30 Annual Report, 1935, p.108. of Chicago Press, 2002). In 1937, psychologist John 31 Annual Report, 1941, pp.7–8. Dollard argued that violence among black southerners was a transferral of anger caused by the southern 32 On Southern public health and illness, see Edward racial-caste system. In 1939, Hortense Powdermaker H. Beardsley, A History of Neglect: Health Care for argued that the same violence came from the lack of Blacks and Mill Workers in the Twentieth-Century police protection, which required blacks to resort to South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, interpersonal means, including violence, to settle 1987). grievances. See David M. Oshinsky, ‘Worse than 33 4 September 1939 Minutes of the Texas Prison Slavery’: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Board, Box 1998/038–8, Documents of the Texas Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp.130–2. Prison Board, Minutes and Meeting Files, June 43 Alvin Poussaint and Amy Alexander identify 1927–December 1941, Folder July–Nov 1939, TSLAC. suicide and homicide as expressions of ‘retroflexed 34 Annual Report, 1939, p.118. anger’ at structural or psychological circumstances, directed against oneself or against someone nearby. 35 1 July 1940 Minutes of the Texas Prison Board, See their ‘Suicide in Black and White: Theories and Box 1998/038–8, Documents of the Texas Prison Statistics’, in Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gor-

22 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’ don, eds, The Blackwell Companion to African-Amer- 54 The description comes from Nelson Olmstead, ican Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, Program 13, 15 June 2006), pp.265–78. 1938, CAH. 44 Karla F. C. Holloway, Passed On: African American 55 Data drawn from Marquart, et al., Appendix B. Mourning Stories — A Memorial (Durham: Duke 56 Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, Program 108, 10 University Press, 2002). Recent research has linked April 1940. The two men executed while Hogan was confrontation with criminal justice to suicide. In on death row were Jack Jackson from Liberty and ‘Suicide in Black and White’, Poussiant and Alexan- June Woolfork from Bexar County, both tried for der cite a 1970 New Orleans study showing that murder. See Marquart, et al, Appendix B, pp.201–33. nearly 50 per cent of black men who committed suicide had a history of conflict with local authorities, 57 Reid, Have A Seat, Please, pp.6, 9. notably the police, while only 10 per cent of whites 58 Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, Program 8, 11 who committed suicide had similar confrontations. May 1938, CAH. Further, in 1989, Lindsay Hayes found that suicide was the leading cause of death in American jails, 59 Annual Report, 1929, E-19. Note that these were while an earlier study found that the suicide rate in non-execution deaths, as the religion of the con- detention facilities was roughly nine-times higher demned were not recorded in Annual Reports or in than it was in the general population. This led the Statistical Record Ledgers housed at the TSLAC. Poussiant and Alexander to conclude that ‘the pos- While most prisoners who died were irreligious, the sibility of suicide or suicidal behavior increases after majority who claimed religion were most likely individuals come into contact with the criminal Baptist, Catholic or Methodist, in that order. See justice system’. See ‘Suicide in Black and White: Statistical record ledgers, Vols. 1998/038–240 and Theories and Statistics’, esp. p.275. On suicide in 1998/038–241. prison, see Alison Leibling, ‘Prisoner Suicide and 60 Annual Report, 1932, p.89. On religious guidance Prison Coping’, in Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia as ‘pastoral power’ and thus pacification on death (eds), Prisons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, row, see Cary Federman and Dave Holms, ‘Breaking 1999), pp.283–359. Bodies into Pieces: Time, Torture, and Bio-Power’, 45 Annual Report, 1936, p.161. See also Abigail Critical Criminology, Vol. 13 (2005), pp.327–45. Groves, ‘Blood on the Walls: Self-Mutilation in Pris- 61 Communication between H. E. Moore and Rosie on’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Crimino- Wilson, as well as a letter from W. P. Barber to logy, Vol. 37 No. 1, (2004), pp.49–64. Governor Allred are in Allred Box 1985/024–96, 46 For data on fractured arms, see Annual Report, Folder Texas Prison System, General Correspondence 1940, p.188. and Proclamations, June 1937, TSLAC. 47 Consider Walter Johnson, ‘On Agency’, Journal 62 Marquart, et al, p.29. of Social History, Vol. 37 No. 1, (2003), pp.113–24. 63 Ibid., p.30. 48 The following paragraphs’ description of Davis’ 64 In 1939 the Annual Report listed ‘Special Death escape/suicide is drawn from the ‘Investigation by Expenses’ among the costs in the General Adminis- Mrs. C. A. Teagle on July 29 1940, at Retrieve State trative section. Burial Outfits came to $220.81, coffins Farm of the Death of Inmate Cecil Davis, No. 94887’, cost $379 that year, and $195 was allocated for ‘in- and Teagle’s 2 August 1940 Report to the Prison quests’, though the actual investigations over killing Board, O'Daniel Records, Box 2001/138–110, Folder were unnamed. Annual Report, 1939, p.49. Texas Prison Board Joint Meeting with Texas A&M Board of Directors, TSLAC. 65 Annual Report, 1930, 2-G. 49 Annual Report, 1940, ‘Deaths by cause for the 66 Annual Report, 1940, pp.175–7. Year 1940’, p.148. 67 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage 50 Don Reid, Eyewitness: I Saw 189 Men Die in the International Edition 1995 [1947]), p.6. Thanks to Electric Chair (Houston: Cordovan Press, 1973), Davarian Baldwin for underlining the importance of pp.22–5; cited in Marquart, et al., pp.30–1. this passage. 51 Don Reid, with John Gurwell, Have A Seat, Please 68 Brundage, Lynching in the New South, pp.256–7. (Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2001), p.6. Origin- 69 Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, ‘Capital Punishment ally published as Eyewitness. as Legal Lynching?’, in Ogletree and Sarat, eds, From 52 Brundage, Lynching in the New South, Introduc- Lynch Mobs to the Killing State, pp.21–54. tion. 53 Marquart, et al, pp.54, 55.

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70 Michael Omi and Howard Wnant, Racial Forma- tions in the United States, From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994). 71 Davis and Mendieta, Abolition Democracy, p.66. 72 On late modern vengeance, see Garland, The Cul- ture of Control. On new manifestations of white supremacy, see Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, ‘The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy’, Social Identities, Vol. 9 No. 2, (2003), pp.169–81.