The first thing I ever read by Bruce Jackson was his loving yet balanced tribute to Alan Lomax, which he let me reprint in a print version of First of the Month (and Year). That piece ends with an account of an evening in Nashville where Jackson, who had just been elected president of the American Folklore Society, blew off the big speechifying meeting of the Society. He ended up, instead, drinking bourbon (“which I hate”) and sitting on a hotel bed listening—along with his wife, Diane Christian, and Alan Lomax’s sister Bess—as Lomax told stories…
It was astonishing. I’ve known a lot of great storytellers but I remember no one ever doing anything like that. Alan talked for maybe three hours. Occasionally Diane or Bess or I said something, but almost entirely it was Alan, telling stories. Stories about working with his father, stories about people we all knew, stories about people only he knew, stores about doing the work. Three hours of it. It was just magnificent.
Jackson has included his tribute to Lomax in his new book Places: Things Heard. Things Seen. About 30 pages in, there’s a Texas tornado of a story about a hard goof sustained over decades that’s surely worthy of ones Lomax told that night in Nashville. Jackson has let me reprint that real tall tale below. I blurbed Places—you can see what I wrote about it at the publisher’s website—but you won’t need me or anyone else to tease you into checking out the book if you read on here…
A New York Jew on a Texas prison horse
1964, my first trip to the Texas prisons. I’d spent two weeks doing interviews and recordings of prison music in prison farms along the Brazos and Trinity rivers: Ramsey,
Retrieve, Ellis, and Eastham, and I’d also visited three prisons in Huntsville: Goree (the women’s prison), Wynne Farm (for geriatric and prisoners with medical and psychiatric problems), and The Walls (the only prison in Texas with a wall, hence the name).
I started and finished up at Ramsey, which is 35 miles southwest of Houston. I got to do something I’d long wanted to do: ride a horse in Texas. George Beto, the commissioner, had told the warden of Ramsey, Sidney Lanier (grand-nephew of the poet and professor at Johns Hopkins University) to give me anything I asked for, so after I’d done all the normal work, I told Sid Lanier that I’d really like a horse for an afternoon.
“What for?” Lanier said.
“I’ve taken photographs from the ground of what the world looks like to the convicts. I want to take some of what the world looks like from the guard’s point of view.”
“Can you ride a horse?”
“Or course,” I said. I didn’t tell him that my horseback riding experience was limited to Frederick Law Olmsted’s Prospect Park in Brooklyn when I was a kid, and a few other rides on horses of that ilk in conditions of that type on bridlepaths.
When I next saw Billy Macmillan, the field major, he said, “Warden says you need a horse. I guess we can find you one,” he said. “How good a rider are you?”
“I haven’t ridden in a while,” I said.
“I get it,” he said. “I know it’s hard to ride much up where you live. Well, I got just the horse for you. Gentle, takes commands well and – “he looked at my legs, which are short, “— and not too big. You go over to the horse lot whenever you’re ready and they’ll take care of you. I’ll tell ’em you’re coming.”
The next morning, after the convict lines went out, I went to the lot and, as Billy Macmillan had said, they were ready for me. The stable boy brought out a horse and put a saddle on it. “Major said you were to get Gerry,” he said. “And he said you was to use this saddle.”
About that time Billy rode up on his enormous chestnut mare. “They taking care of you all right?” he said. I said they were. The stable boy looked at my feet, at the stirrups about six inches below them, at Billy, then at my feet again. “Sorry about that saddle,” Billy said. “It belongs to someone who’s off today and we can’t pull them stirrups up high enough to get your feet in them because it will screw up the leather. This is a gentle horse and you’ll do just fine without the stirrups. Ain’t that right? ”
“Yes, sir,” the stable boy said, not looking up at either of us.
“You just go wherever you want,” Billy said. “I’ll see you out there.” He rode off, tall in the saddle, like John Wayne.
I waited until he was nearly out of sight before I rode out of the lot. I didn’t want him watching me as I got used to the horse and figured out how to make it go, stop, turn left and turn right. I saw the line working a mile or two away in a cotton patch beyond the vegetable garden. It was a straight shot along a perfectly smooth dirt road to where they were. I rode a while at an easy walk, my Nikon around my neck, the reins held in front of me by my left hand. Then came the moment I’d been looking forward to. A straight road with no holes. No one watching. A Jewish boy from Brooklyn on a horse in Texas. I kicked the horse in the ribs, leaned forward and said, “Giddyap.”
I only had to do it once. In seconds Gerry was in full gallop. For a while it was wonderful, but then it got harder and harder to hang on. For the first time, I understood the function of stirrups—which I could not reach. I leaned back in the saddle. I pulled back on the reins. I said “Whoa.” I said “whoa” again. I shouted WHOA!” I pulled back on the reins harder, I leaned further back in the saddle. I said “WHOA YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”
That motherfucker didn’t care what I said or did or how I said it. He kept running flat out.
After maybe a half mile he began to slow and I thought, “Now’s when things get better,” but it turned out that was when things got worse. He didn’t just slow. What he did was, as he downshifted from gallop to canter to trot his body developed an ever-increasing lateral motion. Without stirrups, I was in real trouble so I did the thing no competent rider ever does: I grabbed the pommel and held on for dear life.
Doing that meant I had to let go of the camera. It was secure enough on its strap, it wasn’t going anywhere, but without me holding it, it began to bounce up and down. It bounced onto my forearm. Whack, whack, whack! The Nikon kept whacking into my forearm. Nikons are heavy; they’re combat cameras. I didn’t feel any pain; I just worried about the whacking doing something to the lens. I needn’t have worried; Nikon lenses are made for hard use. Forearms are far less substantial than Nikon lenses.
Eventually Gerry stopped. I caught my breath. I rearranged everything I could find. Gerry and I proceeded at a walk to the cotton patch. I took photographs of convicts picking cotton, the guards watching them.
xxx
After a while, Billy Macmillan rode over and said, “Another hot one.” I allowed as it was.
“Want some water?” I said I did. He signaled the waterboy, who came over with a scoop of water, which I drank. Billy talked for a few minutes, then went off to attend to something that caught his attention. I saw him talking with his field sergeant, Mike Hawke. I took more photographs. I saw Billy talking to the waterboy, then ride off. The waterboy offered me another scoop.
“Cap’n says give you some more water,” he said. Down there, in those days, they called whoever was in charge “captain,” whatever his rank. It was like on board ship, where the guy in charge is a captain, even if he’s a Lieutenant JG.
It was coming on noon in the Brazos bottoms in mid-July. The weather was hot and muggy. My shirt was wet. Focusing the camera was difficult because when I opened my eyes wide, sweat ran in and blinded me. I wanted to get off that damned horse and be back in the building.
Billy rode up alongside of me. “Getting hotter,” he said. I allowed as how it was. “You wanna take a leak?” he said.
“I’m okay,” I said. I did have to piss, but I was worried about getting off and on the horse with my short legs and no functional stirrups.
“You are? All that water you been drinking, I thought you might want to take a leak.”
By that time, I did. I said, “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Come on over here,” he said. “There’s a stump where it’ll be easy for you to get off and on.” I thought he was really considerate, to have realized the problem I’d have about that. We rode off into some brush. He pointed me to a place and he rode off a few yards. There was a stump that indeed made getting off and on easy. He talked the whole time we were pissing. He seemed really happy.
When we were done, I said I had enough pictures so I was going to head on in. I thanked him for his help. He told me to just bring the horse to the lot and they’d take care of it.
Xxx
On the way back, I decided to try galloping again. I now understood the horse’s lateral motion so I’d be ready for it. I pressed my knees in, leaned forward and, as it turned out, didn’t have to kick or say anything. Gerry snapped into a gallop. And just like last time, it got more and more difficult to maintain my balance so once again I leaned back and pulled back on the reins and yelled “WHOA YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” and once again that animal paid me no mind at all and then, when he was good and ready, he slowed in ever more violent lateral stages, and once again I had to let go of the Nikon and grab the pommel, and the Nikon once again began slamming into my forearm.
Gerry stopped maybe a hundred yards from the turnoff to the horse lot. A convict was setting fencepost there. I’d seen him watching us approach. As we stood there, both Gerry and me catching our breath, the convict looked up and said, “Hey, boss, you and that horse, you sure ain’t in contract is you.” It wasn’t a question. I still remember him saying it, and his syntax: “You and that horse, you sure ain’t in contract, is you.” No, we weren’t.
I rode into the lot, gave the horse to the stable boy, who again did not look at me, and went into the building. By evening, my right forearm had doubled in size and was a symphony of blue. The next morning, when I left the prison and headed towards Beaumont, 120 miles east, to visit a friend before heading north toward home, my ankles and waist and ass were starting to itch.
My bitten body
Janey, my Beaumont friend, noticed me scratching one ankle, then the other, then around my waist, and then back to my ankles again. She asked me why I was scratching. Because I was itching, I told her. She told me to stop scratching like that because I was going to get an infection. I said I would, and immediately started scratching the other ankle.
She asked to look at what I was scratching. I took off my shoes and socks. I did. She inspected both ankles. She kept saying, “Uh huh, uh huh.” Then she had me take off more clothes. She told me to turn around, and then she told me to turn around again. She made noises.
“Your first time in Texas and you got some kind of record,” she said. “I’ve never seen anybody bit this bad by redbug.”
“What’s redbug?”
“What you got. Chiggers.”
I didn’t know what chiggers were either, but by this time I had seen a number of the bites and I could infer what they were doing to me. I asked if she had anything I could put on them, some bayou itch spray.
Itch spray, Janey said, wouldn’t do me any good. “Redbug’s not like a mosquito. Redbug’s still in there.”
“What?”
“He’s still in there. That’s what they do. They bore in and eat themselves to death on you. You can’t get them to come out. All you can do is suffocate them so they die faster.”
I’m from Brooklyn. I grew up with waves of summer mosquitoes. That was it in my experience for things that bite. Nothing that stays in there, bores and eats itself to death, that you have to suffocate to rid yourself of.
She told me the technique for suffocating chiggers was to paint the bites with nail polish, sealing off their air supply.
I said, “This sounds like folk bullshit.”
She said, “You’re the one with the redbug.”
“All right,” I said.
I left Beaumont the next morning, driving back to Boston. I itched all the way. I had a vision of being in a car wreck, getting killed, and a state trooper telling my family, “There’s one weird thing. He had nail polish all over his ass.”
The itching attenuated just about the time I reached the Massachusetts state line.
Public bites
Fourteen years later I gave a lecture at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville,
Texas, ninety miles north of Ramsey prison farm. While I was there, the new commissioner of corrections invited me to a barbecue at Goree, the women’s prison, which is located at the southern edge of town. Billy Macmillan was there. Billy was now deputy director of the prison system. We reminisced about old times, about people we knew like Warden Lanier, dead too young of a coronary, the legendary warden Carl Luther McAdams, who everyone called (never to his face) “the Bear” or “Beartracks,” and Rabbit, the convict who ran the building at Ramsey 2, which is where Ramsey’s black prisoners were when the prison was still segregated. We sat at a picnic table with Mike Hawke, now a field major himself, drinking beer, eating ribs, telling stories. We told stories about The Bear, sitting a table or two away.
Xxx
Then Billy said, “You remember that time on Ramsey I long-stirruped you and gave you that antsy horse that hadn’t been rid for a long time and got you to piss in the chigger patch?”
“Say what?” I said.
“You remember. The chiggers.”
“I remember the chiggers. But I didn’t – ”
“Oh yeah,” he laughed. “The saddle, the horse, the chiggers. It was wonderful.”
“All of it? You did it all?”
“Yes.”
“You sonofabitch!”
“Yes,” he said, “yes I am. It was really wonderful.”
“Who else knows?”
“Everybody.” He waved his hand at Mike, who nodded and grinned. Then he waved his hand at the picnic crowd. At The Bear. “I mean, everybody who knows you, they know it. A lot of the convicts who know you, they know it, too.”
“Everybody except me, you mean.”
“Well you know it now, too.”
“And you never told me. Nobody ever told me. All these years. Every time I saw you.You. Mike. Dr. Beto. The Bear.”
“Everybody. Convicts, too, like I said.”
“You sonofabitch.”
“Oh, yes. Much better that way. I’m not sure I should a told you now,” Billy said.