In The Place Of Justice Part 1

In the Place of Justice.

A Story of Punishment and Deliverance.

by Wilbert Rideau.

Author's Note

All the material in quotation marks comes from court testimony, contemporaneous notes made either by me or by others, published sources, or the best of my recollection. I have worked scrupulously to ensure that all the conversations within these pages are faithful in content, if not always to the exact words spoken.

ANGOLA.

MAIN PRISON.

1.

Ruination 1942-1961 "Kill that n.i.g.g.e.r!" a voice barked into the winter night. a voice barked into the winter night.

The headlights of the state troopers' car blinded me. I was handcuffed and in my stocking feet on the shoulder of a two-lane road, standing between the headlights of their car and the taillights of the one I had been driving before they pulled me over. Murmurs ran like the scent of prey through the small crowd of shadowy figures that rustled on the roadway beyond the lights. I wondered how they had gathered so quickly. An arm punctured the pool of light as a man lunged toward me, intercepted by the young trooper who, responding to a police radio bulletin, had captured me. I didn't need to see the faces to know that they were white.

"Give him to us," one man shouted.

"Just give us the boy, and go on your way," another said, more kindly.

A second, older trooper looked indecisive as the crowd grew more restless. I felt only fear. The younger trooper cautiously interceded. "Look, we've already called this in to headquarters. They know we have him, and they're on the way. We can't give him up. We'll never be able to explain it." The older cop fingered his holstered revolver and told the men he couldn't do what they wanted but a.s.sured them that I would be "dealt with."

It was a reprieve, but I felt certain this business could end only one way. It was 1961, and we were in Louisiana.

Within minutes more official vehicles arrived, and the road was flooded with law enforcement officers huddled in talk. Then two deputy sheriffs came over, took me roughly by the arm, and hustled me to the troopers' car. One of them, red-faced, punched me in my side and shoved me onto the floor of the rear seat. Then he kicked me hard with his cowboy boot as he climbed in. "Uh-uh-can't have that," the older trooper said. "We're taking him to the sheriff."

"He's a dead sonuvab.i.t.c.h anyway," the deputy said, leaning back into the seat and pinning me with his foot. The policemen drove in silence. When the car slowed and turned into a gas station on the edge of the small town of Iowa, I wondered if this was where they were going to kill me. My fear virtually disconnected me from my body.

The deputy led me gruffly to a car occupied by two large white men, who got out to talk to the men who had brought me. I was led into the car, where I sat alone in the back seat, hands cuffed behind me. When the two big men returned to the car and were settled in the front seat, they turned to introduce themselves: The driver was Henry A. "Ham" Reid, Jr., longtime sheriff of the parish we were in, Calcasieu; the other was Deputy Charles Barrios. The sheriff had questions.

My name? Wilbert Rideau. Address? 1820 Brick Street, Lake Charles. No, it's my mother's home. Age? Nineteen. I work at Halpern's Fabric Shop in the Southgate Shopping Center.

Barrios got out of the car and went into the gas station.

"Where's the gun?" Reid asked.

"Threw it away," I said.

"You have any other weapons?"

"A knife."

"Where is it?"

"Threw it away."

Barrios returned. "They're going to pick up his mother and bring her to the jail," he told the sheriff.

"My mother don't have anything to do with this," I said, alarmed.

"Well, you're gonna have to help us understand that," Reid said. "You can start by showing us where you threw the gun and knife." I directed them off the highway and onto back roads until we reached the spot. In the dark, they couldn't find the weapons in the gra.s.sy pasture. Thirty minutes and eleven miles later we were in Lake Charles, a booming oil city of sixty-three thousand.

Its four-story brick jail rose behind the parish courthouse on Ryan Street, the major downtown traffic artery. Reid drove past the courthouse and came to an abrupt halt when he saw several hundred whites gathered in front of the jail.

"We can't go through the front," Barrios said, staring at the scene before us.

"Let's try the rear," Reid said, as he put the vehicle in reverse.

People recognized the sheriff's car and ran toward us. My heart raced as Reid spun the car around and drove away from the mob.

I was living the nightmare that haunted blacks in the Deep South-death by the mob, a dreaded heirloom handed down through the generations. We had seen the photographs, heard the tales. They would beat me and stomp me, then hang me from a tree on the courthouse lawn, castrate me, douse my body with gasoline, and set it afire. The white spectators would revel in the bonfire. Afterward they would cut off my fingers and toes, ghoulish souvenirs of "white justice." They'd leave my charred remains on display as a useful reminder.

"You gonna turn me over to 'em?" I asked the sheriff.

"That's not gonna happen," he replied. He talked into his car radio, then made his way, headlights off, creeping toward the jail, stopping beside a large stand of bushes near the jail's rear parking lot. Barrios got out of the car to scout the situation.

"Sheriff, you're not gonna bring my mother into that crowd?" I asked.

"She'll be okay," he said, staring intently down the street. Then he turned to look at me. "But you have to cooperate with us. A lot of people are mad at you right now. The quicker we can get to the bottom of what happened, the quicker we can explain things and calm people down-and your momma can go back home. It all depends on you."

We sat in silence until Barrios returned. "We can go in through the back," he said, "but we have to move fast."

The sheriff gunned the motor and sped up to an inconspicuous steel door at the back of the jail. He and Barrios leaped out of the car and sandwiched me between them, each holding me under an arm. They hurried me through the door, my feet in the air. As they spirited me into an office, I heard the roar of voices even before I saw the sea of white men stirring around in the lobby of the jail. Standing in a hallway facing them were more white men, in uniforms, with guns-plenty of guns.

The office door closed, leaving me alone with a handful of men. Barrios removed my handcuffs and seated me in a chair next to a wooden desk. He offered me water and a cigarette, which I accepted. The sheriff soon returned, pulled up a chair to face me, and asked if I was okay. I nodded.

"I need you to tell me what happened," he said in a kindly voice. "Start from the beginning."

Gladys Victorian was born January 8, 1924. It was a time of postwar prosperity in America and a time of great promise: Telephones were already in widespread use, the first regular licensed radio broadcasting had just begun, and the first sound-on-film motion picture had been shown at the Rivoli Theater in New York City. The Nineteenth Amendment had just been ratified, giving women the right to vote.

Those historic milestones, however, were far removed from Gladys's existence. More immediately affecting her world was the violent revival of the Ku Klux Klan and its campaign of terror dedicated to the subjugation of the "coloreds" and the separation of the races. Members.h.i.+p in the racist organization had peaked at one hundred thousand in the year of her birth, and it was sweeping to unprecedented power throughout the South and Midwest, controlling many local and state governments. The colored population lived in perpetual dread of it.

Gladys was one of fourteen children born to Victor Victorian and Anna Guillory, members of a Creole-speaking farming community of colored sharecroppers outside the small white town of Lawtell, Louisiana. Victor worked a farm with his own animals and his family, without cost to the white landowner, who received a share of the profits from the harvest of "money crops"-cotton, soybeans, and Irish and sweet potatoes.

Sharecropping was hard work, but when plummeting stock prices on Wall Street in 1929 precipitated the worst economic depression in American history, the Victorians, like many who lived on farms during the "terrible thirties," were able to escape the hards.h.i.+ps, deprivation, hunger, and misery experienced by millions of their fellow citizens. Not only were they able to grow and raise the things they needed themselves, but they could also sell to others.

"I heard how people suffered, even saw pictures of people standing in soup lines, starving in the streets with no place to stay, cold," Gladys remembered. "But I never experienced nothing like that. We always had plenty to eat. None of us ever went hungry."

Sharecropping also allowed Victor and Anna to provide their children with an education. The kids would get up at daybreak and do their ch.o.r.es, including milking all the cows, before setting out for school. They'd get to cla.s.s by 8:00 a.m. and get back home about 3:00 p.m., then work on the farm until sundown. That didn't leave much time for homework, but understanding teachers allowed a little spare time for students to do their homework at school. School closed in May, and the children joined their parents working full-time on the farm until September, when the new school year began.

Studying old textbooks handed down from Lawtell's white students, Gladys acquired a fifth-grade education-she and her siblings were the first generation of Victorians who were able to read and write-at the Lawtell Colored Elementary School, a clapboard building with "five or six rooms, one for each grade." The only education beyond that available to colored kids was in the town of Opelousas, seven miles away. The daily commute, at a time when most colored families traveled by horse and buggy or wagon, was daunting. So Gladys joined her parents on the farm as a full-time worker.

The freedom the Victorians enjoyed from the Depression came at a price. Bringing in the crop required the effort of the entire family. "Working the farm was hard physical labor," Gladys recalled. "We didn't have a tractor or anything like that-only mules and horses to work with-which is why all us kids wanted out and, as soon as we could, we left, one by one."

Life for girls like her was sheltered. Wherever they went, they were chaperoned. Church on Sunday was the biggest social event of the week and often the only one. There were few parties, an occasional wedding, and a school dance or function now and then. Escape meant marrying the first decent guy to come along. "Back then, love wasn't the main reason girls got married," said Gladys. Her opportunity came when she was sixteen.

Ferdinand Rideau had been living in Plaisance, a dozen miles away, when he decided to move his family to Lawtell in 1940. "Aww, he was the big man, had a brand-new black buggy that he kept polished and a big fine horse," Gladys recalled. Among the Rideau children was nineteen-year-old Thomas, whom she met at a local dance. She loved to dance, and he was good at it. Since they lived close by, Thomas soon joined the Victorian sisters on their Sunday-morning walks to the only Catholic church nearby, where blacks were allowed in the rear pews. Afterward, they would visit the general store, where Thomas would treat Gladys to a nickel's worth of candy or an ice-cream cone. "Tom was kind of hip and a neat dresser, and had a line," she said. "I liked him." He quickly asked Victor Victorian for permission to marry Gladys.

Having known each other only three months, Thomas and Gladys married in the spring of 1941 at the home of her parents. According to Thomas's older brother Lennis, Thomas wanted to marry Gladys quickly because he had gotten a girl pregnant in Jeanerette, sixty miles south toward the Gulf, and didn't want to marry that girl because she was too dark-skinned. Gladys, on the other hand, had long black hair that fell in soft ringlets and skin so pale she could have pa.s.sed for white, making her more desirable to a color-conscious Creole black man.

Within several months, to earn extra money, Gladys and Thomas joined migrant workers cutting sugarcane in Jeanerette for the old black man Thomas had worked for before, and they lived there through the harvest. The old man liked Thomas and wanted them to stay to work the farm and look after him, telling the newlyweds he'd will the place to them when he died. "It was a big old run-down house and wasn't being taken care of," Gladys recalled. "When you hit the corn-husk mattress, a cloud of dust would rise from it. We had a little army foldaway cot that me and Tom slept in. Put coal oil on the wooden legs to keep the ants from crawling into the cot with us. We didn't know a soul there, and everywhere you looked was sugarcane, too much of it. We left after the crop."

They returned to live with her parents in Lawtell, where I was born in 1942. We soon moved seventy-seven miles due west to DeQuincy, where my father got a railroad job doing hard labor; then he worked at an oil refinery in Sulphur, eighteen miles south of DeQuincy, just west of Lake Charles. When he was drafted into the army in 1944, we followed him to Oakland, California. He was discharged when the war ended-he never saw action-and we returned to the Victorian home in Lawtell. By 1946, I had two brothers, Raymond and Roland.

Then came more short-term jobs for my father-one at an oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas; then one at Memorial Hospital in Lake Charles, where my mother worked as a $2-a-day domestic for a wealthy white family. We rented briefly, and then Thomas bought a tract of land adjacent to an old cemetery for $245 and a "shotgun" house (three rooms in a straight row, front to back) for $150, which he transported to the property. "He'd add on to it whenever he got lumber," Gladys recalled, ultimately expanding it to a five-room house at 1820 Brick Street. My sister, Pearlene, was born in 1947.

To all appearances, our family seemed normal enough, headed by a hardworking husband and father. We never missed church or school; we were well behaved, neatly dressed, cooperative, courteous, and respectful of our elders and our betters. But there was a dark side, too.

After my father returned from that first cane harvest in Jeanerette, he began drinking and partying with newfound and rowdy juke-joint buddies. He first hit my mother a year after I was born because she nagged him about going out to honky-tonks, where liquor flowed and loose women were ever present. Womanizing outside of marriage was characteristic of Rideau men. My mother had never witnessed violence in her parents' home, and it chilled her. She was trapped by it, though, a simple country girl with little education and very little income, the mother of one child with another in her womb. She stayed with my father, and things got worse.

As whatever romance had existed receded, my mother became little more than my father's personal slave. He was the master of the household; the rest of us were to be ruled, to do his bidding, to be disciplined when we displeased him. He'd order my mother to kneel and hold still for him to whip her with his belt, just as he did us kids. "Thomas-don't. Please. Don't do this," she'd beg. When she rebelled, he beat her with his fists, the locked doors and closed windows m.u.f.fling the thumps and screams. At some point, she learned that one way to end a beating was to simply fall on the floor, lie still, and feign unconsciousness, throwing my father into a panic for fear he might have seriously injured or killed her, which could send him to prison. He would carry her limp body to the car, babbling pleas to G.o.d that she not die, and, with us in the back seat, speed to Memorial Hospital, where he'd rush her into the emergency room. It wasn't a tactic she used frequently, resorting to it only when the beating was more than she could bear. When she realized that her ploy also threw me into a panic, she explained it to me so I wouldn't be frightened. Although neighbors would sometimes call the police, nonfatal domestic disputes did not interest them in general, especially when they were between colored people. The white officers would simply talk understandingly to my father in the driveway, caution him to "keep the noise down," and drive away without ever setting foot in the house to see my mother or investigate.

The fence surrounding our yard pretty much formed the boundaries of our lives, except for school. "Stay in the yard!" was a daily refrain of my childhood. Only rarely were we permitted to play with the kids next door. At the end of the school day, I had to go straight home, so I had no opportunity to form relations.h.i.+ps with the other students. I couldn't visit their homes, so they didn't visit mine. I was lonely, driven by a desire to belong. In addition, on the first day of school in the fall, I felt the sting of how different I was from them when our teacher would make us stand in front of the cla.s.s and tell what we did over the summer break. The other kids told about doing things with their families: going to the Grand Canyon or a lake, visiting relatives in California and seeing the ocean, camping. Our family didn't do things together. My father had no interest in us except as evidence of his manhood. Every summer, I was dropped off either at my maternal grandparents' farm in Lawtell or at my other grandparents' house in Opelousas. Although I liked the farm, I yearned to be somewhere else. I learned to avoid the first day of school by feigning illness or simply playing hooky, so I wouldn't have to describe where I went.

Initially, I loved school. I learned through history and geography that the world was larger than Lake Charles. I wanted to fit in with the new people I met, but my social ignorance predisposed me to blunders. Once, in the sixth grade, our teacher asked each student to get up and sing his or her favorite song. While the other students sang standard American pop songs and ballads, I stood up and wailed out John Lee Hooker's gutbucket "Boogie Chillun." It was met with snickers and laughter. I was a joke.

It never occurred to my parents to teach us what was expected of us in relation to others, and what we could realistically expect in return. They didn't talk to me about how to handle problems, deal with girls, or make friends. It never occurred to them that their children should be nurtured at home, encouraged to study, write, and be thoughtful. They saw their duties as disciplining us and providing us with the basic necessities of life-food, clothing, and shelter. They sent us to church and Sunday school, where they expected us to learn right from wrong, and to public school, where they expected we would learn everything else we needed to know about life and the world. They never involved themselves with the PTA, never inquired about what was going on at school. Once, longing to be a part of something, I acted in a school play. My parents didn't come to see it. After the performance, the other parents rushed over to their children and praised them for doing so well. I felt foolish and awkward standing there alone, and I never acted again. Nor did I go out for sports. I knew it cost money to travel to games. No one had to tell me we couldn't afford it. I became ever more isolated, more of an outsider. A puny kid, I was often picked on and pushed around by bullies. My shyness and cowardice didn't help. I grew like an untended weed, without guidance, confronting the world on my own and learning by trial and error.

My native intelligence, though, allowed me to solve some of my problems. I never had to study. I could walk into a cla.s.sroom, skim the lesson or listen to the teacher or discussion, and instantly grasp the essentials. I was a straight-A student. Often I would help less intelligent kids by providing them answers for tests or letting them copy mine. They gave me their lunch money in return, but I would have helped them simply for the price of acceptance. I wanted the same things in life that everyone wants: friends, validation, to matter. But I felt I was being told on a daily basis that I didn't measure up and wasn't worth bothering with, that I shouldn't waste time dreaming about the future, that I was an outsider with my nose pressed up against the window of life, through which I saw other people living.

I took refuge in comic books. My earliest ambition was to be a s.p.a.ceman like my hero, Flash Gordon. Later, I wanted to be an inventor or a scientist so I could change things, starting with my own life. I received no encouragement from my family. "You better get your head out of them clouds, boy," my parents would often say.

I was thirteen when my father's womanizing finally disrupted my world. My mother and I were driving in the family car to get ice cream when we spotted my father's motor scooter on the porch of a woman my mother suspected was one of his girlfriends. She pulled over and knocked on the door. After a while, my father came out. He lied about his reason for being there, berated my mother for following him, said he had done nothing wrong. When he got home, he whipped her.

My mother sought revenge by having a fling of her own. Returning from an out-of-town tryst, the couple had an almost fatal accident that sent my mother to the hospital with broken ribs, internal injuries, and a fractured skull. My dad hovered at her bedside, playing the betrayed but loving and forgiving husband. When she was released from the hospital and came home, that changed.

She was to get up each morning and serve him breakfast, clean his house, do the laundry, iron his clothes, and have his supper waiting when he returned from work. He expected her to be a wife to him in every way and to be a mother to us kids despite her injuries, which he declared to be her problem, not his. He refused to let me help her as she inched her broken body about the kitchen. Every night, groans of painful s.e.x emanated from their bedroom.

We were to say nothing of my mother's ordeal upon threat of whippings. My father presented himself as a victim. He was good at manipulating appearances, mimicking responsibility, courtesy, charitableness, and friends.h.i.+p. He once took me along to a cousin's funeral in Beaumont, Texas, which he attended reluctantly. On the way, he told me our dead relative had been an "a.s.shole." He instructed me to observe and learn. When we arrived, he somberly greeted everyone, then we went over to the casket and knelt. He began moving his lips as if in prayer. Then he burst into tears, crying out his cousin's name, as if overcome with grief. I stood up and stepped back, surprised, staring at my father as others rushed to console him. Between sobs, he babbled about how close he and his cousin had been, how wonderful he had been and how much he would miss him. When we finally got back to the car, he smiled, proud of himself: "Everybody there believes I cared about him. That's the way you get ahead in the world, son. You always leave people with a good impression." It was the only time he ever tried to teach me something.

As we neared home, he told me that he was leaving us, that my mother had cheated on him with another man, that he had tried to overlook it and hold the family together for us kids, but it wasn't working. He was a terrible father, grossly deficient and brutal, but I was devastated nonetheless.

His moving out surprised everyone we knew, but it was premeditated. After my mother's car accident, he had her file an insurance claim for the cost of her injuries. He handled all the negotiations, and after he won a settlement for "a lot of money," he promptly absconded with it, leaving her penniless and pregnant. We were forced to go on welfare. Then he declared the baby in her womb was not his. Ralph, my youngest brother, grew up to be the spitting image of our father.

Living on welfare brought a sharp decline in our already modest standard of living. To be sure, there were other poor kids at school, but poverty added to my shame. I focused more on the kids who didn't need to borrow lunch money from the neighbors or wheel a grocery cart full of dirty, salvaged soft drink bottles into the supermarket for a refund.

I was in the eighth grade when I burglarized a local Piggly Wiggly supermarket, not to get something I needed but for costume jewelry to give the girls in my cla.s.s. I was thirteen years old, and girls had come to obsess me, especially since I didn't seem to impress them very much. I also took about $40 in change to treat the boys in school. I thought I could buy their friends.h.i.+p. My instant popularity faded quickly, and my act of desperation wound up isolating me even more.

The first burglary was so easy that I returned a second time, and got busted. My father came to get me at the police station. I dreaded his reaction, but he never said a word as he drove me to my mother's home. The court sent me to a nerdy white psychiatrist for counseling, and he advised me to return to school. The police had questioned some of the students and teachers, so everyone knew about the burglary: I was so ashamed that I eventually stopped going to cla.s.ses. I opted to hang with the other "problem kids." We often retreated to the overgrown and neglected cemetery adjacent to the school and pa.s.sed our time smoking, drinking, and shooting c.r.a.ps on the low-lying tombs hidden among the raised vaults and tall weeds. We'd frequent poolrooms and cafes, swapping lies about ourselves, other kids, and especially girls. It was stupid, aimless activity by stupid, aimless kids, most of whom were destined for short lives. Skinny and socially awkward, I was often the brunt of their jokes, but negative attention was better than none. Most of the kids still in school avoided me. In embracing the street toughs, I had further excluded myself from the world I yearned to be a part of.

I got a job stocking shelves and bagging groceries at Tramonte's, a family-owned Italian grocery. The store owner knew I was underage and playing hooky but was willing to overlook it in exchange for cheap labor. I was being exploited, which I didn't like, but I needed the money; besides which, I had stepped up in the world: I had a job.

One day my brother Raymond confided that he and a friend had committed a burglary. I agreed to let him tell my mother that he got the money from me, since I had a job. When they got busted, I acknowledged covering for my brother because I saw nothing wrong in what I had done. To my surprise, I was taken to the notorious State Industrial School for Colored Youths, a coed inst.i.tution outside Baton Rouge, along with my brother and his friend, for an indefinite period.

Unlike other penal facilities, this one boasted a well-educated staff, ironically the result of racial segregation. Aside from the local colored schools, this inst.i.tution was the only place in the area where colored educators and social workers, graduates of nearby Southern University, could find employment. But the educational level of the administration did not translate into enlightened leaders.h.i.+p. Staff members whipped every kid in the vicinity of a fight, theft, misbehavior, or other wrongdoing, even if they were only seeking information. Shocking tales of cruelty, brutality, and even deaths occasionally appeared in newspapers after someone escaped from the facility, but staffers were seldom held accountable. Louisiana's all-white government rarely questioned the treatment of colored kids.

Some of the kids in the reform school were street thugs and gang members who carried their feuds into the facility. Most of the residents, though, were there because they were labeled as "problems" in their communities. Some had been committed by relatives who regarded them as unmanageable. These rejects, some of them innocents, did not like being imprisoned, understandably. I was one of them. I considered myself a victim of that vague, faceless, all-powerful ent.i.ty coloreds knew simply as "white folks."

I simmered in my victimization until I volunteered for a part-time job sorting files and cleaning the office of the chaplain, Reverend West. It was an effort to get closer to s.e.xy Black, a gorgeous teenage resident I was infatuated with who had a job in the same building. Reverend West was a nice man who took the time to explain that I committed a crime when I lied to help my brother hide the fact that his money came from a burglary. I was an accessory after the fact accessory after the fact. I was stunned to learn that I had done something seriously wrong. That knowledge mitigated the bitterness that had begun to build up in me.

I became a good student and a model inmate. I looked forward to seeing my mom, who visited as frequently as she could. I didn't try to escape, as others periodically did, nor did I challenge authority.

I was released after five months. Reverend West advised me to return to school, but my shame at having been in reform school was too great for that.

"You want a job?" my cousin Mason asked. He was the janitor for an exclusive women's store at one end of the Southgate Shopping Center in the white section of Lake Charles. A new shop, Halpern's Fabrics, was opening there soon. Because Mason vouched for me, Halpern's manager, Martha Irby, a pleasant, fortyish woman, hired me on the spot as janitor and general helper, what in those days was called a "porter."

The shopping center was across town from where colored folks lived, and we only went there to work or shop. I had neither a driver's license nor a car, so I commuted by city bus. The seating was segregated-blacks in the back. Most coloreds who could catch a ride after a day's work did that rather than run the risk of waiting at the bus stop, especially when it was late and getting dark, when white joyriders would often pa.s.s by to holler racial epithets and obscenities or hurl a beer can or c.o.ke bottle from pa.s.sing cars, laughter trailing behind. If you had to take the bus home, you would try to arrive at the stop almost immediately before the bus's scheduled arrival.

Since there was no place for coloreds to eat in south Lake Charles-there were plenty of whites-only cafes-we generally brought sandwiches from home or bought bread and bologna at a supermarket in the shopping center and ate in the rear of the places where we worked. We inhabited two different worlds, sharply divided by race and maintained by tradition, law, fear, and violence. Ours was always substandard and second-cla.s.s, and we didn't like it very much.

I worked six days a week and earned $70 every two weeks-good pay for a colored in a non-construction job in 1959. I had never had so much money. I was able to help out my mother, purchase nice clothes for myself, and renew my efforts to buy myself some "friends."

My job introduced me to a world in which what I did mattered. I kept Halpern's Fabrics clean and served as a general helper, keeping the stock in order, running errands, and doing whatever the four white, middle-aged saleswomen needed me to do. All the women were nice to me, and I treated them with respect. Mrs. Irby, whom I really liked, was unlike any white person I had ever met, treating me with a measure of respect in turn, taking a sincere interest in me. She didn't like my having quit school and would take time to teach me about the fabrics we handled, sewing, the draperies and home decorating, how to mix paint, operate the cash register, bookkeeping, and the general operation of the business. "You never know when this might one day benefit you," she'd always say.

As things turned out, it became a benefit to the store. When the a.s.sistant manager left, she was not replaced. Instead, Mrs. Irby asked me to a.s.sume some of those duties. I leaped at the chance to demonstrate my knowledge and abilities. I helped with the books, brought deposits to the Gulf National Bank branch, tracked and ordered stock, determined discounts for damaged goods. Mrs. Irby came to rely on me, to the point that she would not go to lunch unless I was there to make sure everything went smoothly in her absence. I became her right hand. She suggested to Alvin Halpern, Jr., the store's owner, that he give me a 50 percent raise instead of hiring a new a.s.sistant manager. She was optimistic he would say yes, since it would translate into a savings for the store. Halpern said good things about my work but gave me a raise of only $2.50 a week. Mrs. Irby was embarra.s.sed. I seethed.

I felt it was unfair, still another setback. I was fed up with a white society that marginalized me. I brooded about that, and about the fact that I had no real friends, only some people who would become chummy when they hit me up for cash. I felt my life was empty, and I despaired of things ever being different.

In fact, at that very moment the racial, social, and legal barriers separating the races in Louisiana were being challenged. On February 15, 1961, Governor Jimmy "You Are My Suns.h.i.+ne" Davis called the all-white Louisiana legislature into its fifth consecutive special session to wrestle with the issue of school desegregation. Ever since 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" school systems unconst.i.tutional, the Louisiana government had been trying desperately to block the racial integration of its public schools. Legislators pandered to the prejudices of the white majority who wanted to keep their traditional way of life intact. The solution lawmakers. .h.i.t upon bore witness to a public mood of near hysteria among whites: Rather than allow colored kids into the white schools, the legislature pa.s.sed a bill to close the state's public schools and put the buildings up for sale. The governor approved it. A federal court blocked it.

I was oblivious to what was happening at the capitol, 125 miles from Lake Charles, just as I was oblivious to Harper Lee's searingly accurate portrait of Southern justice in To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird, her best-selling novel, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961. My small world revolved around the latest dance steps, my next new suit of clothes, and girls. I read neither newspapers nor books, and I didn't watch television. I didn't know who the governor of Louisiana was, much less what the legislature was doing.

For me, the most significant thing about February 15, 1961, was that it was payday. I cashed my check at the bank and, at lunchtime, caught the back of the bus to Waldmeier's p.a.w.n Shop downtown, a couple of miles away. I made my way to the rear of the shop, where the handguns were kept. I'd been thinking off and on about getting a gun for several months. I was a puny nineteen-year-old who weighed less than 120 pounds. I'd been picked on, bullied, and hara.s.sed throughout my life, and I was tired of it. What pushed me over the edge was having been slapped and threatened in front of others at a nightclub by a guy with a knife a week earlier. As I walked back home that night, fuming, I vowed that would never happen again.

Many of my buddies had knives, but no one had a gun. I had never held, much less fired, one. I studied a .22 caliber with a price tag of $14.95. It was small enough to carry in my pocket, concealed. I had never been violent and did not want to hurt anyone. I was buying the weapon to intimidate people. I didn't expect ever to fire the gun; I felt just pulling it out would resolve any problem I faced and, as word spread, the knowledge that I carried a pistol would deter people from trying to push me around.

The p.a.w.nshop owner bagged the firearm and handed it to me. I began walking toward the front door of the store when a hunting knife in a scabbard caught my eye-a cheap, ordinary knife priced at $2. I bought it on impulse and walked out. I caught the bus back to the area where I worked and bought a box of .22 caliber cartridges at an army surplus store. Then I wandered back to work.

I got to work about nine the next morning, the weapons still in my coat pocket. I swept the floor of the shop and the sidewalk out front, cleaned the toilet, then straightened bolts of fabric and other products throughout the store. This was my future-a dead-end job. I was restless. I felt a gnawing need for things to change.

I had a week's vacation coming, starting Monday. I'd heard California was a good place for colored people, with plenty of opportunities for good jobs and a chance to be somebody. But the trip would require more money than I had.