Childhood on a Sugar Land Prison Farm

Every summer and often on holidays, we would head to the prison farm just outside Sugar Land, Texas, where my grandfather worked as a combination veterinarian-guard and where he and my grandmother lived in a big white house with screened porches front and back. Mother would pack up our ’39 Chevy and we’d set out from Beaumont on a highway lined with splattered armadillos and nondescript towns which loomed larger in my childhood fantasies than they did on the landscape. China . . . Devers . . . Dayton ... on past Houston. In those pre-freeway days, before progress and subdivisions devoured the twenty-five miles between Houston and Sugar Land, Highway 90 stretched on uninterrupted except for an occasional gas pump-grocery or a clapboard tourist court. Burma Shave signs, as evenly placed as telephone poles, were considered entertainment rather than environmental eyesores, and we would pass the foreverness of Children’s Standard Time reading the slogans aloud: THE WHALE / PUT JONAH / DOWN THE HATCH / AND COUGHED HIM UP / BECAUSE HE SCRATCHED / USE BURMA SHAVE.

Stafford was a landmark of special significance, because the lanes divided and straddled the town, and because it was the last interruption on the otherwise low, level terrain before we got our first glimpse of the Imperial Sugar Refinery, a towering eight-story brick building with what was probably the area’s only neon sign emblazoned across the top. From there, we had another mile or two to go, past the Sealy Tuftless Mattress Company, the Imperial Mercantile, and the depot, to Central State Farm and the turnoff to Mama and Popo’s.

After a few days Mother would usually return to Beaumont, allowing me to spend a week or two or however long Mama and Popo’s nerves could hold out. The visits were somewhat of a family tradition that started with my older sisters, Norma and Dot, and our cousin Florence. None of the boys in the family ever stayed on, though looking back no one knows why, unless it had something to do with the inherent nature of little boys and the waning patience of aging grandparents. By the time I came along — ten years after my closest sibling — there was no one my age, so I literally had a captive audience.

Occasionally I brought along a playmate from home, but for the most part I whiled away the hours showing off my latest dance routines to the prisoners or helping Mama shell peas. I especially remember sitting on the backsteps watching the convicts pick cotton or beans or whatever was growing, while a guard on horseback pranced up and down the rows, a rifle resting on his shoulder in case someone decided to run. From dawn until dark—or, as the prisoners more aptly put it, “from can to can’t’’—they hoed and weeded and plowed the fields which stopped just short of Mama and Popo’s house. In winter, a trusty would bring coffee to the field guards in what in other seasons served as the water wagon. A metal drum, suspended in back by chains, contained a fire to keep the coffee hot and hands warm. At lunch and when sundown neared, the inmates were herded back to their quarters, sometimes in parade formation doing a “turn-row” trot and flanked by mounted guards; at other times, huddled together in a mule-drawn wagon. Black inmates were taken down the road to “Two Camp,” a three-story structure of bricks and bars; white ones, across the highway to “the new unit,” an equally formidable building surrounded by a high wall and towers and floodlights they turned on at night.

I remember a time or two when Popo called to warn, “A prisoner’s loose,” and then hearing shooting underneath the house. Yet I never recall being scared, nor did the darker side of prison intrude upon my innocence, either the crimes the men were convicted of or how they were treated. They were my friends and in some cases, my heroes. Especially Dan, a white-haired trusty who ran the post office, a small frame structure a vacant lot away from Mama and Popo’s house. Mama said he was serving a life sentence for shooting a man, but to me he was special. And I suppose the feeling must have been mutual. The Christmas I was seven he gave me what I considered my first “grownup” book—The Fireside Book of Christmas Stories. Today, it is one of the first things I would grab if my house caught fire. Besides running the post office, Dan kept books for the prison and drove Captain Flanagan around. He was a particularly neat man. Distinguished looking, as I remember him. He wore carefully pressed white shirts and trousers like all the convicts did, except for the bad guys who were branded with the stripes immortalized by Saturday matinees. He had a lot of “freedom,” even for a trusty, and folks said it was because he was extra smart, or at least Captain Flanagan thought so.

Captain Flanagan was the warden, known as “the Big Captain.” Besides him, there was his assistant,” the “Little Capain,” then “the Steward,” who looked after inside matters such as the laundry and food service, and “the Dog Sergeant,” who kept the bloodhounds. Everyone else doubled as a guard—regardless of his primary assignment—and was addressed as “Boss.” In the case of my grandfather, few people knew him by his given name, Gumade, only as “Boss Shanks.” He might correctly be referred to as a jack of all trades; he maintained the cotton gin, acted as veterinarian (although he had no formal training), supervised a squad of prisoners who tended to the chicken coops and Captain Flanagan’s yard, and was never far from his .38. Popo was born in 1880 in Cooper, Texas, up in Delta County. He met Mama in Perry Landing, where he helped her father raise sugar cane. That was about as much as I ever knew about his past, other than the fact his father fought in the Confederate army. Popo himself was not a large man. In his wedding photograph he appeared handsome, with dark hair and mustache and a youthful innocence that succumbed to his line of work. Yet underneath that sometimes tough lawman exterior he was kind, even gentle, with a mischievous glimmer that betrayed what he really was: a lovable tease. For a time he grew potatoes, but for the greater part of his life he worked for the law, along the Mexican border, in Alabama, and on the prison farm.

Like the other hired hands, he provided his own workclothes—khakis and a straw cattleman’s hat—and got around the farm on a horse, which was delivered to his house each morning by a trusty. He worked seven days a week for a salary that never reached more than $90 a month and, for most of his years there, hovered at around $50. The house was at a point referred to as “midway,” because of its position between the two prison units. It was part of a complex that consisted of Dan’s post office, a rose garden, and Captain Flanagan’s two-story, pillared house, which I remember visiting only once, to play dolls with a little girl he and his wife were supposed to adopt but didn’t. Even though Mama and Popo lived across the road, I don’t recall them going there either. Folks on the prison farm didn’t seem to visit back and forth much, at least not with the Flanagans.

Mainly we passed the evenings on the porch swing listening to crickets and frogs the way we did the radio, or in a bedroom that had been added onto the back of the house. For some reason, that’s where everyone— including company—congregated the way most rural people do around the kitchen table. It was the largest room in the house and with windows on two sides caught a welcome breeze in those days before air-conditioning. Heaven knows it was not for aesthetic reasons. The back bedroom’s furnishings consisted of two utilitarian iron beds, several upright rockers, a plain oak dresser, Depression-era linoleum, and an insurance calendar that changed with the year but never in design. A crank-type telephone was mounted on the wall at such a height that Mama had to stand on tiptoes to holler, “Hello, Central?” into the receiver. The room always smelled of liniment and hummed with the buzzing of frantic flies, the rustling of a nearby cotton wood tree, and the whir of an oscillating fan.

There were two other bedrooms—a particularly small one and then a “fancy” bedroom with “yo-yo” curtains chronicling the wardrobes of female members of the family; a living room fancied up with crocheted doilies and gold-satin pillows commemorating THE ALAMO and ARMY AIR CORPS; a skinny walk-through bath with a door at each end; a kitchen that smelled of biscuit-and-bacon breakfasts, salami-and-onion lunches, chicken-and-milk-gravy suppers, and a dining room whose table fluctuated in length with the family’s births and deaths. Rolled-down canvas shades enclosed the back porch, summer and winter, sealing in a damp coolness. Shelves along the wall nearest the kitchen showcased colorful jars of “canned” peaches and preserves and “chowchow,” and next to the icebox, a crock held cucumbers pickling in homegrown dill.

Occasionally Popo would sit me in front of him on his horse and ride over to the units. The second-time black offenders assigned to “Two Camp” slept on the top floor; unmarried guards, on the second. The ground floor housed offices and the eating areas. In the guards’ dining hall, plates heaped with pot roast, collards, and cornbread, or a similar combination, were passed through a barred window separating the eating area from the kitchen which was kept locked. As I recall, the room was a dingy institutional green, yet somehow the things I rebelled against at home always tasted better there. Even spinach. Maybe because I had watched it grow.

Before the late 1940s when the state legislature was persuaded to up its appropriations, the prison was pretty much self-sufficient. It produced enough not only to feed and clothe the inmates but to generate operating funds. Besides the cattle and crops — including cane raised for Imperial Sugar —a whole complex of operations surrounded Central No. 1: a cotton gin, exterminator, meat-packing plant, cannery, leather shop, and pickle vats six feet in diameter. Sometimes on our outings Popo and I would tour the buildings, most of them corrugated tin that turned a blinding silver in the summer sun.

About the only time we left the prison compound was after work or on one of Popo’s rare days off when we would scrunch into Mama’s and his Chevrolet coupe and drive to Sugar Land or five miles in the other direction to Mrs. Clayton’s service station and store. The trip was more to visit than to buy anything. Mrs. Clayton and her husband Larry were good friends. Few of us in the family ever knew Mrs. Clayton’s first name or Larry’s last one. He had started working at the store as a young man. When Mrs. Clayton’s first husband died, he stayed on to help her run the business and they eventually got married. Even then, most folks continued to call her “Miz Clayton” and him, Larry, and neither seemed to mind. She was a large woman with long gray hair she braided and then wound around her head, the way Mama did, in a halo. Larry was not a large man, as I remember, nor did he say much. Except for an occasional game of dominos, we would just visit, and he or Mrs. Clayton would generally give me a peanut pattie, or a “Round the World” I think we called it.

Perhaps I was too young to view those family trips to the prison farm as anything out of the ordinary. It wasn’t until long after Popo retired in 1949 and moved him and Mama into a prefab house bought mail-order from the Sears Roebuck catalog that I fully appreciated the uniqueness of the experience. It wasn’t every kid who got to spend summers on a prison farm and count among her friends real cops and robbers or whose granddaddy could reel off yams about running down moonshiners in Alabama and singlehandedly apprehending tough hombres along the Rio Grande, then hand-cuffing them around a tree while he went out looking for more.

Today, strange as this may sound, those times in Sugar Land are among my fondest childhood memories. At family gatherings the conversation seldom fails to get around to prisonfarm stories, like the time one particularly obese guard was slashed across the stomach and survived without too much damage, thanks to his fatty insulation, or when Captain Flanagan caught still another guard slumped over in his chair, rifle resting across his lap, dozing. The guard opened his eyes to see the toes of the warden’s boots facing his. Without looking up, he said, “Captain, have you ever noticed the way ants work?”

The all-time favorite is about Mama and Popo making homebrew during Prohibition, right in the middle of the prison farm. That was before I was born, but the details have been carefully remembered and handed down. As children, my sisters were admonished never to mention the brew to anybody and sometimes were posted to keep an eye out for Captain Russell, the peglegged warden. Once, while Mama and Popo were making a batch of brew, he showed up for a visit and was maneuvered to another part of the house. The whole time the captain was there my sister Dot worried that he would discover what was going on and put Popo in jail, which I suspect my grandfather would have viewed simply as another addition to an already good collection of yarns that has made him a legend in the family and continues to entertain his great-great-grandchildren 30 years after his death.

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t think about Popo. That could be because of a photograph on my desk of him and Mama in their later years, but I am inclined to believe it has more to do with his adventures and storytelling abilities and those summers on the prison farm. Sights, sounds, flavors, smells that for most people evoke memories of more traditional visits with their grandparents make me remember the big white house, the freshly turned earth during planting season, turnip greens simmering in the guards’ dining room, and rain pelting against the tin roof of Dan’s post office.

Now and then I browse through The Fireside Book of Christmas Stories in which Daddy carefully recorded “Christmas 1945” and my name but not Dan’s, maybe because we never knew his full name. In those days, inmates were rarely called by anything but their first name or a nickname usually derived from some particular characteristic, like Shorty or Looking- Down Red or Crying Shame. Sometimes a relative would inquire about a convict only to be told he was not at that unit because prison personnel had long since forgotten his real name. Dan never had a nickname, and I guess that was because he was different, or at least I liked to think so.

While I was home several years ago, I decided to drive out to Sugar Land, to see what the prison farm was like today and if I could find out what had happened to Dan. Both his post office and the big white house were gone, reclaimed for farmland as though they had never existed. “Two Camp” had been gutted and converted into storage space after integration, yet the shell revealed the building I knew as a child. The walls remained the same institutional green, and the floor plan was still traceable on the concrete, just as I remembered it: the guards’ dining room was here, the kitchen there, the barred window in between. Across the highway, “the new unit,” known now simply as Central State Farm, remained virtually unchanged: white, with the same high walls and towers and floodlights they turn on at night. Nearby, inmates were picking up pecans while a mounted guard, with rifle ready, looked on.

Inside, the warden treated me to lunch in the guards’ dining room, and to a piece of lemon meringue pie almost as good as that 40 years ago. Unlike the old-timers who seldom went beyond second or third grade, this man had a college degree, yet he shared Popo’s love for stories about the past. Dan had left long before his time, but the warden knew folks he felt confident would remember: a man in town and a former warden who put me in touch with the widow of the dog sergeant who accompanied me to see still another retired captain. For five days I shuttled from Sugar Land to Rosenberg to Huntsville to Madisonville to Normangee. Everyone remembered Dan: his white hair, his intelligence, but not his last name or what had become of him. Vera Bledsoe, whose late husband had tended the bloodhounds for 37 years, vaguely recalled him being paroled in the late ’50s and then marrying a school teacher with whom he had corresponded after she visited the prison on business. But that was the extent of Mrs. Bledsoe’s knowledge. Finally, on my last day in Texas, when it was too late to look any further, I put the question to Joe Hines who had been the warden at a neighboring prison farm.

“Sure,” he answered without hesitating, “that was old Dan Sims.”