Free A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

powerful shoulders that must have served him well when he was young. They must have served him well in prison. Manning is old enough to remember when Roy got arrested for stealing cotton. Manning is old enough to remember Oxford’s last lynching. Manning is old enough to remember getting flogged by a white man. Parchman was bad, he says but so was everything else. It didn’t begin and end at the prison gate.
    â€œOh, man, you don’t know shit,” he says, shaking his head.Manning lives in a patched-together house on the outskirts of Oxford. There is a toolshed in Manning’s backyard made entirely of discarded wooden doors. “It were hell down there, that’s why I don’t take no shit now. If I go again I want to go for something I actually did . But with the help of Jesus and God I seen ’em all go down below. I ain’t jokin’—Bratton, Old Judge McElroy, all of ’em, and thank Jesus I still here. Three people you put your trust in: Jesus, the Lord, and yourself. Trust no man.”
    Parchman occupies forty-six square miles of snake-infested bayous and flatlands in the Yazoo Delta, which stretches along the Mississippi River from Vicksburg to Memphis and east to the Chickasaw Ridge. Parts of the farm were blessed with rich alluvial soil known as “buckshot” that ran up to fifty feet deep, and other parts were so swampy and tangled that they had turned back Union troops toward the end of the Civil War. The prison had no fence around it because it was too big and no central cell blocks because the inmates were distributed around the plantation in work camps. Every morning at four thirty, the inmates were woken up by a bell and marched out to the fields, where they worked from sunup until sundown. The plowing was done by mule, and the picking was done by hand. At dark the men marched back to the work camp and ate a dinner prepared by other inmates. Every work camp had a vegetable garden and livestock pen, and the inmates subsisted almost entirely off what they could grow and raise. After dinner the lights were turned out and the men went to sleep, and at four thirty the next morning it started all over again. There were men who passed their entire lives that way.
    Flogging was the primary method of enforcing discipline at Parchman and was not officially banned until 1971. A leather strap known as Black Annie was used liberally on anyone who would notwork, anyone who disobeyed a direct order, anyone who displayed anything approaching impudence. An escape attempt merited something called a “whipping without limits,” which—since there was virtually no medical care at Parchman in the early days—was effectively a death sentence. Inmates also died in knife fights, died in their bunk beds of malaria and pneumonia and tuberculosis, and sometimes just dropped dead of heatstroke in the fields. It was the closest thing to slavery that the South had seen since the Civil War.
    The result of this relentless brutality was that Parchman was almost completely self-sufficient—and extremely profitable. In addition to growing food to eat and cotton to sell, the inmates also maintained a brickworks, a sawmill, a cotton gin, a sewing shop, a slaughterhouse, a shoe shop, a machine shop, and a thirty-man carpentry crew on the farm. During Roy’s time Parchman was turning a profit of around a million dollars a year, mostly from cotton sales. In the interest of high production, conjugal visits were allowed for the black inmates, and every Sunday wives and prostitutes were brought out to the work camps. As one camp sergeant explained to an investigator in 1963, “If you let a nigger have some on Sunday, he will really go out and do some work for you on Monday.” The wives arrived by train on weekends, and the prostitutes lived in one of the administrative buildings. The inmates met their women in a rough shack they called the “Red House” or the