Free A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger Page A

“Tonk,” and were limited to forty-five minutes at a time. If they went over forty-five minutes they lost their conjugal privileges for two weeks.
    Regular inmates like Roy were called “gunmen” because they worked under the eye of mounted guards who carried .30-30 Winchester rifles across their knees. The guards were called “trusty-shooters” and were chosen from the prison population; they were usually the most violent inmates who had life sentencesand nothing to lose. They wore wide-striped uniforms with the stripes running vertically, and the rest of the inmates wore uniforms with the stripes running horizontally. They were called “up-and-downs” and “ring-rounds,” respectively. In the odd logic of the prison world, the same act that put a shooter in prison in the first place—murder—could also win his release. When the gunmen walked out into the fields to begin work, the shooters drew a “gun line” in the dirt and sat up on their horses and waited. If a man set foot over the gun line, the shooter shouted a warning and then shot to kill. The same was true if the convict got closer than twenty feet to a shooter or failed to wait for permission to cross the gun line in order to relieve himself. A shooter who killed an escaping convict was often rewarded with a pardon from the governor and released from prison. In a state that had no parole laws until 1944, it wasn’t a bad deal.
    The violence in Parchman was so extreme—and the inmate population so disproportionately black—that it is hard not to see the entire Mississippi penal system simply as revenge against blacks for the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Three years before Roy was locked up, two fourteen-year-old black boys were executed by the state of Mississippi for murdering a white man; the boys had been indicted, tried, and convicted all in less than twenty-four hours. And as Roy was chopping cotton in Parchman’s dusty fields, another terrible scandal was unfolding. In 1945 a black man named Willie McGee had been arrested for raping a white woman named Willametta Hawkins in the small town of Laurel. McGee, an extremely handsome man who had a wife and four young children, was arrested for the crime and held incommunicado for a month before being tried and sentenced to death. The jury had deliberated two and a half minutes to decide his fate.
    In the end McGee would almost have been better off if he actually had raped Willametta Hawkins. For the tormented white psyche of that era, the only thing worse than a black man forcing himself on a white woman was a black man not forcing himself on a white woman, and that was apparently what had happened. McGee’s good looks had caught the attention of Willametta Hawkins several years earlier, despite the fact that she was married and had a newborn child. She offered him a job that he quickly accepted, and once he was working for her, Willametta maneuvered him into having an affair by threatening to claim rape if he ever turned her down. After three years of furtive sex McGee finally managed to end the affair, and, true to her word, Willametta told her husband and then went to the police. It didn’t take them long to track down Willie McGee.
    Roy was out of prison eight months when the state of Mississippi executed McGee. The U.S. Supreme Court had stayed McGee’s execution three times to no avail. After the streetlights dimmed in Laurel, Mississippi, every black man in the state must have seen every white woman he knew as a potential threat to his freedom, if not his life, and decided that the safest strategy was to avoid them at all costs. When Roy Smith said to Lieutenant Cahalane in the basement of the Belmont police station, “My home is in Mississippi—there’s no way I’d take no white woman,” he was very possibly thinking of Willie McGee. That same year a black sharecropper in North Carolina was