“We lived in a big house on the plantation,” Carolyn told me. “Not the big house, just a large house that was built for the plantation manager.” Her father, Tom Holloway, had a reputation as an efficient plantation manager and a good cotton farmer, and plantation owners competed for his services, so the Holloway family moved frequently. Moving had become more and more common in the rural South during the Depression, among Southern sharecroppers moving just down the road as well as poor whites taking the “hillbilly highway” to Detroit and African Americans hopping the “chicken bone express” to Chicago. All trekked in search of greater opportunity.3 Home was a fragile concept for the Holloways, but they never traveled very far. Though they lived on several different plantations in the Mississippi Delta, Carolyn’s heart always belonged in Cruger, where her maternal grandparents and Aunt Mabel, her mother’s oldest sister, lived.
Besides being a plantation manager Tom Holloway worked as a prison guard in Lambert at one of the outlying camps of the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. The prisoners “were all black, they were all black men. And my daddy worked at Camp A, the first one. They had a sergeant and a first rider and a second rider. My daddy was the first rider.” All the riders were white men, each with a whip, a shotgun, and a rifle, who oversaw the prisoners from horseback. The inmates in their black-and-white-striped uniforms addressed the drivers as “Cap’n.”4
Camp A had been part of the O’Keefe Plantation in Quitman County until the Mississippi Department of Corrections purchased the land in 1916. In their physical structure, the camps resembled a slavery-era plantation. Black convicts took the place of the enslaved, but otherwise the systems were identical—the same crops grown in the same way under the same discipline. In both instances the farming operation depended on a handful of poor white men to supervise the captive laborers.
The instrument of authority at Mississippi’s prison camps was a leather strap, three feet long and six inches wide, nicknamed “Black Annie,” hanging from each driver’s belt. A former inmate remarked, “They beat hell out of you for any reason or no reason. It’s the greatest pleasure of their lives.” It was not unusual for the drivers to whip a convict for working too slowly or for breaking a shovel. “The driver seemed to be everywhere, ‘directing, scolding, encouraging, or whacking across the shoulders with the whip.’?” More formal punishment was a whipping in the evening, in front of all the men, with the victim spread-eagle on the floor. “They whupped us with big, wide strops. They didn’t whup no clothes. They whupped your naked butt. And they had two men to hold you [or] as many as they need.” Routine offenses like fighting, stealing, and showing “disrespect” to a driver earned five to fifteen lashes; attempts to escape brought the punishment of whipping without limit—whippings that were sometimes fatal. “They’d kill um like that.”5
During the 1930s and well into the 1950s the lash enjoyed widespread public support among whites in Mississippi. Editors, church groups, public officials, sheriffs, and prison authorities all seemed to support whipping as “the perfect instrument of discipline in a prison populated by the wayward children of former slaves,” writes the historian David Oshinsky. These prison camps were “a powerful link to the past—a place of racial discipline where blacks in striped clothing worked the cotton fields for the enrichment of others. And it would remain this way for another half-century, until the civil rights movement methodically swept it away.”6
No one would expect a little girl to be told about or to understand the realities of work and life at one of the prison camps attached to Parchman, particularly if her father worked there. On the other hand, it stretches the imagination to think that the sensibilities of a man chosen as first driver on Parchman Farm were so delicate they prevented him from joining in the brutal rigors of his job. But Carolyn remained firm that her father had never taken part in those routines. “The sergeant told him he would have to take his turn on whipping night,” she said. “My daddy refused to do it. And on whipping night he would come home, and he would go into the bedroom and close the door and go to bed.”
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In her living room awash in sunlight, decades separating her from the last violent years of Jim Crow Mississippi, Carolyn recalled the moment segregation and white supremacy became sharply drawn imperatives: a bike ride long ago that she didn’t take with Barnes Freeman.
Barnes was the son of black laborers. His mother, Annie Freeman, cleaned the Holloways’ house and kept the household running smoothly, while Isadore, his dark-skinned father, worked as a hostler on one of the plantations that Carolyn’s father managed. A white family did not need to be affluent to afford black servants. When I was growing up in the 1960s this was still a ubiquitous pattern in the South: black domestics made and served dinner to white families, never sitting down to share in the meals, of course. The practice gave rise to another inevitable lie white people told themselves: that black employees were “just like family.” The insurance policies, family wills, holiday times, and dinner tables, to say nothing of churches, schools, neighborhoods, and public facilities, told a more honest story. “Barnes was our friend, just like family, almost,” Carolyn insisted. “You know, he was all in our house and everything, and I didn’t think a thing in the world about it. We just really liked him.”
Barnes was “more light-skinned” than his father, “kind of chocolate milk color,” Carolyn told me. “I think he was probably kind of large for his age.” He was four or five years older than Carolyn, but despite their age difference, they often played together. Barnes’s play was inventive, “like putting a rope on an old tire and hanging it from the tree, and Barnes would push us on that tire. We’d sit with our legs through it and he’d swing us.” With the distance of time she described Barnes as her favorite companion, with the possible exception of Aunt Mabel, who frequently kept Carolyn at the family homeplace in Cruger, within about ten miles of the series of plantation houses where Carolyn’s family lived while she was growing up. Cruger was where she usually played with Barnes.
Aunt Mabel was more doting grandmother than aunt, with never a cross word for her favorite niece. Mabel contracted polio as a child and had limped after she recovered; as an adult she fell and shattered her hip and thereafter spent most of her time in a wheelchair. Carolyn’s time with her aunt was therefore often sedentary, a blessing on the hottest days of the summer. A screened porch ran the length of the house and looked out on the dirt road that led toward town, a generous term when applied to Cruger. “It was a little bitty town [that] just had a row of stores and that’s it,” Carolyn said. Her grandfather Lee Pikes owned some land near Cruger, and “a little shack down on the lake he sold fish out of, and he had a grist mill and ground meal, and he bootlegged liquor.” In the scorching, steamy summer heat, Carolyn and Aunt Mabel spent most of their time on the porch, shelling peas, snapping string beans, or just sitting. “I almost never wanted to be inside and was content to sit in the swing on the porch, trying not to move, so I might be cooler.”