Sugar Land Read online

  Sugar Land

  Sugar Land

  tammy lynne stoner

  Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA

  Sugar Land

  Copyright © 2018 by Tammy Lynne Stoner

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Book design by Hannah Moye

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stoner, Tammy Lynne, 1968– author.

  Title: Sugar Land / Tammy Lynne Stoner.

  Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018025572 (print) | LCCN 2018026726 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781597096263 (1-59709-626-1) | ISBN 9781597096270

  Classification: LCC PS3619.T6859 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.T6859 S84 2018

  (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025572

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, and the Amazon Literary Partnership partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  To Karena,

  who I’ve loved since the day we met—

  when we were existential teenagers.

  All of this is because of—and for—you.

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  The Long Shadow of Heaven

  Prison Peacocks

  Butterflies & Bullfrogs

  The Whatfor

  Definitions of Adventure

  From the Tall Grasses

  The Preacher Said Sit Down, So I Sat

  Rhodie Letter #1

  Oceans Inside

  Rhodie Letter #31

  Quick to Fire

  Guts, Crotch, Face

  Doing What You Can

  Music in Traps

  The Wood

  My Souvenir

  I Go, You Go

  The Gov’ner

  What Sailors Know

  Hairnet

  The Prevettes

  Marry Him?

  BOOK TWO

  I Did

  Five Rosaries

  The King of the Twelve-String Guitar

  BOOK THREE

  The Bland Old Opry

  The Last Letter

  Pepto Dismal

  Fashion

  New Pictures of My Girls

  The Two-Ton Monster

  The Many Faces of Hell

  Pinned In, Sawed Out, Light Seen

  Being Available

  A New Dress

  The Oscar Wilde Way

  How Long?

  Mama Who?

  The Drama of It All

  The Cats at Kitty’s

  Living & Dying: Lessons from Huddie

  BOOK ONE

  miss dara

  THE LONG SHADOW OF HEAVEN

  My first workday at the Imperial State Prison Farm for men was February 8, 1923. I wore a dress that made me look like a curvy brown sack and I couldn’t stop burping up the oatmeal I’d had for breakfast. The kind folks at the prison helped me find a place to live, which I called my “shanty.” It came with minimal furnishings: a mostly green love seat as comfortable as burlap, a single bed that poked a little, and what they called “a bistro table with two sitting chairs”—leaving me wondering what other kind of chairs there were. They also paid the first month’s rent.

  The penitentiary was an easy ten-minute walk away, up a street with clean, new telephone poles running down the center. Folks called the area “Guardtown” to separate it from the real town of Sugar Land. Most of the houses in Guardtown had trees out front, and the street even had streetlights—though I did miss the windmills of my hometown, Midland, Texas.

  As I walked down those clean, paved streets that came straight from under a child’s Christmas train set, my nerves jumped more than a grasshopper on a griddle. On my training day, I’d had a tour of the prison and met the Warden—a big-chested man with precisely trimmed sideburns—and a spattering of random folks unhitching horses outside, but that was it by way of preparation.

  Truth be told, I hadn’t thought much about possible dangers of prison life until I got closer to the white walls of the penitentiary. They looked like the walls of heaven—if heaven were an institution to house murderers and thieves, which it may be since we are all murderers and thieves in our own way.

  A horribly freckled guard with a sweat-stained, tan shirt walked me past the meager wooden gate—the only fencing of any sort around the prison. That might seem strange to folks these days, but back then there were very few places to run, so there was no real need for a fence. Still, convicts did run, and when they did, the guards released the dogs and hunted them down on horseback—catching or shooting most of the escapees who didn’t drown in the Brazos.

  We walked through the gate, across a wide patch of dry grass, and into the kitchen building, which—as the guard explained—connected the three main “tanks,” or dormitories, of the prison—one for whites, one for blacks, and one for Mexicans.

  “Stay here. I’ll get Beauregard.”

  I stood with my back against the raw wood, which let off a hot, musty smell. Cigarette smoke thicker than swamp fog hung in the air. I tried to look at ease.

  A few minutes later, a man with a waxed mustache, who was both broad-shouldered and skinny, sauntered up as if he was going to ask me to dance. His white kitchen shirt had no name on it.

  “I’m Beauregard,” he said, holding out his hand to me after he wiped the sweat off on his pants. “I lead the kitchen staff and whatnot. Follow me.” He grunted to the freckled guard, who didn’t care much about us. “Don’t worry, we’re allowed to smile inside the kitchen proper, even though it is quite literally frowned upon out here.”

  Beauregard had a charming look to him, like a man who could skip over every puddle during a rainstorm. Maybe it was that mustache of his, all curled and comical and confident. And he smelled nice, which was something in that place.

  The hallway we walked down was just big enough for two adults to walk side by side. At the end sat another beat-up door. When Beauregard opened it, I felt like we had entered a secret chapter of Alice in Wonderland.

  A dinged-up nickel counter with absolutely nothing on it stretched the length of the long wall opposite the stove. Giant, oversized pots sat on the floor. Utensils were hooked to the wall with chains, as if otherwise they might spring to life and start tap dancing. Seemed bleach was the cleaning method, as evidenced from the overwhelming stench in the air.

  Beauregard said, “I hope you enjoy the smell of Old Dutch.”

  I smiled, noticing that he slicked his hair similar to the way Rhodie—the girl I’d left behind in Midland—did.

  “You were scheduled an hour early so I can take you on a brief tour and get you punched in before we begin prep. Today’s inmates will be in to help get the line up and then the head cook will come in. You’ll meet him later.” He leaned in, even though there wasn’t anyone there that I could see. “Careful of the head cook. Something in his eye gives me goosebumps.” Beauregard lifted his wiry forearm and ran a hand over it as if he was getting goosebumps just talking about it. “Chicken flesh,” he said.

  I nodded and looked behind him at that long, h
ot room that didn’t have one soft object in it.

  × × ×

  Everything went well with me and Beauregard. It felt good and right to be in that antiseptic kitchen, where there would be little to remind me of Rhodie.

  Beauregard stationed me as one of the two people who worked in the area protected by bars. The only person standing without bars between him and the inmates was the last person, who handed out the food trays.

  I buffed the steel of the line for a good hour, as instructed, until the food pots came out. No matter what food they brought over, it all managed to smell like old motor oil.

  Beauregard and a prisoner wheeled the last pot over to me, at the end of the line. They lifted it into the hole I’d prepared. Beauregard’s face got red and his hands shook from the weight.

  He said, “You’re scooping. One blob of gravy on each tray in the upper left corner.” He nodded his head at the prisoner who was lifting an equally heavy pot into the hole next to mine. “Follow Edgar, who lives and works here. He’ll be giving them a biscuit right before you.” Edgar grunted as he wiggled his pot into place.

  A few whistles tooted and then, after two loud clicks, a pair of guards with enormous key rings opened the doors to the cafeteria. The guards wore their own clothes, but you could tell who they were by their cowboy hats and the leather straps fastened with buttoned loops to their belts. Some also carried “the bat”—a leather whip two feet long, four inches wide, and a quarter-inch thick. These were the field guards, and the bat was used to beat inmates in the fields who weren’t “compliant.”

  The fields were the worst of it at Imperial State Prison Farm. Inmates—mostly Negroes—worked sixteen hours a day out there. For lunch they ate stale or rotten bread, molasses, beans, and rice. If they caught a squirrel, they were allowed to eat it. When they had to relieve themselves, they did so in trenches lined with lime along the back of the barracks.

  “Trustys”—prisoners who the guards trusted—watched over the others, so no one kept regimented order. Sometimes they whipped other convicts as a form of retribution for previous offenses against them. At night, the colored men slept in hot, humid, lice-infested bunks with empty bellies, wearing the same clothes they’d been wearing for days on end.

  White lights clicked on and the convicts entered. My stomach flipped a few times, me being worried about being just two feet from rows of violent criminals, bars or not.

  A guard yelled, “File in!”

  Two quiet lines of white prisoners, most wearing faded gray-striped uniforms, walked in. I was taken aback by how muscular they were, even the skinny ones. On the outside, most of the folks I knew had muscles here and there, but they were usually hidden beneath a healthy layer of fried chicken chub.

  Some of the inmates eyed me up through the bars, me being new and female, but no one said anything.

  As advised in training, I wore a shirt under my kitchen coat, since there might come a time when I’d need to remove my uniform top due to the edge catching fire or some other kitchen accident that they called “kitchendentals.” I was glad that shirt was there now to catch my sweat since handling that hot, foul gravy under the intensity of a room of convicts was harder than it looked.

  Ten minutes in, the Warden—whose wife, Beauregard had told me, won the Sugar Land Family Barbecue Cook-Off two years running—cut in between two inmates in the food line and walked up to me. The prisoners stepped back. They were slight steps, but I could tell they were respectful of the Warden, with his perfectly squared-off auburn hair and wet cigar stump in his teeth.

  “Welcome to our humble penitentiary,” he said to me.

  I nodded.

  “I’ve stopped by here to give you the three tips that are key to kitchen work.”

  The line waited as the Warden raised one finger. “One, never add too much sugar to the food; it riles them up. Two, never smile back at these boys in the cafeteria line. And three, never serve meat that’s still bleeding because it turns them into animals. Keep to that and you’ll do all right.” Without waiting for a response, he lowered his hand, turned, and headed back through the crowd of gray-striped clothes—a general in charge of a brigade of dead men.

  After the Warden left, the guards whistled and the white prisoners filed back out. A minute later, they opened a door on the other side of the dining hall and the colored prisoners came in. Leading the pack was a tall man with a jack-o’-lantern smile on his blacker-than-black face. Damn that man was black—black as a crow’s beak, especially with those wet, white eyes staring out at you.

  I couldn’t help but look.

  Meanwhile, the head cook, wearing a white uniform stained by gravy and with “Head Cook” sewn on the breast pocket, walked down behind the line. His scalp was red under his blond hair, seemingly from some strange, internal anger. His hands were also red, under a lawn of blond hair.

  He noticed me looking at the colored inmate. Without introducing himself, he leaned over my shoulder, near my right ear. “You like that one?” he asked me. “That’s Huddie. Been here five years. Came in for some violence perpetrated after he’d been living under the fake name of ‘Walter Boyd’—the same Walter Boyd who had escaped the chain gang six years back. That crazy nigger. You like him? That the kind of friend you want?”

  I kept slopping gravy as if this was all perfectly natural, while the inside my body went static with fear.

  “You watch yourself, girl,” he said before leaving, me wondering if he had some kind of salivary issue since every time he talked his mouth slopped with wet noise.

  When Huddie got to me, I heard him humming and I averted my eyes. He clicked his tongue and waited his turn to get a tray with a biscuit and gravy, bacon, coffee, and sugar. It seemed he didn’t have a care in the world, and certainly wasn’t noticing me. That made me want to know this man who set himself above the walls of the prison.

  A white guard crept up real close behind Huddie. “Quit humming,” he said, smoke sneaking out of his nostrils. And Huddie did, for a moment—but as soon as the guard walked on, he started humming again. He was either the dumbest colored man in the history of colored men, or he knew that the key to happiness was maybe just the key of C.

  “Five minutes to finish!” the walking guard yelled.

  “The white folks got twenty minutes,” I whispered to Beauregard as he passed by.

  “Yes, ma’am, but colored folks have long since learned how to eat fast.”

  After everyone cleared out for the fields, I lifted my steaming tin from its hole and dropped it onto a wobbly wheeled cart. I say this casually, as if this was an easy task. In truth, lifting those hot metal pots onto the cart was as challenging as getting an elephant to stand on a teacup.

  From there I wheeled the pot to the trash, where I tipped it over so I could scrape out the leftover gravy without having to hold the pot. My forearms ached and my back broke out in beads of sweat as I put my girth into it. Metal spoonfuls of wet hit the inside of the trash can with slurping and slapping noises. This food waste would all be collected up to feed the pigs out back, Beauregard had told me, the ones who would be slaughtered—their bacon staying in the prison with the rest of the meat sold to the outside.

  Beauregard cleared his throat. He pulled a round wax can from his back pocket, opened it with a fast twist, and re-waxed the curls at the ends of his mustache. He propped open the kitchen doors for us to wheel through and clicked up the radio before we got to working.

  “I brought this radio in a year ago,” he said, “when I started working here. I told them that if they want my best work, they best let me hear my music.” He tapped his black boot on the concrete floor—a man always ready to dance.

  The radio was quite a fancy piece of machinery—all wooden with rounded edges and mesh in the front cut into diamond shapes.

  “I sold my car to buy this radio. Now I ride my bike to work. It’s more important to have music than a car—a theory that you will witness proven true every Friday afternoon when b
eautiful ladies in long dresses come to pick me up to go dancing in Houston.” He twirled his mustache, wiggled his eyebrows like Chaplin, and nodded to me. “You enjoy dancing, Miss Dara?”

  I nodded yes and smiled, a little—the way I did back then.

  The prisoners working with us that day moved over to the back room with the head cook to start the food prep for sack lunches—the “Johnnys”—for the Negroes in the sugarcane fields. What the cook lacked in height he made up for in the thickness of his arms, which he kept crossed in front of him. As the inmates filed by, he eyed them up, daring them to say something so he could use those arms.

  Beauregard, happy as one of Santa’s elves, slid by me. “That head cook is a mean one.”

  “He seems about as mean as my mama’s senile chihuahua who spent her days tinkling on our herbs and chasing small children down the street.”

  “Ha!” He laughed like a car horn. “I’m so relieved that you talk! I was afraid you were mute—why else would a woman take this job? I figured you were either mute or running from some kind of trouble.”

  “I just like adventure.”

  “That right? Well, in case no one told you, this is where adventure comes to die.”

  Beauregard tuned his radio, something he’d do every half hour or so, and a Billy Murray song came on.

  “It was on my fancy radio here that we all in the kitchen got to hear President Harding give his address. I bring not only music, Miss Dara, but news of worldly events on my radio.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said.

  “Good. Now, let me show you where the soaps are.”

  Beauregard helped me through the rest of the day, giving me order after order on where things go and why. I barely said a word, which seemed fine by him since he had quite a bit to say on nearly everything.

  PRISON PEACOCKS

  The next day, while we were listening to “I Ain’t Nobody’s Darling”—the horns in the song sounding as if they were snickering—a guard walked Huddie up to the kitchen doors and motioned that he go in first.