...
"Yes, I'll admit Ah've done sech things. But this taime they was sure
wrong. Ef I git framed up," he added, "I mean tuh study law ... pull foh
a job in th' prison libery an' read up ... an' take up practice when I
serve my term."
Beside the hog-stealing parson and the little grey-faced pickpocket
there were also:
A big negro youth, black as shiny coal, who was being held over on
appeal. He'd been sentenced to ninety-nine years for rape of a negro
girl ... if it had been a white girl he would have been burned long ago,
he said ... as it was, the sheriff's son, who was handling his case,
would finally procure his release--and exact, in return, about ten
years' of serfdom as payment. And there was a young, hard-drinking
quarrelsome tenant-farmer, who was charged with having sold two bales of
cotton not belonging to him, to get money for drinking....
There was another negro, hanging-handed, simous-faced, who had, in a fit
of jealousy, blown two heads off by letting loose both barrels at once
of his heavily charged shotgun ... the heads were his wife's ... and her
lover's. He caught them when their faces were close together ... and
they were kissing. But he seemed a gentle creature, tractable and
harmless.
On the outside of the cage in which we were cooped like menagerie
animals, a negro girl had her cot. She slept and lived out there by the
big stove which heated the place.
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