chance, sir for ma'am, depending], I have the right Mr. Jones or at least a relative of that Mr. Jones?'
The answers he got ranged from the idiotic to the unprintable, but most were polite enough, though disappointing.
'No suh,' the Negro Joneses would say, 'don't know nothing about that Jones. Our people never had nothing to do with no jail.'
'Thank you, sir for ma'am],' Sam would reply, 'I am very sorry to have bothered you,' and another name was scratched off the list.
The white Joneses were more helpful; their sin was perhaps that they were too helpful. It turned out that most were obsessed with their own families, and kept him on the phone for what felt like hours as they took him through their family trees, and they were so flattered to have a listener interested in their lives, they spilled beans quite readily that hadn't ought to have been spilled to anyone, much less an unknown caller.
'Well, sir, we never had a Jones who worked in a prison, but I'm sorry to say, we had a Jones who served time in a prison. He was a lawyer like yourself, sir, my aunt's husband, and as luck would have it, his name was Jones too, like our family's name, Willard Jones, and it turned out he was over billing an estate to which he had been appointed executor, and he had to resign the bar after he got out of the prison.
He's now in Memphis, I think, and I believe he has passed the Tennessee bar, though of course there are no standards whatever in a primitive state like Tennessee,' and so forth and so on.
Sam wearied quickly of his ordeal by Jones, but there was no quit in him at all, so he kept at it, though he could feel his energy and interest lagging, and his voice growing dull and charm less Of course he was at his worst when he finally connected.
'Well, what would this be in regard to?' the Jones on the other end asked, the first time he'd encountered an upward tweak of voice, signifying a nibble.
Sam looked quickly at his list to figure out where the hell in the maze of Joneses he was, and discovered that this Jones was the third Jones of Mccomb, Mississippi.
'Sir,' said Sam, 'I am in the business of trying to authenticate the death of a Negro man at that prison much later, and I am trying to locate someone who could provide information about conditions there.'
'Under my father, conditions was as good as they could be. He was a fair man with a hard job to do, and he done it like he done everything, which is true-blue steppin' to duty and our Christian god.'
The edge of hostility gave Sam something to work with.
'That is what I had heard. I had heard that this Warden Jones was a fair and a good man. If I can establish that, if I can enshrine his memory and make the court see what a good man he was, then possibly I can demonstrate that what happened after he left?let's see that was? '
'It was forty-three. The gubmint took it over in forty-three.'
'I see. So he was there?'
'Thirty-six to forty-three. He wanted so bad to run his own prison, and he'd been at Parchman quite a while, and when he got Thebes after, you know, old man Bonverite got roasted up like a weenie, and it wasn't much, but he worked it hard. He worked it so hard it damn nigh kilt him.'
'He sounds like a great man.'
'Nobody escaped under Wilson W. Jones and nobody died, neither. I'm not saying it was a nice place, now; it couldn't be.' 'Of course not,' Sam said. 'After all, its mission was the incorrigibles.'
'And I'm not saying no Negro wasn't now and then mussed up a bit by the guard staff, but they had a hard job, and a great responsibility. They didn't beat nobody so bad they died, and my pa was proud as hell of that. When they beat ', they beat ' fair and square, lookin' ' in the eye, I seen it my own self many a time. And b'lieve it or not, the Negro, he likes it that way, too. He likes knowing the rules and what's spec ted of him. You can't give no Negro too much freedom, ' it makes his head spin and there's all sorts of hell to pay.'
'And the government came in, forty-three you say, what was his?'
'He was upset when the gubmint came in?'
'It was the state government?'
'No, no, the U. S. gubmint. The Army. They took it over in forty three.
What they needed with it, I do not know. I do know that my daddy never got another prison, and he was a bitter man. He took the worst job in the system and made a go of it, and had a perfect record, and he went on to be assistant warden at several places, but never got to be top man again. He died of a broken heart, I would say.'
'Oh, I am sorry to hear that,' Sam said, anxious now to get off the phone and pursue this new direction.
'I am sorry, too.'
'So he is not alive and I could not get a deposition from him?'
'No sir, not unless you got a telephone number from heaven.'
'Well, then, I am so sorry to have wasted your time. But may I thank you for your father's service. He sounds as if he were a good man.'
'Thank you, sir. That's more'n he ever got from the state of Mississippi.'
The government took it over in forty-three. What on earth could that mean?
Sam puzzled this one over for a bit, and recalled that nothing he had read anywhere spoke of such a thing. Perhaps it wasn't worth reporting, simply some temporary wartime measure like a supply depot or a reporting station of an ancillary training facility for some arcane specialty, like ball-turret gunning, that needed some isolation to practice in. Or jungle survival; that made sense. Maybe they brought in young naval aviators and gave them a crash course in jungle survival, for certainly parts of that bayou were as wild as anything in the Pacific.
He tried to think of who he could call, and then came up with the name Mel Brasher, who was a staffer in Congressman Harry Ethe ridge's office but had been a county chairman down here in Polk for a number of years before Harry had tapped his talents for the big D. C. job. Once Mel's wife, Sherry, had been picked up for drunk driving after an election night, and Sam had seen to it that the case never came to trial and that nothing had happened to Sherry's license.
So Mel owed Sam; now Sam meant to collect.
He got Mel, not right away, but soon enough, and after a de rigueur session of political gossip and a run- through of each fellow's family and prospects, Sam got to the point.
'Mel, I'm stuck on a case here and I wonder if?'
'You just tell me, Sam. You know you can count on me.'
'Thanks. You want the long story or the short story?'
'Sam, it's D. C.' so I have to have the short. I've got fifty phone calls after this one to return, and I've got to make sure Boss Harry gets to the Silver Spring VFW post tonight.'
'Mel, I'm looking to find out what U. S. government installation was established at a Mississippi state prison in nineteen forty-three. For some reason, the Army came in and took the place over. Why'd they do that, when did they give it back and under what circumstances. '
'A state prison?'
'Actually, a penal farm. For colored. In the bayous of Thebes County, way up the Yaxahatchee River. No country for white men.'
'I'll say,' said Mel. 'I'll have a kid in our office get back to you, Sam. You need this by??'
Yesterday! Sam's brain screamed.
'Well, sooner'd be better than later.'
'I'll get this kid right on it.'
The kid, a pip-squeak voice that wore a name that didn't register, wasn't a fast worker, but he was at least thorough, and it was two days before he called back, two days, needless to say, of anguish for Sam.
After introductory preliminaries, the boy?Harold, that was the name!?got to the point.
'Yes, sir, I checked with the Department of the Army, and you're right, an army unit did move in down there.'
Sam was all ears.
'It was actually Army Medical Corps. So I went over to Walter Reed and used the congressman's name and met a guy in records, and it turned out it was something called the 2809th Tropical Disease Research Unit. They were looking at the jungle diseases and cures for them, so they had to go somewhere where there was jungle, I guess.' 'I see,' said Sam, writing it down. 'Yes, that's very good. Is there more?'
'Well, I couldn't see the file. I just got this fellow to look at it.'
