"Gonna be here the rest of my life, all I did was shoot my wife..."

Sunday, cigarette #1
Cup-a-Joe (inside!), 11:25am
MUSIC: "Parchman Farm Blues," Bukka White

Listen here man, I don't mean no harm,
Listen here man, I don't mean no harm,
If you wanna do good, you better stay off Parchman Farm...

This month's Oxford American music issue has got me thinking about the home country again, particularly Parchman Farm (a.k.a. The Mississippi State Penitentiary, home of the country's first portable electric chair!), which sits about thirty miles from where I was born.

OA's editor-in-chief Marc Smirnoff was weirded out by the Parchman Prison Band's rendition of "Parchman Farm Blues" enough that he put it on the music issue's free CD: "At first it bothered me that this Mose Allison cover wasn't more wrenching. I mean, the prisoners who make up the band are goofing around with a song about being in prison!" I'm with him on that, and with Dede Cannon, daughter of the old prison superintendent, in her anger over the state's discontinuation of Parchman's music program: "I was really hurt at that. He always had hopes of me taking the position on. Being that I was a woman, he had security lined up that he wanted to go with me. He said, 'If anything happens to me, I want you to take the program on.' But we had a new warden, a cattle rancher from Texas, and he believed that prisoners should be out in the fields. So it was a perfect opportunity for them to stop the band when my daddy died."

I had never realized that the presiding judge in Gerald v. Collier (the 1972 Eighth Amendment case brought by Parchman inmates) was one-armed federal judge William C. Keady, who is famous in the Party of the Right for being the star of my favorite Southern story. The tale's full glory is reserved to the oral tradition, but here are the essentials:

During World War II most of the able-bodied men were fighting overseas, which meant that William Keady, who was excepted from the draft because of his missing arm, was one of only a handful of men between the ages of twenty and fifty in the entire state of Mississippi, which meant that some unusual homefront responsibilities fell to him. One of these was clearing the sightlines between the blazes that marked property lines.

Most of the hard work of tearing out the brush was done by an old black hired hand and his grandson, but Keady, in spite of his disability, liked to help out. One time, he was out in the woods hacking away at a bramble when his hatchet got hooked on a vine, and, not noticing, he swung it forward with full force. Luckily for him, the vine twisted the head of the hatchet and Keady, instead of splitting his head open, just knocked himself unconscious.

Next thing he knew, he was sitting with his back against his truck and the old black man was slapping him softly, saying, "Mister Keady! Mister Keady! Please wake up!" Keady stirred a little bit. The old hired hand stopped slapping him and stood up, when all of a sudden the hired hand's grandson fell to the ground and started wailing. Keady was perplexed.

"What's he doin'?" Keady asked.

"Oh, he's just happy," the boy's grandfather explained.

"What?"

"He's just happy he don't have to explain to the sheriff how a one-armed white man managed to kill himself with a hatchet."