O Sister, Where Art Thou?
In the early forties, eight inmates of the Goree prison unit formed one of the first all-female country and western acts in the country, capturing the hearts of millions of radio listeners. Then they nearly all vanished forever.
RT says: This is a great story! For a current fantastic all woman band, check out Giddyup Kitty, they were great at the Telluride bluegrass festival this year. (October 9th, 2009 at 10:33pm)
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One of the intriguing rumors I heard about Goree was that some of the inmates were forced to undergo sterilization operations by prison doctors who believed that females, supposedly the more docile sex, committed crimes because they had some sort of genetic flaw. Sterilization programs were certainly in existence in prisons around the country during that time, and though I could find no record of such a program being funded at Goree, descendants of various inmates told me that their relatives had mentioned to them many times that they had been sterilized against their will so that their supposed hereditary defects would not be passed down to another generation. "You should have seen the tears form in my aunt Ruby's eyes when she'd talk about a certain doctor tying her tubes so that she could never have children," said Judith Bergeron, a resident of San Diego, California, whose aunt, Ruby Mae Morace, arrived at Goree at the age of nineteen after she and her boyfriend had hitchhiked a ride with a man near the Texas-Louisiana line, robbed him, tied him to a tree, and then sped off in his car. "She told me that a part of her life was taken away, that she was made to feel like she didn't deserve to be like other women because of that one mistake she had made on that highway."
Six days a week, the manager of Goree, "Captain" Marcus Heath, a stern, six-foot-two-inch-tall veteran employee of the Texas Prison System who liked wearing Stetson hats and khaki work clothes, had the women awakened at six o'clock and at their prison jobs an hour later. Some of the inmates were assigned to the fields or the orchard, others to the dairy barn or the henhouse. Most of the women worked at the prison's garment factory, where they sat in front of sewing machines, turning out all the clothing and bedding for the entire prison system: uniforms for the inmates and guards, underwear, caps, pillowcases, sheets, and nightshirts. After their ten-hour workdays, the women were fed dinner, and four nights a week, they attended school. Then it was back to the dormitory and in bed at nine o'clock.
If an inmate violated a prison rule—attempted to escape, engaged in "bull daggering" (the phrase then used at Goree to describe lesbian sex), got into a fight in the dormitories, or refused to work—she would be punished. Those who committed the most severe violations were either confined to one of the tiny solitary cabins behind the main building for 36 hours, where they were provided only bread and water, or they received a beating from the Red Heifer, a strap of leather two and a half inches wide and 24 inches long, attached to a long wooden handle. It was, by all accounts, a vicious punishment: According to an investigator who later conducted a study of the state's prisons, the sound of the lash against the buttocks of an inmate was "very much like the report of a pistol."
There were always a few inmates willing to risk the Red Heifer. One was caught with a knife, which she had used to stab another woman in a brawl, attached to her sanitary belt. Another woman, unable to give up her thieving ways, was discovered to have hidden a fellow convict's diamond ring in her vagina. "Cocaine" Nora Harris, of San Antonio, was so intent on bull-daggering other inmates that a solitary cell was constructed just for her. The women who followed Heath's rules, however, were granted limited privileges. They were allowed to gather in the prison auditorium on Saturday nights to watch a "modern talkie," usually a western or a love story, and on Sunday afternoons, they could spend a few hours walking the prison grounds, taking photographs of one another and playing such sports as softball, tennis, or croquet. On the Fourth of July, they could go fishing and swimming in one of the ponds on the Goree property, and on other holidays, like Thanksgiving, they could have dances, the only catch being that they had to dance with each other.
To prepare the women for the day when they would leave prison, classes were offered in typing, shorthand, cooking, and even "beauty culture," for those who wanted to be beauticians. Captain Heath's wife, Clyde Oree Heath, who officially served as Goree's "matron"—she worked in the main office, read and censored all the inmate mail, and gave tours of the prison to visiting politicians and nervous ladies' church groups—was constantly giving the inmates self-help talks about the advantages of acting more ladylike. "I remember my mother would go downtown to the stores to buy things for the girls, like certain kinds of makeup or toiletries that they couldn't get at the Goree commissary," said the Heaths' daughter, Sybil Vick, of Huntsville, who in the thirties grew up in a house next to the main building. "She'd put on a nice dress, high heels, and earrings, and she'd walk by herself through the dormitories just so she could talk to them about their problems. She even put in a flower bed in front of the main building because she thought it would give the girls a greater sense of self-esteem."
Yet nothing could disguise the fact that Goree was a bleak purgatory for the state's female outcasts. The Girls in White were cloistered, with little to remind them of life outside the farm except for the photos that they were allowed to tape on the wall beside their beds and the occasional visits from relatives who took the bus to see them or showed up at the prison gates in old cars billowing doughy exhaust. Their days moved at a snail's pace; the Texas A&M graduate student who visited the prison noticed that one weary inmate had written on a blackboard in one of the prison's makeshift classrooms, "19 x 14 = 266. France is in Europe. Six more years." Another inmate spent her free time staring out a barred window at two horses in a field, always ready to place a bet with another inmate on which of the horses would reach the opposite fence first. One afternoon, a woman working her ten-hour shift behind a sewing machine went berserk. Captain Heath was called in to take away the scissors she was clutching in her hand.
"It wasn't a place you wanted to be," Mozelle McDaniel told me during my visit with her in Tyler. In 1938, when Mozelle was a seventeen-year-old living in the tiny town of Wharton, southwest of Houston, she and her younger sister had driven into town in the family automobile "to see the crowds." They met a couple of boys and were sitting in the car with them when their stepfather, "Daddy Jack" Watkins, appeared, furious that they had stayed in town past nightfall. He drove the girls home, saying, "I ought to whip you." Mozelle walked inside the house, picked up a .22-caliber rifle, walked outside, and shot him eleven times, pumping one shell after another into the chamber of the rifle. When he finally crumpled to the ground, she calmly leaned the rifle against the door frame and went back inside the house. "I shot Daddy Jack to protect the family," Mozelle testified at her trial, which was covered by all the Houston newspapers. "I was afraid he would kill us." Although it was clear that Mozelle had spent much of her childhood at the mercy of a seething, hard-drinking man, jurors in those years were not ready to forgive a woman, no matter how young, who believed that the only way to escape abuse was to resort to a violent act herself. Mozelle was sent to Goree for seven years. She told an interviewer not long after she arrived that she doubted she would be able to survive Goree for more than a year. She could not have possibly imagined that her trip to Goree was about to turn her, and a few women just like her, into stars.
IN MARCH 1938 WBAP RADIO in Fort Worth introduced a show that it called Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls. Broadcast from the auditorium of the all-male Walls penitentiary—just fifty yards away from the concrete-and-steel cells of death row—the show was devoted entirely to acts performed by Texas prison inmates. In that golden age of radio, when personalities like Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Fibber Magee and Molly dominated the airwaves, no one expected Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, which didn't have any commercial sponsorships and ran at ten-thirty on Wednesday evenings, to have much of an impact. WBAP executives were simply looking for a public-service program to fill the station's late-night schedule. Officials of the Texas Prison System, which had been battered by news reports about escapes and beatings and even gunfights within the prisons, saw a chance for a little favorable publicity.
The acts for the show were initially drawn from the ranks of the more musically experienced male inmates. Jack Purvis, who had traveled the world playing jazz trumpet before being nabbed for robbery in El Paso, was asked to put together a swing band. There was also a guitar duo, a harmonica player, a fiddler, a country and western band called the Rhythmic Stringsters, an operatic singer who wanted to be known only as the Anonymous Baritone, and a mariachi group led by Humberto Boone, whom the show's inmate announcer often referred to as "the diminutive Mexican singer." To find more talent, one of the program's directors would wander the hallways of the various men's prisons, listening to the singing coming from the cells. Perhaps because there were so many black performers who wanted to sing spirituals—among the groups were the Cotton Pickers Glee Club ("those eleven dusky songsters from the prison cotton fields," the announcer would intone) and the Negro Quartette from the Clemens State Farm—four good old boys from the Walls Unit formed the White Quartette and sang "Home on the Range."
Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls was part Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour and part Hee Haw. (Although no known recordings exist of the show, a transcript of the first three years is filed in the archives of the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Collection at the University of Texas.) The musical acts were interspersed with interviews with various inmates about how prison had made them better people: The oldest man in prison gave an interview, as did a man who had escaped and been returned, as did the star pitcher of the prison baseball team, the Tigers. For comic relief, one white inmate came out to do an imitation of hogs fighting, and two black inmates nicknamed Fathead and Soupbone did minstrel routines. ("They gave me life for just goin' off and leavin' my wife." "Leavin' your wife? How did you leave your wife?" "Why, I left her dead.") Each show would end with Jack Purvis' orchestra playing the peppy "We Gotta Go." Of course, no one was going anywhere except back to his prison cell.
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