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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But the Goree Girls truly did disappear. They didn't reunite to make appearances on other country-music radio shows. They never returned to Huntsville to play at the prison rodeo. None of them got a job in a cheap honky-tonk with a sign out front that read "Come See Former Goree Girl!" In fact, as far as I could tell, few of them ever talked to other people about who they used to be. In the years after Goree, Mozelle worked in various towns as a waitress and went through many men. (One of her husbands was named Lefty because he had lost several fingers on his right hand.) She eventually ended up in Tyler with her fourth and final husband, Roy Cash, where she worked as an inspector for USI Film Products. When her friends at the Church of Christ or at the Rebekah Lodge in Tyler asked her why she didn't have children, she never told them the story that she had shared only with her closest relatives: that she had been sterilized soon after her arrival at the Goree State Farm. She didn't mention Goree at all. She simply said that that was just the way life worked out.
When Ruby Mae left Goree, she first went to Arkansas to stay with a woman her relatives knew only as "Lillian from prison"—it was most likely Lillie Mae Dudley, the bass player—and then she returned to Ferriday, where she married a crop duster. After he died in a plane crash, she opened a beauty shop, where she became known for her ability to put permanent waves in her clients' hair. (She had learned her lessons well from her Goree "beauty culture" classes.) The women whose hair she cut certainly knew about her past: When Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls was on the air, people in that tiny community had gathered around radios to listen to Ruby Mae sing. But when they asked her if she was ever interested in singing again, she would just shake her head no. "She used to tell me she was all done with singing," said her niece Judith Bergeron. "I really think she just didn't want to think about that time of her life anymore."
Reable Childs was equally determined to start a new life for herself, to be known as someone other than Texas' most infamous female ex-con. After her release, she moved to Houston, and in February 1944 she married Paul Mitchell, the former death row inmate, who had been paroled soon after she was. A year and a half later, they had a child, Gayle. Paul worked at a tool factory and then later as a security guard at Sears; Reable worked as a nurse. The Mitchells lived in a pretty neighborhood near Rice University, where Reable was known as the kind of mother who always baked brownies for the children and took in stray kittens and volunteered at the school library. She joined South Main Baptist Church, but she didn't join the choir; perhaps she thought someone might recognize her voice. One day she made the Houston Press for saving the life of a drowning boy at the Rice University pool. But of course, she didn't mention to the writer of the article that she had once been on the front page of that very paper more than a decade earlier.
When Gayle joined the Lamar High School all-girls choir, Reable taught her how to harmonize, but she never explained how she herself had learned to harmonize. Gayle was always curious to know why her mother was so particular about the boys she dated, sometimes chaperoning her dates just to make sure she was with a proper young man. But Reable never told her about her own mistake with Terrance Bramlett. (Bramlett, incidentally, went to Houston after his parole and contacted Reable, who told him he needed to move on. He eventually married a girl from his hometown and settled in East Texas, where he lived out the rest of his life.) It wasn't until Gayle's senior year in high school that Reable's secret was leaked. Reable had escorted Gayle to see a boyfriend who was attending Stephen F. Austin, in Nacogdoches, not far from the town of Center. A few days later, the boyfriend said to Gayle, "My dormitory housemother came up to me and said, 'Well, I wasn't aware that your girlfriend's mother was Reable Childs, who killed her husband.'" Gayle asked her father if the story could possibly be true. "Was Mother in prison?" she asked. Her father hesitated and then said, "Dumpling, there's something you need to know about me as well."
Still, even with the news out, Reable rarely talked to her daughter about what had happened with her first husband, and she didn't talk about what life was like in prison. She said only that she was not guilty of the crime that had sent her to Goree. After Reable and Paul divorced in the mid-sixties—the drama of their early life didn't carry them into old age—she married a pharmaceutical drug salesman named Wesley Wilson. But it took more than a decade for her to tell him about her imprisonment, and that only happened when she went to Huntsville with him on a business trip. In the middle of the night, Reable woke him up, tears streaming down her face, and told him she needed to talk. After she finished, Wilson shook his head. "You were one of the Goree Girls on Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls? When I was a teenager, I used to listen to you sing."
In her later years, Reable continued to try to keep her past hidden. In 1981, when Gayle married Bill Royer, the well-known Houston native who was one of the Americans held hostage by Iranian militants in 1979, the wedding was covered live by all three Houston network television stations. Reable, who was then almost seventy, stayed in the background, away from the cameras, perhaps because she didn't want any viewer or reporter to recognize her.
But only last summer, two years after Reable's death, did Gayle realize that her mother hadn't tried to wipe all of her history away. I had flown to see Gayle at her home in Virginia so that we could talk about Reable. Late in the day, just before I was about to leave, Gayle pulled out a box of her mother's old papers. I saw what looked like blank stationery of W. Frank Renfrow, the Houston doctor Reable had worked for in the sixties, twenty years after she had left prison. Then I noticed that on the back of each page were the typed lyrics of songs. The first page I studied contained the lyrics to "Blue Moon," which begins "Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, / Without a dream in my heart, / Without a love of my own."
I told Gayle that Reable used to sing "Blue Moon" on Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls. I looked through the dozen or so other songs that had been typed up on the doctor's stationery. Every one of them had been numbers performed by the Goree Girls. "She must have typed them during her breaks at work," Gayle said. Her fingers trembled as she held the pages. "Do you realize that all those years later, she was still thinking about that life? She was still thinking about those days when she was able to get on a stage and sing. She always wanted to be a singer, and she finally got her chance. And then she felt she had to keep it a secret."
When I went to see Mozelle last November, I was not sure she would want to reveal her secret either. In fact, when I called her favorite nephew, Craig McCartney, of Dallas, to ask about her, he said he did know about her murder conviction, but he knew nothing about her singing in a prison band. "You must have the wrong person," he said. "I don't even remember my aunt singing around the house." When I asked if she had ever yodeled for him, he laughed out loud. "My aunt Mozelle—a yodeler?"
It did take a long time for Mozelle to open up. At the Tyler nursing home, she spent several minutes staring at the photo I had brought her of the original Goree Girls. After I wheeled her to her room so we could talk without any of her friends eavesdropping, she spent a couple more minutes staring at another photo I had found, of her singing at the prison rodeo, surrounded by other members of the band. In that photograph, her hat is off and her head is thrown back; she seems lost in the music. "Look at those prison girls singing," she said. "Pretty singing prison girls."
I asked her why she had never told anyone that she had once been famous. Another long silence ensued. I wondered if she had heard my question. Then, out of the blue, she started speaking. "Didn't want to bring it all up," she said. "What I did. All that back then. What people said about me." I stared at Mozelle, amazed. Here she was, at the end of her life, her faltering mind still haunted by that one desperate act she committed when she was seventeen years old.
She told me a few things about the other women she had known in prison, mostly about Reable and Mrs. Heath. ("I hugged her good-bye on the day I left, and I said, 'Good-bye, I'm never coming back.'") When it was time for me to say good-bye to her, Mozelle closed her eyes, put her hand to her neck, and lifted her face toward mine so I could kiss her on the cheek. I told her that I thought she was the only Goree Girl who was still alive. I said that Reable and Ruby Mae were gone and that I had been unable to find the other women from the band. I assumed they were dead too. "When you die," I told Mozelle, "a piece of history goes with you."
There was one of her typical long silences. I almost left. But before I turned for the door, she looked at me and said, "No one thought we could sing, but we did. We sure damn did. At least we did that."
A few weeks later, Mozelle choked on a piece of food at the cafeteria, which brought on a heart attack that killed her. She was buried in a plot next to a pond at the Cathedral in the Pines cemetery south of Tyler. A few of Mozelle's church friends came for the graveside service, as did her nephew. It had been a cold week, but on that day the sky turned a warm, soft blue, and the few leaves of the trees glittered with flecks of sunlight. The minister gave a little eulogy about Mozelle's love of laughter and her desire, in her later years, to help people less fortunate than she. Afterward, the mourners made some respectful small talk around her casket, and then everyone scattered.
I noticed that the obituary in the Tyler newspaper referred to her only as Mozelle Cash. It was the way she wanted it, her nephew told me later. She had asked him years before not to have her listed as Mozelle McDaniel Cash. "She thought it was best that no one remember," he said.
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