In The Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance Read online

  To the late C. Paul Phelps,

  my mentor and friend

  Success is relative.

  It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Maps

  1—Ruination

  1942—1961

  2—Tribulation

  1962—1970

  3—Solitary

  January 1972

  4—The Jungle

  1973—1975

  5—Mentor

  1976

  6—Crackdown

  1976

  7—Truth Behind Bars

  1977—1981

  8—Disillusion

  1981—1986

  9—Soldiering On

  1986—1990

  10—Hope

  1990—1994

  11—Censorship

  1995—2001

  12—Behind Enemy Lines

  2001—2005

  13—Deliverance

  2005

  14—Heaven

  2005

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  All the material in quotation marks comes from court testimony, contemporaneous notes made either by me or by others, published sources, or the best of my recollection. I have worked scrupulously to ensure that all the conversations within these pages are faithful in content, if not always to the exact words spoken.

  ANGOLA

  MAIN PRISON

  1

  Ruination

  1942—1961

  “Kill that nigger!” a voice barked into the winter night.

  The headlights of the state troopers’ car blinded me. I was handcuffed and in my stocking feet on the shoulder of a two-lane road, standing between the headlights of their car and the taillights of the one I had been driving before they pulled me over. Murmurs ran like the scent of prey through the small crowd of shadowy figures that rustled on the roadway beyond the lights. I wondered how they had gathered so quickly. An arm punctured the pool of light as a man lunged toward me, intercepted by the young trooper who, responding to a police radio bulletin, had captured me. I didn’t need to see the faces to know that they were white.

  “Give him to us,” one man shouted.

  “Just give us the boy, and go on your way,” another said, more kindly.

  A second, older trooper looked indecisive as the crowd grew more restless. I felt only fear. The younger trooper cautiously interceded. “Look, we’ve already called this in to headquarters. They know we have him, and they’re on the way. We can’t give him up. We’ll never be able to explain it.” The older cop fingered his holstered revolver and told the men he couldn’t do what they wanted but assured them that I would be “dealt with.”

  It was a reprieve, but I felt certain this business could end only one way. It was 1961, and we were in Louisiana.

  Within minutes more official vehicles arrived, and the road was flooded with law enforcement officers huddled in talk. Then two deputy sheriffs came over, took me roughly by the arm, and hustled me to the troopers’ car. One of them, red-faced, punched me in my side and shoved me onto the floor of the rear seat. Then he kicked me hard with his cowboy boot as he climbed in. “Uh-uh—can’t have that,” the older trooper said. “We’re taking him to the sheriff.”

  “He’s a dead sonuvabitch anyway,” the deputy said, leaning back into the seat and pinning me with his foot. The policemen drove in silence. When the car slowed and turned into a gas station on the edge of the small town of Iowa, I wondered if this was where they were going to kill me. My fear virtually disconnected me from my body.

  The deputy led me gruffly to a car occupied by two large white men, who got out to talk to the men who had brought me. I was led into the car, where I sat alone in the back seat, hands cuffed behind me. When the two big men returned to the car and were settled in the front seat, they turned to introduce themselves: The driver was Henry A. “Ham” Reid, Jr., longtime sheriff of the parish we were in, Calcasieu; the other was Deputy Charles Barrios. The sheriff had questions.

  My name? Wilbert Rideau. Address? 1820 Brick Street, Lake Charles. No, it’s my mother’s home. Age? Nineteen. I work at Halpern’s Fabric Shop in the Southgate Shopping Center.

  Barrios got out of the car and went into the gas station.

  “Where’s the gun?” Reid asked.

  “Threw it away,” I said.

  “You have any other weapons?”

  “A knife.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Threw it away.”

  Barrios returned. “They’re going to pick up his mother and bring her to the jail,” he told the sheriff.

  “My mother don’t have anything to do with this,” I said, alarmed.

  “Well, you’re gonna have to help us understand that,” Reid said. “You can start by showing us where you threw the gun and knife.” I directed them off the highway and onto back roads until we reached the spot. In the dark, they couldn’t find the weapons in the grassy pasture. Thirty minutes and eleven miles later we were in Lake Charles, a booming oil city of sixty-three thousand.

  Its four-story brick jail rose behind the parish courthouse on Ryan Street, the major downtown traffic artery. Reid drove past the courthouse and came to an abrupt halt when he saw several hundred whites gathered in front of the jail.

  “We can’t go through the front,” Barrios said, staring at the scene before us.

  “Let’s try the rear,” Reid said, as he put the vehicle in reverse.

  People recognized the sheriff’s car and ran toward us. My heart raced as Reid spun the car around and drove away from the mob.

  I was living the nightmare that haunted blacks in the Deep South—death by the mob, a dreaded heirloom handed down through the generations. We had seen the photographs, heard the tales. They would beat me and stomp me, then hang me from a tree on the courthouse lawn, castrate me, douse my body with gasoline, and set it afire. The white spectators would revel in the bonfire. Afterward they would cut off my fingers and toes, ghoulish souvenirs of “white justice.” They’d leave my charred remains on display as a useful reminder.

  “You gonna turn me over to ’em?” I asked the sheriff.

  “That’s not gonna happen,” he replied. He talked into his car radio, then made his way, headlights off, creeping toward the jail, stopping beside a large stand of bushes near the jail’s rear parking lot. Barrios got out of the car to scout the situation.

  “Sheriff, you’re not gonna bring my mother into that crowd?” I asked.

  “She’ll be okay,” he said, staring intently down the street. Then he turned to look at me. “But you have to cooperate with us. A lot of people are mad at you right now. The quicker we can get to the bottom of what happened, the quicker we can explain things and calm people down—and your momma can go back home. It all depends on you.”

  We sat in silence until Barrios returned. “We can go in through the back,” he said, “but we have to move fast.”

  The sheriff gunned the motor and sped up to an inconspicuous steel door at the back of the jail. He and Barrios leaped out of the car and sandwiched me between them, each holding me under an arm. They hurried me through the door, my feet in the air. As they spirited me into an office, I heard the roar of voices even before I saw the sea of white men stirring around in the lobby of the jail. Standing in a hallway facing them were more white men, in uniforms, with guns—plenty of guns.

  The office door closed, leaving me alone with a handful of men. Barrios removed my handcuffs and seated
me in a chair next to a wooden desk. He offered me water and a cigarette, which I accepted. The sheriff soon returned, pulled up a chair to face me, and asked if I was okay. I nodded.

  “I need you to tell me what happened,” he said in a kindly voice. “Start from the beginning.”

  Gladys Victorian was born January 8, 1924. It was a time of postwar prosperity in America and a time of great promise: Telephones were already in widespread use, the first regular licensed radio broadcasting had just begun, and the first sound-on-film motion picture had been shown at the Rivoli Theater in New York City. The Nineteenth Amendment had just been ratified, giving women the right to vote.

  Those historic milestones, however, were far removed from Gladys’s existence. More immediately affecting her world was the violent revival of the Ku Klux Klan and its campaign of terror dedicated to the subjugation of the “coloreds” and the separation of the races. Membership in the racist organization had peaked at one hundred thousand in the year of her birth, and it was sweeping to unprecedented power throughout the South and Midwest, controlling many local and state governments. The colored population lived in perpetual dread of it.

  Gladys was one of fourteen children born to Victor Victorian and Anna Guillory, members of a Creole-speaking farming community of colored sharecroppers outside the small white town of Lawtell, Louisiana. Victor worked a farm with his own animals and his family, without cost to the white landowner, who received a share of the profits from the harvest of “money crops”—cotton, soybeans, and Irish and sweet potatoes.

  Sharecropping was hard work, but when plummeting stock prices on Wall Street in 1929 precipitated the worst economic depression in American history, the Victorians, like many who lived on farms during the “terrible thirties,” were able to escape the hardships, deprivation, hunger, and misery experienced by millions of their fellow citizens. Not only were they able to grow and raise the things they needed themselves, but they could also sell to others.

  “I heard how people suffered, even saw pictures of people standing in soup lines, starving in the streets with no place to stay, cold,” Gladys remembered. “But I never experienced nothing like that. We always had plenty to eat. None of us ever went hungry.”

  Sharecropping also allowed Victor and Anna to provide their children with an education. The kids would get up at daybreak and do their chores, including milking all the cows, before setting out for school. They’d get to class by 8:00 a.m. and get back home about 3:00 p.m., then work on the farm until sundown. That didn’t leave much time for homework, but understanding teachers allowed a little spare time for students to do their homework at school. School closed in May, and the children joined their parents working full-time on the farm until September, when the new school year began.

  Studying old textbooks handed down from Lawtell’s white students, Gladys acquired a fifth-grade education—she and her siblings were the first generation of Victorians who were able to read and write—at the Lawtell Colored Elementary School, a clapboard building with “five or six rooms, one for each grade.” The only education beyond that available to colored kids was in the town of Opelousas, seven miles away. The daily commute, at a time when most colored families traveled by horse and buggy or wagon, was daunting. So Gladys joined her parents on the farm as a full-time worker.

  The freedom the Victorians enjoyed from the Depression came at a price. Bringing in the crop required the effort of the entire family. “Working the farm was hard physical labor,” Gladys recalled. “We didn’t have a tractor or anything like that—only mules and horses to work with—which is why all us kids wanted out and, as soon as we could, we left, one by one.”

  Life for girls like her was sheltered. Wherever they went, they were chaperoned. Church on Sunday was the biggest social event of the week and often the only one. There were few parties, an occasional wedding, and a school dance or function now and then. Escape meant marrying the first decent guy to come along. “Back then, love wasn’t the main reason girls got married,” said Gladys. Her opportunity came when she was sixteen.

  Ferdinand Rideau had been living in Plaisance, a dozen miles away, when he decided to move his family to Lawtell in 1940. “Aww, he was the big man, had a brand-new black buggy that he kept polished and a big fine horse,” Gladys recalled. Among the Rideau children was nineteen-year-old Thomas, whom she met at a local dance. She loved to dance, and he was good at it. Since they lived close by, Thomas soon joined the Victorian sisters on their Sunday-morning walks to the only Catholic church nearby, where blacks were allowed in the rear pews. Afterward, they would visit the general store, where Thomas would treat Gladys to a nickel’s worth of candy or an ice-cream cone. “Tom was kind of hip and a neat dresser, and had a line,” she said. “I liked him.” He quickly asked Victor Victorian for permission to marry Gladys.

  Having known each other only three months, Thomas and Gladys married in the spring of 1941 at the home of her parents. According to Thomas’s older brother Lennis, Thomas wanted to marry Gladys quickly because he had gotten a girl pregnant in Jeanerette, sixty miles south toward the Gulf, and didn’t want to marry that girl because she was too dark-skinned. Gladys, on the other hand, had long black hair that fell in soft ringlets and skin so pale she could have passed for white, making her more desirable to a color-conscious Creole black man.

  Within several months, to earn extra money, Gladys and Thomas joined migrant workers cutting sugarcane in Jeanerette for the old black man Thomas had worked for before, and they lived there through the harvest. The old man liked Thomas and wanted them to stay to work the farm and look after him, telling the newlyweds he’d will the place to them when he died. “It was a big old run-down house and wasn’t being taken care of,” Gladys recalled. “When you hit the corn-husk mattress, a cloud of dust would rise from it. We had a little army foldaway cot that me and Tom slept in. Put coal oil on the wooden legs to keep the ants from crawling into the cot with us. We didn’t know a soul there, and everywhere you looked was sugarcane, too much of it. We left after the crop.”

  They returned to live with her parents in Lawtell, where I was born in 1942. We soon moved seventy-seven miles due west to DeQuincy, where my father got a railroad job doing hard labor; then he worked at an oil refinery in Sulphur, eighteen miles south of DeQuincy, just west of Lake Charles. When he was drafted into the army in 1944, we followed him to Oakland, California. He was discharged when the war ended—he never saw action—and we returned to the Victorian home in Lawtell. By 1946, I had two brothers, Raymond and Roland.

  Then came more short-term jobs for my father—one at an oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas; then one at Memorial Hospital in Lake Charles, where my mother worked as a $2-a-day domestic for a wealthy white family. We rented briefly, and then Thomas bought a tract of land adjacent to an old cemetery for $245 and a “shotgun” house (three rooms in a straight row, front to back) for $150, which he transported to the property. “He’d add on to it whenever he got lumber,” Gladys recalled, ultimately expanding it to a five-room house at 1820 Brick Street. My sister, Pearlene, was born in 1947.

  To all appearances, our family seemed normal enough, headed by a hardworking husband and father. We never missed church or school; we were well behaved, neatly dressed, cooperative, courteous, and respectful of our elders and our betters. But there was a dark side, too.

  After my father returned from that first cane harvest in Jeanerette, he began drinking and partying with newfound and rowdy juke-joint buddies. He first hit my mother a year after I was born because she nagged him about going out to honky-tonks, where liquor flowed and loose women were ever present. Womanizing outside of marriage was characteristic of Rideau men. My mother had never witnessed violence in her parents’ home, and it chilled her. She was trapped by it, though, a simple country girl with little education and very little income, the mother of one child with another in her womb. She stayed with my father, and things got worse.

  As whatever romance had existed r
eceded, my mother became little more than my father’s personal slave. He was the master of the household; the rest of us were to be ruled, to do his bidding, to be disciplined when we displeased him. He’d order my mother to kneel and hold still for him to whip her with his belt, just as he did us kids. “Thomas—don’t. Please. Don’t do this,” she’d beg. When she rebelled, he beat her with his fists, the locked doors and closed windows muffling the thumps and screams. At some point, she learned that one way to end a beating was to simply fall on the floor, lie still, and feign unconsciousness, throwing my father into a panic for fear he might have seriously injured or killed her, which could send him to prison. He would carry her limp body to the car, babbling pleas to God that she not die, and, with us in the back seat, speed to Memorial Hospital, where he’d rush her into the emergency room. It wasn’t a tactic she used frequently, resorting to it only when the beating was more than she could bear. When she realized that her ploy also threw me into a panic, she explained it to me so I wouldn’t be frightened. Although neighbors would sometimes call the police, nonfatal domestic disputes did not interest them in general, especially when they were between colored people. The white officers would simply talk understandingly to my father in the driveway, caution him to “keep the noise down,” and drive away without ever setting foot in the house to see my mother or investigate.

  The fence surrounding our yard pretty much formed the boundaries of our lives, except for school. “Stay in the yard!” was a daily refrain of my childhood. Only rarely were we permitted to play with the kids next door. At the end of the school day, I had to go straight home, so I had no opportunity to form relationships with the other students. I couldn’t visit their homes, so they didn’t visit mine. I was lonely, driven by a desire to belong. In addition, on the first day of school in the fall, I felt the sting of how different I was from them when our teacher would make us stand in front of the class and tell what we did over the summer break. The other kids told about doing things with their families: going to the Grand Canyon or a lake, visiting relatives in California and seeing the ocean, camping. Our family didn’t do things together. My father had no interest in us except as evidence of his manhood. Every summer, I was dropped off either at my maternal grandparents’ farm in Lawtell or at my other grandparents’ house in Opelousas. Although I liked the farm, I yearned to be somewhere else. I learned to avoid the first day of school by feigning illness or simply playing hooky, so I wouldn’t have to describe where I went.