MISSISSIPPI: Shooter's Chance

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Under Mississippi's earthy and antiquated penal system, the tougher and more ruthless a convict is, the better off he is. At the 16,000-acre Parchman Prison Farm such bad actors are used as "shooter trusties," equipped with rifles and vertical stripes, and set to guarding their lesser, not so enterprising, fellows. Loyalty (i.e., shooting an escaping convict) is often rewarded with freedom.

In 13 years of crime—which included grand larceny, cattle stealing and blasting an old man with a shotgun and then drowning him in the Mississippi—hefty, hardfisted, 33-year-old Clarence B. ("Hogjaw") Grammar was eminently qualified to be a "shooter." After he began his life term at Parchman in 1940 he demonstrated other good qualities: he beat up fellow prisoners and talked politely to the guards. When he killed a convict who was attacking a prison guard in 1947, the state gratefully released him.

Bully Boys. Success, however, went to Hogjaw's head. Only a year and a half later he got drunk, threatened some Negroes with a shotgun, resisted arrest and was sent back to the prison farm. He was not particularly dismayed; he was made keeper of the prison bloodhounds, was well fed, and was allowed to go off on criminal tracking jaunts when law officers asked for use of the dogs.

Last month, things broke Hogjaw's way. His opportunity began with a simple bit of Negro baiting at a sharecropper's cabin near the town of Kosciusko (pop. 4,291) in central Mississippi. Three drunken bully boys—an ex-convict and moonshiner named Leon Turner and two brothers, Malcolm and Wendell Whitt—broke into the cabin of a Negro named Thomas Harris. They attempted to rape his wife, stole household effects and terrorized his family. A few days later, after the Negro's neighbors complained, the trio was arrested and held for trial.

They decided to "get" the sharecropper. Using a spoon and a beer opener, they chipped mortar away from the bricks of their cell in the ancient Attala County jail at Kosciusko. One night they broke out, armed themselves, got loose-mouthed and hot-eyed drunk on white lightning corn liquor, and then headed for the Negro's cabin again.

They came in at night bawling obscenities and shooting at everything that moved; they killed three children and wounded the sharecropper, before they vanished into the brush.*

One of the trio, Malcolm Whitt, gave himself up when the liquor ran out. The other two hid out. A sheriff's posse was organized to track them down—and the peerless Hogjaw and his hounds were requisitioned from the prison farm. Hogjaw turned up, burly and cocky, in a bright red shirt and striped pants. He belted on a pistol and holster, and at rainy daybreak put three dogs, High Rollin' Red, Nigger and Alabama, on the trail.

Come Out? An hour and a half later, the bloodhounds set up a great bass clamor outside a potato shack on the farm of ex-Moonshiner Turner's father. Hogjaw, who likes to boast that he can outrun a horse, was right with the dogs, but the main body of cops all saw fit to maintain a respectful distance and await eventualities. Hogjaw pulled his gun, fired six shots into the shack and bravely bawled: "Come out, you sons of bitches!"