Former Texas inmate ‘Ol’ Racehoss’ wrote compelling memoir
AUSTIN — He was Albert growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Longview during the Depression, but once Albert Race Sample made it to “Burnin’ Hell” — the inmates’ name for the notorious Retrieve Prison Farm near Angleton — he became Ol’ Racehoss. Prison guards bestowed that name in grudging recognition of his cotton-picking prowess. From dawn until past dusk, summer after summer, the guards on horseback, shotguns at the ready, watched him surge through endless rows in vast fields, picking bolls under a burning sun with the quick hands of the slickest crap shooter in East Texas. No one else on the prison farm could keep up with the wiry, light-skinned black man.
As a young man, Ol Racehoss was in and out of Retrieve and other Texas prisons for more than 17 years. Once he got out — and stayed out — he wrote a book about his experiences. Published in 1984 and reissued this week, Racehoss: Big Emma’s Boy is one of the most affecting memoirs I’ve ever read. The late Studs Terkel got it right when he called it “an outcast’s eloquent testament to life.”
Life was cheap where Sample grew up. His father, a white man, was a prominent Longview cotton broker who acknowledged his son but wouldn’t take him in. (This was deep East Texas in the ‘30s, of course.) His mother, the formidable Big Emma, was a professional gambler, a bootlegger and a prostitute, “busy tricking seven days a week.” Although she physically abused her little boy when she drank, he was her “houseman,” beginning at age 4.
“I sat on the case of bootlegged whiskey bottled in halfpints until somebody wanted one,” Sample recalled. “I collected the money and gave each customer a dipperful of water with which to wash it down, if it was bought by the shot. Between sales, I kept a sharp lookout for the police and a keen eye on the dice when they rolled off the blanket so nobody could switch in some crooked ones. When Emma was shooting, I watched the cigar box she kept her loose change in so nobody would ‘clip’ her.”
He was on his own by 6, hopping freights and roaming
the country by 12 and serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery by the time he was 22 (to be served concurrently with the 30-year sentence he had for robbery by assault.) His fellow inmates in the segregated facility were the most incorrigible black convicts in the Texas prison system. He quickly learned it was called “Burning Hell” for a reason.
Unit began as a plantation
The Retrieve Unit, now known as the Wayne Scott Unit, had been an actual plantation. A South Carolinian named Abner Jackson got it going in 1839, and according to the Handbook of Texas, constructed a two-story mansion, slave quarters, a sugar house and ovens. Around 1842, Jackson sold half his interest to James Hamilton, a former governor of South Carolina and an emissary to Europe for the Republic of Texas. By 1860, the Retrieve slaves were producing more sugar than almost any plantation in the state; its owners were the second-largest slaveholders in Texas.
In the early 1900s, the slavebereft plantation leased convicts from the state to work the cotton, corn and sugar-cane fields. The state bought the 7,424-acre plantation in 1918 for $320,829.60 and continued to use the property as a prison farm into the 1990s, its 700 hardworking inmates making it one of the most productive in the state.
Life in Burnin’ Hell during the 1950s and ‘60s would have been familiar to the slaves who worked the land more than a century earlier. Sample and his fellow inmates, some 400 in all, ran the daily risk of being worked to death or shot to death by sadistic, racist prison guards, most of them ignorant and uneducated. Both the guards and their prison-system bosses would have sneered at any thought of rehabilitation.
Sample’s description of the brutality, the insanity and the grinding racism of prison life in the mid-20th century is as powerful as anything I’ve read in years. He had an ear for dialogue, particularly AfricanAmerican dialect, and the stories he tells — sad and enraging, to be sure, but just as often funny — are unforgettable.
“It’s an unbelievable story,” David Dow, professor at the University of Houston Law Center, told me this week. “I don’t think I got out of my chair until I finished it.”
Dow, founder of the Texas Innocence Project, wrote the foreword to the new edition. “The story is still a very contemporary story,” he said. “He’s writing about an era that’s superficially very different, but there’s still racism. It’s of a different nature.”
Sample survived, the result in large part to a mysterious spiritual moment he experienced during a brutal 28-day stint in solitary. Released from prison in 1972 at age 42, he became the first ex-con in Texas to serve as a probation officer. He received a full pardon and restoration of all civil rights in 1976.
In 1982, Sample and his wife Carol — they met in Houston in 1975 and married the next year — quit their jobs, sold their car and moved into a rent house in Dripping Springs. Sample, who had worked for a couple of years at the Forward Times newspaper in Houston, sat down at a typewriter and began writing his book, with Carol editing at her own typewriter across the room. It took them nine months.
“He just sat down and cranked it out,” Carol Sample told me Thursday morning as we sat in her kitchen in far East Austin. “It was something he had to do.”
And now there’s something she has to do. Her beloved Race died of cancer in 2005, leaving her with 30 years of funny, poignant, incredible stories still to tell. She finished her sequel to Racehoss a couple of months ago.
Danced with Ginger Rogers
I promised her not to tell too many of the stories she shared with me, but one I can’t resist. Young Albert, she said, taught himself to tap dance by watching Bo Jangles teach Shirley Temple in movies he saw at Longview’s Rembert Theater (admission nine pennies). Soon, he was tap-dancing for spare change on downtown streets and not long afterward made his way to Dallas where he danced two shows nightly at a nightclub. He made $5 a show, although the aunt he was staying with usually stole it while he slept.
One night, the little boy met his idol, the former wife of the club owner, a man named Jack Pepper. The beautiful, blondhaired young woman asked him to dance with her, and after rehearsing for about an hour, they performed a number together. Ginger Rogers called him Lil’ Bubba.