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bones Elrod Sykes had discovered in the Atchafalaya Basin were not somehow involved in this case.
However, where do you start in investigating a thirty-five-year-old homicide that was never even reported as such?
Although southern Louisiana, which is largely French Catholic, has a long and depressing record of racial prejudice and injustice, it never compared in intensity and violence to the treatment of black people in the northern portion of the state or in Mississippi, where even the murder of a child, Emmett Till, by two Klansmen in 1955 not only went unpunished but was collectively endorsed after the fact by the town in which it took place. There was no doubt that financial exploitation of black people in general, and sexual exploitation of black women in particular, were historically commonplace in our area, but lynching was rare, and neither I nor anyone I spoke to remembered a violent incident, other than the one I witnessed, or a singularly bad racial situation from the summer of 1957.
The largest newspapers in Louisiana are the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. They also have the best libraries, or "morgues," of old newspapers and cross-referenced clippings. However, I started my strange odyssey into the past on the microfilm in the morgue of the Daily Iberian.
Actually I had little hope of finding any information that would be helpful. During that era little was published in Louisiana newspapers about people of color, except in the police report or perhaps on a separate page that was designated for news about black marriages.
But in my mind's eye I kept seeing the dead man's string-less boots and the rotted strips of rag about his pelvis instead of a belt. Had he been in custody? Was he being transported by a couple of cops who had decided to execute him? If that was the case, why wasn't he in handcuffs? Maybe they had locked the chain on him to sink his body, I thought. No, that couldn't be right. If the victim was being transported by cops, they would have kept him in cuffs until they had murdered him, then they would have removed the cuffs and weighted down the body. Also, why would cops want to sink the body in the Atchafalaya, anyway? They could have claimed that they stopped the car to let him relieve himself, he had taken off for the woods, and they had been forced to shoot him. That particular explanation about a prisoner's death was one that was seldom challenged.
Then I found it, on the area news page dated July 27, 1957. A twenty-eight-year-old Negro man by the name of DeWitt Prejean had been arrested in St. Landry Parish, north of Lafayette, for breaking into the home of a white family and threatening the wife with a butcher knife. There was no mention of motivation or intent. In fact, the story was not about his arrest but about his escape. He had been in custody only eleven hours, had not even been formally charged, when two armed men wearing gloves and Halloween masks entered the parish prison at four in the morning, locked the night jailer in the restroom, and took DeWitt Prejean out of a downstairs holding cell.
The story was no more than four column inches.
I rolled the microfilm through the viewer, looking for a follow-up story. If it was there, I didn't find it, and I went through every issue of the Daily Iberian to February 1958.
Every good cop who spends time in a newspaper morgue, particularly in the rural South, knows how certain kinds of news stories were reported or were not reported in the pre-civil-rights era. "The suspect was subdued" usually meant that somebody had had his light switch clicked off with a baton or blackjack. Cases involving incest and child molestation were usually not treated at all. Stories about prisoners dying in custody were little more than obituaries, with a tag line to the effect that an autopsy was pending.
The rape or attempted rape of a white woman by a black man was a more complicated issue, however. The victim's identity was always protected by cops and prosecutors, even to the extent that sometimes the rapist was charged with another crime, one that the judge, if at all possible, would punish as severely as he would rape. But the level of white fear and injury was so collectively intense, the outrage so great, that the local paper would be compelled to report the story in such a way that no one would doubt what really happened, or what the fate of the rapist would be.
Also, the 1957 story in the Iberian had mentioned that DeWitt Prejean had been taken from a holding cell eleven hours after his arrest.
People didn't stay in holding cells eleven hours, particularly in a rural jail where a suspect could be processed into lock-down in twenty minutes.
I left Bootsie a note, then drove to Lafayette and continued on north for another twenty miles into St. Landry Parish and the old jailhouse in Opelousas.
The town had once been the home of James Bowie before he became a wealthy cotton merchant and slave trader in New Orleans. But during the 1950s it acquired another kind of notoriety, namely for its political corruption, an infamous bordello named Margaret's that had operated since the War Between the States, and its gambling halls, which were owned or controlled by the sheriff and which were sometimes raided by the state police when a legislative faction in Baton Rouge wanted to force a change in the parish representatives' vote.
I parked my truck at the back of the courthouse square, right next to the brick shell of the old jail, whose roof had caved in on top of the cast-iron tank, perforated with small square holes, that had served as the lock-down area. As I walked under the live oaks toward the courthouse entrance, I looked through the jail's glassless windows at the mounds of soft, crumbled brick on the floor, the litter of moldy paper, and wondered where the two gloved men in Halloween masks had burst inside and what dark design they had planned for the Negro prisoner DeWitt Prejean.
I got nowhere at the courthouse. The man who had been sheriff during the fifties was dead, and no one now in the sheriff's department remembered the case or the escape; in fact, I couldn't even find a record of DeWitt Prejean's arrest.
"It happened. I didn't make it up," I said to the sheriff, who was in his late thirties. "I found the account in a 1957 issue of the Daily Iberian."
"That might be," he answered. He wore his hair in a military crewcut and his jaws were freshly shaved. He was trying to be polite, but the light of interest kept fading from his eyes. "But they didn't always keep good records back then. Maybe some things happened that people don't want to remember, too, you know what I mean?"
"No."
He twirled a pencil around on his desk blotter.
"Go talk to Mr. Ben. That is, if you want to," he said. "That's Mr. Ben Hebert. He was the jailer here for thirty years."
"Was he the jailer in 1957?"
"Yeah, he probably was."
"You don't sound enthusiastic."
He rubbed the calluses on his hands without looking up at me.
"Put it this way," he said. "His only son ended up in Angola, his wife refused to see him on her deathbed, and there're still some black people who cross the street when they see him coming. Does that help form a picture for you?"
I left the courthouse and went to the local newspaper to look for a follow-up story on the jailbreak. There was none. Twenty minutes later I found the old jailer on the gallery of his weathered wood-frame home across from a Popeye's fastfood restaurant. His yard was almost black with shade, carpeted with a wet mat of rotted leaves, his sidewalks inset with tethering rings, cracked and pyramided from the oak roots that twisted under them. The straw chair he sat in seemed about to burst from his huge bulk.
I had to introduce myself twice before he responded. Then he simply said, "What you want?"
"May I sit down, sir?"
