Somewhere In Time

Where was I? I do not even know. The colonel is up to his old tricks, again. I mean old, too. As you all know I spent a lot of my early years working for the State of Alabama. The State of Alabama Department of Corrections. Now that is a joke, corrections. What did they correct for me? Nothing. I was at Limestone Correctional Facility in the late year of 1997. I was on the chain gang. Every morning about 400 inmates, convict is what I would rather be called. There is a huge difference between a convict and an inmate. Trust me, you would rather be a convict, too. Anyway, rain or shine, all them inmates, plus a few of us convicts, would congregate outside in lines of twos. It is called duece it up.All the police, with their oak tree limbs hanging on their sides, would chain five of us up, together. We got down on all fours, like a dog, and the police would chain one leg to another until there were five of us chained together. When the five inmates were chained they would take off with a boss and head out to the land of nod. It was about 100 acres of trees that had been sawed down and the five chain gang members would encircle the stump and start to dig it out. The tools we used were rather primitive and very large. They were homemade hoes, axes, sling blades. bush axes, and the handles were made of tree limbs that were about 3 inches in diameter. I gotta tell you this chain gang shit sucked. I only was lucky enough to be a member of the infamous chain gang for about three weeks. There was a situation that happened on I-65 just south of Montgomery that put a screeching hault to all chain gangs in the state of Alabama. The way the story was told by the time it got to Limestone, and inter-prison communication was almost as good as AT&T, a crew was taking a break from bush axing the side of the interstate when two guys that were chained together started a cuss match. The boss man warned them that he would shoot their ass if they started anything. Apparently, one of the boys had hearing problems cause he grabbed his bushaxe and raised it up to show his cussing friend that he was not afraid to use it on him. The boss told him to put it down and when he decided to take a swing at the guy he was cussing the boss man shot him dead as hell. It was wonderful news to me. The state of Alabama on that day stopped the chain gang at all of its prisons. I was not mad, at all.         theblogmeister