Kinnie Wagner. The “Main Mos’ Dog Boy” of Parchman Prison Farm. Circa 1930. I remember my mama singing about him. I can hear her now, alto voice – standing over the wood stove in the kitchen, singing Jimmy Rogers, the Chuck Wagon Gang, or some such plaintive ballad from her youth just south of Pistol Ridge, not far from Stump Texas, in rural Forrest County.
A favorite song of hers was “The Ballad of Kinnie Wagner,” a colorful, populist desperado who also murdered at least five men, including a deputy sheriff in Lucedale, Mississippi, who was trying to arrest him over a stolen wristwatch. In 1926, the singer, Vernon Dalhart, recorded three songs about “Kenny” [sic] Wagner. All summarized and romanticized the events in his life, and the most popular ended with an appeal:
For Kenny Wagner broke the law
And threw his life away,
And right behind the prison bars
He’ll sit till judgement day.
So folks take fair warning
And heed this kind advice,
Don’t’ ever break the laws of God
You’ll always have to pay.
Growing up, I was all ears for stories of these picaresque, romanticized, larger than life figures like Wagner, who brought a bit of excitement to our otherwise uneventful lives. When I was nine or ten, some fly by night entrepreneur, some refugee from a disbanded carnival, brought the genuine, guaranteed to be the original, Bonnie and Clyde death car to Lumberton and put it on display for a few days under the big oak tree at the intersection of highways 11 and 13. For twenty-five cents, you could sit for five minutes in the front seat of the shot up, bullet riddled, grey Ford coupe and marvel at the bloodstains covering the seats, headliner, and floorboards. It was a cheap, somewhat macabre thrill, even though you suspected that the car came from a Louisiana junkyard and that the “bloodstains” were really catsup. Much of the public had earlier thought of Bonnie and Clyde as the Maid Marion and Robin Hood of the Great Depression. Years later, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty perpetuated this myth in their movie, “Bonnie and Clyde,” (1967).
So how did Kinnie Wagner (1903-1959) acquire the sobriquet of “Main Mos’ Dog Boy?” It was simply Parchman prison patois for “bloodhound master;” stir speak for “dog handler;” and jail jargon for “relentless tracker of escaped convicts.” A serial escape artist, at Parchman and elsewhere, Wagner supposedly trained his bloodhounds to ignore his scent when on his trail. The ploy worked, as he successfully escaped the farm at least once. One can’t help but think of Robert Johnson’s seminal delta blues anthem, “Hellhound on my Trail” (1937) and wonder if either he or Wagner were ultimately successful in eluding the devil.
A peculiar mystique exists in our society concerning prisons, penitentiaries, and jails. We have developed a unique folklore which preserves the legends of hard men behind hard steel. If you don’t believe this, just stand on the pier at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf and watch the boatloads of tourists fall over themselves embarking on the tour out in the bay to Alcatraz. Even in Mississippi, a place where you don’t want to mess with the Law, a place that locked Johnny Cash up in Starkville for just picking flowers, we have mythologized hell holes like Parchman Prison Farm which occupies a unique place in the pantheon of American prisons. Legendary and infamous worldwide for its brutality and fenced in hopelessness, the farm was established in 1906 on the self-sufficient, “plantation” model, and covers some 26 square miles of flat delta land in rural Sunflower County, along highways 49W and MS32, 8 miles north of Drew, and 90 miles south of Memphis. The name conjures up images of inmates “parching” in the hot, delta sun, as in parched peanuts, but Mr. Parchman was the owner of the original plantation. The delta blues singer, Booker T. Washington “Bukka” White, born “somewhere between Aberdeen and Houston,” MS, and who had served two years at Parchman on a murder charge, wrote of it in his 1940 song, “Parchman Prison Blues:”
Oh listen you men, I don’t
mean no harm (2x)
If you wanna do good, you
better stay off ol’ Parchman farm.
We got to work in the
morning,’ just at the dawn of day (2x)
Just at the setting of the sun,
that’s when the work is done.
My mother-in-law lived at Clarksdale, the largest town near the prison, and when we visited her on leave from the Navy in the sweltering summertime, I would marvel at the shimmering heat rising up over the nearby mile-long cotton rows, with the giant, wheeled irrigation machines crouched over the land like mechanical insects from H. G. Wells’ “War of Worlds” (1897) and think to myself: It’s. A. Long. Way. Between. Drinks. Of. Water. for anyone dragging a cotton sack behind them. And that was the “free” world, with Parchman smoldering just down the road.
In addition to being a stone-cold killer, although he alleged until the end that he killed only in self-defense, Kinnie Wagner had the “nous” early on and was a “picaro,” in the tradition of a rough, dishonest, but appealing literary “hero.” As such, he unknowingly tapped into that romantic, anti-establishment feeling common in Depression-era America, hence my mother singing. Although a criminal, he had somehow gained something of an admirable persona, with folklore, legend, and song painting a picture of him as chivalrous to women, generous to the poor, and the stereotype of the anti-heroic Southern outlaw. He seems to have taken to heart that principle in English Common Law which states that “everything that is not forbidden is permitted.” Leaving home in Scott County, Virginia, at an early age, he always seemed to have returned worse off than when he left. A charmer, he even talked a woman sheriff in Arkansas who had fallen in love with him to release him from jail, and his guards at Parchman remembered that he spent most of his cell time answering letters from female admirers. Like most classic morality tales, however, he came to no good end, dying in his Parchman cell, age 56, a forgotten, doddering old man, not “la plus belle des morts,” the most beautiful of deaths.
My experience with shady characters, much less flat-out outlaws, is very limited. Navy ships have “brigs” or jails, at least the larger ones do. On my first ship, a buddy of mine got thirty days on bread and water for busting up a bar in Toulon, France, and I visited him whenever he got mail. The brig was down in the bilges, and the guards were from the ship’s Marine Detachment, a bunch of obnoxious jerks, who loved to throw their weight around. I would slip him a candy bar every visit, and they never saw it. He was already skinny, and I was afraid he would starve to death. That was about 1960; the Navy doesn’t sentence sailors to bread and water any more. I assume they still have brigs. They call shipboard jails “brigs” because of the Navy’s historical use of derelict two-masted sailing ships, or “brigs,” as floating jails. Samuel Johnson said that “a ship is like a prison, only with the possibility of drowning.”
When I was a second-class petty officer, between ships at the Brooklyn, New York Navy Yard, I got seconded to the New York City Armed Forces Police for a year. We were like a rapid response group, made up of Army, Navy, and Marine Corps personnel, called out to whatever part of the city military personnel were causing trouble. We also spent a lot of time patrolling the Port Authority Bus Terminal looking for deserters. You could spot them a mile away, looking over their shoulders. Today, nobody cares. It was one of those jobs where you were either bored silly or fighting for your life. I was armed to the teeth, carrying a .45, a couple knifes, night stick, and pepper spray. Stun guns hadn’t been invented yet. The Army was in charge, and I often got stuck with this sergeant first class, senior to me, who would drive our squad car up to Central Park, turn off the two-way radio, and go to sleep. I wasn’t the most gung-ho person on the force, but it was embarrassing to be asked why we didn’t respond when we were needed. The worst part of that job was occasionally having to escort a prisoner to the Naval Prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the “Alcatraz of the East.” Jack Nicholson might have romanticized the job in the movie, “The Last Detail” (1973), where he played a crusty boatswain’s mate escorting a kid who stole $40 from an admiral’s wife’s charity and got an eight-year sentence, but the reality was different. I was accountable, handcuffed to the culprits, and there were no “fun and games” enroute to Portsmouth as in the movie, especially when that no-load sergeant first class was my partner. That prison closed in 1974. Since it opened in 1906, it housed over 86,000 military inmates during its 68 years of operation. Most such lawbreakers are now sent to the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
In addition to Kinnie Wagner, I grew up hearing about the infamous Copeland Gang. I had a cousin who served as Chief of Police of both Lumberton and Poplarville during his law enforcement career, and he was a very able amateur historian who did extensive research on the Copeland gang, enough to fill two self-published books on the subject. He spent his spare time down on Red Creek with his metal detector, searching for the gang’s lost gold.
Born in Jackson County, and variously described as: “an outlaw, hog thief, slave-stealer, smuggler, pirate, counterfeiter, burglar, looter, arsonist, murderer, and criminal gang leader,” James Copeland got himself hung at Old Augusta (now New Augusta, east of Hattiesburg) in 1847. Before he died, however, he allegedly buried a large hoard of gold in what is now Pearl River County. Generations of determined treasure hunters have dug holes all over south Mississippi, seeking what probably isn’t there. Copeland was an early example of the Mississippi anti-hero outlaw, and the ongoing search for his gold is no more than the wish being father to the thought.
I just read a breathless article in another local newspaper celebrating the fact that the county jail in an adjacent town, because of its “efficient” operation, had a surplus in its operating budget of “several hundred thousand dollars.” Something about that statement struck me as bogus. I guess it’s better than operating in the “red,” but I didn’t realize jails were supposed to be money making operations. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work alongside some prisoners from a local jail, not the one mentioned above, involved in a federally funded auto mechanics training program. I was less than impressed with the two, single slice of bologna sandwiches and six vanilla wafer lunches that those young men had every day. I bet that jail’s budget was in the “black.” If you study the history of Parchman Prison Farm, you will see that such a misguided profit focus and mission ultimately led to fraud, waste, and abuse, with Parchman ultimately being taken over temporarily by the United States Justice Department.
I have nothing but respect for our local law enforcement officers. The other night, I forgot to lower the garage doors, and something tripped our alarm system. We failed to hear it, sleeping upstairs, and we were awakened about 2:00 AM by two Lamar County Sheriff’s deputies who had been dispatched to investigate. They were extremely courteous, but very professional and obviously prepared for any eventuality.
I suppose the larger question is what attracts us to dubious characters like Kinnie Wagner and James Copeland? Perhaps many of us have our own rebellious, reactionary streak? Maybe that’s why singers like Johnny Paycheck got rich on anti-establishment songs like “Take This Job and Shove It” (1977). And who didn’t feel a vicarious thrill when they heard his rendition of “I’m The Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised?” (1971). Maybe it was only me.
So, how should we view men like Kinnie Wagner? Maybe the way Humphrey Bogart sized up the Claude Rains character in the movie, “Casablanca:” “Oh, he’s just like any other man, only more so.”
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
