CHAPTER 3. MARRIAGE—TRAVEL IN 48 STATES 36
Waldheim cemetery where the Haymarket men are buried and placed a rose there. Then down through the snow towards Georgia.
Before we came to Sewanee Mountain in Tennessee, we stopped at a store to buy food and were told that on the other side of the mountain we would see a painted woman on a horse right near the Bottomless Pit. That she would make a sign to a man in the bushes and he would throw us in the Pit. We joked all that afternoon and next day about this prediction. Around 3 p.m. we rounded a corner and sure enough saw a woman about 35, with painted lips, on a horse. She asked who we were and where we were going. We told her and we must have sounded all right for she motioned to a man in the bushes to lower his rifle which had been pointed to us all of the time, saying, "They're o.k." We asked if there was a Bottomless Pit nearby. The woman told us to look around and right behind us was a hole. She told us to throw a stone in it. We did so and could not hear it splash. "How deep is it?" we asked. "No one knows, and if they drop in there they'll never know anything," she replied. We hurried on down the mountain and at dark came to a house. We asked for a drink of water and were in turn asked if we were going over the mountain, "Just came down," we replied. "What, didn't those people on the other side of the mountain rob you?" the lady asked. We told her we had heard a story about the woman on a horse and the man in the bushes with a gun from the other side of the mountain, but no one there had disturbed us. "That's Pop," said a small boy referring to the man on the horse. "You shet up!" said the mother. We camped there that night.
In Rome, Georgia we said hello to the parents of Joe Webb, and they gave us a picture of him on the chain gang. Whether I had done Joe a service to save him from the rope for the ball and chain is a question. In Atlanta we went out to visit the prison. Ex-convicts are not allowed to return and visit. As we came to the outside Tower the guard laughingly said, "Go ahead; I guess you are no ex-cons." We sat on a bench with about twenty other visitors waiting until a guard would show us through the prison. DeMoss, who had framed me into solitary passed several times and looked at me, but I suppose he was not sure about me. As we were going through the yard and got near the house where I was in solitary so long I whispered to Selma and she very sweetly said to the guard who was escorting us:
"Officer, how many people do they have in solitary now?"
"About 30. . . . Oh, we don't have solitary any more," he hemmed and hawed.
As we went through the kitchen the Negro lifer who had given me my food in solitary winked at me, recognizing me.
We worked in Georgia for 18 months. I studied the history of that state for an article for THE NATION in its series on States, but as I recall it was not published. On the streets of Atlanta one day I met a rather seedy man who recognized me. He asked me to come around to his church, but in the midst of his missionary effort he must have remembered that this was the animal he had under his torture for 8 1/2 months while he was deputy warden, for he suddenly stammered and changed the subject before the invitation for salvation had been
