Thanksgiving at the State Pen

For several years of my early teenage years my aunt and her family and my grandparents worked at Louisiana State Penitentiary and lived on the grounds. The girls in my family would drive down and spend Thanksgiving at the state pen. It was more awesome than you would ever guess.

As you could imagine the first appeal to me was that I got to tell everyone that I was going to spend Thanksgiving with my family at Angola. Even after explaining they were not inmates, it was still pretty fun for me. I mean who gets to say that they get their car searched before they can visit their cousins! I was strange. Well, I AM strange.  My Aunt Lynn gave great tours of Angola. I her driving us around pointing out the different cell blocks and explain what level of security was housed there.  Cell block J was were they kept the really bad people. She also told us about the prison riot and how that changed everything. The year they went to see the electric chair I was in the middle of full throttle teenage drama so I stayed home to be petulant. I was heart broken when I found out that I missed that and it added fire to the teenage angst.

In reality it was an idealistic setting for family gatherings. They say nowhere is safer than the living area of the state pen because any escaping prisoners just want off the grounds. Also, there was all that free labor for things like lawn care and house upkeep. The housing was just like normal little neighborhoods with houses that were exactly the same and then a little area for people to place trailers. It was beautiful, safe, and full of children, and, honestly, you could forget that you were anywhere but a Louisiana small town neighborhood until a chain gang came by.

It also meant we got really interesting gifts. We would arrive and my aunt and cousins would give all sorts of strange handicrafts made by the prisoners. They bought us things like leather purses or carved wooden stuff. Somehow I felt strange owning something that someone made with their hands  trying to pass time and make a little extra money for whatever inmates buy. I got this one red leather purse that was fascinating in how fine the work was while managing to have almost garish patterns in it. We would also get fun things like t-shirts with “Three Hots and a Cot” printed on them. I loved that shirt!

Another Angola specific memory I have is listening to everyone talk about the prison rodeo. We would sit around our smoked turkey and billion other delicious things the womenfolk made and they would talk about how we needed to come down for the prison rodeo. Apparently if you have nothing but jail time ahead of you, you are far less afraid of getting hurt by a bull. They have a game unique to Angola where a few inmates volunteer to sit at a poker table in the center of the ring and they let a bull out. I don’t know how an inmate won, I just know it sounds pretty messed up.

These were some of my fondest Thanksgivings in memory. What does this say about me?