It was as if the Scripture were unfolding before his eyes: good
and evil, redemption and damnation. One time, a melee broke out
in the prison. As Sheriff White tried to quell the riot, his children
ran to the nearby courthouse, calling for help. The Austin Weekly
Statesman published a story about the incident under the headline
BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD; THE COUNTY JAIL TURNED INTO A VERITABLE
SLAUGHTER PEN. The reporter described the scene that young Tom
had encountered: “The writer has seen many bloody and sickening
sights in his experience in newspaper work, but none of them
approached the disgusting sight that met his gaze when he entered
the county jail yesterday afternoon about half past five o’clock.
Turn which way he might nothing was to be seen but blood.”
After the incident, in which five men were badly injured,
Emmett White became a firm, even unyielding, sheriff. Still, he
showed remarkable consideration toward the people in his custody
and insisted on making arrests without brandishing his six-
shooter. He did not philosophize about the law or his
responsibilities, but Tom noticed that he always maintained the
same manner, no matter whether the prisoners were black or
white or Mexican. At the time, extrajudicial lynchings, particularly
of blacks in the South, were one of the most egregious failures of
the American legal system. Whenever Emmett heard that locals
were planning to throw a “necktie party,” he would rush out to try
to stop it. “If a mob attempts to take the negro” from the sheriff, a
reporter noted in one case, “there will be trouble.” Emmett refused
to put young, nonviolent prisoners in the jail alongside older,
more dangerous convicts, and because there was no other place for
them, he let them stay in his own house, living with his children.
One girl remained with them for weeks on end. Tom never knew
why she was in jail, and his father never discussed it.
Tom often puzzled over why criminals did what they did. Some
of the prison’s inmates seemed bad through and through, the devil