.MTM4OA.MTE4OTg0

April 28, 1951

 This is something I am ashamed of doing. it is easier for me to steal than to beg, which is perhaps why I am here - but desperation makes me

bold, so I am asking if you can contribute, as a short loan, five dollars to my Liberation Fund - I am serving the seventy month of a two year sentence in this Dixie dungeon, and I am making plans to hang it up and make my way back through the Union lines -

 Bud has been enormously helpful, and with the money he has sent, I am going to grease a cooperative shot-gun guard of the chain-gang I was in,

but I am in need of some money for civilian clothing to negotiate the perilous passage between here and the Mason-Dixon iron curtain.

 Perhaps if I can give you an idea of what I have been through, you will understand my urgent desire to be altogether elsewhere - not since Oliver Twist 

has anybody taken such a pasting from a perverse Fate -

 Every day I go out with a work gang at sun-up to work on the roads with two shot-gun guards or to quarry sand or line-rock, or to dig ditches through

snake-infested swamps while fighting off clouds of s tinging sand-gnats. Months of this heat-tearing labor has made me physically as lean and muscular as a hound, but the mental torture I have undergone at the hands of cursing half-drunken guards has been formidable

                     (over)