"They had no business mixing you and me, Waters," calls a pale and balding man from the bottom bunk of a conical tent as another inmate climbs into the top one.
"That supposed to mean," scowls a darker skinned younger guy as he rolls onto a thin mattress barely filled with cotton batting.
"Hold your horses, mister," laughs the old guy turning from his side onto his back. "You know what they call me, right?"
"Hahaha, I get it," grunts Waters as he pulls a coarse wool blanket over his sodden khaki clothes. "Oil and water don't mix, do they?"
After two days of rising muddy water and sinking drinking water in the old penitentiary, the involuntarily fasting prisoners had taken matters into their own hands. It took the arrival of the National Guard in army boats to quell that flood of rage in the cold torrent of January 1937. Then the inmates had been rounded up and herded across pontoon bridges to an emergency tent city thrown up by the WPA on a bluff just east of the Kentucky State Reformatory.
The Frankfort prison had been operating on the banks of the Ohio River since 1800 with segregated buildings and single-celled rooms barely retrofitted for electricity. Funding had long been earmarked for a new reformatory, but the lean budgets of the Great Depression had put a cog in that wheel of progress. It took the flood of the century to get the modernization process rolling again.
"Speaking of mixing, how did a man like you end up on this side of the river?" the older guy softly calls, tucking the olive army blanket around his bony shoulders.
"They was shipping us down to Eddyville so I slipped into your line," mutters Waters as he rolls his small frame from side-to-side, unable to find a comfortable spot.
"All the coloreds are going to maximum security?"
"In that highwater hell some guys broke into the women's building."
"Whewee, nothing like a black man maybe getting a white woman to get 'em riled up."
"Why they call you Oil, anyways?" whispers down from the top bunk after a few moments of silence.
"Had me a bus garage before the crash."
"Oh, it's not 'cause a that O.L. at the front of your nameplate?"
"Well well, there's your secret to keep - it's Orville Leslie to nobody but you and me."
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