LOCATION: Whitfield MIssissippi; Waxahachie, Texas
PERIOD: 2015
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Louanne Murray Bowden (1967); Constance Maddox Haynes (1913-2015, 102); Helen Haynes Murray (1947)
While at CMCF, Louanne developed an exemplary record of good behavior including mentoring several other young female prisoners. For example, about half way through her sentence, a young woman, Lucy Cooper, was sent to CMCF on a drug charge, given eighteen months. Lucy was a funny, bright, and street smart but fragile woman who simply could not do the time for her crime. Despite being taken under Louanne’s wing, Lucy became increasingly more and more despondent, eventually suiciding from an overdose – within weeks of her release (see song, “When Louanne Met Lucy in Prison“).
Not long after this tragedy Louanne’s case was reviewed by a judge who ruled that hers was a case of justified homicide and her sentence was commuted to time served. These events coincided with the death of her grandmother in 2015, when she was released after serving about 60% of her original sentence. She returned to Texas for her grandmother’s funeral and remained there with her mother, to live once again in Highland Park, however, now in somewhat reduced grandeur.
A Waxahachie Funeral
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)
A call from that charity lawyer,
Words like “justifiable homicide”.
She heard him say the phrase “time served”;
Then a thirty hour Greyhound ride.
Twelve years in, Louanne walked out of prison;
In a blue dress and a brand new pair of shoes.
Destination: a Waxahachie funeral;
Her grandma dead at a hunderd ‘n’ two.
Standin’ with her people among weathered stones;
Stiff new shoes powdered with red dirt.
Back home to witness a tough ol’ Texas woman,
Laid into a plot of Texas earth.
Her daddy died five years before;
That was a funeral Louanne had to miss.
It’s just her and her Neiman Marcus mother,
Left behind to make some sense of this.
They climb inside a shiny black Lincoln;
Go back to that big old empty house.
Their polite Highland Park friends,
Don’t know how to talk to her now.
Standin’ with her people among weathered stones;
Stiff new shoes powdered with red dirt.
Back home to witness a tough ol’ Texas woman,
Laid into a plot of Texas earth.
Louanne and momma sit in the kitchen;
Mute and surrounded by their ghosts.
They stare across a walnut table;
A cup of coffee and a slice of melba toast.
Louanne remembers another August;
That magic summer when she turned eighteen.
When her life seemed so full of promise;
Magnolias and September dreams.
Standin’ with her people among weathered stones;
Stiff new shoes powdered with red dirt.
Back home to witness a tough ol’ Texas woman,
Laid into a plot of Texas earth.
© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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