Virginia Pate is one of the few mentioned by name in my book. For good reasons. She took a great chance inviting me to share the bed of her 5 children when I was stranded with her niece, Virginia Honore, far out in the swamps one night. This could offend both the klan-type of whites in the area and, as it turned out, the blacks. Already the first night her neighbor George Wilson kicked in the door and pointed a shotgun in my stomach and chazed me out. He was later killed by Virginia's two nephews with the result that her sister, whom we call "black", as a prison guard for years had to watch them from her tower in the Angola prison with order to shoot to kill if they tried to flee.
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