Racehoss: Big Emma's Boy - Hardcover

Sample, Albert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501183974 ISBN 13: 9781501183973

Publisher: Scribner, 2018

Synopsis

“A timeless classic” (San Antonio Express-News), reissued with a new foreword, afterword, and ten percent more material about a black man who spent seventeen years on a brutal Texas prison plantation and underwent a remarkable transformation.

First published in 1984, Racehoss: Big Emma’s Boy is Albert Race Sample’s “unforgettable” (The Dallas Morning News) tale of resilience, revelation, and redemption. Born in 1930, the mixed-race son of a hard-drinking black prostitute and a white cotton broker, Sample was raised in the Jim Crow South by an abusive mother who refused to let her son—who could pass for white—call her Mama. He watched for the police while she worked, whether as a prostitute, bootlegger, or running the best dice game in town. He loved his mother deeply but could no longer take her abuse and ran away from home at the age of twelve.

In his early twenties, Sample was arrested for burglary, robbery, and robbery by assault and was sentenced to nearly twenty years in the Texas prison system in the 1950s and 60s. His light complexion made him stand out in the all-black prison plantation known as the “burnin’ hell,” where he and over four hundred prisoners picked cotton and worked the land while white shotgun-carrying guards followed on horseback. Sample earned the moniker “Racehoss” for his ability to hoe cotton faster than anyone else in his squad. A profound spiritual awakening in solitary confinement was a decisive moment for him, and he became determined to turn his life around. When he was finally released in 1972, he did just that.

Though Sample was incarcerated in the twentieth century, his memoir reads like it came from the nineteenth. With new stories that had been edited out of the first edition, a foreword by Texas attorney and writer David R. Dow, and an afterword by Sample’s widow, Carol, this new edition of Racehoss: Big Emma’s Boy offers a more complete picture of this extraordinary time in America’s recent past.

About this title

From the Author

I WAS HEADED TO HELL ON THE DAY I WAS BORN.  BY THE TIME I STOOD SHACKLED AT THE BACKGATE OF THE TEXAS PRISON KNOWN AS "THE BURNIN HELL," I WAS READY.  I DIDN'T CARE ABOUT NOTHING OR NOBODY.  HELL WAS WHERE I BELONGED.  I CAME FACE TO FACE WITH THE DEVIL.  HE BLINKED AND I KEPT ON STEPPING.

From the Inside Flap

ert Race Sample was the Retrieve, a branch of the Texas State prison system reserved for the most incorrigible prisoners. A cotton plantation where men slaved from dawn to dusk under the cruel leadership of "Boss Band," it cracked the spirits of the weak and hardened the souls of the strong.

For "Racehoss," as Sample was called, the Retrieve was a place to witness unbearable brutality -- which he recounts in awesome detail in the pages of this stunning book. It is the classic story of the son of a troubled mother, of a young man gone bad, and of his first tentative then tremendous steps toward reclaiming his own destiny.

His ability to understand the forces that drove him to prison, and his devotion to helping others also see the light of change, earned Sample his release in 1972 and a full pardon in 1976. His story is gripping, powerful, and utterly real -- true testament to the strength of the human spirit.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1501183974
• ISBN 13: 9781501183973
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416