Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part 1.5

Partin Reign May be Short-Lived

Edward G. Partin, start witness in the trial of Jimmy Hoffa, is now reigning supreme over the Teamsters in central Louisiana.

‘I’m not going to have Partin and a bunch of hoodlums running this state,’ Gov. McKeithen told us. ‘We have no problems with law-abiding labor. But when gangsters raid a construction project and shoot men up at work I’m going to do something about it.

‘Partin has two Justice Department guards with him for fear Hoffa will retaliate against him,’ Gov. McKeithen said, ‘This gives him immunity.’

The governor referred to an incident in Plaquemine when 45 to 50 men shot up 30 workers of the W.O. Bergeron Construction Co.

“Baton Rouge has never has such a siege of labor violence as it’s seen since Partin came back from the Chattanooga trial with two Justice Department guards to protect him.”

New Orleans State Times, 27 January 1968

Big Daddy was released from his Texas penitentiary the same year my father, Edward Partin Junior, went to an Arkansas penitentiary. It was the beginning of wrestling season my sophomore year, and I was only 123 pounds and around 5’2″, the runt of the family. But, I was still taller than Grandma Foster, a tiny old lady who looked remarkably like Yoda, and I never understood how she produced Big Daddy and my two equally huge great-uncles, Doug and Joe.

Grandma Foster was born in 1903. She was the oldest person I knew. She was about as big as Yoda; she had his wrinkly skin and wispy gray hair, and she usually had a twinkle in her eye hinting to the wisdom of having lived longer than anyone else in the room. She had Big Daddy’s sky blue eyes, but hers had been turning more and more hazy from cataracts. Like Yoda, she hunched a bit, probably from compressed vertebra over a lifetime of labor.

She had lived through WWI, The Great Depression, the first airplanes, WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, Civil Rights, two president assassinations (William McKinley and John F. Kennedy), and her oldest son becoming a national celebrity and then going off to prison for a range of charges including theft, racketeering, and, as Chief Justice Warren liked to point out, perjury. She would pass away in 2003, shortly after sending me her first email from a Yahoo! account, which simply said, “hi.” All of her stories were shared orally, and they tell you a lot about how my grandfather grew up and came to run the Loiusiana Teamsters and send Hoffa to prison.

When Big Daddy got out of prison early for declining health due to diabetes and an undisclosed heart condition, he moved back in with Grandma. The Baton Rouge Partins gathered to welcome him home. My great-uncles Joe and Doug were there, and so were their children, my second cousins, Jason, Don, another Douglas, and another Donald; all were big boys with big men as fathers. My uncle Kieth, my dad’s little brother, showed up, too; he was as big as Big Daddy. My dad was smaller than Keith, but still a big man. He was in an Arkansas jail then, waiting for his slot in a federal penitentiary to open up.

Because I felt dwarfed and alone, I huddled around Grandma Foster. She and I were the smallest in her cramped living room.

Big Daddy had deflated in prison, and he was a loose fitting shell of what he had been when he went in in 1980, but he still smiling and enjoying holding court in front of his family. He was sitting in a dining room chair with Grandma’s double glass doors behind him, blocking out most views of the forest behind her back yard. Even sitting, his head was taller than mine. His smiling face dominated my view and filled my mind’s eye. Even as I listened to Grandma, all I could see was his face filing my entire vision. He was smiling as if he knew the punchline to the world’s funniest joke that he’d never share with anyone. He was a magnet, working without visible effort to bring everyone around him.

The Patins were laughing so loudly that I had to lean in to hear what Grandma was saying. She sounded poor. Her soft and mumbled rural Mississippi accent provided a link to the past that no book or film could recreate.

“Some of our neighbors was slaves as chil’ren,” she told me. “They had it worse than we did. But they worked hard and never complained.”

She spoke with a matter-of-fact sincerity with everything she said.

“But there weren’t no work during the depression. We all did what we had to do to feed our chil’ren.”

Grandma Foster and her neighbors lived in shotgun shacks that surrounded the sawmill, she said. It was a popular style after the civil war. In southern working towns, the thin facade of shotgun shacks allowed a lot of homes to be packed within walking distance of where cheap labor worked, like at the Woodville sawmill. So many people were packed on each street that neighbors could hear each other snore. There were no secrets in Woodville.

“The walls was so thin,” Grandma said, “You could shoot a shotgun through one wall and it would go clear through the other wall. Some people said they called it a shotgun shack ’cause they was no doors inside, just one room after another, so if you shot through the front door it would go all through your house and out the back door without hittin’ nothin’.”

“We lived in a shotgun shack, just like all the Negros,” she said. “And they all knew Edward’s daddy weren’t no good,”

He was Grady Partin; only one photo remains of him, and he was a tall but thin man. He died in the 1960’s and was buried in Baton Rouge by Big Daddy and his brothers. They bore him no ill will.

“Always getting into fights and goin’ to jail,” Grandma Foster said. “He’d get his pay from the sawmill and spend it at the bar before he got home.”

Though it was prohibition, she said, there were always bars. It’s how poor people coped with the depression, she said.

“It weren’t right, but it’s what they did,” she said. “Edward’s daddy would get paid on a Friday, and stop at a bar and come home with no money. We’d be poor again come Saturday morning.”

“Edward’s daddy was a lush,” she said.

“But not Edward,” she beamed. “He never drank, and he always brought home money for his momma. He learnt from watching his daddy, and promised he’d be nothin’ like him. He’s always been a good boy.”

She looked up at three generations of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gathered around Big Daddy. She squeezed my hand and looked at me lovingly and said, “You could be the first Partin not to go to jail.”

She couldn’t have been happier. Her wrinkly eyes teared up and added blur to the cataracts obscuring her aging blue eyes. (That’s where Big Daddy and most of the Partins got their blue eyes; I have my dad and Mamma Jean’s dark brown eyes). I squeezed Grandma’s hand back and listened, not really understanding anything. Big Daddy’s smiling face still dominated my vision.

She wiped her eyes and said, “We was all poor, but at least no one looked down on us because we was white.”

If it hadn’t been for Grandpa Foster being willing to marry her, she said, she didn’t know what she would have done to raise three boys by herself. She talked about him, but because he died before I met him I didn’t really pay attention and I can’t recall what she said. In 2017, Doug would write about it in his self-published autobiography, “From My Brother’s Shadow: Teamster Douglas Westly Patin Finally Tells His Side of The Story,” but I didn’t recall it in 1986. From what Grandma and Doug said, Grandpa Foster was a good man who never drank and treated Grandma kindly until the day he died. When they met, Grandma was struggling to put food on the table for her three big boys, Big Daddy was the oldest, around 16 when Grady Partin left, and Doug was around 11 and Joe was around 8.

“There was no work,” she said. “I sewed dresses for the girls at the cathouse down the road, and I sold quilts when I could. If it hadn’t been for Edward, we wouldn’t have had no food most days.”

Doug would disagree in his book; he says he earned 25 cents for every air force recruit he brought to the cathouse, and that he helped put food on the table, too. But, like how Big Daddy’s face dominated my view, he seemed to dominate everyone’s memory of what happened. Doug would point out that in books about Hoffa there’s almost as much focus on Edward Partin as Hoffa, and only brief mentions of “Partin’s brother.” He would simmer on that fact until his death during the early months of Covid in 2020, and in his book he would make a point of every 25 cents he brought home.

“When your Grandpa Foster asked me to marry him,” she said, “he knew we was already takin’ care of.”

When Big Daddy moved to Baton Rouge with Mamma Jean and their five children, he brought Grandma and Grandpa Foster, Joe, and Doug with him. Grandma found a job at Dillard’s in Cortana Mall, and worked behind the counter there for almost twenty years. She retired soon after Grandpa Foster died, and lived in the house Big Daddy had arranged for her.

Ever since I knew her, Grandma lived alone in that small home. Everyone knew she was home all day, every day, and could look after me last-minute. She always had food ready; though I never told her, she had never learned to cook. I sometimes lied and told her I was cutting weight for wrestling when I wasn’t; I suspected that even Big Daddy and Uncles Doug and Joe said they were full when they really weren’t. Though she would never earn a livelihood cooking, the quilts she still made were works of art that hung draped in one bedroom she used as a sewing room. Even during the depression, enough people bought them that she and her children didn’t starve between husbands. She enjoyed the memory of being able to pay her own way with her hands, and though her eyes and hands didn’t work as well any more, she always kept a project quilt laid out in the sewing room so she could work on it now and then.

“We was lucky,” she said.

She looked at Big Daddy and smiled a genuine smile; she had the same cheeks as Big Daddy and me, but when she smiled a genuine smile her wrinkled cheeks bunched up under her blurred eyes.

“Edward looked after us,” she said, patting his thigh. “He always has.”

She became serious and leaned in to tell me something important.

“Edward didn’t rape that Negra girl,” she said, as a matter of fact.

Because Big Daddy had just been released from prison early, newspapers were digging up old charges and the controversy around his testimony against Hoffa. It had only been two years since Brian Dennehy portrayed him in Blood Feud, which kept him in the nation’s mind. Though he was no longer as famous, his release was noteworthy in the New York Times and LA Times, and of course the Baton Rouge Advocate and New Orleans Tribune put him on the front page and many people wrote into the commentary with old opinions on Hoffa.

“Look here,” she said, pointing to the Look! and Life magazine photos of her oldest of three sons, and four of her grandchildren. Doug was never mentioned in those articles. My dad and Keith are splattered throughout, and so were aunts Janice, Cynthia, and Theresa; Aunt Janice even had a full page photo of her sitting on Big Daddy’s lap, looking up into his smiling face with a grin on her face and devotion in her eyes.

“It says so right here,” Grandma said, tapping the full-page photo of her son and granddaughter in America’s most popular magazine. That issue of Life, with Luci Baines Johnson’s smiling teenage face on the cover, was well worn and the corners of pages with photos of Partins were worn from Grandma’s fingers flipping to what she wanted to show.

“Bobby had the FBI put a lie detector on Edward,” she said.

She flipped the Life issue to the full-page photo of his lie detector results, a series of squiggly lines that looked like a seismic detector recording the rumble of 18 wheelers. Under it was a photo of Big Daddy, smiling in a chair and wearing the gadgets necessary for a lie detector test, and a white lab-coat wearing person holding a clipboard and standing behind him. She tapped the scientific-looking photo as evidence.

“That cathouse owner told that lie,” she said, as a matter of fact. “People didn’t like unions back then, because they was uplifting all people outta poverty. When you is a Teamster leader, they say all kinds of nasty things to make you look bad.”

The lie detector results were not about the rape, they were about Hoffa plotting to kill Bobby Kennedy and asking Big Daddy to help, but no one would ever point that out to Grandma. The Partins were showcased in the same issue as the new first family, the Johnsons, and the timing was centered around Big Daddy’s surprise testimony against Hoffa, only ten months after President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed as he rode through Dallas in his convertible, allegedly by Lee Harvey Oswald using an Italian army carbine outfitted with a scope by a Dallas gunsmith. In the Life article, and after the jury’s verdict made national news, Bobby wanted to make Big Daddy seemed like a reliable witness.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover authorized the release of surveillance on Big Daddy and Hoffa, and in that magazine, when President Kennedy’s assassination was still daily talk, Big Daddy’s lie detector test supported Hoover’s report that, two years before President Kennedy’s assassination, Hoffa originally asked Big Daddy to obtain plastic explosives so they could blow up Bobby’s house and everyone inside, but when Big Daddy said no to killing kids, Hoffa said he could shot Bobby Kennedy with a .271 rifle outfitted with a scope as Bobby rode around in his convertible. The similarity between Hoffa’s plot against Bobby Kennedy and what happened to President Kennedy sparked a wave of conspiracy theories. Hoffa’s attorney’s were in the midst of appeals, and Hoffa started a campaign against Big Daddy, bringing up the rape and other crimes, trying to convince America that Edward Grady Partin was unreliable and untrustworthy and just a tool that Bobby Kennedy was using.

“Hoffa, too,” she added. “He’d say anything about Edward to get out of prison.”

She pointed a gnarled finger towards a few books on her baker’s rack, Hoffa’s first autobiography, penned from prison, and his second, released just before he vanished from a Detroit parking lot on 22 July 1975; they were full of anecdotes about Big Daddy. The books looked unread.

“But there’s another Edward Grady Partin, one the jury never got to hear about,” Hoffa wrote in Hoffa on Hoffa.

“This Edward Grady Partin is mentioned in criminal records from coast to coast dating from 1943, when he was convicted on a breaking and entering charge, to late 1962, when he was indicted for first-degree manslaughter. During that twenty-year period Partin had been in almost constant touch with the law. He had had a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps. He had been indicted for kidnapping. He had been charged with raping a young Negro girl. He had been indicted for embezzlement and for falsifying records. He had been indicted for forgery. He had been charded with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.”

The 1962 kidnapping and manslaughter charges were what Hoffa always referred to using “bunny ears” to say Big Daddy was in jail “for a minor domestic problem.” That was what Chief Justice Earl Warren ranted about in Hoffa versus The United States, though he emphasized the perjury charges to imply that Big Daddy had perjured in Hoffa’s trial.

I never learned why the other justices allowed Big Daddy’s testimony to send Hoffa to prison. Growing up, I heard a lot of theories that Hoover had something on all of them, including Warren. (Another theory was that Hoffa had something on Warren, and another was that Warren was simply sharper than the other eight guys.)

“But Edward was a good boy,” Grandma said. “When Bobby asked him to get Hoffa, he did. They put a lie detector on him, and the FBI said he told the truth.”

She tapped the Life magazine.

“He saved Bobby’s life,” she said.

She pointed to the full-page photo of Big Daddy smiling and holding Aunt Janice on his lap, with her laughing face gazing at his lovingly. (Like most adult women I knew, Grandma adored the Kennedy boys and called them by the pet names Bobby, Johnny, and Teddy.) Under that photo it said something like: “Ed Partin stopped a plot to kill Bobby Kennedy and his children.”

“And the lives of his chil’ren, too,” she said, tapping the photo like morse code to a beat that matched her voice.

“Now, what kinda man do that?” she said, with the closest thing to judgement I ever heard come from her. “He would have got away with it, too, if not for Edward.”

She patted my hand and her face bunched back. It took a few breaths, and then she said: “And he told Bobby that for him to risk his life, they had to take care of his momma. And Jean, too. And they’s children.”

She looked at me and said: “Your daddy is alive because of Edward. He told Walter to put all those FBI agents around Jean and his children and protect them, and he did. Edward got Bobby to protect us.”

“That’s when Bobby bought me this house,” she said proudly, waving her gnarled arthritic fingers around her living room and out the double glass door towards her back yard. The hint of airplanes taking off and landing was barely noticeable, because her back yard faced a thick forest of pine trees, a rarity in her working class subdivision.

She adored that yard. Despite being old and hunched over, she pushed her gas powered lawn mower and maintained her vegetable garden religiously. It was a shame; she grew lovely vegetables, but somehow she overcooked them in pot that began with a burnt roux, as if her old eyes couldn’t see the color changing from brown to black, and her old nose couldn’t smell the change from baked bread to the arid stench of burnt oil and flour. Her kitchen window faced the back yard, and she’d get distracted cooking and stare out at it and smile and think about her past, and how lucky she was now.

“He wouldn’t rape no girl,” she said. “Even if she was a Negra,” Grandma emphasized. “He wouldn’t let Hoffa kill Bobby’s family because of his chil’ren were in the house.”

“Edward was a good boy,” she said, patting my hand and smiling up at me.

“You a good boy, too,” she said. “Your daddy was a good boy, too.”

“But Ed’s got problems in his head,” she said, meaning my dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior. “Walter says it’s like a disease. But you don’t got it.”

She patted my hand reassuringly.

“And look, Hon.” She waved her hand towards the faint roar of airplanes landing and taking off from the airport, and the faint but constant rumble of Teamster 18 wheelers headed to and from the lumber mill and the row of petrochemical plants ten miles north of her home.

“Edward had the governor build the interstate here. Think of all them people,” she said, “Black and white, that’s got jobs now because of Edward.”

I hadn’t understood any of that conversation, I just remember Grandma’s adulteration and Big Daddy’s silent smile and dominance in my vision no matter who was talking. I’d hear the same stories several times over the next few years, but I was only twelve years old when Big Daddy was released from prison and moved in with Grandma Foster and first paid attention to my family history. And, like everyone in Baton Rouge, I always wondered why I-110 had been built.

I-110 benefited northern Baton Rouge as if it were built for that purpose. Growing up, I’d overhear adults talking about how Big Daddy was responsible for getting politicians to build I-110 and put the petrochemical plants far away from railroads or river ports. Teamsters drove petrochemical products past the airport, train tracks, and Mississippi River port that led upriver to most of the country and downriver to all of the world. I-110 joined the cross-country I-10 in an elaborate sky bridge that circled downtown and allowed 18 wheelers to barely slow down as they swung onto I-10 and into the lifeblood of America. In the oppossite direction, they hauled in things bound for global trade, especially Latin America and the Caribbean Islands, including Cuba before Kennedy’s 1961 embargo against Fidel Castro’s communist regime. President Kennedy, I had heard, used New Orleans to get a case of Cuban cigars before declaring the embargo.

Almost every product bought or sold in America or overseas depended on Teamsters, which is why then Senator Kennedy first tried to stop Hoffa; with his word, Hoffa could call a strike and slam the American economy to a halt. He knew it, and so did the 2.7 million Teamsters loyal to him and paying monthly dues that built the Teamster Pension fund up to $1.1 Billion in untraceable cash, a ridiculous sum of money back then, more than the annual output of some some countries. Big Daddy was a small version of that, but to Louisiana, which depended on shipping petrochemical and agriculture products by truck and anything at all through the port of New Orleans.

Big Daddy was an outlier. He had no high school diploma, had never attended college, and was a known criminal, yet somehow he ran the state of Louisiana, even from prison, just like Hoffa continued to run the Teamsters when he first went to prison in 1968. In Walter Sheridan’s 1972 opus, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, Big Daddy’s discussed more than anyone except Hoffa. To explain him to the public, Walter explains how he became an outlier by referencing my grandmother, Mamma Jean, who finally got him to settle down.

“Partin, like Hoffa, had come up the hard way. While Hoffa was building his power base in Detroit during the early forties, Partin was drifting around the country getting in and out of trouble with the law. When he was seventeen he received a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps in the state of Washington for stealing a watch. One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dismissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later Partin was back on the West Coast where he pleaded guilty to second degree burglary. He served three yeas in the Washington State Reformatory and was parolled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a plea to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamsters Union, went to work, and married a quiet, attractive Baton Rouge girl. In 1952 he was elected to the top post in Local 5 in Baton Rouge. When Hoffa pushed his sphere of influence into Louisiana, Partin joined forces and helped to forcibly install Hoffa’s man, Chuck Winters from Chicago, as the head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.”

The difference between Jimmy Hoffa’s blurb about Big Daddy’s history and Walter Sheridan’s thoroughly researched account is that Walter omits the rape charge from when Big Daddy was 17, and he ignored the charges of collaborating with Fidel Castro. And, instead of just saying Big Daddy received a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps, he says Big Daddy stole a watch. I don’t know why Walter omitted the rape charge or anything about arming communist Cuba ahead of President Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion, but I can explain the discrepancy between his and Hoffa’s version of Big Daddy’s dishonorable discharge.

According to stories I recall and Doug’s autobiography, the jury found Big Daddy innocent because one juror said, “Ain’t no white man need to go to jail for nothin’ he did to a nigger girl.” That man was the town barber, known to talk to anyone willing to sit down and get a haircut.

That case had to be hidden, even in the 1964, because it was too abrupt for the national news coverage that followed Big Daddy’s testimony against Hoffa. But, Big Daddy was found guilty of petit larceny when he and Doug stole all the guns in Woodville, Mississippi, and sold them to the New Orleans mafia, which was only a few hours downriver. That, and his marine records, couldn’t be swept under a rug when people looked at Big Daddy.

The Woodville judge let Doug, who was only 12, go free. Doug was only a tool, a patsy who allowed himself to be tied to a rope and lowered through the roof of Woodville’s Sears and Roebuck hunting store by Big Daddy, who was only 17 but already so strong that he could raise Doug and his armfulls of hunting rifles, shotguns, and pistols back up through the roof hand-over-hand. Big Daddy had noticed that the doors and windows were locked and barred, but that the roof was vulnerable if you could climb up there and hoist things out. He recruited his little brother to help, and that story was how I learned to break into Scotlandville Magnet High School for the Engineering Professions in 1986; it”s still true, and a surprising number of security guards for big buildings don’t check the air conditioning or ventilation vents on roofs.

In 1943, in the middle of WWII, Big Daddy and Uncle Doug sold all but a few of the guns to a couple of mafia men in New Orleans, about two hours downriver from Woodville. They bought motorcycles with the money, and had the summer of their lives, riding all over the south with pockets full of gas money in an otherwise poor time for people, until a sheriff noticed and found the remaining guns in their shared bedroom of Grandma’s shotgun shack house. They were arrested and pleaded no contest. The judge gave Big Daddy a choice: join the marines and fight in WWII, or go to jail.

Big Daddy joined the marines and punched out the basic training commanding officer two weeks later. On a whim, he reached down and removed the unconscious captain’s watch. Stealing doesn’t get you discharged, it gets you demoted; Big Daddy was dishonorably discharged for punching out an officer. But he liked to talk about taking the watch, which may be why Walter reported it that way.

Big Daddy returned to Woodville as a free man with a new watch on his thick wrist. He had honored his contract with the judge to join, not to remain in, the marines. He was more free than most men his age, because with a dishonorable discharge, he was unable to be drafted and was only 18 years old. A whole life unfolded before him.

With all the young and able men gone to war, Big Daddy quickly rose to power as the union leader for the Woodville sawmill workers. He then soon also ran the truck driver’s union, which brought in trees and carried out cut lumber. Though he never worked in the sawmill or drove a truck, he was soon running unions for both of those industries, and began growing his union like a franchise growing among similar towns. As Doug wrote, “Ed did what Ed wanted to do,” and he was really good at getting out of contracts and influencing juries.

Jimmy Hoffa was rising to the top of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters around that time, and he knew that Big Daddy was the type of person who could negotiate trucking contracts and grow the Teamsters in Louisiana. Hoffa was already in and out of court cases with then Senator John F. Kennedy, who was chairman of the U.S. labor relations committee, already on his back. Knowing how to fix a jury was a useful skillset to someone fighting two or three mosquito cases a year, petty trials meant to pester Hoffa and slow him down.

Hoffa already knew Big Daddy’s history when he asked my grandfather to head the Baton Rouge Teamsters. The Teamsters Hoffa selected as leaders were all like Big Daddy. As Hoffa wrote, if you play with snakes, you’re bound to get bitten. Big Daddy sent Hoffa to prison, and it was another local Teamster president, Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan, who would claim to have killed Hoffa on behalf of the mafia.

I’m sure Hoffa would have made different choices with the gift of hindsight.

Some of the other stories I heard in the next few years were different, but all atrocious. When the woodmill north of Grandma’s house refused to hire Big Daddy’s Teamsters “because they had Niggers willing to work for half the price,” Doug said he and Big Daddy and a handful of big Local #5 boys fell some tall pine trees across the dirt road leading away from the mill. After the non-union truck drivers got out to clear the road, they were never seen again. The next day, Big Daddy showed up at the mill and said he heard they had openings for drivers, and that’s how the Teamsters began driving the route from where I-110 would eventually dead-end all the way to downtown’s port on the Mississippi. All of his contracts in the early 1950’s had similar outcomes, and Local #5 grew and the economy boomed and everyone looked up to Big Daddy.

I don’t know why I was immune to Big Daddy’s spell. Maybe it’s because I grew up reading Hoffa’s two autobiographies and Walter Sheridan’s treatise on Hoffa. Copies sat somewhere in the house of every relative I knew, though few seemed to be read by anyone other than me. But that’s conjecture. More than likely, I saw Big Daddy fresh out of prison, deflated, and that coincided with meeting Coach Dale Ketelsen and joining the Belaire Bengals wrestling team.

From that point on, I began traveling to other schools for dual meets and seeing the Matthew Effect first-hand. Every time Coach drove us up I-110 in Belaire’s big blue Chevy sports-team van, I saw Big Daddy shaping Baton Rouge to fit him and his family, and every time I stepped onto the mat against schools like Capital I saw bleachers full of African American sisters and mothers, and I wondered what had happened to that juror who said no white man needs to go to jail for anything he did to a Negra girl.

As I mentioned, Hillary and I never talked in high school. For all I know, he had read the same books and articles about my family that I had, and that’s why he beat me so badly. I wouldn’t judge him for that.

To this day, I’ll never understand why only Chief Justice Earl Warren saw Big Daddy the way I did. And I’ll never know if the 13 year old version of me was moving towards Coach Ketelsen and wrestling team, or away from Big Daddy and the Partin family.

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