Anyone for golf? December 15, 2004 Del Lessard The Bay Beacon newspaper Florida Panhandle

Your community lost your slaves, and now you are going to have to pay to golf - and the shame of it all - is you treated your slaves well when they were with you. Y'all let hundreds of them roam your community freely each day, giving them pleasant work instead of boredom in dorms. You fed them good, and they had beds. Now you hear they are fed green bologna, forced to work on new prisons or go to isolation cells; so even though it is probably too late - someone ought to try to get them back.

Dear Mr. Lessard:

Has there been any follow-up to the reported bad conditions that evacuated Eglin prisoners were thrust into? Or anymore follow-up to the golf course's woes due to the manual-labor force suddenly disappeared from Niceville into the land of green bologna, and reportedly dark underground of the BOP?

I have a brother who is a federal prisoner, and before class-consciousness awoke in me after a prison visit, I was a bit of a golf enthusiast, so found your article interesting - very interesting indeed. I thought it a wondrous weave of those subjects - golf and slave labor - written right into straight news that might bring your prisoners back. I wondered if Del Lessard was a golfer in Niceville, and gonna have to start paying fees, too.

I found myself grateful that you included the information that Ms. Freyermuth and Ms. Chambers gave to you concerning the prisoners suffering physically and emotionally since the move - along with the golf course, recycling center, armament museum and public welfare office - once staffed with federal prisoners. (See 13th Amendment - I know y'all were legal).

All in all though, you might have just said it like it all reads to me - rather absurdly. But here's the plain truth.

Your community lost your slaves, and now you are going to have to pay to golf - and the shame of it all - is you treated your slaves well when they were with you. Y'all let hundreds of them roam your community freely each day, giving them pleasant work instead of boredom in dorms. You fed them good, and they had beds. Now you hear they are fed green bologna, forced to work on new prisons or go to isolation cells; so even though it is probably too late - someone ought to try to get them back.

Your slave labor force has disappeared, and was likely planned, and Hurricane Ivan just an excuse to make it a quick amputation, not a long drawn out public fight. It's the days of secrecy - ask and the 'they's' don't have to tell a journalist a thing.

If our loved ones are safe enough to tend your golf courses down there and everywhere - they'd do well to come home and tend their children - ya know? Journalists - real journalists - once kept things on a better course than free public golf courses.

Thanks for including the abuse of the prisoners that have left Eglin - but please, don't just forget them as slaves lost. They are people, with families who love them - and it's Christmas for Christ's sake!

Nora Callahan, Executive Director, The November Coalition

(Ed. - On the eve of printing this issue of The Razor Wire, the publisher of The Bay Beacon called our office to confirm Nora as author, and that they were publishing her essay.)