HATTIE ELLIS ... she was, like so many of the women who came to the Goree State Farm in the thirties, a mystery. All that can be known about her comes from meager scraps of information—a trial transcript, the few references to her in the transcripts of the WBAP radio show Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, and some mentions of her in the Echo, the newspaper written and edited by Texas prison inmates.  She was a black woman in Dallas who had been described as “a bootlegging sister. 
When she was just twenty years old, Hattie was sentenced to thirty years at Goree for murdering a woman named Henrietta Murphy, According to trial testimony, Henrietta and some other women had come to Hattie’s house, wanting to buy whiskey for a dollar from Hattie’s boyfriend. Hattie didn’t sell them any whiskey, and she and Henrietta got into an argument. Henrietta, who was apparently drunk, urinated on Hattie’s floor. Later, Hattie drove up to Henrietta’s house, talked to her for a few minutes while sitting in the car, then opened the front door, got out, drew a pistol, and shot her in the stomach and then in the back. 
Describing life inside Goree. the entire prison was segregated. The black inmates—and there were twice as many black women as white women in the prison—were kept in their own dormitory. They ate their meals there, away from the white women, and during church services and on movie nights, they had to sit in their own area. It may be assumed it was the black women who were given the harder jobs—tending to the crops, working the dairy cattle, picking the fruit from the orchard—while the white women were given the jobs in the main office or in the prison’s garment factory.


Hattie Ellis - Desert Blues

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