The following exerts are from a recently discovered "jailhouse diary" kept by a Freedom Rider named Judson Fawley. While a valuable source of information on the Civil Rights Era, they also offer a tantalizing insight into the personality of the individual know as Mr. Bojangles who would later be immortalized in song by the Nitty Gritty Dirt band.
May 26th, 1967:
For the fourth day in a row, I, along with all of the other inmates in Wing 3 of the New Orleans County Jail, am awakened by the sounds Mr. Bojangles' arrhythmic dancing and off-key singing. Since I am Bojangels' cellmate, I am unavoidably awoken first. As the other inmates begin to stir the daily torrent of death threats emanate from their cells and fill the corridor.
"Shut that crazy old coon the fuck up," yells Willers from the adjacent cell to the left before volunteering "or I swear to Christ I'll nail his black ass to the prison floor!"
What am I to do? After all, it was I who implored upon Mr. Bojangles to dance in the first place.
Mahoney, in the cell directly across from ours, begins to hurl paper cups full of toilet water through the bars into Bojangeles and my cell where they miss their intended target and splatter harmlessly on the floor. The commotion invariably summons Kapansky, the guard, who each morning points his baton through the bars of our cell and threatens to split Bojangels head in two should he fail to "Cut that shit out, on-the-double".
May 31st, 1967:
Admittedly, when I first asked Mr. Bojangles to perform I expected to be regaled with a litany of traditional Blues songs and Negro spirituals. To my great dismay, the only song in Bojangels' repertoire appears to be "If I Knew You Were Coming, I'd Have Baked a Cake" and the only lyrics he seems remember from the song are "If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake... baked a cake... baked a cake." Unless interrupted by the appearance of Kapansky and his club, Bojangles' rendition of "If I Knew You Were Coming, I'd Have Baked a Cake" can go on for hours.
June 2nd, 1967:
I may have mentioned earlier that after twenty years Bojangles still grieves for his late dog. Hardly a night has passed wherein the old man hasn't launched into a rambling lament about the animal (Curiously, the dog's name never seems to remain the same. Most of the time it's "Rex", occasionally it's "Spot" and at least once it was remembered as "Jefferson Davis", which is a rather strange name for a colored man o bestow upon anything, let alone his canine companion). Last night, during one of these sobbing breakdowns I placed my hand on Mr. Bojangles' shoulder and said "There, there. He was a good dog, wasn't he?"
"Not really, no. He used to shit all o'er t' place. An' his farts - whooeee" Bojangles sputtered forth along with about a pint of saliva.
"But you really seem to miss him..."
"Hell yeah, I does. Of all the critters I ever did fuck, and I fucked a barnyard full, that mutt had the tightest asshole."
June 3rd, 1967,
Today was a day of revelations: The first being that the Mr. Bojangles with whom I share this cell is not, in fact the Mr. Bojangles. That is to say that he is not, as I had been led to believe, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Apparently the authentic Bojangles died of heart failure in New York City in 1949. No, as it turns out, the counterfeit Bojangles is in actuality one Thomas M. Stackpole. Even more shocking is the gossip that Mr. Stackpole/Bojangles is not even a Negro. He is, according to the extremely reliable jailhouse grapevine, a dark-skinned Welshman.
Perhaps most disturbing of all was Bojangles' elaboration on the reason for his incarceration which he had earlier given as "Cause I drinks a bit". This afternoon he expanded upon it, in a disquietingly matter-of-fact manner: "Cause I drinks a bit and then I likes to go down by the schoolyard and show li'l Bojangles to t' purdy children" Bojangles stammered, unbuttoning his fly and exposing his shriveled penis.
Addendum:
Two days later Thomas "Bojangles" Stackpole was transferred to the New Orleans Sate Prison where he tried, unsuccessfully, for five years to be raped in the showers. He was released in 1972.
