Jackson Alabama is pure country!

There is not much to the town, the stores close before sundown and on Wednesday afternoons.

The fast food places are never open later than nine in the evening except Friday and Saturday nights.

Clarke County is predominately Black.

Alabama has a large Cajun population in that area. They are neither Black nor White.

Nearly all of the Cajuns of Alabama have Indian and black blood in their ancestry.

Most successful businesses belong to the white segment.

SBA has tried to help hundreds of Blacks form small businesses but the success rate is almost zero.

Lumber and pulp wood are the largest industries in the area.

Residents do most of their shopping in Mobile. Jackson is a mail order town. If a person wants something at a local hardware store, the chances are that they won't have it. But they can "Get it for you in a day or so".

Several years ago the high school had to quit having school functions. The last Junior - Senior Prom was a disaster. During the first hour of the dance three white students were knifed by blacks in two separate incidents. When the school tried to send every one home, a riot had started. There was a lot of damage.

The Senior Prom was canceled.

Those girls that had bought dresses and were looking foreword to having one last social event before they became young adults were crushed.

Three of those girls, close friends from K to 12, were still keeping in touch.

Pat had gotten married two weeks after she had graduated from high school.

She lived near town on a cattle farm owned by her in-laws.

She and her husband lived in a trailer.

Pat worked at a bank in town.

Pat's salary was what they lived on.

Her husband was a typical Red Neck, he wanted to just hunt and fish, not keep a steady job.

A few times he had beaten the shit out of her when he came home drunk. She knew she had made a mistake marrying him but had not gotten up the guts to do anything about it yet.

Lynn had married a fellow student. He had enlisted in the Marines his senior year and was at Quantico.

She saw him for a few days every month. Not often enough to keep that gnawing itch for sex scratched.

Lynn lived in a duplex apartment in town and worked at the city hall.

Jo Ann was still single. She was not willing to settle for the dull life with the men and boys there. She wanted to do better than become a baby maker in that hick town.

She was going to the Junior College and working for a large lumber company.

Hunting season came in November.

Pat's husband planed to be at the hunt camp down river every week end.

The girls got together often. Week ends were dull for them.

There was nothing they could do for excitement in that small town that would not make them the subject of gossip.

Lynn suggested they go gamble at the Choctaw Indian Reservation in Philadelphia Mississippi.

One of her friends had received a coupon in the mail that offered two nights and two days at the casino with meals free.

They all thought it might be fun. None of them had any spare cash but it was free wasn't it?

Lynn called and explained that a friend had given her the invitation, she and her husband could not come. Could she and two girl friends come instead. She was told they could.

Lynn made reservations for them for Friday night and Saturday night.

Thursday evening Lynn called her husband in Virginia and talked for a few minutes.

Pat's husband left for a long week end at his hunt club that evening. Friday afternoon she called her mother in law and told her she was spending the week end with her sister in Mobile.

Jo was the only one that had only to pack a canvass shoulder bag and just go.

The girls left Jackson after work and checked in at the casino shortly after dark.

They just threw their luggage on the beds and went right back downstairs to the casino.

Pat wanted to play the nickel slots.

Jo and Lynn wanted to play table games they had been playing Black Jack for years on a computer.

Lynn found them a five dollar minimum table and they bought twenty dollars worth of chips each.

Four hands later they had lost their chips.

A waitress had taken drink orders right after they had bought in the game.

The girls took their drinks and wandered around. They found another table to try.

Again they bought four five dollar chips each.

Both of them won the first eight hands, then lost one and won the next six.

They were on a roll!

They finished those first drinks and ordered two more. Jo explained to Lynn that the drinks had hardly any alcohol in them.

After a time each girl had several hundred dollars in front of her.

Pat found them and was babbling about having hit a jack pot on a nickel machine.

She had won two hundred nickels, that was a hundred dollars.

Lynn told her that she and Jo were winning too. Lynn said that those red chips in front of her were five dollar chips and the green, twenty five dollars. The black were one hundred dollar chips.

Lynn told Pat she thought she was over a thousand dollars ahead.

Jo said she was nearly two thousand ahead.

Three nice looking guys, neatly dressed, and in their middle age years, were playing at their table.

One of them offered to bank roll one of them. He proposed that one of them put her money in her purse and play on his. He wanted half her winnings when she was through. If she lost he would be the looser not she. The other two said they wanted to do that with the other girls.

Pat asked if she was included, she confessed that she had never played Black Jack before.

The youngest one offered to bankroll her and teach her at the same time.

They shifted seats, one of the girls was between each man.

Lynn changed her small chips to hundred dollar ones and put them in her fanny pack.

Jo did the same.

Play resumed, The ladies were playing with black one hundred dollar chips then.

At first Pat needed a lot of coaching.

They began to win nearly every hand.

When they began to bet a thousand in chips the Pit Manager moved up behind the dealer.

Their guys were not doing as well as they were.

Those girls could not loose.

One of the guys borrowed a thousand from another guy, he had been loosing.

The Pit manager got on his phone and soon the table was surrounded by Security Guards and guys in black suits.

If a fly had landed on one of those girls legs it would have been taped.

At two thirty the run of good cards began to taper off. The guys were tired of winning a little then loosing it back.

They wanted to quit. The girls wanted to quit also. They had a little too much to drink while playing.

All of them were tired.

The guys offered to pop for a late supper.

Lynn told them they had complimentary meal tickets.

She was only a little hungry, she said. What she really wanted to do was get her shoes off and lay down.

Jo and Pat took them up on their offer and insisted Lynn come with them for at least the time it would take to split their winnings.

After they were seated at a table each of the girls took the casino cups they had put their chips in and spilled out their winnings in a pile in front of her.

They stacked those black chips in stacks of ten.

Pat had never played before but was the big winner. She had twenty eight thousand, four hundred in her stacks.

Lynn was next with twenty four thousand eight hundred.

Jo had twenty two thousand even.

The girls split their winnings with their sponsors.