Polk County has no shortage of colorful characters in its history.



There was "Acrefoot" Johnson, the "Barefoot Mailman" who walked the mail route from Fort Meade to Fort Ogden. He was said to walk faster than a horse could gallop and even took passengers on his back from time to time.



There was also "Bone" Mizelle, the wisecracking Cracker cowman. When a wealthy family from Vermont asked Mizelle to send their son's remains home, he supposedly exhumed a cow-hunting buddy instead on the premise his friend had never traveled.



"Pogy Bill" Collins hailed from these parts for a time, too. The Okeechobee outlaw-turned-lawman, who once told a miffed judge "I ain't gonna be sentenced with no damned Sears, Roebuck catalog," was at one time the Frostproof police chief.



And then there was Daddy Mention - "a chain gang escape artist who could outrun the longest shotgun," as historian Stetson Kennedy described him.



Daddy Mention was truly a character. Once heralded in stories throughout Florida, he was known to nearly every jail and prison inmate in the state.



"Not that any of his former friends can describe Daddy Mention to you, or even tell you very many close details about him," states "The Florida Negro," written by the Federal Writers' Project in the late 1930s. "They agree, however, that he has been an inmate of various and sundry Florida jails, prison camps and road farms for years, and from the stories told of him, he must have enjoyed an almost unbroken stay in places of incarceration."



He lived behind bars, and escaping was his favorite pastime. One story preserved by the Federal Writers' Project recalls how Daddy Mention escaped from the Raiford prison, only to have the warden's mule chase him back to the compound.



Another preserved tale involved a jail in Lakeland, where Daddy Mention was locked up for vagrancy. It's said that while he was here, he became the hardest worker on the gang, chopping down trees, picking them up by the butt end and hauling them off by himself.



"It wasn't long before the cap'n and his friends was pickin' up a little side money, bettin' people Daddy could walk off with any tree they could cut," the story states. "It got to be a regular sight to see Daddy walkin' around the jail yard, luggin' a tree-butt in his arms."



And that's how he got away. One day he simply picked up a tree, walked out the gate and kept going. No one questioned him - the guards probably thought it was just another bet.



"I didn't have no trouble. I jus' kep' that log on my shoulder an' everybody I passed thought it'd fallen off'n a truck an' I was carryin' it back," Daddy Mention supposedly told someone later in Tampa. "Soon's I got to Plant City, I sold the log for enough to ride to Tampa, and they ain't goin' to catch me again in Polk County."



Unlike Johnson, Mizelle and Collins - all of whom were real men who had their reputations enhanced by stories - it's unlikely Daddy Mention ever existed anywhere but folklore.



"It is evident that he is another incarnation of Big John de Conquer, that hero of slavery days who could out-smart Ole Massa, God, and the Devil," Zora Neale Hurston once wrote. "He is the wish-fulfillment projection. The wily Big John compensated for the helplessness of the slave in the hands of the master, and Daddy Mention does the same for the convict in the prison camp."



[ Cinnamon Bair, a Polk County native, can be reached at cinbair@hotmail.com. ]