“Leave the bottle.”
He pauses, scans me, and knows, then, that I’ve come from the War, that I’ve seen terrible things done to white folk. He puts the bottle next to my shot glass and vanishes without another word. Doesn’t even tell me about the price.
In the morning mistiness, the dust motes hang in shafts of light that have burst through the windows overhead to illumine an auroral walkway, leading straight to the bar. The place is quiet. A drunk snores in a corner. Robins dance on the windowsill. The world outside this shadowed place is all light and coruscating tree branches. There’s the clink of bottle against bottle and the bartender emerges from the backroom with a case of bourbon, the glass unmarked, unlabeled. Because anyone from around here knows exactly what make it is. I watch the bartender place the bottles, wipe down the counter with a dishrag, and snap the tops off the whiskey he intends on using today. No one ever wrote a set of musical notes so pretty.
I’m the only animate customer in the establishment, and in these few quiet hours before the place becomes rowdy and raucous and overflowing with too much noise, I can enjoy a drink in peace. Maybe watch an out-of-towner salesman amble in, hat off, and ask for a Kentucky bourbon, and I would smirk and joke with the bartender like we knew each other: “Pour him a bourbon and tell him it’s from Kentucky.”
I laugh at the daydream.
THE Negress takes a seat one away from mine.
“You know horses?”
I bite back a snarl in response to the woman’s query. “Enough to ride ’em,” I say into my drink. My thoughts are a swirl of mint juleps and summers with people richer than me, afternoons spent in the shadow of barns, watching from far away as sable beasts, mounted by nigger jockeys and tiny whites, sped around a track and people screamed at the things, at those beautiful animals, who in the course of a race could erase an entire family’s riches or turn a lucky man from a pauper into a prophet. I’m a child before the end of the world. Run fast, turn left, run faster. “You ever go to the races?” I don’t realize until I finish the question that I’ve asked it.
“’Nawl. We didn’t race ’em where I was from,” says the Negress before tossing back her drink and, with titanic impertinence, pouring herself another from my bottle. She’s covered almost entirely. A ragged coat, cloth wrapped around her gloved hands, the fingertips poking out through sand-colored fabric. Outside of her face and those fingertips, there ain’t a lick of black skin to be seen.
She ain’t there but to be ignored, I guess.
She smirks, shyly, shifts the battered hat on her head, comes across a little sideways, maybe turned mad by having been born that color. Maybe she’s paramilitary. If she was, she’d’a killed me by now. “You do any railwork? I knew some folks did some railwork, Blacks mostly. Following the length of rail westward or wherever it spun ’em. How old were you when they came ’round? When they told you you could get paid to work horses and round up Blacks that didn’t have paramilitary Specials to protect ’em? Bring back slavery.” She’s talkin’ to me and herself at the same time. “One of ’em sees you had killin’ in you. Takes a likin’ to that. ’N’ it’s not long ’fore you’re called on to do your duty.”
The air sizzles. Pops. This has to be a dream, so I keep my mouth shut.
“But you were smart enough then to know that when they said roundin’ up unprotected Blacks would be your job, that they really meant the other thing, and that’s what that one fella wanted to see you do.” The Negress pulls rolling paper out from the folds of her jacket. Fiddles with it. Starts rolling. “You ask him now, he’d tell me you didn’t mind killin’ ’em and missin’ the payday. That you’d figured them for animals anyway, not deservin’ of life, and were simply restorin’ things to their natural balance.” She stops, collecting herself. Trying to remind herself of something. “I dunno. Maybe I ain’t givin’ you enough credit.” And she dares to look me dead in my face.
Before I can leap out of my chair and show this nigger what’s what, she slaps something cold and metal and glowing around my wrist and a memory seizes me entirely. The air is aswarm with Virginny accents and everybody is louder, just trying to be noticed looking well and well dressed.
An electric shock rips through me. My mind goes white. Then—
A horse race. Last night’s rain has softened the ground into mud and several drunks, some in expensive jackets, already lounge in the effluvium, scrambling aimlessly to right themselves like upturned stag beetles. I remembered Billy and Hollis’s warnings the night before over brandy, their chuckled admonitions that I exercise caution, their claims that it could not possibly get as bad as last year, their secret hope that it might. The clubhouse perpetually on the verge of being burned to the ground by errantly struck matches, raving drunks stumbling about in clouds of vitriol and delusional fury, aiming to settle ancestral scores, everyone with a mint julep in each hand, vomiting across aisles on each other so that the runways were slick with bad decisions and people slipping and grabbing on to you to keep from slipping further and being stomped on in the mad rush. More drunks pissing themselves in the betting line, stooping over to snatch their soiled money from the sticky floors, fighting each other to get back upright again.
“Come now, we mustn’t miss the actual race.” Uncle Al grabs my arm affectionately and half hauls me down the sidewalk, already crammed with people moving in all directions, down toward Churchill Downs.
I’m about to find my groove when I see, across the street amid the pulsing throng that’s less walking in any direction so much as vibrating with life, Virginia. Flower-patterned sundress, freckled alabaster skin smelling of juniper trees, head haloed by reddish-blond hair. She glows and seems to move blissfully unaware of the fact. She’s got new wrinkles, a curving fold just by the side of her mouth, a small tree of lines by her eyes, and her hips have filled out slightly. Cushioned by her hair is a wide-brimmed summer hat half a season too early, and I know she only wears it for her husband in whose arm she threads her own, and it’s exactly that consideration that draws me to her again, expels all other conscious thought, and I follow the course of her movement as it parts a stream through the crowd before her and takes her off into the distance.
Uncle Al pulls me toward him, whispers in my ear, beneath the sound of wooden gate-doors swinging open and shut and people shouting at each other, decency diminishing with each second, under the slap of bootheels sticking and sucking out of mud and the distant neighing of horses prepped for their big turn this afternoon, “Five million dollars will be bet today.” And I’m led to believe that a piece of that will fall squarely into my own pockets, simply because I belong to this family.
This place is still standing, this land, because when Black folk with the power to blow you wide open without a second thought came by, these members of my race put up no fight. Just let ’em rush through, hoping they were on their way to somewhere else, bankin’ on being left alone if they stayed docile enough, content to be left making the money they’ve been making off other white backs. I know this is a memory, because I haven’t yet taken up arms against the Specials. I haven’t yet joined the Normal forces in ridding the country of the scourge of Spooks. Right now, I’m just young and dumb and in love with someone else’s woman.
I see, in the infield, among the milling swarm of stained dinner jackets and sticky beards and rumpled sun hats, Virginia’s beatific face again and resolve to get near her. On my way out, someone shoves a drink in my hand and I down it, then shove up to the bar and order two more drinks, none of which survive the trip back out past the outdoor betting windows, past the regular Blacks drunk with the power of handling their own bets and the resentful white men shoving past them, and the younger whiskey gentry, running about like the children they are, with their girlfriends hoisted on their backs, hats waved above their heads like they were cowboys riding their steeds bareback.
No one selling drinks out here, but the air reeks of stale whiskey and beer splashed on shoes and staining dress shirts. I’ve eyes only for Virginia, passing through the gates, one by one descending into a more atavistic tract of bowel until I’m shat out, through a tunnel, stepping over bodies, elbowing my way through a throng of people, striking out at loud voices, uncaring of faces that regard me with shock and disgust and could care less about the race none of them can see from here.
She is an island of gilded effortlessness in the midst of the chaos. I grab her hand, and instantly our fingers are entwined, no argument, no resistance, and we float through the masses and past the entrance of the adjacent Bingham Gentleman’s Club and the pristine white tablecloth and the politicians and well-to-do legislators and landowners and their ladies, past the smell of their untainted-ness, past the immaculately groomed lowhill whites serving them, past the corruption tightened in their faces, and into the spacious, cushioned ladies’ room, where, in the confines of a stall, I hike up her dress, one leg thrown over my shoulder, press her against the wall, and kiss her, the fingers of one hand wrapped around my neck while the fingers of another fumble at my belt buckle.
The gates all open at once and Morning Glory speeds out, fast and sable as a cloud of dun-colored geldings thunder close behind, and their hooves strike the ground near enough to crack it with rhythmic pounding and the onlookers are screaming and shouting, each for their own bets, the sound like tumultuous waves breaking against a sheer cliff face, and as a man absently, nervously chews the edge of his program and grips it in a white-knuckled embrace, the horses pant, nostrils flaring, sweat-sheen drawing out the contours of each starkly defined muscle, flexed in the movement, when, rounding the bend, Water Lily, before on the outside, kicks harder against the ground and gallops hard on the turn, pushing ahead, women in the stands, gloved hands slapping the railing slapping the stall door men with necks stretched forward like the horses, inching them ahead as if through mimicry they could push the horse with a bit more energy, whispering beneath their breath Go, go, go, keep going, keep going, yes, come on Angel, the women on their feet, without regard for their husbands, both screaming madly, faces contorted in rage and ecstasy, the hooves thudding enough to drown out every sound until just before the end, which they feel mounting with every left turn, there is silence, two horses having broken away from the pack and Morning Glory’s jockey with the switch in his hand raised high poised on the brink of violence, the horse pulsing beneath him with each stride, and all is silent in that brief instant before the horse crosses and the air is thick with release and relief and yes, oh God, yes, thank you, yes, a trickle of foaming blood issuing from each of Morning Glory’s distended nostrils.
“What’d you do?” I’m shaking and darkness settles over the bar’s interior. The sun is gone. Clouds have extinguished it. “Who are you?”
“Jason Lingerfelt?” She already knows the answer to that question.
I’m paralyzed. My fingers refuse to wipe the whiskey from my overgrown mustache.
She’s got her hand on a chain linked to the bands around my wrist. She’d moved so quickly and quietly that no one, not even the bartender, notices my predicament. No one here will save me. Steel shines in her newly argentate pupils. She’s a Special. “Jason Lingerfelt, you’re under arrest for the kidnapping of Margaret Morgan and her two children from the Specials-Occupied State of Ohio to the Whiteland State of Texas. And for the murder of Absalom Morgan, her son.”
[May 17th, 20—, 7:52 p.m.]
I got into a private high school on scholarship. [Laughing.] Yeah, one of those New England prep schools. Let me tell you, best four years of my life. You could feel like you were standing on a precipice though with everything that was going on in the world. We were doing virtual classes. And it was tough for a lot of people, because not everybody’s got the same tech or not everybody can, like, find a quiet room to do their classes in when they gotta share an apartment with a whole-ass family, know what I mean? It’s one thing, you know, if it’s school in your own community and like how it used to be way back in the day and people got the temperature readers in their homes and the schools got the hand sanitizers and everybody kinda knows where everybody’s been, right? But, like, the private schools, that was a whole other game. You got people from all over the country, all over the world. And they tried to do the in-person thing for a few years kind of on-and-off, but the pandemic was like nah, fuck that. This was a couple years before me, but the big thing was when, like, international kids started coming here and getting sick then bringing that virus back to their home countries, and you really saw like, wow America’s the ghetto. [Laughter.] But, yeah, it was like that. Like, you hear older generations talking about how, like, immigrants used to come here or their parents came here looking for a better job or a better life or whatever, and you look around, and you’re like “for this?” Meanwhile, most people I knew were like, oh you’re American? Stay the fuck away from me, man. I remember talking to kids—and it was a certain brand of kid too, who, like, knew shit but wasn’t, like, too tied to this place—and they were always like “get me the fuck outta here, bro.” Sometimes, if you’re from a place, and you love it, you wanna claim it, and part of that is also wanting to improve it, right? Meanwhile, for a lot of us, the only America we known is basically a country on fire, right? Like, America’s somehow the only country that could not only fuck up response to a global viral pandemic, but keep fucking it up, and you also got all the race laundry out in the open like that, and, granted, it’s stuff anybody with a brain and half a conscience knows about, but now it’s all happening out loud, you know? And that’s just what you’re born into. So then it started happening to us, you know? Some of us started thinking like the generations before us. Like our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ generation. Like maybe life in America ain’t it. Maybe we could build a better life for ourselves and our families somewhere that wasn’t here. Growing up for them, you couldn’t actually go to another country. That’s how bad it was here. Other countries banned us from traveling to them.
I think white folks got so fed up with being told where they could or couldn’t go that they finally got serious about putting that first Colony together. Buncha companies or corporations, I forget who was the first to announce. Probably the Tesla guy, but then the government got involved and was throwing all this money at it. And before you know it, people are actually going up into space. I’m in school with these rich white kids and by the time we’re getting ready for college, their parents are getting set up in space. That’s how fast it was. Them shits even had the Amazon logo on the building sites. All over their uniforms, all of that. But yeah, all of that’s happening while I’m in high school.
The whole place was like a mini-college. Classes were tough in the beginning. I wasn’t used to that kind of rigor, you know? But I remember it as a good time, generally. People were kind. Went out of their way to take care of me. By now, Auntie was my legal guardian. I didn’t know that all types of stuff was going on behind the scenes. Mom and Dad caught the virus and that fucked me up for a while. Then there was Uncle Jim dying, and I was too young to process all of it. My whole mind was escape, you know? Just, like, bury yourself in your schoolwork. Bury yourself in getting out of this country. Just finding a way out. But one thing I did learn? How to go to school with rich white kids. [Laughter] It’s an honest-to-God skill! Made college a lot easier. But, you could definitely see the change in them too. The bad ones get worse and a lot of the good ones turn bad, because that’s the world they’re in and that’s how their parents are. Some of the good ones stay good. But I had some Black teachers and I didn’t find out till much later how lucky I was.
In prep school, white boys start to grow into their superpowers, figure out all the things their whiteness and their manhood gets them access to. By the time they get to college, they’re full-fledged villains. [Laughter] But I was an orphan, know what I mean? I came from slave land in the South, up north to a dying factory town, the type that people point to and say “deindustrialization” or “post-industrial” or something like that, practically a Rust Belt type of city, then I get here. And I say to myself, “You know what? You’re working-class.” And it wasn’t really embarrassment for me. When we were kids, me and my cousins used to help Auntie out cleaning and disinfecting office buildings all around Connecticut, but we were just kids and we figured this was just how the world was ordered. And I was good enough in school that I could flex on the other kids in my class. Nobody made me feel like they were better than me. You know how white folks do, no offense. But I got to college and saw how rich white people get and it started to stink. It smelled really, really bad. If my soul had a nose, it spent most of that time all the way wrinkled up.
THEY chain me like a nigger.
Manacles around both wrists, a chain looped through to link with the shackles around my ankles so my hands have no choice but to sit in my lap. I ponder asking the marshal across from me for a cigarette, just to hear her break up the silence between us when she tells me why she has to say no, but I think better of it. Out the window is honeyed pasture our train’s cutting an iron-straight line through.
Will they hang me right away? I almost ask her.
I hope they don’t. I hope they give me time to get used to Ohio air for a bit, maybe write a letter to Ma and let her know I’m not sad about how things turned out, hope they’ll give me a chance to explain that I wasn’t a deserter, I just had some lucrative business to attend to, running down lonely Spooks and sellin’ ’em into them labor camps before my home was overrun with Spook-sympathizers. And I hope they’ll let me shave so I can die smooth-faced and dressed as well as I can afford and greet God in better condition than I’m typically known for maintaining.
I smirk because I can trace the woman’s thoughts. “You think my family gon’ kill you once they find out you done took me under the auspices of the law of a country ain’t none of ’em reco’nize?”
By God, she don’t even blink.
“We ain’t that backwards we don’t recognize a government’s capacity to restore order and civility and whatnot, make men outta us barbarians. I ain’t sour ’bout how it turned out, but I am quite perplexed at havin’ woke up to a world where a Negress can look a white man dead in the eye, who’s wearin’ chains like a nigger and be all right with that situation.”
