I hate Ohio.
THE lock turns.
I lie on my side for a bit longer, eyes adjusted to the darkness, and see in the entranceway the Negress’s silhouette.
“Where’s the body?” she says and I can tell in her voice that there ain’t no more of that mutual “respect” we’d cultivated during that train ride from Kentucky to Ohio. “Where’s the body?” she asks again.
I sit upright, my chains slinking about me, and make a show of wiping the sleep from my eyes. How many nights had she ridden, state to state, crossing from Specials-Occupied territory to Whiteland and back, searching for what I told her might or might not be there?
“You said the body would be over in the valley. That desert trail you took to get back from here.”
I wait.
“It ain’t.”
In the near-darkness, I can hear the change in the marshal’s voice, the new steel in it, the hardened will of a woman who suspected she might not get to do what she had set out to do. I smile. “You cain’t find twelve white men in all of Lorain County who’d convict me under color of law for kidnapping.” I’m more than a little astonished at my fortune. Anybody saw my record of bets at the racetrack could tell I’ve never been that lucky. Lucky me that it’s against their law to strap me to a chair and plumb the depths of my beshitted mind for proof of the crime. “Bet they all died in the War, didn’t they. And you cain’t find that little boy I allegedly ran down with his momma. And that nigger woman I ran down—allegedly—is off in the wind. Which means, all that’s left is the one I shot. Allegedly.” My smirk enlarges. “Without that nigger’s body, it looks like I don’t get to hang, don’t it.”
“Don’t it.”
Looks like we’re goin’ to Texas.
Before I can raise my hands to hit back, the marshal is on me, keys wrangling the locks on each chain and in a few moments, my shackles fall away. My instinct is to rub my wrists, then as the marshal kneels before me and finishes undoing my restraints, I hold back the urge to wrap my fingers around her neck and engineer a new path to freedom. But she stands up and says in a voice that seems to grip the collar of my shirt, “Let’s go find that body.”
I let her pull me with that voice because maybe if I walked the way I walked, I could carry the illusion that I was the one holding the trump cards, that I could go the other way whenever I wanted and that I chose out of some mysterious motive to stay. Maybe it’s myself I’m trying to convince. That I’m really going along because I don’t want to feel that glowing collar around my neck yank me somewhere I don’t want to go. So I step with the Negro marshal. Follow her to the stagecoach that, when it gets going, moves with others before and behind it as a caravan. Sit beside her as she fiddles with the loose wrapping around her hands, more relaxed than she’d been at that bar, the both of us listening to the two nigger gravediggers who sit up front under the night-sheet pocked with stars, shovels erect between their knees, telling a story I can’t understand, that sounds, when I drift off into sleep, like something that could have only existed in a dream.
[May 17th, 20—, 10:48 p.m.]
I heard there might be jobs down south, that the South was sort of rebuilding itself. A lot of young professionals at the time—highly educated, city folk—were headed to the South. Atlanta was the mecca, but there were other spots. And it really felt like there was a fight to take it back. I mean, you had the police shootings and whatnot, and it really turned Ferguson into a heavy place. Reminded you that there was Black folk suffering there. You got little spasms like that in the news. Mom and Dad were in college when Hurricane Katrina hit in, when was it, 2005? Yeah, ’05. Dad was a freshman in college at the time and had a roommate from New Orleans, he hold me how he was lookin’ at him, and really couldn’t believe he was talking about the same place Grandma and Grandpa were living. Same city. And when the hurricane touched down, all that white kid ever talked about was his family’s properties. That’s right. Plural. Properties. But he assured Dad that his family’s houses were in the “safe” part. Mom was always gettin’ on Dad for showing me news clips from that time, but you see all that aerial footage and if you look closely, there’s bodies floating in the water. And you look around now and it’s like what’s changed, you know? What the fuck has changed? They lived through the Ferguson uprising too. That whole era of police killings caught on cell phones and uploaded to YouTube. Some of them had been doing it since Oscar Grant. Michael Brown was the flashpoint for a lot of them. And this cinematographer friend of Dad’s from Kentucky sometimes came to visit when I was little and he and Dad would always talk about that time and about working in these white offices. Practically everybody’s white. Your bosses, the other reporters, the copy editors, the fact-checkers. I mean everybody. Covered in snow. And Dad and his friend would rattle off these names. John Crawford. Kajieme Powell. Eric Garner. Ezell Ford. George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor, Tamron Parker, Miriam Ortiz, just goes on and on. Had a work buddy who was one of those guys going back and forth between St. Louis County after that kid Michael Brown’s death, waiting to hear if the police that shot him would face charges. And everyone was nervous because you know how it goes, but you’re still stupid enough to hope. And the decision came down and everything exploded, but what got to this guy, what ate at him, wasn’t the decision itself but the hopelessness—I’m talkin’ sheer hopelessness—in the faces of those young men he saw gathered around those fires on West Florissant. Told this cinematographer friend who told me that he cried for about three weeks after that. Freddie Gray and Walter Scott, those were just names to me, you know? Boogiemen that Mom and Dad brought out to tell their little boy how to be when police were around. But these are people who look like these fellas’ cousins and uncles. I saw pictures of them and they look like my cousins and uncles. The way Dad talked about it, was like war reporting. You come up for air after diving into the deep end on segregation in McKinney, Texas, after a little Black girl gets body-slammed by a cop at a pool party, and two breaths later, you gotta write about what your generation thinks of that white boy that shot up that church in Charleston. Mom didn’t talk much about that stuff, and I think she just wanted to raise me to grow up in a better place, you know? More peaceful? She didn’t wanna kill the hope in her little boy. I mean, she knew what was what. She knew what the world was, knew what this country was. But I’d hear her chew Dad out after one of his friends came to visit or called and they got to reminiscing.
But the South was what was happenin’. We were different from our parents and grandparents. Supposedly. Not to say that they weren’t as strong as us or that they just took it on the chin while we were ready to fight for what we wanted. Not anything like that at all. We got what we got because of what they took and how they faced the worst of white people.
One time, Dad’s cinematographer friend, he told me that whenever he ran into some difficulty or some challenge making a movie, he would think back to growing up in Louisville and what the lighting was in those moments. He was all about using what lighting was available. If it was dark in a room he was filming in, like nighttime, then he would use Christmas lights, that sort of thing. Or he envisions the light in his aunt Mary’s kitchen. Told me whenever he had an issue or couldn’t figure something out, he would tap into those memories. [Inaudible]
I don’t know why I thought of that just now. Maybe it’s just all this talk about what the South meant to me at that time. Maybe what it meant to a lot of us. I grew up in the North too; they had their prejudice. Whenever some white politician would roll back women’s rights—and you’d have a white woman governor signing an abortion ban into law, stuff like that or when a cyber police budget would get approved and those fucking robot dogs would show up on our block or a school had to shut down because the state government got lax about virus stuff—people would be like “oh we should burn down Alabama” or “Mississippi is just a buncha hicks” or “Georgia should go ahead and secede if they wanna go back to the Dark Ages,” as though there weren’t all kinds of Black people fighting for their lives against all the white folk trying to kill them down there.
So after I left that tech job, I headed down South and that’s where the stupid thing happened. Actually happened on the way there, but there’s no need to get into all that. But yeah, I was in my early thirties the first time I saw the inside of a prison.
THE carriage stops.
One of the Negroes in the wagon up ahead, monstrous, steel-formed giant of a man, staggers off the wagon bench into the brush by the side of the path, coughing blood into his palm until he stops and vomits over some cacti. That tax you get for walkin’ around this radiation-ridden plateau gotta get paid somehow. Even if you got augments.
He heaves again, chunks in a stream of red and pink. Like he’s trying to expel the demons that God had stuffed into his body upon conception. May cancer kill him dead.
The nigger walks back to the wagon, still a giant, but one whom cancer has hollowed out, whose steps clang against the desert floor with an empty, excavated ring. A shell whose important parts have rotted away.
Two deputies flank the marshal on her bench, one of them holding the reins. And they chuckle to each other.
“I know that field,” the one on the marshal’s left remarks, pointing off past a rounded mound of sloping hill. He shifts his rifle between his legs as he talks. “Would come out with Joe in the mornin’s before chores and shoot off a couple rounds to get good.”
“What’d you do that for? Nothin’ to hunt here in these parts ’cept coyote. And I’ll be goddamned if you went and picked up a taste for coyote.”
The first deputy shrugs. “Wasn’t about eatin’ what we shot, really. More ’bout shootin’ it and nothin’ else.”
“Shootin’ just ’cause?”
“Shootin’ just ’cause.”
“You think that big fella’s gonna make it all the way till sunup?”
“I wouldn’t bet against it.”
“It or him?”
“Whatchu mean?”
“When you said you wouldn’t bet against it? That mean his livin’ or his dyin’?”
“His livin’.”
“That so?”
“You seen the size of ’im. Could probably beat a steam drill just like that John Hardy fella.”
“You mean John Henry.”
“Do I?”
“John Henry’s the fella beat the steam drill. Hardy was a gambler.”
