“Naw, I heard it in a song—”
“Well, you heard it wrong. And I got about a dozen friends and family members back in Talcott, West Virginia, willin’ to tell you so to your face.”
Time was, they coulda just looked it up on a computer.
The first deputy shrugs again. “All right.” He spits. The jet of sputum shoots out like a train from a tunnel, disappears, and lands with a splat against a rock. “Still wouldn’t bet against it.”
The rolling of the wheels over the desert’s debris becomes its own lullaby music until it stops and the marshal is standing at the carriage’s side, waiting for me to step out. She has rope in her hands and when she binds my wrists, I don’t protest. I imagine she is pretty sore about the last stop.
She walks me out the carriage and one of the deputies walks with us as we cut a path through the sharp-bladed desert grass and sagebrush that tower like sentinels over their arid fiefdom. We walk until the caravan is out of sight and the way the deputy cradles his rifle makes me wonder if I might have to dig my own grave out here soon. Cheatgrass and Mexican horsetail scratch at my ankles and I am glad when we stop, but that gladness flees me when I see the well not ten meters away. The others wait for me to say something, to verify that their suspicions are correct and that somewhere in this vicinity a body is buried, to plead for mercy having been spiritually aggravated by proximity to my crime, I dunno. But whatever it is, I don’t do it, and the marshal sees that I won’t, so she sniffs, her deputy spits, and she says, “It ain’t here, either, is it.”
And I look around because I feel I owe them that much, then shake my head.
The marshal turns to lead me back, but the deputy stops me.
“We could be standin’ on that boy’s grave right now, not knowin’ it, and this guy’s laughin’ at us. How you know he ain’t full of shit right now?”
The marshal turns to me. “Are you?”
I shrug. “I was drunk when it happened. And it was dark out.” I look around at the mounds that seem to be, in the light from the deputy’s lantern, constantly changing shape. I’m sober as a stone, but it all looks like a massive dreamscape. None of the lines stay still.
“You sure ’bout a well bein’ there?” the marshal asks, not seeming the least bit exasperated with me.
“I, I don’t know. There mighta been.”
“And there mighta not been,” the marshal says to herself, and that ends the conversation.
Silence burdens the air between us before the marshal brings me back to my carriage and leaves me to go talk with her deputy, who hasn’t moved and who wears a look of indignant obstinacy on his mug. Even from where I stand, I can hear the sheriff snoring a few wagons ahead, face engulfed by hat, fingers laced across his chest, boots up on the bench in front of him in the wagon bed. The niggers speak in hushed tones above me, either not caring that I can hear or not knowing I can.
“You think the sheriff’s gonna realize how far gone we are?” the first asks.
“Fool’s fast asleep. I were in the same car as him, I’d kick ’im just to show you. Fool’d sleep through three thunderstorms in a row, wake up wonderin’ why the grass was so wet and who knocked them trees over. Fool can’t barely put his gun in his holster ’thout shootin’ hisself. How he gonna know we as far gone as we is?”
“I only bring it up ’cause that white man they say killed that lil’ boy, he might could go free if’n that body’s far ’nough out west. Ain’t no law there in the Territories.” He means Whiteland.
“Homesteaders, though.”
“White folks just as stupid as that sheriff, you ask me. Ain’t nothin’ out here but could get a man killed. And here they are just chasin’ it like a babe after candy. Don’t know nothin’ but violence.”
The second groans. “You start philosophizin’ again, I’m f’in to walk back.”
“We get out into other counties, we’ll be walkin’ back anyhow.”
“Maybe we won’t have to dig none. Shit, it’s hotter than all get-out.”
“Nigger, we ain’t that lucky.” The first harrumphs. “Ain’t got that white man’s luck.” His voice dips, as though he’s hiding it even from his companion now. “White man can go and get drunk as he want, shoot a free no-Special-type nigger ain’t do him no kinda harm, and have us niggers sweatin’ till the Third Comin’ chasin’ our own tails, diggin’ holes in the goddamned dirt while he snickers at them that caught ’im. I tell you, two bits says we don’t find no kinda body out here.”
“You willin’ to bet your pay on that?”
What did it matter? The sheriff is oblivious to the fact that we sit at the ambit of his dominion, that if we keep on for much longer, whatever body gets found would mean nothing in the case for me hanging. The part of me that loves hearing myself talk wants to nudge the man awake and warn him, wants to skirt a little closer to the quicksand’s epicenter, but learned prudence keeps my mouth shut.
[May 17th, 20—, 11:56 p.m.]
They had me at Gladden Correctional in South Carolina. Bishopville. In Lee County. Largest max in the state, and it had eight other prisons to compete with. Here’s a thing about South Carolina, at least at the time: one in ten prisoners was servin’ a life sentence. If you were doing a long bid, you had to do at least 85 percent of your time. That’s automatic. No getting around that. You could be an angel on the inside, no getting around that 85 percent. If you got twenty years or more on a felony charge, you ain’t gettin’ out till maybe seventeen years later. If all goes well. And here’s something about Gladden specifically: year or two before I got there, seven inmates died in a riot. Apparently the deadliest in the twenty-five years prior. Quarter of a century. That’s where I was headed. No prior incarceration, no jail experience, no prior charges. Decade earlier, I was studying abroad in Paris. Hell, I went to Yale! Just … wrong place, wrong time, and there I go. You know what’s really wild about the whole thing? I’m still thinking about what this means for my student loans! [Laughter]
The riot mighta been after I got there, I’m not sure. This is where things start to get fuzzier. I was always stressed, practically to the point of breaking. Because, at that age, you have a pretty good idea of all the different ways you can be hurt. Physically, psychologically. You know your pain threshold, or you think you do. So you spend quite a bit of time wondering what it’s going to be like when you’re finally raped or whether or not you should do like in TV or the movies and walk up to the biggest guy in the yard and try to hit him just to prove you’re not the one they should mess with. Doesn’t occur to you that a big part of prison is the boredom, you know? The tedium of it. You don’t learn that till later, sometimes till too late. There’s all kinds of ways you can hurt. Another thing you realize is that a lot of the racism you mighta seen or experienced out there is milk and cookies compared to what’s waiting for you in here. It’s like the curtain’s raised on America in there and you see the country for what it really is. You see what people are like when you tell them to let go of their inhibitions. I ain’t never seen anybody hate another person the way a white South Carolina CO did beating a Black inmate with his nightstick on the causeway.
But there are things you pick up. Some of the guys who had phones would make these short little videos to put up on the socials and show people on the outside what it was like and how you could do certain things. Like how to make your own electrical unit. They used to be called “droppers” back in the day. Like, way back. Like, Attica-back. And what you’d do is you’d take two razor blades like this, see? And you’d put matchsticks between them and wrap them together with string or thread, whichever you had near. Take a paper clip to hook a piece of lamp cord to the thing, then place the whole thing in water and boom. You got yourself a heater. What’s the process? Electrolysis? Yeah, that. The heaters were contraband only when the COs felt like giving you a hard time. But being caught with one could get you put in AdSeg. Or sometimes, instead of AdSeg, they’d just lock you in your cell. They did that sometimes when solitary was too full. Figured it was about the same. But things were just inconsistent a lot of the time. You thought you knew how a CO was, whether this was one of the hard-asses or this was a guy who respected you if you paid him respect, then they’d turn around and dock you for something they let slide a week or two ago. Even the guys who’d been there a while, it got to them too. Because you figure a man can endure just about any routine. But it’s the back-and-forth of it that gets to him. The fickleness. If the only constant is chaos, then you’re always primed for static. If nobody’s gonna give you peace, ever, then you gotta be ready for blood all the time. And if you took anybody’s blood pressure at Gladden, you woulda broke your machine or whatever.
I heard how it used to be. Like at Attica in the 1970s. Nobody who was alive then was alive now, but these things get passed down.
The state only gave you this thin gray coat, two work shirts, three pairs of pants, one pair of shoes, three pairs of underwear, six pairs of socks, and one comb. Everything that could be gray was gray. Then, once a month, you’d get a bar of soap and a roll of toilet paper. One roll. That’s all you got for free. You can’t even say they fed you. You just get used to going to bed hungry. That’s why you angle for jobs in the kitchen or mess hall. Sure, it’s seven days a week rather than five or two or whatever, but at least you can get some leftovers. To get anything more than that, toothpaste, deodorant, extra toilet paper, you needed money. You wanted to call your loved ones or have them call you? You needed money. Hell, sometimes you even needed to grease a palm to get visitation rights back. So you worked or you hustled or both.
Going to prison at that time was like going back in time. On the outside, smartphones and cyberization and Colonies, and on the inside, concrete and transistor radios. [Laughter] You could ask for magazines or books and there were some organizations that made it their mission to send stuff to you. But especially after the latest wave of protests and riots and stuff on the outside, they got real old school about all that. In theory, everybody’s mail could get censored. Or opened. Letters got thrown away. Stuff blacked out. Every time a magazine was sent in, it had to go through the administrative committee who would review it. But if you were Black and put in a request, more likely than not, it wound up on the prohibited list. It was like that for a lot of the Arabs there too. Almost nothin’ we wanted made it past the mail room. My heart went out to the Puerto Ricans and the Guatemalans there. Anything written in Spanish got thrown out immediately. Couldn’t have no common-law wives or husbands come in or any kids you had with them.
One cat in there, Puerto Rican cat, had me help smuggle this letter out for him. And you’re probably wondering if I read it already and whatnot to make some sort of judgment about the type of person I am who would read someone’s letter like that … but, yeah, I read it. [Laughter] He said for the person he was writing to not to write their name when they wrote back, so the letters won’t get confiscated. Because he was being retaliated against by some COs on some nonsense or something or other. He told this person he listened to WVOC or WDXY, one of the AM radio stations they got in Bishopville. Told this person he listens between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., because that was after dinner. Call in and the DJ will take requests. Even though it was a news talk station, they had this part of the night when they could let listeners call in with a message for somebody in one of the prisons. Ask them to play a song or just say hi. Just to hear the other person’s voice. They started it when the pandemic first hit, as a sort of goodwill thing because prisoners were dying left and right and the jails and whatnot wanted to put on a good face and stay open. So, if they could make sure everything was copacetic, they let the calls happen. Lot of people let up on the prisons after that. Anyway, the reason this is important—this story—is because he writes the other person’s name in the letter. Tries to be coy about it, but I can see, even with the Spanish sprinkled through, who this is headed for. It’s goin’ to Freddie. What do you think about that? Wild world, right? Freddie! The Puerto Rican cat I lived in Hartford with all those years back! Gave me even more questions about what Freddie’d been up to all this time. Anyway, I couldn’t turn around and tell this guy that I knew the dude he was writing to, otherwise, he’d know I read his letter. So it just stayed with me. Didn’t tell no one. And Freddie had no idea where I was or that I was in here and that he could write to me too. Just a little bit of cosmic choreography I had to keep to myself. Fella’s name was Joaquin, and it turns out, he’d been just a year or two before me. The story seemed to be that, for the most part, the prisoners did what they were told, all about trying to do their time and get out, right? And prison’s got routine for the most part, even if that routine happens to include regular opportunities for you to get the dogshit beat outta you by a CO or someone in another gang. But lately, there’d been a different crowd coming in. Some of them were new kids who got picked up off the street, some of them were transfers from out of state, and they were young. They were young, they knew what was going on in the world, and they knew what they were talking about. Could quote Mao and Malcolm but they’d read Audre Lorde too. bell hooks, Angela Davis, all of that. Their parents were protesters and activists and you could tell stuff was getting bad on the outside with the space stuff because of how these kids were coming in. And you’d see these cats standing up for themselves even when they didn’t have a gang of fellas with them and it was just them and the CO. Was like watching a white guy poke his finger in a cop’s face and tell him his taxes pay that man’s salary. It’s thrilling in that car-crash kinda way, know what I’m saying? Part of me, though, sees a brother and feels sick. Like, I know what’s in that kid’s future. And it was like that for a lot of ’em. But they didn’t bow. Some of them would get beaten damn near to paralysis. But they had this air about them. And it’s not like it was all them either. Them bein’ at Gladden unlocked something in the rest of us. You spend all that time cut off from the world, and you forget that almost right before you came in, it was normal for someone’s name to be a hashtag on the Twitter app and it come out that they’d been shot eleven times runnin’ away from a cop and that there was video evidence and that you had to watch that and that the cop would get off scot-free, first with paid vacation, then they’re back on their beat. So these kids were a reminder of that. And it’d get into this cycle. You had the CO decide to be a jerk. Then the kid would take it standing on his feet, and so would a bunch of the others. Then that’d make the CO get his posse and they’d come down even harder on the kids, who’d find their own way to respond. And you could tell it was making everyone antsy, because every CO there knows that their life and their safety depends on us prisoners feeling a sense of respect and that if we have a legitimate complaint, it’d fall into a willing ear. You lose that, then you’re one dude walking 120 inmates who don’t like you all the way to breakfast. But a lotta people are COs that got no business being COs. Not only that, your population of guards is pullin’ from the rural South Carolina job market? Lotta poor white people bein’ left behind while the planet’s gettin’ warmer and the rich folk are fuckin’ off to space. A lot of the bad stuff white folks did to Black folk, they did to these kids. Some of these kids came into here beyond hope. They watched their parents get spied on by police and picked up in unmarked vans. Had their first taste of first-gen toasters. They just knew how the whole system was. They knew, and they didn’t give a fuck. I think it just made them more likely to blow the whole place up. Ain’t no cage for their kind of angry.
CAYENNE startles. Shakes away the residue of Jacob’s shadow, which had darkened the corners of her vision.
The desert is empty before her.
That ringing in her chest sounds again, and even though she knows she is the only one to hear it, the sound ripples over the plateau, winds down the path that cuts through the hills and, like quicksilver, swallows the landscape until it is gone, and that invisible tugging that has so far led her to the horizon lessens and Jacob is no longer so loud a voice in her head that she can hear nothing else.
Behind her, the sheriff and one of Cayenne’s deputy marshals argue in hushed tones about how far they’ve traveled, the sheriff insisting they could not have already covered fifty miles, the deputy declaring that the sheriff had no way of knowing that they’d traveled fifty miles because he’d slept through most of them. They buzz back and forth at each other for several minutes as Cayenne leads the caravan. Then Cayenne hears the sheriff’s horse approach, prepares herself.
“How do we know this jackal’s not leadin’ us into an ambush, Marshal?”
“He ain’t had no chance to round up a posse.”
