🕯️🕯️"Goliath" by Tochi Onyebuchi

WE are fed tough strips of meat that taste like what I imagine coyote would taste like and given milk in small glass jars. The sheriff and a few deputies hold congress in the adjacent kitchen and in their talk is all the gruff politesse of men at work, men who are always at work, men for whom work is sustenance, breathing. Though to imagine that sheriff doing anything more strenuous than eating a pastry nudges a few chuckles out of me. The place looks bigger on the inside than its outside promised, but I still have to curl my legs at the knees to provide space for the lawmen that sit with me and the marshal, who, by now, has joined us inside.

“Tough livin’ out here, I imagine,” says the sheriff in the other room, stating the obvious. “Noble of y’all to make a go of it like this.”

“We do well enough,” the invocation to God parenthetical in the homesteader’s graveled voice.

“Coyotes a problem for y’all?”

The homesteader shifts in his seat, announced by the rustling of his overalls. “Not more than’s expected.”

“Mmm.” The sheriff munches on something. “Good milk here.”

“Thank you.”

And so it goes, back and forth, without substance until talk migrates to the future and what westward expansion might portend for these folks on the outskirts of Eden County. One of the niggers outside starts coughing up a lung again and everyone quiets until he’s finished, or dies, by the sound of it, then picks back up again. The marshal reclines against a wall, standing, rifle cradled in her arms. Some of the deputies recline where they sit, pistol-belts loosened or wrapped and lying next to them on the wooden floor, while they finish eating and some of them slouch in slumber. I feel the marshal drilling a hole in my back with her stare, and that’s when I notice I’d been eyeing a deputy’s loose guns. The pistols fit snugly in their holsters. I look away and bring the glass jar I’m holding to my lips and realize it is already empty. Guess I’m determined to look like a fool.

“And you can bet your ass on my word that I’ve got no more love for them Charleston suit-and-tie guttersnakes than I do for them scorpions I’m always pickin’ outta my boots every morning,” bellows the sheriff. “Parasites, always tryin’ to stick their hands in the next man’s pockets, ’stead of building what they need they own damned selves. And not stoppin’ of course until every parcel of land is subject to their whims and wishes as scribbled out on them parchments they dare to call laws in this part of the world. Last I heard, they’re regulatin’ where you can and can’t set up a dome, protect yourself from the radiation. Think they can put a price tag on good air.”

“Yeah, that don’t carry too much truck down here.”

“Give it time.” Takes a drink. “Give it time.” He stifles a belch, sighs. “Don’t understand that hard work’s a God-ordained virtue.”

Not knowing, I want to tell the homesteader before sleep takes me, that God originally intended it as punishment.

[May 18th, 20—, 1:22 a.m.]

Anyway, the guys beat the shit outta most of the COs, but this older guy throws his body on top of one of the guards to keep him from getting hurt too bad, and a couple of the other guys do the same. He looked like the type of guy if you asked why he did it, he’d say he done seen enough violence in his life, that sort of thing. By now, we’ve got a hold of everybody’s keys, so we’re jamming them in, trying to unlock the gate into the yard. At that point, people just start streaming out. Like it’s a flood. Me and the older guy, we lock some of the guards in an office room on the upper floor, mostly for their own safety. They could still radio their buddies in the other dorms, let them know what was up. But for some reason, I don’t know why, they didn’t. I mean, this had happened a few years prior, prison riot that killed about seven of us. None of the guards were hurt, but it was just some typical gang stuff. Thing is, it broke out in multiple dorms at the same time. Maybe like three of them. So it’s not like this type of thing could never happen. That whole thing ended with a bunch of bodies piled on top of each other by the barbed wire ringing the whole prison. That’s how that sorta thing squares out in Gladden.

Anyway, guys are streaming into the yard and they catch people right after the mess hour, so a bunch of people still haven’t made it back to their dorms. Somebody shouts that we’re taking over this place, and that’s all it takes. Wasn’t nothin’ coordinated. But I’m still in my tunnel. And I see one of the guards has been hurt real bad. Probably a head wound. Bleedin’ from his nose, mouth, all over his face. And kinda shaking on the ground. Me and the older fella pick him up and carry him all the way to the admin building, which we can walk to freely at this point. We try to get his name, but he ain’t in any condition to talk. So when we get to the main admin building, we can only bang on the door and say we got a guard here that needs help. There’s enough glass in the building for the admin people to see that there’re a lot of inmates that aren’t where they should be right now, and they know something’s goin’ down. Found out later that the alarm wouldn’t go off for ten minutes. Which means all the chaos that happened happened in less than ten minutes. We’re banging on the door trying to get this guy help, but they’re just staring at us. Warden’s in there, I think. Prison superintendent. Bunch of the head guys.

Musta taken us a whole ’nother ten minutes for them to open the door and take him in. I’m pretty sure if they’d done it sooner, the poor guy woulda lived. Then again, he mighta died during what happened after. Or he mighta died from the food or water we were given. Ain’t no tellin’. All I know is that when the guys would find out, that would be it. We’d have the death of a CO on our sheet. That’s murder. And they’d get all of us on it, no matter if we’d hit the guy or not. Me and this older fella too.

We get back and there’s almost fifteen hundred inmates in the main yard. They’ve taken over the Spine, and it looks like a bunch of the dorms are wide open. Still, there’s this weird calm over the place. Not, like, calm. But order. Time gets real weird around this point. Real elastic, because all of a sudden, it’s the afternoon. And stuff’s been set up. I don’t know where the guys got these supplies, probably from the metal shop and the various offices and whatnot they had access to during the rumble. Because someone’s set up a table and there’s a bunch of medical supplies stashed under it and around it. And another table’s been set up, and somehow [laughter] somebody set up a speaker system and a microphone! Like it was a block party!

At the time, it didn’t feel like the calm before the storm. It felt more like some sort of validation. I came out worried that some race war was gonna break out. You could see how the whites were sorta separating themselves from the rest of us. But you get a little closer and try to see if maybe you gotta get more almost-dead COs to the admin building, and you get there and you see that there’s this circle of Black and Arab fellas, and they’re facing out. They’d made this sort of protective circle around the hostages. Yeah. That’s what the COs and prison staff out in the yard were now. Hostages.

I get there and, suddenly, the old fella’s not at my side anymore. He’s standing up on this table with a microphone and he’s speaking. And you could tell he was from around here. Super South Carolina dude. Said it was time to come together, put aside our racial differences. That we were in a special situation. We had power. And we could use it for petty stuff, getting revenge on people who wronged us here, gettin’ high tryin’ to forget our worries or forget the fact that this was where we were. Or we could band together and help make things better for all of us. “They have to listen to us now,” he said. “They got no choice.” I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to get through to all of us who weren’t already in the bathrooms shooting up or who hadn’t already started raping smaller inmates we mighta had our eye on for a while. And then a couple other guys got on the table and started talking and introducing themselves. Couple of them were transfers. Two were Black Panthers, a couple started out as community organizers in places like Ferguson and Milwaukee, fella from Oakland, type of folks to have had tear gas shot at them by police. Coulda come from the same middle-class households as me, just got caught in the dragnet and thrown here. There was a guy from the Young Lords, who repped the Spanish set. And there was some white Marxist cat. Sam something. Started with an M. We called him Red. Anyway, the old guy gives his speech in the beginning, then at the end, he announces that they’re setting up a counsel and negotiation team. People can volunteer and people can nominate others. I don’t know why, but I volunteer. Maybe goin’ to Yale had convinced me I was some kinda smart dude. But I know I wasn’t like the transfers who had actual negotiating experience, you know, dealing with the folks at their old facility. I think a reason nobody had a problem with me joining was because I didn’t have beef with nobody. Wasn’t a part of any crew. Managed to keep my nose clean and all that. Matter of fact, I was pretty well liked. I’m just assuming that last part. Sometimes it doesn’t mean people are doing nice things for you. Sometimes, it just means that people aren’t doing you harm.

One of the Black Muslims, Rasool, he ends up being the chief medical guy and he organizes trips to the sick bay to get medical supplies. Far as I knew, he wasn’t any kind of doctor. But he knew there were guys that needed treatment for things like diabetes and Rona stuff and other long-term-type illnesses. Then there was the issue of the sores and the vomiting that had hit a bunch of us. Pretty soon, though, he’s got it all pretty under control. I guess, you give a guy a chance, he can rise to the occasion.

Before the day was done, though, we’d started seeing a response. One of the dorms had been retaken by police or prison guards or the army or whatever. Think it mighta been the Goon Squad. During the initial chaos, we’d been fuckin’ afraid of them. Terrified. No-mercy type cats. They wouldn’t beat you, they’d cripple you. They don’t see no kinda response except just short of lethal. And I guarantee you: quite a few of our guys who died before and after this died specifically because of the Goon Squad. If they could, they’d chop our heads off and put them on spikes outside the prison. They had sharpshooters on the roof, and I didn’t even want to think about what was happening to the prisoners still locked in there. For sure, their dorm was on lockdown. Pretty sure the whole prison was, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that, say, they’d even cut off the water or whatever. Electricity, water, all of it. That mighta actually saved a bunch of them from what was coming.

We figured them retaking the prison was inevitable. Just a matter of when and not if. You could already hear police sirens wailing on the other side of the barbed wire. Didn’t seem to faze the security team, who had taken to wearing red armbands. Saladin was the head of the security team. He was the guy made sure everyone was safe. Everyone. Hostages and the rest of us. Woulda been too easy to let everything go sideways. Lord knows some of us wanted it, but maybe that’s why the Lord saw fit to put others in charge.

They set up tents in the yard and made sure everyone got fed from basically what was a community bucket filled with things that people went and swiped from commissary. Candy bars, sandwiches, juice boxes. Imagine what it feels like to eat for free what you used to pay an arm and a leg to get. I bet you think we turned into gluttons, just wasting food and whatnot. But some of us couldn’t get it into our heads that we deserved more than we took. Some of us barely took anything, just a little more than our usual portion or what we could normally afford. Sure, there’s some rebellion in that fact. But we just wanted to taste free, you know? In the back of your head, you know the bill’s gonna come due, and in the worst way possible, but you can’t let yourself get bogged down by that. Not in the moment. In that moment, you’re free. You can’t be thinking of the spiked cage they’re building for you.

CAYENNE feels, in the homestead’s embrace, an echo of home. Its heartbeat, recognized. As though, at any moment, Jacob might step in from another room, slouch against a doorjamb, hands in his pockets, and smirk.

The others are on the verge of sleep, some having already slipped beneath the lapping waves. The talk between the sheriff and the homesteader has softened and the gravediggers outside have ceased their shuffling and Cayenne imagines them maybe having a smoke and plotting their own mythology in the constellations above their nappy heads. When the lawmen recline, some of them with their hats over their faces, they carry the physical ease of children in their unconscious, a young boy’s understanding of his own limbs and the length to which they stretch, the perfect angle at which to pitch one’s back for comfort, the easing back of shoulders a man’s obligations have pushed up and forward. They are relaxed, and it is the first time she has seen them so.

Cayenne shakes away sleep. Her blood itches at the memories trapped here, someone else’s memories, someone else’s Pa putting that bench together and someone else’s Mama working in the garden, her dress pooled in white around her kneeling form. It was another life. But Cayenne needs to watch the prisoner, who needs only a moment’s inattention to escape and never be found again.

Jacob was here. With his people to come and complete what the storms and flooding and fire and red dust had started. To cleanse the land. Maybe this had once been a town with a town hall and a grocery store and maybe a strip mall and a Main Street and homes populated with white folk a world away from the tornadoes and hurricanes up north and the flooding and the earthquakes and the fires everywhere else. And maybe Jacob remembered what Marauders had done to people who looked like him, and maybe he’d felt like these white folk had needed reminding.

Voices quiet into silence, the lawmen descend further into slumber. But out of the kitchen, a glow hovers, moving slowly through the air until it has entered the main sitting room. Cayenne blinks at it and only after a few moments of confusion sees the figure of the girl silhouetted by the oil lamp’s flush. She does not recognize her from the faces that stirred in the window upon their arrival. This one is different and floats more than walks. Glides.

Jacob slouches inside her, hungry.

The girl drifts to the farthest of the sleeping deputies and as she nears, the young man stirs awake and, upon opening his eyes, gapes at the girl for several seconds. He appears caught in a trance, unbelieving of this thing standing in front of him, this evidence of celestial design. She leans forward, her lamp balanced on a tray that also holds up small glasses of warm milk. And the deputy, seeing her offering, takes a glass, all the while wondering at her face and the expressionless luminescence that gilds it.

She is this way with all of them.

Their nap, when they loosened the stole of steely masculinity from their shoulders, was the only precursor to this vision, preparation. They see her and, one by one, they are children again, faces drained of skepticism and flint and filled instead with bewilderment and awe. Did Lincoln ever look at anything like that? she wonders, before biting her lip against the wondering.

Jacob unfurls his claws, Cayenne feels the movement scrape her insides. The girl draws near. Leans forward with neither smile nor frown on her face and offers the tray, which holds only a few remaining glasses. Cayenne hazards a glimpse into her eyes, amber flecked with minims of green and shards of morning. Each of the lawmen, upon holding silent communion with her, had been startled into a posture of recognition, of remembrance, and Cayenne feels herself drawn to the same angle.

The girl then serves the slaver a glass of warm milk and Cayenne watches her fold the tray against her chest and, lamp held at her side, vanish into another room. The prisoner smiles at the girl, and Cayenne takes consolation in that exchange. She decides she won’t watch that white man hang in Ohio.

[May 18th, 20—, 1:52 a.m.]

The negotiation team has pretty much all its members, but they wanted to have a better process for putting together their council. Wanted a person from every dorm that was present to be represented, and you could volunteer, but you had to be elected. Once that was settled, they kinda let anybody take the microphone for a bit. That thing hardly went untouched. People made all kinds of speeches. Some were really out there, but some of those fellas, well, they coulda been preachers in another life. This goes on for a while, and you can tell some of the guys are starting to tune it out and figure out what it is they want specifically. But then it comes together pretty quickly that the next step is to write up demands.

I get picked. That’s when I got the nickname “Yale.” Plenty of the other guys in there had gone to college, some had finished enough course credits there or in other facilities to be able to graduate or whatever, but I think I mighta been the only Yalie in Gladden Correctional Institution. So they go, “Let’s have Yale do it!” So me and a white guy, Heath, we put our heads together and basically take all the cacophony and chaos of the past, maybe five hours, and turn it into a list of twelve demands. We were typing, sure, but we also had to be decision makers and translators. Somebody’s talking about how the food they get served is against their religion, we gotta translate that into “non-pork diet for select inmates” or if someone’s complaining that when we get out, it’s impossible to get back into school, we write “better communication with academic institutions to allow for transfer of credits.” Also, these issues had to be voted on. In this new “spirit of togetherness” [laughter], you can’t let it seem like one person or one group is getting privileged over another. We know what that looks like because the COs do it all the time. And we also know how fragile this whole thing is. It’s funny. Sometimes you have an idea of what you’re taking part in, that it’s history. Mom and Dad talked about that, growing up during a pandemic when the whole country was basically falling apart. Sometimes, you know you’re living through a chapter in a history book. But sometimes you’re just thinking about the next day or how you’re going to get through the next minute. Prison collapses time like that. Somebody stupid once said you only do two days, the day you get in and the day you get out. Now if that ain’t the dumbest shit I ever heard in my life! [Laughter] You do every single goddamn day of your sentence! Anyway, I say all that because this Heath cat keeps saying “Attica, Attica, it’s just like Attica” over and over and over! Just “Attica, Attica, it’s just like Attica!” I’m just like “my man, calm down, we gotta get this list out or this whole thing goes sideways.”

Apparently, at some point while we were doing this, the superintendent got on a bullhorn and demanded to know what the hell was going on. So a delegation got sent, and apparently it was four or five guys tricked out in face shields like the Goon Squad had and, like, makeshift bats, kinda for protection but also kinda to protect their identities. And apparently when they got to the pathway, they all start talking at once and the super tells them to shut up, real fuckin’ mean. And there’s just silence, and they just stare at him. Then one of ’em, mighta been Red—he was a wild boy like that—he says, “We talk to the commissioner, or we talk to no one.” Just like that! [Laughter] The superintendent just storms off, and that’s that. And that ends up being why this list me and Heath are putting together is so important. We’re going to the commissioner. Straight to the commish.

The sirens outside the prison are far enough away that you can still hear people talking in the yard, but there’s another sound, softer, and you realize it’s cameras clicking. Reporters are here. Heath then comes up with this idea. Usually, if we needed to get info to our lawyer or a reporter or just online in general, like, up on the Socials, like a pic of our face after a CO beat us up or maybe blocked-up toilets or other evidence that what we was going through was damn near unconstitutional, you had to smuggle in a cell phone, snap the flicks, and somehow get the pics out to them. If they unblocked the wifi or data usage, then you could upload shit directly, but you needed, like, burner accounts on the Socials for that. Direct communication was always safer. You could text, or sometimes even find a way to upload them onto a computer at a workstation and send a bunch of files. But they been cracking down on illegal cell phones and blocking the wifi, so that got too tough after a while. Here, though, we had the chance to bring the news to us. And now it was them talking about “Attica, Attica” and that’s when it starts to set in that maybe this is one of those history moments too. So we were able to get word out that reporters were welcome and their safety was guaranteed. You could probably guess how skeptical they mighta been. Their whole idea of Gladden was that a year or two back, we’d had a gang riot where seven dudes died. We’re the most violent max in the whole state. Everyone’s afraid of us. All together, we’re the boogieman. So they weren’t the first people to see us. First person to see us was actually the commish.

We couldn’t really believe it when he came through. I know there musta been some negotiations and stuff that happened between the team and the admin staff, stuff above my pay grade. [Inaudible] But sure enough, out the admin building and into the yard, flanked by this huge, ’roided security team, actually surrounded on all sides by those dudes, is the commish. Bald head, kinda skinny dude with a little bit of a belly. Doesn’t look too much like a supervillain in a movie. Has a kinder face than you’d expect on someone in his position. Turns out, he was new to the post, which might explain why he didn’t yet have that hardness you get in the face. Maybe one of those people who thought he could turn the place around, so to speak. Make some real reforms or whatever. And, well, if that don’t get beat outta you quick … [Laughter]