Anyway, he’s surrounded by the security team, who bring him to the negotiation table, and I’m sitting right across from him. Everybody’s real cordial with him. Black even gets him a juicebox from the food pile. I notice that they made sure he had a clear view of our tents, our sick bay, and all the medicine we had to treat people. Made sure he saw how organized we were handing out food and water. We were organized! That’s how they wanted him to see we were. How we wanted, actually. You hear about this guy and the power he has over our lives and here’s a chance to make a real impression. He ain’t just a voice on the shortwave radio, he’s here sitting down right across from me, ready to negotiate. Oh, and they made sure he saw the hostages, all surrounded by their own security detail, those dudes I mentioned earlier who were facing outward, they had those stone faces on, not like they’re daring somebody to try them, but that they don’t have time to play around and that you test them at your own peril.
When we finally laid eyes on the commish, couple of the guys called him Stretch, and the name took. I wasn’t gonna call him that, but, for some reason, I can’t recall his name. So he’s gonna be Stretch in this story. Maybe Mr. Stretch if I’m feeling charitable. [Laughter]
First order of business was finding out why he hadn’t responded to our little manifesto earlier. A lotta work had gone into that document, and to be brushed off like that ticked a lot of us off. Made it seem like he was just entertaining us, not takin’ us seriously. He told us that he had [finger quotes] taken our demands under consideration. That’s what he called them: demands. But that the doc seemed just like a copy of some other stuff that’d been circulating in some California prisons around the same time or a little earlier. So, ultimately, he thought we were just making a ploy or whatever. Maybe he didn’t truly believe things were as bad as they were and how close we were to exploding at that time. He coulda prevented a lotta pain and broken bones by just listening to us, but you know how these things go. Whenever we try to talk about our demands, I’m talkin’ about the ones we sent out earlier during the uprising, he kept trying to move the discussion to the hostages. We made sure to let him know they were being taken care of. Fed, clothed, hydrated, protected. We made sure he had a good line of sight on them too. But that was all he wanted to talk about. We knew, though. We knew they were the only thing keeping us from getting pretty much killed. Without them, they woulda had no problems straight up storming the prison and leaving our blood on the walls.
That was a thing we asked him about. If he could take care of. Could you get some of the snipers off the roofs? Maybe scale back the police response? We figured we’d showed him that we weren’t a pack of animals. And, just under an hour after we started discussions, after he was getting ready to leave, I told him, in a low voice too, “You see, Stretch, we got you in and we’re getting you out unharmed. Ain’t nobody lay a finger on you the whole time you was here. Remember that.” Then he went back to his people, who I imagine weren’t too happy that he didn’t have the hostages with him. Easy to underestimate a bunch of convicts. Not just prison admin staff but even activists, reporters, all of them. They think they know what we need and want more than we do. Wanna tell our stories for us, because they think we can’t read or some shit like that. Like we’re primitive thinkers, like we got no sophistication or nothin’ like that. Anyway, our sophistication kept us alive that day. And not only did Stretch get the police to pull back a little bit, but he even got the water running again. Some of the pipes got damaged in the initial riot. We also had him check in on some of our friends who were being held in solitary and who we hadn’t heard from. Next time he came to us, he had a couple reporters with him. I think they saw him come back unscathed and figured their chances were pretty good. The Columbia Record, The Sun, Greenville News, New York Times, even someone from USA Today. Prison still wasn’t allowing any drones in the airspace over the facility, so it could only be on-the-ground footage. There mighta been some other smaller pubs in there, some online joints, but we didn’t care. We were ready to answer whatever questions anybody had for us. Some of the reporters were cyberized, but because they didn’t have to go through any metal detectors, they got in and could snap flicks of everything that was going on. Beamed some of that shit straight up to the Colonies, I heard.
Didn’t matter who we talked to, just as long as we got the word out about the big thing that was happening here. The extraordinary thing. Samson was in this prison. We were Samson. You know the story of Samson? In the Bible? Mighta seemed like we had small ambitions at first, and I don’t know about the others, but I started to feel like maybe, just maybe, we could bring this place down. Not actually bring it down but make it livable. Turn it from the hellhole it was into something you could walk into and still maintain a sense of dignity. Me feeling this had nothin’ to do with the reading or the education I had before I got in here. Had nothin’ to do with the type of life I lived beforehand. Because I think everybody comes to prison, deep down, wanting that. Or at least some version of that. Who comes to prison wantin’ to be turned into an animal?
OUTSIDE, she visits the gravediggers who hold counsel with the stars, their kinfolk.
[May 18th, 20—, 2:51 a.m.]
The old man, one who’d helped me carry that injured CO to the admin building, he said as much. Right when the newscasters and everyone got to the center of the yard, he—the old man—got up on the table with the microphone. Said he was speaking to the people of the United States of America. I don’t remember his exact wording, but I remember how the speech he gave made me feel. Everybody was quiet. You could hear a pin drop. Was like nobody was even breathing. And he goes into how we’d asked the prison administration for many things, but they’d only given us murder and brutalization. That’s what he said: “brutalization.” He told them, “We are men. We are not beasts. All of us, every single man in this facility, is worthy of dignity and humane treatment. This isn’t the beginning, this is merely the continuation. We have set out to change the conditions of our confinement and resist the way in which our bodies are brutalized and discarded. We are not disposable. We are not beasts. Listen when we tell you this. We will be seen. And we will be heard.” There was more, some of it was about our specific demands, some of it went into his own background, growin’ up local, in South Carolina, and seein’ how climate change was fuckin’ up his home and how Black people were bearing the brunt of it. But that’s the part that stuck out to me. Made sense that he was a preacher’s son. He had that bearing about him. A little bit showy but really feelin’ like he was being guided by a higher purpose. Kinda like what they talk about in AA. You may not feel it while it’s moving you, but you look back and see that you were being guided by this current winding through your life. It’s carrying you. And you feel it best when you submit to it. That’s what I think the old man felt he was doing, submitting to this higher purpose. You could tell it in the way he spoke. His voice didn’t crack, wasn’t dry from the poisoned water we’d been drinking, he didn’t sound weak from the infected food we’d been getting all summer and going into that September. That was our Samson right there. Short hair too. [Laughter] You could feel him pressed up against the pillars of the temple, everybody crowded around him, police watching, even from their drones in the sky. And you could see him pushin’ and gettin’ ready to bring the whole place down.
After that round of negotiations broke down, some of us were kinda scared that the concessions we’d won—like getting the water running again and establishing food lines—might get taken away. But then talk reached us that they were gonna send a doctor in to check in on the hostages. Not only that, but some local politicians were gonna be coming through. It really felt like a weight was being lifted from us. Every time we looked at the roofs or even outside the barbed wire around the prison, seemed like there were fewer police and army folk. The reporters had thinned out a little bit too, but we didn’t think it was ’cause they weren’t interested in us. Maybe they just went somewhere we couldn’t see. Or they were able to let drones in to record everything.
Outside, you could feel the wind. Like, really feel it. I realize now that was ’cause it was starting to pick up. It was howling a bit and some of us wondered if that was why it felt harder for us to hear each other. They sent a doctor in, not one of the doctors that had already worked in the prison. Those bitch-ass niggas couldn’t give a fuck about us when we saw them, whether we needed psych meds or a tooth had rotted in our mouths. There were even stories that they experimented on some of the inmates, sterilized them without their knowing, infected them with all sorts of shit. Anyway, this doc was a new doc. I think he was from a nearby hospital. Anyway, he came in and saw that we’d already put sutures on those who needed it and splinted fractures and all types of stuff. Rasool was in on a murder rap, he was never gonna see the outside of this place. But Doc trusted him enough to send him back and forth for supplies and to help take care of the hostages and the people who needed it. Watching them work together was some kind of magical. You shoulda seen it. Like two peas in a pod. Just straight business. You watch that and it’s like you’ve opened a portal to some parallel universe right next to ours, and you’re lookin’ at what coulda been. Pretty soon, the doc leaves, and it’s just us.
It’d gotten dark and the wind picked up and it was drizzling a little bit. But everybody pretty much decided to sleep in the yard. If we was gonna get attacked, let us at least see it coming. Remember that weight I was talkin’ about? The one being lifted? You really felt it come up off you now. There was guys in there hugging, somebody started up a drum circle. At one point, you could hear singing, real barbershop-quartet type stuff. I saw Heath wiping his eyes at one point, just kinda standing by himself. He was sniffling and he’d either just finished cryin’ or was about to start. Maybe both. I asked him what happened, figured maybe he just got some bad news about family or somethin’, and he just kinda stood there for a moment, glowing a little bit, and he looked up at me and just said it’d been so long since he’d been able to get close to someone … I’m sorry. I’m just … remembering that night. Before so many of us died turning back to look at what had happened to us. Just … that night.
Anyway … later that night, the old man found me and just kinda stood with me. All my time there, people had been fascinated with me on account of my background. Some people thought I made up the whole Yale thing, but other people would latch on just to hear my story like I was some exotic animal, but the old man, he wasn’t like that. He was sure of himself, you know?
You know what he tells me? I’ll never forget. The rain was starting to come down pretty hard, and the wind was gettin’ really loud, and it wasn’t like he was raising his voice or projecting or nothing like that. Matter of fact, he’s speakin’ real low. And he goes, “It’s been so long since I’d seen stars. It feels good. Like a blessing.” He gets quiet, then he says, “Story says that there weren’t even ten good men in Sodom and Gomorrah. I think there were. And I think before the fire came down, they got a good look at those stars. They felt loved. I believe that.”
THE marshal has my ropes wrapped around one fist. Hat tight on her brim, she leads me forward toward the glowing purlieu. The sun is coming, and the sky blues along the horizon toward which we move. Horses clip-clop behind and alongside us. My steps have no more energy in them. The marshal seems in about the same condition as me, driven more by inertia than any other propulsive force. As much as this landscape resembles anything we have walked through before, it is different, sparks a deeper recognition. The marshal doesn’t resemble that Spook child at all, but I’d had the kid that many paces ahead of me when we’d last taken this trail.
Air sizzles around us the farther into the desert we amble. No one speaks, but I take it everyone assumes I’m leading us the right way. It feels right. And if they feel I am deceiving them, it wouldn’t be a thing for them to kill me and bury me right here where no one would ever know I’d once been alive. A beetle tips itself over, slipping from a rock and landing on its shelled back, sharp, segmented legs clawing the air for purchase. A vulture cries. When I look up to see where the call had come from, there isn’t a bird to be found.
We all look ahead to see three black dogs gnawing at a small off-white cloth protruding from the earth. The sheriff fires a round into the air, startling the dogs, and when they see we aren’t going to alter our course, they skulk away. I notice now that we have entered a small valley through which runs a barely breathing river.
The sheriff calls out to the gravediggers and they answer by running with their shovels, the big former steel driver trailing behind them, toward where the chewed thing stands erect. When we see that it’s the toe of a boot, we all quicken our pace and pretty soon we form a loose circle around it.
Rain has churned the soil since the last time I’d been here, raised some parts and buried others, and maybe that’s how the body came up like that amid patches of moss and errant greenery. I recognize the pattern along the sides of the upturned boot-toe. We all stop at the thing and look at it for some time, then the marshal snaps to attention and cannons out an order and the gravediggers begin disinterring the body.
“Careful, watch the head. Don’t damage the head, you stupid. Dig around the body.” The sheriff skirts the edge of the makeshift tomb like a housecat searching for the right angle of attack. The gravediggers mumble to each other as they work in a language discernible only to themselves, one of them setting about where the head’s buried and the others angling around the erupted earth by the foot, caving the ground away to reveal the rest of the leg and the other foot as well.
“Now, go on and get the sack,” the sheriff says to one of the marshal’s deputies, who looks to another among the deputies, who in turn looks to another, silent accusations in each gaze. The sheriff, upon seeing that no one has moved, gazes in befuddlement at the young men, all of whom shrug when his eye falls upon them and who, in the face of his mounting anger, struggle to hold back renegade chuckles.
“Can’t believe this horseshit. You mean to tell me none of yous had the wherewithal to bring the sack with you when we mounted up outta Oberlin?”
Nope, their expressions say.
“Christ a’mighty.” He paces. Stops. “Well, get the rug, then. We’ll wrap him up in the rug. Lord knows, he ain’t ridin’ in my carriage.” The deputies sour, and the sheriff turns to the body that has now been, for the most part, excavated.
I expected the nigger boy’s eyes to be gone, plucked out and eaten by one animal or another, but there they are, agape in wonder at the sky they’re finally getting to see. The gravediggers carve out the sides of the makeshift grave and stop when they hit metal, look at each other, then at the sheriff, and resume digging until they’ve unearthed a rusted shovel. Everyone stops moving and the sheriff looks at me with something akin to horror on his face. The deputies stop their banter. Even the marshal looks at me as if I were something new and alien to her, like we hadn’t spent all that time on the train together. And the question hovers in the air over us.
You made that boy dig his own grave?
I show no remorse because I am past that, merely sniff and spit at the ground. Rope burns my wrists.
The gravediggers toss all the shovels out over the edge and one of them climbs out and positions himself to catch the body when they roll it up. The deputies arrive with the rug that had served as a placemat for some of them during the ride. It unfurls by the nigger standing over the grave and the two other gravediggers, one of them the cancer-ridden giant, lift the corpse, twice nearly dropping it, and roll it onto the rug. It’s smaller than I remember. They climb out and start rolling up the body, when the sheriff shouts, “Wait a minute. Just wait a minute.” Pointing to one of his underlings, “Go get me some parchment and some stove polish. And a bench too, or somethin’ to write on.”
I still remember a time when we typed things on tablet screens with our fingers. Christ, I’ve gotten old.
The kid dashes away, returning in a few moments with a makeshift writing station. He kneels on the desert ground, back erect, with the small cardboard box holding the paper down. After a moment, he undoes his gun belt and lays it neatly at his side, then relaxes into his posture.
“You ready?”
The kid nods. Everyone but the kid stands in an aspect of reverence, like scattered penitents of a church congregation finally gathered in the presence of a process bigger than themselves.
“Date: the eighteenth of July in the year of our Lord twenty fifty—” Dogs bark and I don’t catch the rest. We wait. The dogs stop. “Location: Eden County, Texas.” He looks to one of the suited men, probably a magistrate or a magistrate’s errand-boy, for confirmation. And when one of the marshal’s deputies nods, the errand-boy nods too.
I shuffle my feet, suddenly bored.
“The deceased, Absalom Clark Morgan, aged”—a pause, then aside to one of his factotums—“how old are we sayin’ here?”
“Does the prisoner not know?”
The sheriff regards me. “How ol’ was he? General range-like.”
I shrug. Gene-fuck property ain’t got that kinda age. “Adolescent. Kid-like.” I think. “Maybe sixteen. But just barely.”
The sheriff frowns at me like I’m playing a joke on him, but I guess that’s to be expected. He returns to his former attitude. “The deceased, Absalom Clark Morgan, aged fifteen, was found under a patch of earth within the boundaries of Eden County. Approximately seventy-five yards from the valley ridge a corpse was buried in the ground and upon recognition of said corpse, officers of the law proceeded to dig up and exhume the body. Among them Sheriff John Bell of Eden, Deputy Sheriff Bill Oates, Deputy Magistrate George Hawkes, U.S. Marshal Cayenne Jackson, hailing from Lorain County, Ohio, and several of the marshal’s deputies from neighboring counties. Upon their arrival in Texas, they traveled over the course of many miles in a single evening to reach the spot at which lay the final proof of a crime committed in the Specials-Occupied State of Ohio.”
The scribe scribbles as the sheriff dictates.
One of the marshal’s deputies steps toward the sheriff. “We’re not doin’ all that autopsy business here, are we?”
