That's for the funny papers. No, I've seen through that in my adventures. Here's what it is: it's arrogance. Vanity. Love of self.
You think you're so special. Yes you do. And when we treat you special, when we do all this to you, it may hurt like hell but pain doesn't mean a lot to a tough cracker like you, been blown up in the war, and shot a few times to boot. You can get through the pain. No sir. Now I'll tell you what you can't get through. Are you listening?'
Earl didn't say a thing. He was concentrating on not passing out.
'Yes sir. What you can't get through is this: to be nobody. Take away what's special, make you nobody. Make you just another convict and you have the rest of your life down here among the lowest and crudest and most violent of the Negroes. This is just it, this place. No hope of escape or recognition, nothing at all special that's going to happen to you. You'll be anonymous, a face in the crowd, a nobody for ever and ever. Now how do you like that?' Earl said nothing.
'You think about this. We're going to give you a nice day or so in a private lock-up with some food and a toilet; you get a shower twice a day. You can play the radio. We get you some newspapers. I won't even pretend to hide from you what I'm doing, because you'll see through it.
All that's to make you think of the good stuff of life.
Then it's over, convict. Then you go to the Ape House.'
It makes a long, o time man, o feel bad It makes a long, o time man, o feel bad It makes a long, o time man, o feel bad O my Lord, Lordy, when he can't get a letter-a from home. O Captain George, he was a hard a driving man O Captain George, he was a hard, a driving man, O my Lord, Lordy, out on the Gulf and Shelf Island Road It wasn't music, not really. It was a chant, deep and from the heart, pounding with rhythm as hoes flashed and bit into the earth in unison.
Earl could see them far away. They were in the broad fields, chopping weeds from gullies, and they seemed to be engulfed in mist, as if legendary; but it was dust that rose and the men just fought through it, their hoes rising and falling to the sound of their song, as guards rode around them on horseback with guns.
'You don't look over there, convict,' said Earl's escort. 'You ain't going over there. Over there, them's got it easy. Where you're going, it be hard.'
Earl walked along the dusty road, his wrists ensnared in chains, and his ankles too, so that the only steps he could take were mincing and pitiful. His arms still ached from the shots. Two men flanked his shuffle, and one was up front and one behind. The sun beat down, a Mississippi sun that seemed to have been put into the sky for one purpose alone and that was to fry the hell out of all men unfortunate to experience its blast full out.
He felt somewhat better now, at least in a physical sense. He'd had food and shots and was clean. His clothes were clean, if simple, cotton, striped as were all the convicts', and boots that fit.
But in other ways, he didn't feel better at all. Bigboy was right. Big boy was smart. Bigboy had him figured out pretty good.
The two days of relative respite did more to hurt Earl than all the abuse that had been heaped upon him by Bigboy and the prison itself. He listened to the radio, he ate grits with butter in the morning, a ham sandwich in the afternoon and fried chicken in the evening, buttery biscuits and gravy. He saw now that his life didn't have to be circumscribed and brutal. They had moved him, as expertly as they had beaten tattoos on him with their clubs, beyond simple survival toward contemplation. Thus his true enemy became his own thoughts: he remembered his son, that wary, observant boy who had a strange gift for stillness, and could just sit and watch for hours without saying a word, and then, when quizzed, spit back all and everything that had passed before his eyes, no matter how insignificant.
He thought of his wife, the most beautiful gal he'd ever seen in his life, and how he'd fallen crazy in love with her that first time he'd seen her at the USO in Cape Girardeau in 1944, after coming back from Saipan and going on that bond tour in his fancy uniform, a designated hero of America meant to inspire people.
That's what came back the most to haunt him, and that's when he hurt the most. It was easy to be a hero when you had nothing to look forward to, and the only thing you had to believe in was the United States Marine Corps. But then, in love, he had to go back to another terrible battle, and he remembered the leaden sorrow he had felt, because for the first time in his life, the world had seemed so full of possibility.
But he went back. He had to. It's what he did, it's who he was.
Well, Lord, I woke up this mornin', man, I feelin' bad.
Wah?babe, I was feelin' bad, I was thinkin' ' the good times, Lord, I once have had.
They were singing to beat the devil down, or to beat the hopelessness from their own spirits as they chopped and chopped. They are singing for me, Earl thought.
The camp was surprisingly elaborate, like a government installation, a series of barracks behind a barbed- wire fence, and, inside it, another square of barbed wire, and inside that, a single barracks.
At each corner of the inner square, a two-story tower stood, and Earl could see the machine guns mounted in them. He saw how flexible they were: they commanded the entire compound, and with30-caliber water-cooleds capable of sustained fire, and with the barracks beneath them simple jerry-built structures of wood, no place was safe from their wrath, given the physics of the ballistics. If it were necessary, the guns could hose down the compound in a matter of seconds, minutes at the most, and all inside the barracks would be dead. There was no cover from the guns; they controlled all.
They entered the first compound, and it was almost a community. Not all the men were at work, but some hung back, cleaning barracks, scrubbing floors, hanging laundry, doing all the administrative work that would keep such an institution going. In a separate shed, he could see women cooking at big vats, preparing food for the men, all of it under the eyes of guards, who patrolled under the drill instructor hats, watching intently for too much fraternization. Just beyond the wire there seemed something like a free community, or a trustee community, where in relative freedom a few older men lounged and chatted laughingly with each other. That had to be the famous '- town. Yet they all stopped to stare as this strange little convoy approached them: a white man in the stripes of a convict. Surely they'd heard rumors or knew of the white boy locked in the coffin, but hadn't really believed it. Here he was at last, in the flesh, a white boy, chained and being led by the tough boys in the hats.
Then they reached the inner compound. Earl could see Bigboy in there, surrounded by his ass-lickers, watching him approach with something not quite glee but certainly smugness.
The gates were opened after an elaborate ritual with the locks, so that no gate was opened completely. They stepped in, it was locked behind them, then the last gate was opened.
'Welcome to the Ape House,' said Bigboy. 'Jack, you're going to like it here.'
Earl just saw another barracks building, with barred windows and a row of crude shifters outside, the wood all dilapidated and every which way, as if some invisible burden of woe had bent the place down over the years. Its roof was wood and it was painted the pale green of institutions everywhere.
'Let me tell you, Jack, who your new roomies are going to be. They are the worst of the worst. They aren't just killers, they're the crazy, wild Negroes, the angriest, the most violent. You have multiple murderers in there, you have all the riffraff in the state that everybody wanted to hang but couldn't quite, because maybe they only killed another Negro and not a white man. But in there, Jack Bogash, in there there isn't any hope and there is no future.'
Some laughter came from the guards around Bigboy.
'You won't last a night in there. You're going into a hell so deep no white man can come out alive, or maybe would even want to.'
Bigboy brought his dark-glassed eyes so close to Earl's, Earl could see his own scraggly self reflected in them, big as life.
'You are the answer to their hopes and dreams, Jack Bogash, you are.
There's a blue-gum nigger in there named Moon, and he's the meanest black bastard who ever walked the face of the earth, and they say he's endowed like a horse. Tonight is the best night in Moon's life. Moon is going to shine tonight, Jack. So Jack, what's it going to be? Are you coming clean, Jack, you telling us your real name? Or you going into the Ape House?'
'My name is Jack Bogash,' Earl said.
SAM knew people; people knew Sam. That was one of his gifts; he had made friends wherever he'd been.
So now, feeling he'd pretty much used up his congressman's assistant's assistant's good will and energy, he
