classes and prayer meetings and the other stuff they made us sit through or stand through when we were almost too tired to live. I think a few of the women did it so the guards would treat them better in bed. Some guards liked to hurt you. So for us, talking was dangerous even if no guard saw you do it.
'Anyway, it didn't seem that anyone gave Day Turner away. Lauren Olamina just told her people that when it happened, they should lie face-down on the ground with their hands behind their necks. Some of them didn't want to. They thought Day was right. But she kept at them, pushing them, asking them about lashings they had seen—one guard lashing eight or nine people at the same time with just one finger.... She got herself lashed over and over, trying to talk to them—to the men in her group especially. I think Day worked on them at night when men and women were locked up separate. You know the kind of shit men say to one another when they want to stop other men from listening to a woman. From what I heard, Travis Douglas was the one who kept Olamina's men in line. He wasn't all that big, but he had a force to him. People trusted him, listened to him, liked him. And for some reason, Travis trusted Olamina. He didn't like what she was telling them to do, but he ... like he believed in her, you know.
'When the break came, most of Olamina's people did what she had told them to do. That saved them from being shot or from being beaten as badly as the ones like me who didn't get on the ground fast enough. Day's people started grabbing guards, and the Acorn people dropped like stones. When the pain hit, they were already getting down on the ground, all but a guy named King—Jeff King—big, good-looking blond guy—and three women. Two were named Scolari—sisters or something—and Channa Ryan. I knew Channa Ryan. She just couldn't stand it anymore. She was pregnant, but not showing much yet. She figured if she died taking one of the guards and a guard's baby with her, it would be a good deal. There was this one particular guy— ugly son of a bitch who washed himself maybe once a week. But he used to make her go to his cabin two or three times a week. He had his fun with her. She wanted to get him. She didn't, though.
'Day's people killed one guard. Just one, and it was a woman who got him—that evil bitch Crystal Blair. She died for it, but she got him. I don't know why she hated the guards so much. They didn't rape her, didn't pay that much attention to her. 1 guess it was just that they took her freedom. She was a big pain in the ass while she was alive, but people kind of respected her after she was dead. She ripped that guard's throat out with her teeth!
'Day's people hurt a couple of other guards, but it cost them 15 of their own. Fifteen dead just to start with. Some others were lashed to death or almost to death later. Some were kicked and stomped as well as lashed. I was because I was too close to Crystal Blair when she killed that one guard. Day got killed too, but not until later. Later, they hanged him. By then, he was so busted up, I doubt he knew what was going on. The rest of us got hurt, but not so bad. The ones who could walk had to go out the next day to work. If we had headaches or teeth kicked in or bad gashes or bruises from being kicked with boots, it didn't matter. The guards said if they couldn't beat the devil out of us, they'd work him out of us. The ones who couldn't walk disappeared. I don't know what happened to them—maybe killed, maybe taken away for medical treatment. We never saw them again. Everyone else worked for sixteen hours straight. They lashed you if you stopped to pee. You had to just do it on yourself and keep working. They did that for three days straight. Work sixteen hours—dig a hole. Fill it up. Chop trees. Make firewood. Dig another hole. Fill it up. Paint the cabins. Chop weeds. Dig a hole. Fill it up. Drag rocks from the hills. Break them to gravel. Dig a hole. Fill it up.
'A couple of people went crazy. One woman just fell down on the ground and started screaming and crying. She wouldn't stop. The other one, a big man with scars all over his face, he started running and screaming—going nowhere, running in circles. They disappeared too. Three days. We didn't get enough to eat. You never got enough to eat unless you got kitchen duty. Every night they preached hellfire and damnation at us and made us memorize Bible verses for at least an hour before they'd let us sleep. Then it was like we hadn't slept at all and they were getting us up to do it all again. It was hell. Plain hell. No devil could have made a better one.'
Cody Smith. She was an old woman when I met her—illiterate, poor, and scarred. If her version of the break and its aftermath is true, it's no wonder my mother never wrote much about it after her captivity. I've never found anyone who heard her talk much about it.
But at least she got most of her own people through the rebellion. She lost only three, and two others—the Mora sisters—had given away their status as sharers. I wonder that all the sharers hadn't given themselves away. On the other hand, when everyone is screaming, I suppose sharers' screams don't draw special attention. 1 don't know how the Moras gave themselves away, but Cody Smith and other informants have told me they did. It may have been the reason that after the rebellion, they were raped more often than the other women were. They never gave any other sharer away.
That was my mother's 2034. I wouldn't have wished it on her. I wouldn't have wished it on anyone.
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What was done to my mother and to many other interned people of her time was illegal in almost every way. It was never legal to collar non-criminals, never legal to confiscate their property or separate husband from wife or to force either to work without pay of some kind. The matter of separating children from parents, however, might have been managed almost legally.
Vagrancy laws were much expanded, and vagrant adults
