The main complex of buildings was at the end of a yellow gravel road that wound through acres of cotton and string beans. The inmates, in white uniforms, were chopping in the rows, their hoes rising and flashing in the sun, while the guards sat on horseback above them with rifles or shotguns balanced across their saddles. The sun was straight up in the sky, and I could see the dark areas of sweat in the guards’ clothes and the flush of heat in the inmates’ faces. Except for the motion of the hoes, or a horse slashing his tail against the green flies on his flanks, they all seemed frozen, removed, in the private ritual that exists between jailer and prisoner. Sometimes a trusty, sharpening tools in the shade of the cedar trees at the edge of the field, would carry a water bucket out to the men in the rows, and they would drink from the dipper with the water spilling over their throats and chests, or a guard would dismount and stand in the shade of his horse while the men sat on the ground and smoked for five minutes; but otherwise the static labor of their workday was unrelieved.
The dust clouds from my car blew back across the fields, and occasionally an inmate would raise his head from his concentration on the end of his hoe and look at me, one of the free people who drove with magic on the way to distant places. And as one of the free people I was the enemy, unable to understand even in part what his microcosm was like. From under his beaded forehead his eyes hated me, and at that moment, looking at my air- conditioned car and the acrid cloud of dust that blew into his face, he could have chopped me up with his hoe simply for the way I took the things of the free world for granted — the women, the cold beer, the lazy Saturday mornings, the endless streets I could walk down without ever stopping.
But I did know his world, maybe even better than he did. I knew the sick feeling of hearing a cage door bolted behind you, the fear of returning to solitary confinement and the nightmares it left you with, the caution you used around the violent and the insane, the shame of masturbation and the temptation toward homosexuality, the terror you had when a cocked gun was aimed in your face, the months and years pointed at no conclusion, the jealousy over a guard’s favor, and the constant press of bodies around you and the fact that your most base physical functions were always witnessed by dozens of eyes. I knew how the weapons were made and where they were hidden: a nail sharpened on stone and driven through a small block of wood; a double-edged razor wedged in a toothbrush handle; barbed wire wrapped around the end of a club; spoons and strips of tin that could open up wrists and jugular veins; and all of it remained unseen, taped between the thighs, carried inside a bandage, tied on a string down a plumbing pipe, or even pushed into the excrement in the latrine.
The reception building was surrounded by trees and a green lawn. Three trusties were trimming the hedges, edging the sidewalks, and weeding the flower beds. They looked right through me as I walked past them to the entrance. I didn’t know why, but I always felt a sense of guilt when I was around prison inmates, as though I should apologize for something. I knew the sequence of absurdities that often put them there, and I knew, also, that the years of punishment and the debilitating ethic that went with it had almost nothing to do with correction; but if I thought too long on any of that I would have had to fold my law degree into a paper airplane and sail it out my office window. I looked directly at the Negro clipping the top of the hedge (he was so black that his white uniform looked like an insult on his skin), and he moved the clippers at a downward angle on the side of the hedge so that his face turned away from me.
In the distance I could see one of the crumbling gray blockhouses left over from the last century, and I wondered if that was the one where John Wesley Hardin spent years chained to the wall of a dark cell. They fed him gruel and water, and whipped him every day with a leather strap to break him, and when he was finally taken out to work in the fields they manacled an iron ball to one ankle, and two guards always stood over him with shotguns. He served his hard time like that, fourteen years in chains with the whip and horse quirt laid across the buttocks.
And I remembered the songs that Leadbelly had sung on the same farm: “The Midnight Special,” “There Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos,” and “Shorty George,” and the lines about the “black Betty,” a four-inch-wide razor strop, three feet long, nailed to a wooden handle.
I sat in the scrubbed reception room and waited for the guard to bring Art from the fields. The room was divided by a long, low-topped counter, and the inmates sat on one side and the visitors on the other, their heads bent toward one another in a futile attempt at privacy. There was a sign on the far wall that read: DO NOT GIVE ANYTHING TO THE PRISONERS; CIGARETTES CAN BE LEFT WITH THE PERSONNEL. At one end of the counter a huge guard, with rings of fat across his stomach, sat in a wooden chair that strained under his weight. There was a dead cigar in his mouth and a filthy spittoon by his feet. Most of his teeth were gone, and he licked his tongue across the strings of tobacco on his gums. His face was like a pie plate, and the washed-out eyes wouldn’t focus in a straight line. Occasionally, he looked at his watch and pointed one thick finger at an inmate to tell him that his visiting time was over, then he would suck on the flattened end of his cigar. I could almost hear the digestive juices boiling in his stomach.
Art came through a back door with a guard behind him. His black hair was dripping sweat, and the cobweb scar in the corner of his eye was white against his tan. His palms were grimed and his forearms filmed with dirt and cotton lint. There were black rings in the creases of his neck, and his clothes were rumpled and stained at the knees. He had lost more weight, and the veins in his hands stood out like knotted pieces of cord.
“How long we got, boss man?” he said, taking a package of Bugler tobacco from his shirt pocket.
“Fifteen minutes,” the guard said.
Art sat down and curled a cigarette paper between his fingers. He didn’t speak and his eyes remained downcast until the guard had walked back to the door.
“What do you say, cousin?” he said.
“I think we’ll get a new trial.”
“Half the guys in here live on new trials. They don’t talk about nothing else. They write letters like paper is going out of style.”
“The difference is that you’re not guilty of anything.”
“You know that don’t have nothing to do with serving time.”
“Listen, as soon as the appeal goes through I’m going to have you out on bond.”
“That ain’t good-guy jive, is it?”
“I don’t bullshit a client, Art.”
“All right, you don’t. But I’m hanging by my ass in here. This is a rough joint, man.”
“What’s happened?”
He rolled the cigarette and folded down the wet seam with his thumb, watching the guard at the end of the counter.
“A couple of the hacks are laying it on. They know I’m with the union, and they’re getting off their rocks while they got me in the field. Three days ago the hack said I was dogging it in the cotton and they gave me the apple- box treatment. They take you down to the hole without supper, and all night you have to stand on an upended apple crate, even though you piss your pants. If you fall off, the hole boss gives you a few knots to get your attention.”
He took a book of paper matches from his shirt, split one longways with his thumbnail, and lit his cigarette. He breathed the smoke out through the empty space in his teeth.
“The field boss already told me I’d have to wear out a hoe handle a week if I wanted to earn good time from him,” he said. “He stays so close on my ass that horse is shitting and pissing all over me. They’re going to make me build the whole five, man, and I’ll run before I do another month.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I’ll run or I’ll ice one of those bastards. I’m through with that pacifist shit. When I was standing on that box with the hole boss looking down at me from the cage, it hit me what a dumb sonofabitch I’ve been for the last five years. The Anglos want us to be pacifists, just like they taught us that blessed are the poor crap in church. Man, we never knew how blessed we were. They want us to keep our hands in our pockets while they knock the piss out of us.”
“Forget about that running stuff, you hear?”
“It’s not something you plan. You start thinking about all that time and your clock gets wound up, and you’re ready to go through the wall with your fingernails.”
Art’s voice had risen, and the guard was looking at us with his crooked eyes. The fat tissue of his mouth was pressed in a small circle around his dead cigar.
“I spent a little time in a prison compound, too,” I said.
“Then you know what that patience shit sounds like.”
“Give it another couple of weeks and I’ll turn every handle I can to have you on the street.”
