CHAPTER 2

I was my own person, so I was told, so I believed, and so I was treated by Ted, and so I therefore had no reason to sneak away from my so-called home, to leave covertly in the night without a word. Instead, I found Ted sitting on his veranda, surrounded by flowers he once told me he never liked, reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s sports page while having breakfast.

“I don’t know why this is a continental breakfast,” he said, pushing a croissant with a finger.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“Well, the day had to come.” He bit into a cheese Danish and looked up at the sky as he chewed.

“I’m going to drive back to Los Angeles.”

“That seems like a likely destination. However, you don’t have a driver’s license,” he pointed out.

“I bought a fake one.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“It pays to have money,” I said.

He nodded and put down the Danish. “I’ve often wondered how the soldiers in the Civil War could do it,” he said. “Imagine, charging across a pasture with men getting blown to smithereens to the left and right of you and you keep going. What is a smithereen?”

“I bought a used Toyota. At least I think it’s a Toyota. At any rate, most of it is blue.”

“It must be, then, a Toyota. Well, you’ve got all my numbers and Podgy’s number and I assume some cash. Call Podgy and he’ll get you whatever you need, wherever you are. Call me if you need help.” He went back to reading his newspaper. “I don’t know why I bought that basketball team.”

“Good-bye, Ted.”

“Come back soon.”

I left Atlanta, the mansion, my so-called home, and Ted, recalling Ted’s words as I drove west on Interstate 20, then exited off the freeway and took US 278, looking for a road that was less road, possibly a more scenic route, “Once you leave Atlanta, you’re in Georgia.” And as I recalled his words, they came true. The troubling truth took the form of a flashing blue bubble atop a black-and-white county sheriff’s patrol car. I watched as the nine-foot-tall, large-headed, large-hatted, mirror-sunglassed manlike thing unfolded from his car, closed his door, and walked toward me—one hairy-knuckled suitcase of a hand resting on his insanely large and nasty-looking pistol, the knuckles of the other hand dragging along the ground. I had a thought to be terrified, and so I was.

He said to me through the completely rolled-down window of my yellow and mostly blue Toyota Corolla, “Hey, boy.” Those were his exact words, though I cannot capture adequately his inflection. It was not a greeting as much as a threat, somehow a question, certainly an attack. His dented badge said Officer George, and I found that funny.

“Officer,” I said as a greeting and as a question.

He took my greeting as a smart-ass remark, which it might have been, I don’t know. But I could tell from his depthless eyes that he didn’t like it. I imagined his eyes as blue lifeless marbles even though I couldn’t see them, hidden as they were behind his mirror lenses, but I assumed they matched the rest of his features. He said again, “Hey, boy.” More threatening this time.

“Sir?” I said.

“Okay, boy, first thangs first. Why don’t you let me see your license and registration?” But it was not a question.

I leaned over to reach into the glove compartment for my registration, which was as bogus as my license, and at that point I was startled by shouting, though I could not make out clearly what was being said. It sounded like, “That thar be far nuff, nigger! Sitch on back straight and git out the veehickle!” This was punctuated by the brandishing of his huge pistol. That I heard clearly.

“I was just reaching for … ” I tried to say.

“Y’all done heard me na, boy! Move na! Move yo black ass. Na, git out chere, raght na!”

My first thought was this man sounds like Jesse Jackson. My second thought was not to mention my first. I got out of the car, and he turned me around roughly and used his forearm to press me against the rear window. He slid me down the length of the car and leaned me over the short trunk, patted down my sides and the insides of my legs. He jerked my left arm behind my back, slapped on a cuff, then pulled back the right. “Don’t move, nigger!” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Shut up! I don’t want to hear another word outta yo mouth, you understand me?”

I said nothing.

“I said, do you understand me?!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shut up!”

His voice faded a bit as I imagined him backing toward his patrol car. I heard him on his radio. He said, “I need backup out here on 278 near the mill. Had a little trouble with an uppity nigger.”

Before I could whistle “Dixie” or any other tune there were three more black-and-white patrol cars and similarly brown-shirt-clad miscreants swinging their long arms around me. There was a lot of whooping and chattering and hoo-hahing and head scratching about whether my license was phony, about whether my car was stolen, it was just too clean, and about whether I was or was not that “actor feller.” A short very round one offered up the expert knowledge that “them thar movie cameras make you look older and fatter.” To this another said, “Then how many cameras on you, Cletus?” They had a big laugh. I didn’t laugh, leaning as I was still with my face against the trunk of the car.

Officer George brought his face close to mine. “Well, Poitier, I’m afraid you’re under arrest.”

“For what?” I asked.

“You hear that?” he asked his cohorts. “Did you hear that?” Then he got even closer to me, his breath smelling like something dead. “Well, fer one thang, sassin’ an officer of the law, which around here is the same as resistin’ arrest. Now, there’s speedin’ and failure to stop immediately when I turned on my light. And then there’s bein’ a nigger.”

“That’s not a crime,” I said, then realized just what I was saying. “I’m not a nigger.”

They laughed.

“This chere is Peckerwood County, boy,” George said. “And chere, you’s a nigger. And it’s a crime if’n I say it is.”

I was, to say the very least, terrified. To say the very most, in my mind, I was bending over as far as I could to kiss my ass good-bye. I was taken to the town of Peckerwood, the county seat of the county of the same name. I was denied my cliché one phone call, my car and belongings were taken to who knows where, and I was being called Sidney Poitier by the deputies and the jailer. They were encouraged to do so, pleased to do so, because of my insistence that my name was Not Sidney Poitier. Dressed in actual prison stripes that made me feel a little like Buster Keaton, I was arraigned by a judge who also had the surname George and shared all physical features with Officer George, save his size. The little snaggletoothed jurist pounded his gavel and said, “A year at the work farm!”

“Don’t I get a lawyer?” I asked.

“Two years!”

Evolution might have been glacial where they were concerned, but not with me. I kept my mouth shut after that. I considered attempting a bit of Fesmerization, but I was terribly afraid of the effects of ineffective staring.

The upside was that I was getting out of the town of Peckerwood, Georgia, though my impression of it was formed without a proper tour. The downside, and I mean down, was that I was getting out on a blue-and-white county bus bound for the Peckerwood County Correctional Prison Farm. The bus was at least thirty years old, smelled of urine and, oddly, carrots, and had caging on the inside of the windows. I was shackled to a slight white man, maybe twenty years old, with grease-slicked-back dishwater-blond hair, and from the way he stared at me I knew he liked neither me nor the fact that I was black nor the fact that we were chained together. If only I could have gotten to a phone I could have called Podgy, gotten some money, and probably bought my way out of this mess. Then it would have been back to Atlanta to hire a lawyer, and I would have wound up owning Peckerwood County. It occurred to me even then: Who would want to own Peckerwood County? The reason it was what it was was because there was absolutely nothing and no one there of any value. It was a terrestrial black hole, rather white hole, a kind of giant Caucasian anus that only sucked, yet smelled like a fart. We rolled through pine trees across spiderwebbed and cracked asphalt deeper into the county’s colon. We stopped finally at the farm. Shacks and more shacks, rows of dusty nothing, with many trees that managed to provide no shade at all. We filed out of the bus, twenty black and three white souls.

“What do they grow here?” I asked no one in particular, but for some stupid reason said it out loud.

“This here is a dirt farm, boy,” a mirrored-lens-covered set of eyes shouted at me. “Our dirt crop ain’t what it used to be and it never was!” That’s what I finally figured out he said. It sounded like, “Dis chere a dir farm, boi. Aw dir crop ain’t wha eah yoost to be, but den tit neber wa.” This would be how all the guards sounded all the time, and so I had no idea what they were telling me to do or not do.

They gave me a moth-eaten army-surplus blanket and a bar of soap and a tin cup and a quilt-thin mattress to put on the metal slab that was my bunk. The toilet was a hole in the middle of the aisle in the center of the shack. In other words, we were sleeping in a big outhouse. All of the men in my shack were black, as lost looking as I was, but finally not so much different from the rest of the inhabitants of Peckerwood County. The older men pushed me and insulted me, called me nigger, and forced me to the bunk nearest the toilet hole.

That first night I was awakened by a big white potato face looming over me. I of course had no idea what he was saying, at the top of his lungs, but it was clear that he wanted me to come with him. He took me out into the yard and handed me a shovel, opened his mouth, and let out, “Way dunt ye digs me a hole ri chere, boi?” But it wasn’t a question.

Since there was a shovel in my hands and ground beneath my feet, I assumed he wanted me to dig my own grave, so I started. The ground was rock hard, and the shovel didn’t make a dent.

“Put yer bac inter it!” he said.

I did, leaning onto the implement and scratching out a little stubborn earth at a time. I worked away; the tobacco-chewing Nazi stood over me while I became soaked with sweat and grief.

“Keep awn deegin’.”

It was so dark and still so hot. I was about two feet down into a sizeable ditch when another peckerwood joined us. He looked at me and said, “Why’n ye takin tha dir outta my hole, boi?”

“Because I was told to,” I said.

“Ja hear tha?” the second said to the first.

“Sho nuff.”

“You’n a uppty nig, aintcha?” the first said. “We’s awl gyine put y’all in da cain.”

“Ya, in da cain,” the second said, laughing a kind of panting-dog laugh. “We see haw he see thangs in the mornin’.”

I had no idea what they said, but I knew it couldn’t be good. They dragged me some yards away and stuck me all folded up into a four-by-four-foot corrugated-tin cube in the middle of the camp. I felt hot and sick in the dark and thought that I was about ready to die. I recalled all the prison movies I had seen, not many, and wondered if some good-hearted trustee or brave fellow prisoner would appear with a much-needed drink of water or a biscuit or a leathery scrap of dried meat. None did. However I was sure that the cliché shower scene was certainly on the program. I had the thought that things could not get any worse, and then I heard the thunder. It rained much of the night. With the heat and the humidity, the rain and the confinement, I felt hot and cold and parched and soaked.

The next morning I was dragged out of the can, not the box as I might have called it (it being a box), and was nearly blinded by the intense sun. I was distracted from the stinging light by the stinging blows to my midsection and the side of my head. I stumbled into the mess line and received a platter of gruel and a tin cup of warm pond water. We were then lined up chained to a partner, in my case the same fellow as the day before, and marched toward a bus, the top of which was laden with shovels and hoes and slings.

The bus was an oven. I felt my stomach turn as soon as I boarded. It stank of the sweat of men, the piss of men, and the shit of men. And though we prisoners were soaked and sickened, somehow neither the smell nor the heat seemed to affect the guards whose jackets remained on and buttoned, the brims of their Stetsons remained pulled low, and the ammo belts were worn snuggly around their corpulent middles. I sat near the back of the bus, my face pressed against the diamond-patterned cage, my right wrist shackled to the white man’s left. The foul-smelling behemoth belched and roared to life, and we bounced out to the highway. The sad guts of Peckerwood County rolled by in a blur, and the sight of it did not lift my spirits. A red pickup with a couple of teenagers riding in the bed pulled even with the bus and then started horn blowing and shouting. I could not make out what they were saying, their being from Peckerwood County, but the quality and substance of their noise were clear. I heard “nigga” a lot and “darkie” and “slave.” Then, as the pickup sped up to avoid oncoming traffic, it began to fishtail. Then the bus began to fishtail, and I could see that this was not a good thing. I gripped my fingers tight around the plastic molded seat, pulling against my shackle mate’s attempt to pull his hands to his face, which by the time I looked was wide open in a Munchian scream. My grip failed as the bus began to capsize. We tumbled across to the far side, then across the ceiling as the bus somersaulted down the embankment. The air was filled with screams and choking sounds and dust and crying and dust and swearing and dust. It came to rest upside down.

I don’t believe I was knocked completely unconscious, but it did take me some time to gather myself and evaluate my predicament. My first assessment led me to the ridiculously obvious conclusion that I was deep in what my mother would have called dung pudding. I was lying facedown on my faceup shackle partner. He was out cold, an immediate plus that soon became a minus as I detected the odor of gasoline. Fearing the bus would explode into flames at any second, I yelled at his dead face.

“Hey!” I looked around. Then, “Peckerwood!” I closed my eyes and listened to the moaning and weeping all around me. I did not believe myself to be injured, though I considered the possibility that shock and adrenaline might be covering any pain. The gas fumes found my nostrils again. “Peckerwood!” I shouted. I crawled over his body and dragged him across the ceiling to the emergency door at the rear of the bus. At some point it had been welded shut, but the accident had torn the doors off. My shackle mate began to come around as I pulled both of us through mud and away from the wreckage. I sat up and leaned against a thin tree and watched. The guards were dead or unconscious. Many of the prisoners were not moving either. Others were locked into place by their incapacitated cuff buddies. My partner sat up and looked at the mess with me. He looked at me.

“I thought the bus was going to blow up, so I dragged you over here,” I said. “I was wrong.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

“What?”

“Let’s get outta here. You stupid or somethin’? We gotta run.”

Of course he was right. The Peckerwood justice system had proven to be anything but, and if I remained I faced perhaps another year tacked onto my sentence for surviving the crash.

“Come on, boy!” the cracker shouted, getting up to pull me into moving with him. “Run!”

And so we ran. Without looking back. Without looking at each other. We roughly yanked each other this way and that, not thinking about destination or even direction, moving only to put distance between the wreckage, the guards, the cops, and ourselves.

We ran through a hollow and got scratched thoroughly by a stand of some kind of thorny bush. Finally we stopped running, panting like dogs. Peckerwood tugged the chain and I pulled back and suddenly we were wrestling with it. He tried to yank me past him, but he lost his balance and I fell on top of him. He must have injured his back in the bus crash because he screamed out in pain that I had not inflicted. I stood up and over him, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

“My back be fucked up,” he said.

I fell to sitting on my butt.

“What your name, boy?” Peckerwood asked.

“Poitier.”

“What? That sound like some kinda girl’s name.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Patrice,” he said. He spat on the ground between his feet.

I said nothing.

He started to get up, pulling me by the chain. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” I asked.

“South,” he said.

“Atlanta,” I said.

“I gots people southa here.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“I sayd we’se going south, boy,” Patrice said. He struggled to his feet and gave me his best cockeyed dangerous look, but when he pulled on the chain he grimaced in pain.

“Atlanta,” I said again, observing how my yank at the chain caused him such discomfort. “I’ve got people and money in Atlanta.”

“You ain’t got shit, nigger.”

I tugged the chain again, this time with a bit more authority. “Well, I don’t have an injured back, you stupid moron.” I pulled once more and watched him wince. “Atlanta.” As I said it I realized I didn’t know how I planned to get us there. I knew only that we needed to head east.

Due east we ran, or as close to east as I could guess, as hard and as fast as we could go, which wasn’t very because of Patrice’s injured back and our inability to move with any coordination whatsoever. We fell over each other like a couple of Keystone Kops, pulled ourselves up over each other, scrambled up steep hills and tumbled down muddy yet rocky embankments. We listened the while for the barking and howling of dogs, but heard nothing. I wouldn’t have thought to be concerned about dogs at all, but Patrice said, “Them dawgs is fast and if’n dey catch yo ass, yo ass is last week’s poke chops.”

We paused for another necessary breather, this time sitting side by side on a fallen log. I looked at him and realized just how ugly he was. His face was somehow much too big for his head; his crude features sprawled everywhere to no good effect. “Why do you think they chained us together?” I asked for no reason other than to make conversation.

“I guess that thar warden guy has got hisself one of dem senses of humor,” Patrice said.

“No doubt.”

Patrice looked at me and then at the sky. “Atlanta,” he said. “That don’t sound so bad. Dem’s some purty gals in Atlanta.”

“What did you do?” I asked. “Why did they put you in prison?”

“I stole me a fuckin’ car. Twere the finest midnight blue Buick deuce and a quarter with cream yeller insides you ever laid yo sad darkie eyes on, boy. And then I drove the thang into my girlfriend’s living room, the lyin’ cheatin’ bitch. What about you?”

“Apparently it’s illegal to be black in Peckerwood County.”

“If it ain’t, it oughta be.” He focused his eyes on the sky again. “Atlanta. If’n I had me some money I could be Charlie Potatoes in Atlanta.” He winced at a pain in his back.

A dog barked in the distance. We got up and ran. We climbed a short hill and found on the other side what could only be called a raging river. The water was churning, violent, wearing steadily away at boulders of all sizes. It was about fifty yards across, but it looked like a mile. The river’s noise was deafening. The din served to cover any sounds dogs might make, but also made them seem closer and more real. I could not hear what Patrice was yelling at me, but I understood that we had to cross. I took the first step into the, if not icy then cold as hell, water. The water pushed first at my ankles. I was surprised by the strength of the current even in the shallow water. Then it pushed at my knees, my thighs, until I was chest-deep, and it was all I could do to move my feet at all. I tried to drag my feet through each step, feeling the water wanting to lift me. I clung to slippery, slimy rocks. I picked up a foot to step over a stone and felt the force of the river seeking to push, pull, twist, and suck me into its flow. I glanced back at Patrice. He was tracing my path, gripping the chain that connected us in the fist of his cuffed hand. Suddenly I was weightless, completely without purchase, and I was gone, sucked under and popped back up like a cork. I felt a momentary snag as Patrice tried to hold onto a boulder, but then he was with me, bobbing and thrashing and crashing into each other and every rock we could find. I was pulled completely under, and I could see my mother’s face. I was in our old kitchen and she was baking cookies, talking about investments and the changing face of media. “News will be the new entertainment,” she said. “Trust me, Not Sidney. It won’t be enough to report it, news will have to be made. It’s going to be a bad thing, but it’s going to be.” She slid the first batch into the oven and closed the door. “That’s where we’ve gone. Everything in this country is entertainment. That’s what you need for stupid people. That’s what children want. Drink your milk.” Then my head was out again, and I was sucking in much-needed air. Though Patrice was tethered to me, he seemed very far away. I saw that we were passing a calmer section of water and I tried to kick toward it, but I had no control. Patrice was able to swing around into the friendlier water where he grabbed an overhanging branch. He screamed as he pulled me to him. We pulled ourselves into the safety of some driftwood and panted like dogs.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what, nigger?”

“For pulling me out.”

“She-it, I ain’t pulled you out.” He hacked and spat. “I kept yo ass from pullin’ me in.”

We dragged ourselves onto the bank, up and away from the river. It started raining, pouring. I was surprised at how bad the rain felt even though I was already soaking wet.

“Well, at least them dawgs gonna lose our scent trail for a while,” Patrice said, coughing up and spitting out more river.

I caught a whiff of him and wondered if that was true about the dogs losing our scent. I looked back and imagined the redneck trackers and the bloodhounds coming to the river’s edge. It wouldn’t take much more than a below-average intellect to conclude that we had crossed over, so to speak. We climbed and then came down a hill into an open scar of land. A rusting and idle backhoe was standing near a pit. The rain fell harder, and thunder rattled in the distance. The place seemed to be a construction site, but nothing was being built, and so I thought it was a fitting metaphor for Peckerwood County. The ground was sloppy with mud, and we sank to our ankles with each step. Then we heard the sound of a car or truck, and we jumped into the pit. We splashed and fought with the mud and standing water in the bottom until we were plastered against the red clay wall. The engine noise faded, and we looked around to find that the hole was about ten feet square and as high.

For minutes we tried to climb the clay walls, but not only could we find no purchase on the slimy face, we defeated our efforts by our retarded, out-of-sync motions. It was a miracle, if you’re receptive to such language, that one of us didn’t end up strangled by the chain.

“This isn’t working,” I said.

Patrice looked at me with his eyes. I thought I could see panic seeping into his face.

“You stand on my shoulders,” I said.

“Why?”

“So you can reach the top and then pull me out.”

“Why you gonna be on da bottom?”

“Your back is hurt,” I said.

He shook his head. “Naw, I ain’t fallin’ fer it. I don’t trust you. You want me to do all the work pullin’ your lazy nigger ass up.”

“Okay, I’ll stand on your shoulders, and then I’ll pull you out. Does that sound better?”

“Right. You think I’m stupid? You’ll get up there and next thing I know you’re runnin’ to Atlanta and I’m still in di hole.”

I looked at him, then held my cuffed wrist in front of his face. “Patrice, we’re chained together. I can’t leave you.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I tried to climb up on his shoulders, but his back just wouldn’t allow it. I leaned over and helped him step onto my shoulders, then I stood as tall as I could with my right arm raised as high as I could reach. Patrice reached up with his right hand, the chain pulling at his left. Mud fell down into my face. He grunted, a sound not so different from his talking, and swore, and finally said, “I got me sumpin’.” The sumpin’ turned out to be a root, and he managed to get his body out and clear. He grunted even louder, even screamed once as he pulled me up.

“We’d better get out of this road,” I said.

The rain let up, and the heat of Peckerwood County found its full form. Now, without the rain, I was as wet with perspiration. We staggered a mile or so away from the muddy pit and collapsed on our backs in high grass.

Patrice looked over at me and said, without provocation, “You know, I don’t like you. Nigger.”

“I can well imagine.”

“I don’t even like yer name. Potay.”

“That’s fine by me.”

“You makin’ fun of me, boy?” he asked.

“Nature beat me to that,” I said.

He hopped to his feet, and of course I did as well. We stood there staring at each other. I wish I could say I felt nothing, but I found a bit of hatred in myself for this redneck fool. I could see that he was not only ready to throw a punch, but that punch was forthcoming. I had seen the behavior so often in my life as a constant bully victim. I decided it was a good time to attempt to Fesmerize him. Up went one brow, and I leaned into my gaze.

“What you starin’ at, boy?”

I said nothing.

Then he punched me, a left to the face, that hurt much less than I imagined it would. We yanked at the chain back and forth, trading a couple of punches. Even while we rolled around in pathetic mortal combat I considered that the presence of at least a meager intellect was necessary for Fesmerian success.

Though I’d had much truck with being beaten up, I was not an experienced fighter. I was, however, more fit and slightly larger than my opponent, and it turned out that Raymond’s sadistic karate instruction had stayed with me more than it was reasonable to expect. I was able to block most of Patrice’s punches and keep him more or less off balance. However, what he lacked in skill and size he compensated for in stupidity, a stupidity that made his movements highly unpredictable. For example, a couple of times he tried to run away from me, forgetting that we were linked together, only to get yanked back like a dog on a long leash. He would then come flying back at me with the wildest roundhouse punch. I realized during the scuffle that my instinct to throw a blow was simply absent, and I realized as well that if I did hit him and managed to knock him silly or out, then I would be tethered to deadweight, a dumbbell, if you will. Finally, I was on top, straddling his torso with my knees pinning his shoulders to the ground.

That’s when the business end of a rifle was shoved in my face.

At the other end of the weapon was a singularly ugly redheaded boy of perhaps twelve years. I had never thought a child could be ugly, but his mouth was too small for his pie face, and yet his teeth were those of a larger person. All this set below a nose out of something by Erskine Caldwell. And all that on a head far too large for his scrawny body. Even with the gun pointed at me I wondered immediately how I could take in so many features so quickly and wondered further if he could close those lips over his bathroom-tile teeth.

“Y’all be careful wit dat peashooter naw, boy,” Patrice said.

I moved away from Patrice, and we slowly found our feet.

“Why you two chained up like dat?” The boy looked at Patrice, but kept the rifle pointed at me. “You takin’ him to jail?”

“Yeah, sumpin’ like that,” Patrice said. “You live round chere?”

“I lives over dat ridge, through the holla, up a hill, and past the branch.” He pointed. “Not far.”

“Who you live wit, boy?”

“My ma and my sister.”

“What ’bout yer pa?”

“Ain’t got no pa.”

“What ’bout neighbors? You got neighbors?”

“Ain’t got no neighbors.”

“What ’bout kin? Cousins? You got cousins?”

“Ain’t got no cousins.”

I watched and listened to those two idiots.

“What yo name?” Patrice asked.

“They call me Bobo.”

“Well, Bobo, you gots a spider on yer gun.” When the boy looked down, Patrice knocked the rifle away. He also managed to knock the boy to the ground. “Dumbass,” Patrice said.

I grabbed the rifle and realized that the boy was not moving. I put my hand behind his head and felt a rock there. “He hit his head,” I said.

“So what? Let’s go.”

“He might be hurt.” I touched the boy’s wide face and said his name a couple of times.

His eyes opened and he leaped up and away from me to hide behind the legs of Patrice.

“You got food at your house, boy?” Patrice asked.

“We got some.”

“Take us there.”

I kept the rifle.

It was no short walk to the boy’s house. As if the heat and humidity were not enough, it was dusk when we came to the branch, and mosquitoes were swarming. The house turned out to be a shack right out of every hillbilly’s origin fantasy. Had it been constructed of logs it might have had a rustic charm, but being made of clapboard and tin it had no charm at all. On a line hung from a post to a stunted tree hung clothes at wild and odd angles. Just in front of the porch was an open well surrounded by loose and broken bricks.

“Sis!” the boy called out.

A young woman stepped out onto the rickety porch. A look at her face left no doubt that she and the boy were related. The way she tilted her head to locate our sounds told me she was blind. “Bobo, who you got out dere wit y’all?”

“We don’t want no trouble, ma’am,” Patrice said, sounding almost human. “We just want some water and sumpin’ ta eat.”

“Dey’s chained together, Sis.”

“Do you have any tools?” I asked the boy, but he only looked at me and ignored my question. I glanced at Patrice.

“You got any tools?” Patrice asked.

“Yeah, we got some tools.”

“Go fetch us’all a chisel and a big hammer.”

“We gonna come in naw,” Patrice said to the woman. “You be a good girl and fix us up some food.”

The woman knocked over a chair on her way to the stove. “I gots some beans a-cookin’,” she said.

The place was a mess. Piles of clothes were everywhere. Clean or dirty, I couldn’t say. There was no fire burning in the place. The stones of the fireplace were thick with soot, and the timbers that held up the tin roof had been darkened by smoke as well.

The woman dropped a couple of bowls and spoons onto the table. We ate. The beans were awful, and they were cold. I looked and saw that there was no fire in the cookstove. But I knew I needed the energy if I was going to keep running, so I chewed and swallowed and tried to kill the taste with some very stale bread.

Patrice talked with his mouth full. “What yer name?”

“Sis,” she said.

“What that short fer?”

“Ain’t short fer nothin’.”

“Huh. Sis,” he said to himself. “That’s a purty name. Got any coffee?”

“I’ll git it.”

I looked up from my bowl at Patrice. “What does this taste like to you?”

“Taste like food, that how it taste.”

Sis came back with the coffee just as Bobo arrived with the mallet and chisel. Patrice and I jumped up for the tools and went and sat at the hearth. I put the chisel to his cuff and pounded it.

Bobo said, “One of ’em’s a nigga.”

“Which one, Bobo?” Sis asked.

“Da black one.”

“Which one dat be?”

The cuff fell away from Patrice’s wrist, and he set to work on mine. He said, “I the white one.”

“Which one is you?”

“This one.”

My cuff came off, and I stood and walked across the room, grabbing the rifle from the table as I did. “I’m the black one, and I’m over here,” I said. “That should clear things up.”

Patrice tried to stand up, but let out a yell and fell backward. “What’s wrong?” Sis asked.

“It’s his back,” I said. “I think he’s hurt pretty bad. Here, help me get him to a bed.”

We put him on a cot surrounded by piled clothes. I looked down at him, helpless there, and I resolved to leave him in the morning. Somehow he read that intention in my face and said, “If’n you does, I’ll sho nuff tell where you headed.” With that, exhaustion took him, and he fell asleep.

“Is you really black?” Sis asked me.

“He sho am,” Bobo said.

“My great-grandpappy used to have him some slaves,” the blind woman said. “They say he owned a plantation.”

“How nice for him,” I said. I felt myself growing sleepy. “Listen, I’m just going to sit over here and close my eyes for a bit.” I held the rifle cradled against my chest and drifted.

My dream spiraled like all things spiral: life, reflection, desire toward some truth, but never aimed directly at it. The year was 1861. Somehow I knew that and somehow I knew that I was in New Orleans, though I had never been there and certainly hadn’t been there in the nineteenth century. Though it was only March, the air was wet and hot, wetter than air should be, hotter than air should be. My clothes, my clothes were magnificent. I was dressed in a canary yellow frock suit, fitted at my trim waist and just a little snug across my chest. My shirt was white and crisp in spite of the humidity, and I realized that for some reason I was not perspiring like those around me. People watched me, I believed, with some admiration and some respect and perhaps fear. The yellow of my suit made my dark brown skin seem smooth in the bright sun. Other slaves wore tattered work clothes as they labored loading and unloading cargo. The ship’s captain, with whom I was dealing, was wrapped in drab attire, as was the white dock foreman, a short, fat man in a vest. They all called me Raz-ru, and I heard a black man refer to me behind my back as the claw.

“That does it, Raz-ru,” the captain said, handing me a copy of the shipping bill. “Tell me, will we ever see Mr. Bond down here again? Or are you taking over everything?”

“Maybe,” I said, intentionally leaving it unclear about which question I was answering. “Maybe.”

As I walked away from the docks a black man named Jason joined me. I greeted him by name. He was taller than I, very slender, and his voice was unusually high pitched.

“They says the war is comin’, Raz-ru. They says we gonna be free men,” Jason said.

“Who is they?” I asked.

“Everybody.”

I stopped and looked him in the eyes. “I hope it’s true. I believe it is true. Are you ready for it?”

“I’m ready.”

“Good man. Stay ready.”

Then I was wandering with less ease, but more than I would have expected, through a crowd of white men, ugly faces, some with tobacco-stained chins, some dressed in finery. I was in an auction hall, and the merchandise was slaves. The item on the block was a man about my size, built very much like me, square jawed like me. The auctioneer barked out his attributes, said he was as strong as an ox, could lift and run all day and didn’t mind the heat or the humidity. He then gestured, and the man ran back and forth through the aisle, the muscles of his back rippling, his head down. The first bids were called out, and I heard fifty, then seventy-five, but I didn’t hear what price he finally fetched.

A sudden hush fell upon the room as what looked very much like a white woman was pushed onto the block. But she couldn’t have been white because she was on the block. In New Orleans there were hundreds like her, but this woman wore the clothes of a so-called lady, and by that I mean that she was dressed from the waist up as well as below, given a respect that any other slave could never have expected. She stood with her back straight, her chin out, defiant. All the slaves behind the block came together as if a choir and then, as a choir, sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” their voices soft, mellow, round, their gaze a collective one, dumb and lost.

“I have here a high-, high-yellow bitch of good lines,” the auctioneer called. “Her good white blood is evident, but I can guarantee her hot and steamy nigger disposition. From her hips you can see she’s probably not much for breedin’, but she’s great for rehearsin’. Her skin might be white, but she bleeds black. A fine luxury purchase for the discriminating gentleman.”

Before the bidding began, a familiar voice rang out, offering five thousand dollars. It was the voice of the man who owned me. Hamish Bond stepped forward, dashing and comfortable in his camel dress coat, his tightly cinched green cravat, his camel top hat, his oiled hair graying at the temples just below the brim. Bond was not nearly as tall as me, but he carried himself entirely erect, as if he had been constructed anew for the day.

“I have a bid of five thousand dollars from Mister Hamish Bond,” the auctioneer sang. “Five thousand dollars. Do I hear any other bids? Five thousand once. Twice. Sold to Hamish Bond.”

The woman looked liked every other mulatto in New Orleans, but Bond paid for her and took her back to his place in the Quarter. I arrived a couple of hours later to find myself standing in the kitchen, hearing about the new acquisition from the last high-yellow object of affection, Michelle.

She moved around the kitchen in a long dress, a scarf around her head. Her dark eyes blazed. She moved with some grace, but not much. “Raz-ru,” she said, pointing at the ceiling. “She’s up there right now, in that room that used to be mine. And I have to wait on her, treat her with respect and deference.”

The cook, another young mulatto woman, said, “The way we used to have to treat you.”

“Shut up, Dolly,” Michelle said. “No one asked you.”

“I have to treat her like she’s more than nothing while he tiptoes around her like she’s made of glass or some such, like she’s white like he is. Why did I fall from favor, Raz-ru? He used to treat me like that. Why no more? Did he drill deep enough to strike black, and now he needs a new well?”

“And he’ll need a new well again,” I said.

Dolly came over, a big wooden spoon in her hand, talking like the voodun princess she was, “Might be the last well he get.” She stirred the air with her spoon. “It’s comin’. Change be comin’. It’s in the air. Soon, Master Hamish won’t be having his yellow cookies.”

“Dolly, go about your business!” Michelle said. “Take the tea up to that … that new one.”

Michelle watched Dolly leave. “Samantha Moon, that’s her name. She was living high and mighty up in Virginia, thinking she was white, and then the truth came back to roost. She got to live free for a long spell and she ought to be happy about that, but she doesn’t believe she is what she is. I would also feel sorry for her except that she had those free years that I didn’t have. I’m beginning to think the only difference between being black and being white is that if you’re white you just don’t know about your blood, you’re dumb to your blood, ignorant about that one drop. White people fear that one drop like we fear the rope.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, but they also love that one drop. Like the way Bond loved you and will love her. Fleetingly.” I studied her face. “Tell me, do you really love that man?”

“He is so kind.” Her face did a dreamlike thing, it became long, then fat and I had to think to fix it and I was not sure it was ever the same.

“The devil is often kind. He controls with his kindness. His darkies collect and sing him praises for his kindness. They huddle together and parade like a single creature behind that wagon he calls kindness. He kills with his kindness.”

“You ask me why I love him,” Michelle said, her dead-doll eyes locked on mine. “Why do you hate him so?”

“You don’t need to ask that.” I realized I was still holding my hat in my hands. I was nervous because I had no place to go. “So, this woman upstairs, who has been dragged from her home, sold on the block, she cannot accept her blood?”

“Cannot and will not, Raz-ru.”

“She may soon wish that her blood will accept her.”

“She will not,” she said.

“Then she is more than a fool. She is stupid.”

And in the dream, the words felt strange in my mouth, the faces seemed in soft focus, no hard edges, no sharp contrasts, except that rage burned inside me, my not so much feeling it as knowing it. The slaves irritated me with their love of singing. Michelle irritated me with her love of Bond. I irritated myself with my artificial dignity, my station as boss Negro, a meaningless designation. The chorus of slaves appeared in the kitchen. Swing low, sweet chariot, coming fo’ to carry me home. With the awful music as background I wondered about the pale woman upstairs and wondered why her blood mattered to any of us, except of course that she, like us, was property, and somehow it was an offense that she did not care or that she was incapable of holding that fact in her head. The choir of slaves kept singing, and I turned to shout at them, “Would you niggers please shut the fuck up!”

They looked shocked, taken aback.

“Just shut the fuck up,” I repeated.

Grumbling, they disbanded, and the scene broke away into pieces, and I found myself being asked by Bond to sing a song for him and his sea captain visitor. Though I did not want to, I could not stop the song from finding my throat. My mouth opened and out it poured while I tasted bile. “Blow the man down,” I sang, and as I did, my voice deeper than usual, I sought to punctuate it with irony that of course fell on deaf ears. “Give me some time to blow the man down,” I sang the last line and then walked away from them as a storm approached.

Finding myself in the room of the new mulatto princess I was at once confused, outraged, and saddened. I could find no words to share with her, and it soon became clear to me that she was not only unaware of my presence, but unable to see me. The wind blew the French doors open wide, and the curtains danced like loose sails. Samantha Moon tried to push against the wind to close the doors, but she was beaten back. Then Bond dashed in from the veranda and, as if fighting a wind that possessed agency, he closed the doors and locked them. He went to Samantha Moon and helped her to her feet. They stared deeply into each other’s eyes, as deep as they could stare, and kissed. I wanted to puke over and over while they wrestled through brief and uninteresting sex, not knowing why I was made so sick, not knowing why they were having sex. All this while a slave who looked just like Barry White stood at the foot of the bed singing, “Can’t get enough of your love, babe.”

Spiraling around and around I found myself standing on the deck of a riverboat. As it docked dozens of black people gathered on the hill beyond the dock and began to sing, sing in that mellow and sweet-sad and sickening way of gospel music, sing praises to the master arriving home. I followed Bond and Samantha Moon off the boat and across the dock. There he placed her on the seat of a buckboard that had been decorated with magnolia blossoms and red and white ribbons, and he stood in the bed of it. The wagon carried him and his mistress to the plantation, the singing Negroes dancing behind, singing, cakewalking, grinning, grinning, grinning. One short, spry, bald black man high-stepped the whole way beside the wagon. I lagged behind, wondering at once what I was doing there as Raz-ru and what I was doing in this dream that certainly could not be my own.

Samantha Moon was standing on the veranda wearing a veranda-standing dress, her light skin catching the moonlight. She was asking me why I hated Bond and why I hated her. I told her that I did not hate, but that I was sad for her, for her inability to accept herself, for her refusal to acknowledge her real self. She glided across the room and went on about Bond.

“He has raised you like a son, even broken the law to teach you to read. He never beats any of you,” she said.

“You?” I repeated.

She look upon me, puzzled.

“You mean us.”

She stepped more fully into the moonlight, I imagined to appear whiter.

“Oh, yes, he’s a good master. Good ol’ massa Hamish. He sho nuff good. He don beat us or nothin’.” I stared at her. “How would you describe a relationship where one of the good things to say was ‘he doesn’t beat me’? Do you know about his past?” I asked.

“He told me all about it. How he was a slave trader, and he was known as Captain Strike Down and about the Rio Ponga. He told about the burning village that haunts his dreams. He also told me that it was not only white men doing evil, but blacks as well. He told me about Geezo, the black king whose men were burning the village. He told how they would split open heads and run their fingers through the brains of still-living people. He told me all of it, Raz-ru.”

“And you believed him. I suppose you would want to. Poor rich Hamish Bond, living with the guilt of ruining so many lives. I don’t see him sharing his wealth with the ruined. No, he stays rich and we stay slaves because there were black men as evil as him. So says he. It is his burden to care for us.”

Then stuff happened, as stuff happens in dreams, things that I either cannot remember or in fact didn’t happen, though it seems like those things, forgettable as they apparently are, must have happened. But there I was, knowing that Bond had left the plantation only to test Samantha’s love by leaving her alone to the advances of Charles DeMarion, evil neighbor slave owner, beater of slaves, raper of slaves. Knowing also, as I stood outside the closed doors of the drawing room that Samantha Moon was in there with Charles DeMarion and that I would be running in to save her from his inevitable attempt at rape.

And so I did respond to her cry for help and why, I’m not certain. Would I have run in to save a dark slave from his raping hands? Was it her carriage? The way she believed herself to be white? Was I defending her honor? Defending white womanhood? Or was it, sicker still, my attempt to protect the property of the master I so hated? I hated myself as I ran across that room. I pulled him away from her, and he began to beat me with the crop he always carried. I stood tall and punched him. All this while a choir of black voices floated over us, singing, “I Shot the Sheriff.”

Michelle came running into the room, looked at the unconscious DeMarion and then to me. “Run, Raz-ru! Run before he calls the sheriff!”

I ran. I ran for all I was worth, which was a pretty penny I was told, through the acres of tall cotton, through the towering stands of sycamores, over the eroding levee and into the stagnant and stinking swamp where I knew my white pursuers would not follow—not into the swamp, into the deepest of black backwater, full of poisonous snakes and angry gators and long nights with light from only wild eyes. I was happy to be there. A wet hell, but a quiet heaven. All the singing was hushed.

Tornado. Rain. Bird calls. Spiraling. The blue uniform of the Union Army fit tight across my chest and loose in the trousers. The war was pretty much over. Growers like Bond and DeMarion were wanted for having burned their crops and had fled into hiding. The city of New Orleans was awash with blue uniforms like mine. The former town palace of Hamish Bond was empty, and I sat there in it, candles burning on the dining-room table, dusk turning to night outside. Samantha Moon walked into the room from the courtyard and was startled by my presence.

“Come in,” I said. “How does freedom taste? Oh, that’s right, you’ve already tasted freedom. Does it taste the same? Is it sweeter? More bitter? Does it go down easily? Like your master’s sperm?”

“You’re disgusting,” she hissed.

“I thought you might find me so.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to light the candles.” I stood and walked toward her at the other end of the table. I picked up the six-candle holder. Only five burned. Narrow candles with tall flames. I held the light close to her face. “Are you able to see yourself more clearly now? I think that I can see you more clearly. Now that you’re free. And now that I’m free.”

“Where is Hamish?”

“Hamish,” I said. “I don’t know where he is, but I will find him and I will kill him.” I pushed the candles closer to her face. “Can you feel the hot? The heat? The heat they say we darkies burn with? Can you feel my heat?” I moved my face closer to hers and spoke to her left ear, the ear on the side of her heart. “You do feel the heat, Samantha Moon. You’ve always felt the heat between us. It’s starting deep down, isn’t it, like a tickle someplace. You feel it because here I am, waiting to reconnect you to your blood, ready to infuse you with your history, sad and ugly though it may be.” My breath touched her face, and it seemed to me she found it sweet smelling, the way her eyelids fluttered. I whispered to her, “You long to be filled with the juice of lost fruit, don’t you? You need your denied tale, the one I hold between my legs. You feel the blood, don’t you, Samantha Moon?” Her breath was fractured, catching snags as it left her. “The heat, Samantha Moon, the heat.”

Her lips trembled as she leaned toward me, aching for my kiss.

“Sadly, I don’t feel the heat,” I said.

She began to weep.

Then Hamish Bond was in the room. He held a long sword and leaned on it like a cane, like a swashbuckler. “You’ve made the lady cry,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “It saves me the trouble of finding you.”

“You would kill me. After all I’ve done for you? I remember the village so vividly, so vividly. It was on the Rio Ponga in Africa. You think we white men are bad, but you should have seen those black pagans. I saw more than one whack off the top of a head and run his hand through some poor nigger’s warm brain while he could still feel it. I was sickened by them, sickened, I say. And there, under the body of a woman was a two-month-old tar baby. I put myself between one of Geezo’s men and caught a spear through my leg. I saved that little monkey and brought him home, treated him like a son, taught him to read, to move through the white man’s world.” He stared at me while moving closer to Samantha Moon. As he did, Samantha Moon’s skin grew darker. With each step her skin became more like mine. “I should have saved myself the wound and let the spear strike that little bastard dead.” He looked over at Samantha Moon and was startled.

I pulled out my service revolver and shot him in the chest.

The room became filled with hovering sullen, perhaps angry, perhaps relieved, black faces, and none of them sang.

Then I was in a brothel, plush red pillows soft and comfortable behind my naked back. My arm was slung over the back of a velvet davenport, my reddened and sore knuckles grazed the flocked wallpaper. A long-legged white woman with strawberry blond hair, pale blue and vacant eyes, crawled sensuously, yet awkwardly, toward me. I watched her over the distance, coming across the worn oriental rug, her deep red-painted nails like bloody claws. She came to me and kissed her way up my leg to my soft penis, then she took me into her mouth.

My penis was wet. I could feel that. I swam in the darkness of sleep, slowly remembering my pursuers, where I was. I opened my eyes to see the boy asleep across the room. I looked to my left and saw Patrice asleep on the cot. I looked down to find the top of the blind woman’s head in my lap. I scooted away and fastened up my trousers.

“Which one are you?” she asked.

“I’m the black one,” I said.

She spat. “I had me a notion.”

We sat in silence for a while, and then I asked, “Is it just you and your little brother?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He thinks Mama just went out to de stow. But she ain’t comin’ back.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“Over a year now. She run off with the scrap-metal man.”

“How long have you been blind?” I asked.

“How you know I ain’t been born thisaway?”

“I don’t. That’s why I asked.”

“I was ten year old when Mama threw a pail of lye in my face. You can see I’se all uglied up with burn scars.”

“Hardly noticeable,” I said. In fact it was difficult to see the scarring, though it was there, and it made me sad to see it.

“Mama said she couldn’t keep no man on account dey liked me, and one day she got mad and threw the lye onto me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Den she had Bobo and blamt everthin’ on him.” She seemed to look off into space, but of course she wasn’t. “How old you be?”

“I’m eighteen.”

“You young,” she said.

“I look older.”

“You sho sound older. I like the way you talk. You sound fancy.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Well, you don’t sound like nobody from round chere.”

“I can well imagine.”

“What dey arrest you fer?”

“Being black,” I said.

“Hmmm. I heard tell that was illegal.”

“It is in Peckerwood County, anyway,” I added. “I just want to get to Atlanta so I can forget about this place.”

“I always wanted to go to Atlanta,” Sis said. “Doan know why. Cain’t see nothin’, that fer sho.”

“Did you go to school?” I asked.

“For a while. Den Mama threw that lye into my face and I never went back. She said I was ugly and the other chilluns would laugh at me. And I couldn’t see no board or books no way. I heard one of Mama’s beaus say she dint send me ’cause she was afraid she get charged wit buse.”

“Abuse,” I corrected her.

“Abuse.”

“You don’t have to be able to see a book to read it,” I said. “You could go to school. You still could.”

“Dat’s crazy talk.”

Those words hung in the air awhile. Patrice snorted, gagged a bit, then settled back into his snoring.

“Is yer friend a good-lookin’ feller?”

“First, he’s not my friend. I don’t know. Somebody might think he looks okay. He’s looks a little like that old move star, Tony Curtis.”

“I ain’t never seen no movie,” she said.

“You haven’t missed much.”

“You got family in Atlanta?” she asked.

I shook my head and then realized the uselessness of that. “No. Sort of. No, I don’t. I used to live there.”

We sat quietly for a while, listening to Bobo and Patrice snoring in the darkness. I could see a bit of the moon through the far window.

“You think we’ll make it to Atlanta?” I asked.

“I don’t see how,” she said. For once she didn’t sound stupid or out of it. “Not on foot anyway.”

“Well, on foot is all we got,” I said, feeling rather colloquial.

“But if’n you was to jump the freight.”

I tilted my head. “What?”

“The freight train. It goes to Atlanta. And it be going real slow up the ridge. Kinda steep. I jumped on it when I was little. We rode it fer fun. We always jumped off befo’ it topped the hill.”

“Where is the train?”

“The train ain’t always there. It come by once a day going one way and at night goin’ tother.”

“Where are the tracks?”

“Across the branch, through the holler, over the hill, and round the bend. At least that where it used to be. I ain’t been there since Mama burnt out my eyes.”

“Which train goes to Atlanta? Day or night?” I felt terribly sorry for Sis, but she was making my head hurt.

“Day, I think.”

“And how far away are the tracks?”

“It’s a fir piece,” she said.

“How fir?”

“Fir nuff.”

“Is it two miles or twenty?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“Well, which?”

“Depends on what way you go,” she said. “Any fool know that. Bobo could show you the way, I think.”

I looked over at the sleeping child. “I’m pretty sure he could. Do you think he would?”

She didn’t answer. She leaned back, her face in shadow now, and she might have gone to sleep. I looked at Patrice’s sleeping face, then over at the boy. These were sad people, and for the world I wanted to think of them as decent. Perhaps they were decent enough, but the place that made them was so offensive to me that all who lived there became there. I wondered how a little education might benefit them, but I came to the same conclusion. Well, sort of a conclusion, as I hadn’t reasoned toward it at all. I believed they were all ego, but hardly conscious. As insipid as that model of mind seemed to me, it proved useful in my surface understanding of them. And I could see that any sort of hypnosis was unlikely to work as there was no sub- or unconscious to tap into.

“You two luv birds through yapping?” Patrice said.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I was tryin’.”

“How is your back?”

I didn’t know why I was asking. I certainly didn’t care. Now that we were no longer chained together, there was no reason for us to remain together, except that Bobo probably would not take me to the train tracks, but he would lead the way for Patrice. I needed Bobo and therefore I needed Patrice, that was my conclusion, with a therefore and everything.

“I’m in treemundus pain. So, what was you and Sis talkin’ ’bout?”

“I thought you were awake,” I said.

“You was keepin’ me awake. There’s a difference. And I heard y’all, but I tweren’t listenin’.”

“Another interesting distinction.”

“So, what she say?”

“She said there’s a freight train to Atlanta that runs near here.”

“Where?”

“That’s the problem. We need Bobo to show us how to get there.”

“And I ain’t goin’ do it, less’n y’all take us to Atlanta wit y’all,” said Sis, sitting up and bringing her face back into the moonlight through the window.

“Ain’t happenin’, Sis,” Patrice said.

“Then y’all on yo own.” She crossed her arms on her chest and stuck out her chin in defiance.

“Well, naw, Sis, there ain’t no reason to be all like dat,” Patrice said. He reached over and put his hand on her knee. “I bet a purty gal like you got so many beaus round chere that you really don’t want to leave.”

“Ain’t no beaus and you can stop yer sweet talkin’. We’s going to Atlanta wit y’all or nobody goes.”

“I don’t want to argue,” I said, “and I don’t much care who hops the train with me. I just want to get on and get out of this hellhole. Bobo, what time does the eastbound train go by?”

“About dusk. If we leave at dawn we’ll jus’ make it.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes again. “We’ll need our rest,” I said. “I’ll need mine anyway.”

I slept a dreamless sleep this time, but I awoke to the nightmare of Patrice and Sis having sex in the cot. Across the room Bobo was eating cold beans out of the pot on the stove. I covered my ears to block out the grunting and moaning. Luckily the noise was short lived, and soon they were both snoring. I tried to repress my humanitarian thoughts of helping the poor blind girl find a school so she could learn to read.

At first light I was standing out in the yard, happy for the sun to be coming up, happy to be out of the beans-, sweat-, and sex-stinking confines of the cabin. Then Patrice walked out with Sis dressed in a fresh tattered calico dress. Their faces appeared even more vacant than before.

“Ain’t it a beautiful mornin’, Potay?” he said.

“I cain’t even see and I know it beautiful,” Sis said.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’s in luv,” Patrice said.

I shook my head. “And?” But I knew what was coming and then it came.

“Sis and Bobo is comin’ wit me to Atlanta,” Patrice said.

Bobo stepped out of the house and stood by them. He pulled at his sister’s sleeve.

“That’s great. Congratulations.” And it kept coming.

“Since you know folks there, we was thinking maybe you’d let us stay wit you fer a little while, til I get on my feet, ya know?”

“Are you crazy?” As I asked the question, to which I of course knew the answer, I remembered that I needed the boy to lead me to the tracks.

The hounds howled in the distance. The sound was chilling.

“If them is Jubal Jeter’s dawgs, they gone be on y’all real fast,” Bobo said. “Dem dawgs is mean, too.”

“I’ll do what I can to help,” I said.

“See, Bobo,” Sis said. “I told you, Potay be a good nigger.”

I looked at the three of them, standing there against the backdrop of that cabin like an Andy Warhol parody of American Gothic, residents of a cul-de-sac at the end of Tobacco Road.

It was just sunrise, and the air was already hot and sticky. As parched as I was I refused to drink any water from the well. I could only guess how many rodents had fallen into it to drown and decompose. Neither was I hungry enough to consume just one more bean or rock-hard piece of bread. The hounds called and they sounded closer.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Before we could leave, Sis and Bobo grabbed a few things, and Patrice had an idea to throw the dogs off our trail. He covered the ground with black pepper and every other seasoning he could find in the house.

“It’ll take ’em awhile to sneeze dat out,” he said. He giggled. “I wish I could be here to see when dey do.”

Finally, we set off, Bobo leading the way, struggling with his oversized rucksack and a brown paper bag. Sis and Patrice followed after, each carrying a worn leather valise as she held his hand for guidance. A bad situation no matter how one looked at it, unless of course you were blind and in fact they all were, and perhaps I as well. I noticed the sad detail that Sis’s shoes did not match. Both boots were black and worn, but the heel of one was at least a half-inch higher than the other and so she limped. I brought up the rear. I carried the boy’s twenty-two rifle, mainly so no one else would, but a bit of thinking made me realize how quickly the presence of that weapon in my hands could get me killed, so I tossed it into the brush just after we crossed the creek.

The sun cooked us as we dragged ourselves up and down hills. Patrice helped Sis over fallen logs and over puddles, and I imagined I saw some tenderness there. Perhaps I did. Then we came to the tracks. Bobo assured us that we had made it with a couple of hours to spare, so we found some shade and rested.

“Will you help me find one of dem schools?” Sis asked me.

“Sho he will,” Patrice said.

“And I kin go to school, too?” Bobo asked.

“You sho kin,” Patrice said. He leaned his head back and looked up at the clouds. “What I wouldn’t give fer a drank.”

“I got a bottle in my suitcase,” Sis said. “Thought it might come in handy.” She opened the leather bag and pulled out a mason jar with a lid. It was filled with a clear liquid.

“Well, dang it to mercy, I knowed I loved you all along,” Patrice said. He took the jar, unscrewed the lid, and took a whiff. “Lawdy, that smells fine, finer than frog’s hair.” He took a swig and coughed. “Here, honey, have a bite.”

Sis took a long drink and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. She handed the jar to Bobo and he did the same. Bobo gave the jar back to Patrice. I was thoroughly and absolutely disgusted, yet somehow not surprised at all.

Patrice pushed the jar toward me, but I waved it off. I watched them drink themselves unconscious, and I realized that it didn’t matter where they were, they would never be going anywhere.

The train’s whistle blew. It was coming and I was the only one awake. I did not wake them. The locomotive passed, and I walked to the tracks. Just as Sis had said, the train was moving very slowly up the grade. I found an empty boxcar and easily climbed into it. Alone. I left them sleeping there where they belonged, with one another.