“What would you do if one of the men on the chain gang broke away and jumped in our car?”
“That won’t happen, Roy. We won’t be stopped much longer. Their leg irons are too tough to bust, and these prisoners are swinging bush hooks, not sledgehammers.”
“The air is so smoky here. It must be really hard for the men to breathe when it’s so hot.”
“We’re in the Bessemer Cutoff, baby. This part of Alabama is full of steel mills. If these men weren’t prisoners, most of them would be working in the mills or mines or blast furnaces somewhere in Jefferson County.”
“There are more black guys than white guys on this chain gang. On the last one we passed, in Georgia, there were more white prisoners.”
“We’re going to move now, honey. Get your head back in.”
“Uncle Jack had two brothers working construction for him who’d been on a chain gang. Their names were Royal and Rayal.”
“They told you they were in jail?”
“Uh-huh. They didn’t murder anybody, only robbed a bank. Tried to, anyway. Rayal, I think it was, told me the reason they got caught was because they didn’t have a car. They got the money, then tried to take a bus to get away.”
“Where was this?”
“Jacksonville, I think. The bus didn’t arrive when it was supposed to, so the cops arrested them.”
“I’ll never forget that movie with Paul Muni, I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. At the end he escapes, and when he meets his old girlfriend, she asks him how he survives. As he disappears into the shadows, he whispers, ‘I steal.’ It’s pretty spooky.”
“I feel kind of bad waving back at the chain-gang guys, you know? We get to leave and they don’t.”
“Here we go. Oh, baby, doesn’t it feel good to have a breeze?”