It was nearly 9 p.m. and raining heavily when the ancient Packard rounded the corner of the muddy road and ground to a halt on Hemlock Row, a claptrap group of shacks located three miles west of Pottstown, Pa. Fatty peered through the muddy windshield at the exhausted-looking homes, some of them made of nothing more than two-by-fours nailed together with plywood and tin, then frowned at Paper, who was seated next to him. She was clad in a heavy coat and slacks, her hair tied in a wrap with a worn oilskin cloche atop her head. She sat patiently with her hands in her lap, looking out the rain-streaked window. In the back seat, the hulking frame of Big Soap, fast asleep, his head crammed into the rear corner, blocked a good portion of Fatty’s back window.
“I should’a brought my pistol,” Fatty muttered.
“Gun won’t do you no good here,” Paper said.
“How do I know one of these cowboys out here won’t come and kick in my windshield?” he said.
“If you can show me a pair of cowboy boots in these parts, I’ll give you a hundred dollars right now,” Paper said. “They ain’t the type out here.”
“What type are they?”
Paper sighed. “I’ll go inside. Just wait for me, Fatty. I know what I’m doing.”
Fatty frowned and tapped the steering wheel. He was nervous. He’d never been to Hemlock Row, a tiny hamlet of black life that most Chicken Hill blacks avoided. Chicken Hill’s Negroes were, by their own definition, “on-the-move,” “moving-on-up,” “climb-the-tree,” “NAACP-type” Negroes, wanting to be American. But the blacks who lived in this clump of nine tiny shacks spread over two acres just off the road heading west toward Berks County had no desire to be in the white man’s world. They were Lowgods, said to be from South Carolina someplace, all related in some form or fashion. Who the first Lowgod was that came to Hemlock Row and why they settled there instead of Chicken Hill, or Pittsburgh, or Reading, or Philly, no one knew. Fatty heard rumors that the Lowgods were actually Nate’s people, though he’d never had the nerve to ask Nate about it. And why would he? The Lowgods were private, suspicious, unpredictable, and kept to themselves. They grew their own vegetables, tended their own animals, and kept their own counsel. They walked different. They talked different. Their language was odd, full of lilting phrases that pelted the ground like raindrops. Gullah-speak, they called it—half English and half African—full of hoodoo sayings and things that only the Lowgods understood. They were also not to be fooled with. A few years back in Fatty’s jook joint, a big, hulking Chicken Hill resident named Bunny Hales picked a fight with a tiny, skinny little stranger who claimed to be a Lowgod from Hemlock Row. Fatty had never seen somebody move so fast. The Hemlock Row man fought with his hands and feet, using some kind of kicking art that sent Bunny’s teeth flying out his mouth like Chiclets.
“If your girl wanted to be civilized, she’d live on the Hill,” Fatty said.
“Her people’s here,” Paper said simply.
“Does she like living like a monkey?”
“Will you quit? You wanna get Dodo outta the nuthouse or not?”
“I want to keep something in my pocket other than a handkerchief. That’s why I’m here.”
“For a guy who dreams big, you think awful small,” Paper said. “That kind of thinking’ll keep you in Pottstown the rest of your life.”
“Who said I want to leave?”
Paper grabbed the door handle, pushed the door open, and stepped into the rain. She turned and leaned in, speaking through the open door, the rain dripping off the narrow brim of her hat past her glowing dark eyes. “I’ll call out if I need you to come in.”
Fatty thought he saw a glint of fear in those beautiful spirals and couldn’t help himself. “Oh hell,” he said, reaching for the door handle. “I’ll go in with you. These rusty, hoodoo niggers don’t bother me.”
“Just set tight,” Paper commanded. She nodded at Big Soap in the back seat, fast asleep. “And keep him in his cage. Y’all come inside if I call. And if you do come in, step in with your hat in your hand and a smile on your lips. Don’t say nothing. That sassing mouth of yours’ll earn you a lesson out here that’ll last.”
She slammed the car door, pulling the hat tightly over her head and splashing through muddy puddles over to one of the houses. She knocked on the front door. The door was pulled opened by an unseen hand. She vanished inside and the door closed.
Fatty eyed the door anxiously. A mist laid itself on the windshield. He turned on the wiper blade and watched it make one exhausted swipe across then quit. Then another. Then quit. It didn’t help.
He drummed the steering wheel again, impatient, biting his swollen lower lip while having an argument with himself. Between the near disaster of Nate two nights ago and Big Soap’s mother marching up to his jook yesterday, he’d about had his fill of Dodo. How could a man get ahead if he had crap dropping on him all the time? Paper’s arrival at his jook yesterday made it a trifecta—three disasters in a row. He wished she hadn’t come, because he could tell by the mourning clothing she wore when she arrived—a crisp black dress and black hat—that she’d come from Chona’s funeral, which everybody on Chicken Hill had attended but him.
She sat on the porch in that pretty black dress and said simply, “Where was you?”
Fatty shrugged. He didn’t want to hear it. Chona’s death was a tragedy, but he’d walled off that sort of grief when he was a boy, long ago after his father died. That was the last funeral he’d ever gone to. No more death extravaganzas for him.
“You know I don’t go to them kind’a things.”
“You look low, Fatty.”
“Actually, I’m feeling jiffy.”
“Stop fending and proving,” Paper said. “I know you and Miss Chona go back.” She was right, but who was she to say that? How did she know Chona’s father had been one of the few who helped his family after his father died? Paper was four years younger than he was. She was a kid then, living six blocks away, farther down the Hill, which might as well have been a hundred miles. Boys had been lining up outside her house doing back flips to get her attention even then. What difference did it make now?
“She got her people to take care of her,” Fatty said. He was silent a moment, then asked, “Did Bernice go?”
Paper nodded. “You know how Bernice is. She came. She didn’t speak. She didn’t sing—which she should’a. But it was a nice service. A lot of it was in Jewish so I don’t know what was said. But I enjoyed it. Jews bury their dead quick. They don’t set ’em on the cooling board for days and fool around like we do.”
Fatty nodded, frowning. “What about Nate and Addie?”
“What about ’em?”
“You know what I mean.”
“They taking it hard. Specially Addie.”
Fatty was silent, watching the smooth lines of Paper’s face etched in concern. Even when she was worried, Paper was fine. There was something in her manner so truthful and light, the way she covered her pain with mirth, that always shifted his heart a little, except at the moment, for she wasn’t laughing or smiling. He started to offer a word of comfort. The next thing she uttered, however, made him realize he was a fruitcake for being soft on her.
“Addie and Nate are planning to free that boy. And you gonna help.”
“Who am I, Abraham Lincoln?”
“Stop playing dumb. They plan on breakin’ Dodo out the nuthouse.”
“Sure. And I quit selling oil wells last year.”
“Nate got it set up to send him down to South Carolina after we get him out.”
“We?”
“That’s right. I need you to run me over to Hemlock Row tonight. I’ll pay for the gas.”
“Hemlock Row? I know bums living in packing houses who wouldn’t go over there.”
“Why not?”
“Them rusty-skinned niggers is setting over there doing hoodoo and eating butter beans and white livers as we speak. No thanks.”
“I said I’ll pay your gas.”
“You can save your chips.”
“Fatty, you don’t like money?”
“Keep your little quarters. Whoever sold Nate and Addie a story about getting Dodo out of Pennhurst is trading hog slops for piss. That place is run by the state, Paper. If Nate and Addie had any sense, they’da sent that Dodo down South before Miss Chona got herself eaten alive by Doc Roberts.”
“So you know what he did?”
“I don’t give a hoot about that witch!”
“If you don’t care, why you so hot and bothered?”
“I ain’t like the way the vote came in, if that’s what you asking, them taking Doc’s word and blaming Dodo for nothing.”
“That’s why you’re coming.”
Fatty chuckled. “Just ’cause a train can toot don’t mean it’s gonna roll down the track.”
“You going anyway.”
“Sorry, Paper.”
“You’re going ’cause I need a man to take me.”
“There’s plenty fellers round here happy to do that,” Fatty said. “Great big fancy fellers with elephant-sized pockets full of dollars. They’ll carry you wherever you wanna go.”
“But they ain’t you,” Paper said. And here Fatty expected Paper—whose glorious beauty broke some boneheaded man’s heart at least twice a month—to laugh off her own remark. But she didn’t laugh. Instead, she looked directly at him with big dark eyes that seemed to contain every blue sky and country mountainside he’d ever seen and said, “I need somebody I can trust.”
That threw him.
Sitting behind the steering wheel, Fatty cursed himself. He had to confess he was no different than most men. There was something about Paper that made him want to kneel down. She had a way about her, a power. Even as a child she had it, and when he came home from prison four years ago and saw her for the first time after two years away, he’d harbored a faint hope that maybe she’d see that he’d grown, that prison had changed him for the good. But she was gone then. She’d grown herself—from a cute, sassy child to a woman of laughter and easy gossip, playing life easy, making light of the darkest news, the most wonderful walking newspaper in the world—all without a man. He would’ve done anything to win her attention when he came out, which, of course, he could not. She didn’t seem to see him—and why would she? Why would someone so special fool with an ex-con whose reputation bore the stamp of prison stink, selling hamburgers and booze and scrap metal when she had royalty tripping by her house every week—railroad porters and teachers and such, even rich numbers runners from Philly, fellas who traveled and wore clean shirts and smooth ties every day, not workman’s clothing like he did. He knew of one Pullman porter from Baltimore who came every month and asked Paper to marry him, promising to spirit her down to a land of marble steps and swinging jazz and more soft-boiled crab than a soul could toss down their throat. The fella even showed up at Fatty’s jook one night, laughing and joking, a handsome, slim, light-skinned chap with smooth skin and shiny shoes. Fatty had to stifle an urge to march up to him and punch him out. But the fella drank and danced to the blues and spent money and proved to be an easygoing, fun fella. By the end of the night, Fatty felt ashamed. He realized then that he was dangerously soft on Paper. He’d seen the results of that softness in his own jook and back in Graterford, too: the fights, the scratching, the hollering, the knifings, the cells full of stories about some poor lovelorn sucker who got his feelings hurt, then reached for whiskey with one hand and his pistol with the other only to wake up to find himself doing an eighteen-year bid. He wanted no part of that.
And yet he was staring out the windshield at the doorway waiting for the source of the problem while feeling sorry for himself, running his tongue over his wooden tooth and his lower lip, still swollen from the giant gash he got from Big Soap. He could have let Big Soap slug him anywhere in the world after he’d gotten them fired. He chose the front of Paper’s house. Who am I fooling? he thought.
He glanced in the mirror at Big Soap still sleeping in the back seat. “Soap!” he yelled.
Soap woke up groggy, rubbing his face. “Yeah?”
“Set up and pay attention. Less’n things get thick out here.”
“Why we here again?”
“ ’Cause of Paper. She’s trying to figure a way to spring Dodo.”
“From where?”
“Pennhurst.”
“That’s a shame. How’s old Dodo doing?”
“If he was eating biscuits and gravy, would we be here?”
“What’s he done again?”
“Nothing, Soap. He didn’t do nothing wrong.”
“Why’d they send him to the nuthouse then?”
“He got in a mess.”
“Is that why my ma’s so mad?”
“I don’t know why she’s mad, Soap. She’s your ma.”
“Rusty said Doc Roberts was pulling Miss Chona’s clothes off and Dodo saw it.”
“I don’t know what he saw.”
“She died some kind of way.”
“Soap, do I look like a doctor? She was sick a long time.”
“That’s not what Rusty said.”
“What’s Rusty know? She fell down in her store and just died. That’s it.” But in his heart, Fatty felt sorrow, and behind it, a burst of simmering rage. He’d known Chona all his life. “Of all the white people in town, why her?” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
Fatty didn’t bother to reply. Chona wasn’t one of them. She was the one among them who ruined his hate for them, and for that he resented her. Miss Chona. She wasn’t Miss Chona when they were kids. She was just Chona, his sister’s best friend, the odd girl with the limp who walked to school with Bernice, the two walking behind him, ignoring him, which was fine with him in those days. But then life happened. He’d gone to jail after high school, and when he returned home, the die was cast. Chona got married and went back to being white and Bernice had all those kids and got saved to the Lord and inherited his daddy’s house—which he should’ve gotten, being his father’s only son. Bernice had opened up that very house to hide Dodo—and that’s something no one else in Chicken Hill did. The two had shown loyalty to each other in the end. Whom had he showed loyalty to? It frustrated him, thinking of their friendship. He wanted no part of either of them. They were lame. Stumblers. Losers. He had to make his own way in the world. Where was the money to be made fooling around in that complicated mess? He had to survive. That’s just the way it was.
Big Soap lit a cigarette and Fatty glanced at him through the rearview mirror. In the sudden light, Big Soap’s face was a silhouette. “All ’cause of a stupid stove,” Fatty said.
“A what?”
“Way back when, Dodo lived with his mama in a little house off Lincoln Avenue. She had a stove that blew up some kind’a way. He lost his sight on account of that. His ears went bad. After a while, his eyes come back, but his ears didn’t. After his ma got sick and died, he stopped going to school on account of he couldn’t hear nothing.”
“That’s why everyone calls him Dodo?”
“A name don’t mean nothing.”
“If it don’t mean nothing, why don’t they call him horse? Or car? Or spaghetti?”
Fatty stared out the windshield, disgusted. “I don’t know who’s dumber, Soap. Dodo or us. You wouldn’t see him out here setting in the rain waiting for these bone-in-the-nose niggers to cook him for breakfast.” He stared at the doorway where Paper had disappeared.
“What’s keeping her?”
Inside the little clapboard house, Paper found herself in a room of folding chairs that faced a table at the front of the room. A typewriter and a set of blank white cards sat atop the table. Nine people, four men and five women, sat in silence facing the front of the room. They glanced at her when she came in, nodded silent greetings as she took a seat in the back row, then looked ahead again in silence.
Moments later, a side door opened and a stately black woman with large black eyes and smooth dark chocolate skin entered. She was so well-dressed that even in a city like Philadelphia, just thirty-five miles distant, where fashionably dressed Negro businesswomen walked up and down Broad Street regularly, she would have stood out. She wore a drop-waist dress, with a sash around the hip and a skirt that went to her ankles. A cloche hat adorned her neatly pressed hair, a simple amulet hung around her neck, and double-strap Mary Jane shoes decorated her feet. She moved with the air of a queen, striding to the front of the room, standing behind the table that bore the typewriter, and gazing about.
The sight of this regally dressed figure standing behind a meager table facing an audience seated on folding chairs in a dilapidated two-room clapboard house four steps from Pennsylvania Route 23 with the tin roof clattering with the sound of rain and the wind howling into the cracks of the walls seemed so ridiculous that Paper had to stifle the impulse to laugh. But she knew better. For this was Miggy Fludd standing before her. And Miggy Fludd—Fludd being her married name—was a Lowgod. And if there was any colored soul on earth, any soul below Jesus Christ himself, who could get Dodo out of Pennhurst without the white man’s help, it was a Lowgod.
Miggy peered about the room.
“Are y’all ready?” she said.
A soft-looking cherubic woman who sat in the front said softly, “We been ready, honey. We been ready.”
The black women of Chicken Hill were a tight community. Most worked as maids for the white man, walking down the Hill to town each morning to wash the clothing, cook the food, raise the children, care for elderly parents, and allow the white women their privilege. But the colored women of Hemlock Row sang a different song. They were Lowgods. Unlike the black women of Chicken Hill, who were, for the most part, subservient, willing to toil as day workers for the white man, the Lowgod women were not good servants. They were distant and aloof, splendidly beautiful, with long necks and rangy arms. They did not smile or scrape or offer small talk. Their baleful stares, careless shrugs, and strange accents made them terrible hires as maids, for their dark beauty intimidated the white housewives and aroused the sexual slumber of their husbands. Their smooth skin glowed with an ebony arrogance that made the blistering pink of their white bosses seem weak by comparison. Neither were they especially keen on outdoor work and gardening, which a few, when pressed, did to some effectiveness. Instead, the Lowgod women, by and large, laundered. They fetched their laundry each morning on foot. It was not unusual on any given morning to see five or six Lowgod women lugging huge bags of clothing up dusty Route 23 from Pottstown to Hemlock Row, a good three miles, bearing the laundry of the town’s prominent families, for they cleaned and pressed skirts with such care and precision that even the most intolerant white housewives put up with their frightening long silences and odd accents. The Lowgod women were known for their laundering skills. They stood head and shoulders above those of most other laundresses in the area, save Paper’s. That’s how Paper met Miggy.
Miggy was a former coworker. The two washed, tag team, for the same customer, an insanely scrupulous housewife whose husband was a vice president of the National Bank of Pottstown. When one wasn’t available, the other was used. Eventually, the two formed a friendship, for Paper’s easy presence, wonderful laugh, and disdain for the quivering, testosterone-driven weaklings known as men won over the most hardened, suspicious females, and Miggy was a curious soul indeed. They were nearly the same age, and Miggy’s thirst for learning to read and a curiosity about Paper’s seemingly glamorous life as hostess for several handsome Pullman porters resulted in Miggy’s marriage to a railroad porter, a short affair that ended badly, for the man had a temper and no experience with a Lowgod, whose women took backwater off no man. Paper’s intervention saved the man’s life and likely saved Miggy a turn in the penitentiary. Thus, the friendship between the two women solidified.
Paper had not seen Miggy in some time, as Miggy had retired from the laundering business three years before for reasons she never explained. But when Paper wrote saying she had a problem with something at Pennhurst, Miggy had written back saying, “I got an answer for you,” and described in exact detail the time and place where Paper should come, ending her letter with a strict message: “Don’t come out here judging.” Paper, feeling suspicious that perhaps Miggy had fallen into prostitution, dragged along Fatty and Big Soap as a safety measure because she was aware that if a Negro on the Hill took an occasional misunderstanding too far, Big Soap and Fatty could be depended on to handle matters discreetly and, if necessary, with force.
Seated in the back row, Paper watched, fascinated, as Miggy stood before the small assembly. Her eyes scanned the room. They fell on Paper and moved past with no acknowledgment at all. Instead, she took a seat at the table, pulled the typewriter and cards closer to her, and said, “Who’s first?”
A man raised his hand.
Miggy nodded at him. “Go ahead.”
“My daughter is sick. Will she get well?”
Miggy rose from the table, removed her hat, raised her regal head toward the ceiling, spread her arms out, and, to Paper’s utter surprise, gave a long mournful cry, her mouth wide, her white teeth visible, as if she were crying to the gods. She closed her eyes, then slowly, methodically swerved, dancing in place, hips swinging around easily, sensuously, arms moving about in a cool, curved manner over her head, then down at the waist, then pulled back and forth as if she were rowing a boat; then faster, her body moving in tandem, the wide hips swaying in place, eyes closed, then faster, the bracelets and bones-and-teeth jewelry she wore clattering together over the sound of the rain banging against the tin roof—a kind of feverish African shake, faster, faster, super-fast; then the assemblage of bracelets, necklace, curves, and breasts slowed, like a train coming to a halt, slowing, slower, then stopped, and standing before them again, regal like a queen, breathing deeply, was Miggy of old, her eyes closed, head bowed, humming softly to herself. Then she opened her eyes, her dance-call to God complete, seated herself at the table, all business again, pulled the typewriter close, inserted a card, and started to type.
When she was done typing, she held the card up. The man rose and proceeded to the front of the room. She handed him the card and he sat down. Miggy peered around the room and said, “Next.”
On it went, as Paper watched, astounded. Old Miggy Fludd, who could barely read when they met—a typing fortune teller. Who would’a thunk it?
The questions came from each of those assembled, and they ranged in scope and manner. Is mama sick back home and not telling me? Is my husband coming back? Is my wife dating my best friend? Why has my cousin been so mean to me? After each question, Miggy rose, retreated into the zone, danced a marvelous short dance, reemerged from her zone, typed the answer on a card, and handed the card to the questioner.
When she covered all nine people in the room, she stood behind the table with her hands touching the top of her desk like a schoolteacher and said, “Are we all done here?” She glanced at Paper.
Nobody turned around to look, but Paper felt as if the room were looking at her anyway. She found herself staring holes in the floor. No Lord, she said to herself, I don’t want to know nothing about tomorrow.
“Nobody? All right. Goodbye then,” Miggy said. She sat behind her desk as the room rose, each person placing a few coins in a donation jar on her desk as they filed out.
But she called out to one as he reached the door, a slim gray-haired man bearing a beaten fedora in his hands with flecks of black in his ragged gray mustache and beard. “Bullis, can you stay a minute?”
He stopped and turned, standing by the door as the rest filed out of the room into the rain. “What I done now?” he said pleasantly.
Miggy took the jar full of coins, emptied the coins onto her desk, and separated them slowly. “How you doing out there, Bullis?”
“Out where?”
“At work.”
“I’m doing good.”
Miggy slid all of the coins over to him. “I needs a favor,” she said.
The man eyed the coins. Then pushed them back toward Miggy. “All right.”
Miggy nodded at Paper. “See that pretty thing setting back there? She’ll tell it when she’s ready.”
“Who’s she?”
“One of them from Nate’s side of town.”
The old man paused for a moment, blinking thoughtfully. “Nate’s still living?”
“Can she call on you or not?”
“Course.”
“I’ll fix it up.”
“All right then. I’ll be round.”
Paper found herself struggling for words as the man departed, then said, “Miggy, you got all them fancy clothes doing this kind of job?”
“Oh no, honey. This is my work. Not my job.”
“Telling fortunes?”
Miggy frowned. “I’m an oracle. I’m a messenger. God’s word comes to me when I dance, and I give His answers to people who asks.”
“I ain’t seen nar one of them reading what you put on them cards,” Paper said.
“Most of ’em can’t read,” Miggy said.
“Then why write their answers?”
“They’ll find somebody who can read. Or I’ll read to them myself later. I see most of ’em every day.”
Paper wanted to ask, “What if they don’t like what you wrote?” But she reminded herself where she was, so instead she asked, “What you giving ’em, Miggy?”
“Hope, honey.”
“Ain’t that what church is for?”
Miggy smiled. “Last year some gangsters from Reading come out here looking for a fella named Sanko. Hear tell they had a four-hundred-dollar ransom on Sanko’s head. Sanko was what you would call in our language a twi, someone who says nice things about people, sells air castles about ’em, makes ’em feel good about what they doing even if it ain’t always on the dot. He can talk the horns off the devil’s head. He makes a few dollars that way. He don’t do nobody no harm. What he done against them gangsters, the who-shot-John part, I don’t know, but them two come out here to the Row dressed in suits calling theyself preachers. Said they come to give Sanko the Gospel.”
She paused, finished up counting her coins, and placed them in her pocket.
“That is why the earth is troubled, Paper. You will not find one parent in ten thousand who would raise their child to be a murderer acting like they got God’s understanding. God’s Holy Hand has been laid on most folks out here on the Row long before they come to this country. We got our own church and our own way of doing things going back to how we was raised in the South. We keeps our reckonings against unjust sorrows in the family. We know when someone is giving God’s milk and not the devil’s water. So them two fellas looking for Sanko left outta here on a cooling board. And don’t nobody round here know nothing about it. Sanko is walking round the Row building air castles and telling lies to this day. And I’m oracling on as I please.”
She paused, straightening out the cards on her desk and the typewriter. “You a good woman, Paper. I owes you for your kindness when that Pullman porter put a beating on my heart. I ain’t the same person I was the first twenty-seven years of my life.”
“I didn’t tell you why I was here,” Paper said.
“I already know. There must be three hundred folks working out there at Pennhurst. And most of your colored workers out there is from the Row. You know why? Your basic Chicken Hill colored wants to eat their food off the high fryer. They aiming to be high siddity like white folks. But pretending to know everything and acting like you’re better than you know you are puts a terrible strain on a body. It makes you a stumbling stone to your own justice. Your basic Lowgod don’t care about that. Us Lowgods understand that when them patients at Pennhurst throw their poop at us, or pisses on the floor, or spits at us, they ain’t got no peace. They understand what most people in this land don’t: that you can’t restore what you ain’t never had. Living on a land that ain’t yours, pretending to know everything when you don’t, making up rules for this or that to make yourself seem big, that puts a terrible strain on a body. This land don’t belong to the people that rules it, see. And it’s made some of ’em, the best of ’em, the most honest of ’em, it’s made ’em crazy. We is in the same place, you and I, being colored. We are visitors here. Thing is, us Lowgods, wherever we is from, the old Africaland, I suppose, we were keepers of our fellow man. That was our purpose. We’re still that way. That’s all we know of our history, the one that was moved from us before we was brung here. You know what Lowgod means in our language? Little parent. We know most folks are weak and wisdom is hard to know. So the poor souls at Pennhurst is not hard for us to handle. I work up there myself. The patients ain’t hard to deal with. It’s the workers. The doctors and medical people and so forth. Those are the hard ones.”
“I ain’t studying them,” Paper said. “I’m just looking for—”
“I already know who you want,” Miggy said. “And I know how to get him out.”
She pulled her chair close to her typewriter, reached for an index card, then looked at Paper, holding the blank card in her long, slender fingers.
“They put your boy in Ward C-1. That’s not an easy place. It’s for what they call the lower functions. The ones they reckon can’t feed themselves and such. We got a Lowgod in there. Well, he’s from the Row, let me put it that way. He used to be one of us, but he’s gone astray. He got hisself into a tight round here, so he don’t come round no more, for we don’t want him. He’s unjust. And twisted. That’s why he lives up there at Pennhurst. Stays up there one hundred percent of the time now. Handles the worst patients. I heard about . . . well, there’s a few like him in this world. They finds room for folks like him up at Pennhurst, for so long as his evil is fed every now and then, he keeps order. He ain’t never gonna leave there, for if he ever comes back here, we’ll send him home to his milk. You got to deal with him to get your boy out free and clear.”
“Will he help?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. He’s twisted. But I can get your people to him.”
“If he’s twisted, how we gonna deal with him?”
“I ain’t said how you deal with him. I just said you got to.”
“We don’t know nothing about that kind of thing, Miggy.”
“You got a Low Country colored living right there on the Hill. Ask him.”
“Who?”
“I am not so big a fool as to think you don’t know,” she said. “Bullis, who you just seen, he’ll get your people inside. After that, it’s up to you what to do.”
With that, she pulled the typewriter close, placed the card in the carriage, typed a few letters, handed Paper the card, and gathered the rest of her index cards in a neat pile. “Come back and see me sometime. And bring that street-ways fella you thinking of marrying with you. The one waiting outside. He’ll do, by the way, for a husband. He got a good heart.”
With that, she turned from the table, strode to the side door, stepped out into the dark rain, and vanished, the door closing behind her.
She was gone so fast that Paper forgot to ask her for the name of the Lowgod man inside the ward. She looked down at the card in her hand. It bore three words: “Son of Man.”