Axeman’s Jazz

KWAKO hammers a railroad spike through a piece of oak the size of his arm. Then he splashes brown paint on a milk jug, jams the jug on the spike—a taccoon’s face or a bear’s—stands the oak up straight and whittles it with a small axe. I’ve parked my car on a gravel patch near the sign welcoming visitors to the Multicultural Museum. When I first walked up, he nodded hello but said he needed to finish this detail, so I’m standing to the side by a holly bush, watching him conjure an animal. I haven’t seen Barbara.

This whole coastal area, southeast of Houston, remains flooded, slushy and sodden, seething with mosquitoes. I wonder if the city or the county has done any drainage studies here, considered easements for detention ponds … a ten-year … no, a fifty-year … storm-event capacity …

Mud speckles my Taurus and the bottoms of my shoes. The humidity is as dense as a sheet. Kwako drills holes in the wood then inserts a pair of garden spades. His stiff leather gloves smell like hot rubber. He pulls them off, stands back, almost bowing to his work. Mockingbirds cackle in the willows. “Miss Washington,” he says. “How you been?”

“Tell you the truth, not many white—’scuse me—folk like you drop by here. You’s easy to recall. What can I do for you? Interested in one of Barbara’s quilts?”

I hesitate, wiping my shoes on the slick Bermuda grass. Its blue blades tickle my ankles. Kwako smiles at my awkwardness, steps behind me to a pile of loose wood. He bends, wags his head to bring me over. I squat beside him. “See this here?” He brushes a finger through a groove in the oak, stirring brittle, leaflike fragments. His long arms are like crate slats. “Wing casings,” he says. “Formosan termites. I bought these-here rayroad ties, sight unseen, to sculpt with from a fellow over Loosiana way, but most of ‘em worthless. Critters munching ‘em.” He snaps a board across his knee. It crumbles like old bread. “The Formosan is a fearsome thing. Imported sometime in the forties on army cargo ships, friend of mine says. Now they eating up the French Quarter over to N’Awlins, eating their way down the coast. Back in June, during the swarming season, couple we know down the road apiece was serving dinner to a roomful of guests when a cloud of these things come flying out of the dining room walls, dropping into the gravy. Kindly drained the sociability out of the evening.”

“Yeah, we up to our butts in plagues.” He grins, in love with his life in spite of it all.

A door slams. I peer across a tomato garden to the house. Barbara is touring a small group of visitors around the grounds. One man hands her some money; a woman next to him carries a box. “Bingo,” Kwako sighs. “On’y sale this week.” The people head to their cars and Barbara returns to the house, emerging a minute later with a bundle of laundry, which she hauls to a tiny shed adorned with horse collars and rusty plow blades. A washer cranks up inside the shed. Barbara comes back out with a pair of shears. A red scarf wraps her head. Brown skirt. Squash-yellow blouse. Kwako calls to her. “‘Member Sister Washington?

She waves the shears, wipes her hands on her skirt, joins us. Sweating, tired. Her hands are blistered. “Miss Telisha. Welcome back.” She pats her forehead with her arm.

“No no.” She slips the shears into a dress pocket. “Let me make us some tea.”

We follow her to the house. It’s hotter inside than out. Her kitchen smells of nutmeg and vanilla. Small blue bottles with trumpet lips line her windowsills. They’re filled with sunlight. A framed painting of Jesus gazing upward, looking very much like a twenties movie star, Rudy Valentino or somebody, tilts on the dining room wall; a yellowed palm leaf fans out behind it. Kwako and I sit at a table whose Formica top is peeling, patchy like a giraffe’s hide. Chunks of lumber and metal lie scattered throughout the house, even in the kitchen, and Barbara has to step around them as she pours water into a kettle and reaches into a cabinet for ribbed glass tumblers.

Kwako watches me, stroking his tangled beard. The house settles and creaks. I can barely breathe in the heat. I undo the top button of my blue cotton blouse, rub the soppy V at the base of my neck. “Elias Woods,” I say. “I’ve received permission to visit him up in Huntsville.”

“I wanted to ask both of you, since you know him, if you’d mind accompanying me.”

“You wouldn’t be allowed inside—you’d have to wait for me somewhere while I actually talked with him. But prison … it’s not a drive I want to make by myself.” I’m aware I’m talking quickly, unsure of myself, embarrassed. “I’d ask my uncle, but his health’s got me worried and I don’t want to strain him right now. My cousin works during the day. So I thought of you.”

Barbara dumps ice cubes onto a counter and fills the tumblers. Kwako’s still tugging his beard. “He’s gonna lead you to your daddy, is he?”

“My uncle says Elias knew him. That’s all I know. I just want to put some questions to him. I know you don’t know me very well, and this is a lot to ask—”

“—but you made me feel welcome last time I was here. And you know Elias—”

“We didn’t traffic with him all that much, you understand,” Kwako says. He slurps his tea.

Barbara reaches over and pats my hand. Her callused fingers feel like wood grain. Kwako says, “I heard your daddy play once. I’s telling Barbara after you left last time. Little club near Baytown for sailors and oil workers. Must have been … oh, ‘65 or so. ‘66, maybe. Bayou Jim Washington. Hell of a player. Dark and slender, wearing him a fancy new Stetson and slick black boots.”

I lean forward, waiting for more, but Kwako shakes his head. “On’y time I ever seen him. Didn’t talk to him or nothing. Didn’t know Elias knew him. Them days, Elias was spending lots of time in the city with the law students from over at Texas Southern, doing sit-ins at the lunch counters. Real active, he was.”

“Cops say he confessed. They’s always at each other’s throats, Elias and his woman.”

“Anyway. I’d be happy to pay for your time, since I’d be taking you away from your business …”

Kwako glances at Barbara. “Gives me two days to buy new wood and finish my bears.”

“Well then, looks like you got company,” Kwako tells me. “Little vacation might be nice. We hardly never get one.”

We finish our drinks in silence, then Kwako asks if I’d like to see some of Barbara’s quilts. I understand he’s suggesting I buy one in compensation for the favor they’re doing me. We squeeze into a back bedroom. It’s also jammed with lumber. Lovely quilts of all colors droop over clothes racks, chests of drawers, chairs, and the bed. Outside, a rose bush scrapes the window screen. The bed’s headboard ticks in the room’s awful swelter. The air burns my throat. I stumble against a framed poem on the wall. Barbara catches me and it. I apologize; she smiles. I study the words. “These were part of our wedding vows,” she tells me. “Goes all the way back to slavery days.” She straightens the frame on the wall:

HE: De ocean, it’s wide, de sea, it’s deep
Yes, in yo arms I begs to sleep
Not for one time, not for three
But long as we’uns can agree

SHE: Please gimme time, suh, to “reponder”
Please gimme time to “gargalize”
Then ‘haps I’ll tu’n away from out yonder
And answer up ‘greeable for a s’prise

Barbara’s eyes mist, but I can’t tell if it’s nostalgia of the heat. “Reminds me of the song my mama used to sing while she did her piecework,” I say, fingering a brown and yellow quilt on the bed. The fabric cools my palm. “Foller the drinking gou’d…”

Barbara grins. “When the sun come back / When the first quail call / Then the time is come / Foller the drinking goud…”

“Oh my, yes. Old slave song, from the Underground Railroad. My grandma taught it to me.”

“Sure. Grandma said there’s a feller name Peg Leg Joe, former sailor, an abolitionist, who’d travel from plantation to plantation, working, and while he’s there, he’d teach the slaves this song. Always, the following spring after he’d gone—when the first quail called—a few slaves would disappear, heading north, following the Big Dipper, on the trail he’d scoped out for them.” She steps past me and unfolds a huge blue quilt from a chair. “I made this one after patterns Old Granny taught me, designs going back to slavery.” She runs her fingers across appliqué and beadwork in the upper right-hand corner. “These represent stars, see, the spring constellations. Plantation women worked from can to can’t—sunup till after dark every day—so the stars was there in the morning when they started, just beginning to fade, and they’s there when they finished up at night. After supper, the women would all gather on a porch and commence talking and piecing.” She asks Kwako to help her spread the quilt on the bed. Vibrant colors—reds and greens across the blue. But I’m embarrassed for her when I see how crooked the lines are: just like Mama’s. As if hearing my thoughts, she tells me, “Old West African superstition, says Evil travels in a straight line, so the slave women, they’d sew their lines all cattywompers, block Evil’s path.”

“You bet. To throw off suspicion, too—see, these quilts was signs in the Underground Railroad. The patterns formed a map. When they got word it was safe to travel, the women would hang their quilts out over windowsills or on porch railings, signal folks the running time had come. The masters, they didn’t think twice about it. Figgered quilting was just a hobby for Mammy, kept her happy in the evenings, and the sloppier-looking the work, the less attention it drawn to itself. But all the slaves knew what these things meant.”

“That’s right. Hidden in plain sight.” She pats a square to the left of the stars. “Shoofly.”

“Well, Shoofly say it’s time to shoo!” She points to another square, just below the first. “This here’s the Monkey Wrench.

The “drunkard’s path” is another raggedy-ass pattern Mama made. I run my hands across it. “So this is how it’s supposed to look?”

Barbara nods. “Your mama must have been real proud of her roots, hewing to the old piecing ways.”

“She—” I lift the quilt, rub it against my cheek. My eyes sting. “I don’t know.”

“We’ll work something out when you pick us up on Thursday, how’s that?” Batbara says.

Kwako peers out the window, past the rose bush, picking his teeth with his little finger. “Yessir, business sure slow today.”

“No, that’s okay,” I say. “I’d like the quilt. I’d be honored to have it.” I pull the checkbook from my purse.

“Here at the Multicultural Museum, we only prepared to deal in cash,” Kwako says.

“Thursday will be fine,” Barbara assures me, touching my arm. “Take it. I hope it pleases your mama.”

Kwako steps over to help me fold the quilt. “Then I guess we’d better find your daddy, eh?”

On a dirt road between flooded rice paddies and Houston’s southern edge, I stop the car and pull Barbara’s quilt across my knees.

In Dale Licht’s house, in that white man’s house, she sang a slave song, stitched a freedom map into her African patterns. My mama, who ran from the niggers, who denied her own family. My mama, who refused me a black heritage (though she did name me Telisha, didn’t she—why?), weaving for herself a rich, down-low world.

What did she value about her own darkness? What part of her wouldn’t let go? I bunch the beaded stars in my lap, lift the fabric to my lips, and kiss the flying geese.

The sky is smudged paper, soiled by refinery smoke. Heavy air force planes drone low over the land whose still water glistens among spreading weeds. A chain-link fence, tilted and slack, runs along the road near my Taurus. A rusty sign on it says, AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL SECURITY,INC. Through my rolled-down window I smell the lot’s years of neglect. Rotted leaves in the mud, a thousand insect eggs gone to ruin. Dust scuffles. The day’s bad breath. Wrecked cars sit in a field up ahead. On broken antennae they snag cottonwood fuzz from the air, strands of wind-ripped spider webs. Foam rubber spills from split seats. Torqued metal. Fine raw material for Kwako. Gather up rubber, plastic, leather, glass. Hammer, sand, plane, and saw. Make me a mama, sir, will you please, sir? A figure I can lift and carry. Pencil mouth. Shoe-heel ears. A bra stuffed with nothing (those cancerous breasts). Top her off with a plume—a shredded get well card, sent a day too late.

I’m staining the quilt with my tears. My hands hurt, gripping its edges so hard. If I could make it through the muck out there I’d comb through the death-cars, the nuts and bolts of abandonment, until I found a radio that would sing to me from far across the years, my mama’s voice, the voices of buried slaves, steady, fearful, hushed: Foller the drinking gou’d / Foller the Risen Lawd.

“It’s a cell phone,” I explain, tossing the wrapping and the box. “I want you to keep this handy on Thursday while I’m gone. If you have the slightest pain, even a twinge, you call Ariyeh at school. I’ve left the number on the table.”

He leaves the phone on the counter, next to a jelly-smeared knife, then goes to play a record. I pour myself a glass of water, walk to the porch, stretch my back and arms. Across the street, in the Magnolia Blossom, two paper-pale men stroll among the tombstones. Satchmo purrs “The Potato Head Blues.” I stiffen. I don’t want to assume, automatically, that any fancy-dressed white man poking through a black neighborhood is the enemy. I’m no conspiracy nut, like Reggie.

“Thanks.” I take a last look. The fact is, I know a developer when I see one.

On Thursday, I spin along the swamp roads, pick up Kwako and Barbara. On the radio a newscaster tells us that the “former H. Rap Brown,” now known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, is awaiting trial in Georgia for murdering a sheriff’s deputy. “Mr. Al-Amin once helped lay the foundation of the civil rights movement, along with Julian Bond, John Lewis, Huey Newton, and Stokely Carmichael, registering voters, forming the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee,” the newsman says. “In the ensuing years, the civil rights leaders scattered into various philosophical camps, some distinguishing themselves, others falling into disgrace.”

In the back seat, Kwako clucks his tongue. “Hot-headed boogee. Had so much going for him. How he let it all get away from him? It’s just like Elias.”

“Elias? Well, let’s see. I ‘member the day the Texas Southern students sat at the Weingarten’s lunch counter over on Almeda Street, protesting the WHITES ONLY sign. Elias was with them. Till then, Houston papers was proud to say, ever’ day, how ‘docile’ the city’s coloreds had been. But one or two lunch counters, and that was it in Houston. The moneymen was too damn skittery. Signs came down straightaway.”

“Not overnight. The Major Leagues had integrated their teams, so when a guy like Willie Mays come to town, you had to put him up in a nice hotel with all the rest of the players. Baseball what finally broke the color line here. But Elias and them others, they was out front early. Solid and brave.”

“So what happened to him?” I ask. All around us, in barbed-wired fields, cows wobble, heat-stunned, near steaming stock tanks. Old barns crumble into kudzu. I roll my window up, punch on the AC.

“Drifted out to West Texas, worked at the Pantex plant, making nukes. Come back here—”

“Is there something wrong with us? These men were heroes, right? H. Rap Brown? But now he’s just another black man with a gun. Another brother in jail …”

“Yeah, and his old buddy John Lewis is an important U.S. congressman. Don’t go painting with a broad brush.”

“Sometime I think the big shots of history just got lucky to be where they was. Circumstances a hair different, you know, they’d be sinners ‘stead of saints. Hotheads, all of ‘em—that’s why they’s out front when historyring its bell. Looka the Alamo—we call those fellas heroes, right? Hell, they’s a bunch of rough-and-tumble scalawags. If they’da died in a saloon fight, which was real possible in most their cases, we wouldn’t be saying their names.”

We pass tupelos and sweet gums, a “Live Minnows” shop, old red-clay mule-cart roads winding off among dark pines, past gravestones sinking into weeds.

“Still, there is a lot of black men in jail,” Kwako mumbles. “That’s a fact.”

Barbara spots a fruit stand and asks if we can stop. I pull over by a series of pine crates stacked to form tables. Watermelons, apples, and pears. From my purse I grab a wad of bills. “On me,” I say. I hand her ten twenties. “And this is for your lovely quilt.”

She smiles and tucks the money into her bright yellow skirt. “You like to learn piecework? I’ll show you sometime. Then you can be like your mama.”

She greets the big, hearty man behind the crates. He’s filbert-colored, gray-haired, and sweating. Horseflies swarm a row of cantaloupe. The air smells rancid and sweet: moist sugar, overheated auto brakes.

“Hardwoods mostly gone from here,” Kwako says, glancing around at the pines. “Steam skidders dragged ‘em all away …” A wistful bemusement hovers just at the edge of his voice, reminding me of Bitter. It accounts, I’m sure, for my ease with him.

“Three oak cubs.” He grins. “And a brand new zebra made from Coke bottles and a suitcase.”

Barbara asks the fruit seller to bag her up half a melon and a pair of Granny Smith apples. She leans close and whispers to him. He leads her to a box of Ziploc pouches next to some peanut sacks. The pouches are filled with fine white grains. Barbara smiles at me, embarrassed.

It looks like chalk—fertilizer for houseplants or something. Barbara seems shamed by it so I don’t ask her, but as she turns from the fruit stand, she opens the pouch, pinches a bit of powder between her forefinger and thumb, and sucks it into her mouth.

“Dirt,” Kwako tells me softly. “Fresh from the Georgia hills. She craves it like some folks crave popcorn or crackers.”

Barbara’s shy now, but I give her a sympathetic smile. She admits, “I’d eat it for breakfast, lunch, and supper, with a little iced tea, if I could, but it’s bad for my system. Stops me up, you know, and leaves me tired.”

“When I’s a girl, my mama’d give me fifteen cents and say, ‘Go get me some kaolin from Miz So-and-So.’ She ate it whenever she’s pregnant with my little brothers and sisters. Said it settled her tummy. Sure enough, when I’s carrying my firstborn and got sick in the mornings, I remembered what she’d said and hunted some down for myself. Been hooked ever since.”

“There’s a big dirt trade from Georgia and all through the South, over here to the coast, even up to Chi-town, along the Delta,” Kwako tells me.

Back in the car, as we’re heading through the woods, Barbara says, “You know the way the earth smells after a long dry spell, then a spit of rain hits it, stirring up old pebbles and leaves? That’s how kaolin tastes to me.” She chews a creamy pinch. “Doctor tells me, ‘Girl, this stuff is used in paint, ceramics, fiberglass, it’s used to make paper—it ain’t to be eaten!’ and I know he’s right, but Lord, my mama was right too. Calms me like nothing else.” I’m glad she trusts me enough to give me a glimpse of her life. Two kids, boys, she says, both grown—I wonder how old she is?—working in the Ship Channel, loading boats. “Hell-raisers, but they made good men. Married now. Responsible daddies. We’re right proud of ‘em.”

We pass the remaining miles listening to a Sonny Rollins tape Kwako has brought, foggy sax twisting around mushrooming drumbeats. As we approach Huntsville, I notice blueberry fields on either side of the road and remember passing through here as a girl, in Mama’s car, traveling from Houston to Dallas. I recall black men in ghostly white suits picking the berries and realize now they must have been prisoners working for the state. In high school, one of the persistent rumors was that Creole women, just out of jail, hung around “nigger” cemeteries near Huntsville. They’d “do” a boy for a six-pack of beer.

On the town’s outskirts, sleek new housing crowds bulldozed fields; the unfinished homes are only about ten feet apart—a developer’s strategy to reduce the taxable land. Corporate campuses, white and bland. Condos. Hotels assembling ski lodges, made of hill-country limestone. Billboards say, DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS. In the town itself, new additions have been tacked to older homes, a sign of prosperous times in the prison industry. Satellite dishes, swimming pools. College boys swerve past us in freshly waxed sports cars; farmers rattle along in flatbeds.

All I know about the Texas prison system, from reports in the mayor’s office, is that the state once fed inmates a powdered meat substitute called Vita Pro, whose nutritional value was nil—and there was some question about where the unused meat was going and who profited from its sale. In the early eighties, the prison director was forced from office under suspicion of corruption. But this town is thriving; building cranes, skeletal girders soak up the sun beneath buzzing black police helicopters.

Downtown, in front of tobacco shops and clothing stores, men linger in shadows, wearing blue, short-sleeved shirts, khaki pants, wraparound shades. They light each other’s cigarettes, mill about uncertainly, clutching plastic bags, manila folders. Ex-cons, I figure, out on parole, sniffing the outside air, testing to see whether it’s poison to them now. Tattoos smear their arms.

Near the vaguely Italian courthouse, narrow cafés serve Diet Cokes and Fritos, All You Can Eat Noon Specials, to men in cheap ties—middle-management types. We spy them through the windows. I spot only a few women on the street, mostly in front of a lumberyard converted into a county museum and on the steps of a Baptist church so large it appears to be swollen.

I have twenty minutes to make my appointment. With Barbara’s help, I choose the nicest-looking café in the main square and drop her off with Kwako. “I won’t be long,” I say. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

“We’re fine, honey.” She slips the dirt inside her purse. “Kwako’ll read the paper, and I’ll do a crossword or two. Take all the time you need.”

“It’s good to have a break.” Kwako pauses on the sidewalk, stretching his arms. He seems frail here, out of context. But the café looks reassuring, full of dark faces.

Once I’ve seen them comfortably seated, I check my scribbled directions and make my way to a thin, tarry road surrounded by chain-link fences trimmed with barbed-wire. Every fifty feet or so, cinder-block guard towers shade my car. The guards grip cell phones. They look bored. I drive slowly, carefully. A sign in English and Spanish informs me that my presence here means I’ve automatically consented to a possible search. I come to a large sally port, but then I see a small VISITORS sign shunting me off to the left. I turn and immediately I’m stopped by a uniformed man with a cell phone. “He’p you, ma’am?” I give him my name. He asks me to wait in my “vehicle.” Puny trees ring a pale brick admin building just up ahead; it looks like the tidy home of a college president. After ten minutes or so, the man returns—I didn’t see where he went—and directs me past the building to a nearly full parking lot. I lock the car and head toward a chain-link gate manned by two other sullen uniforms. They buzz me in and point me toward a boxy structure. Inside, on a warped corkboard nailed to the gray stone wall, handwritten notices announce TDC rules, the Employee of the Month, car and house rentals. A battered water fountain gurgles in the corner. A carrot-haired man smacking gum asks for picture ID, hands me a clipboard, orders me to sign in. In the “Reason for Visit” column I write “Dallas Mayor’s Off.” He squints at my words. “All righty. Follow me. Oh—you can’t take that purse. We’ll hold it for you here.” I hand it over; he stuffs it in a cabinet with other purses, paper sacks, even two or three Happy Birthday balloons, then leads me through a narrow doorway to an outside path lined with artificial flowers and tall Cyclone fences festooned with concertina wire. From somewhere in the distance a loudspeaker shouts, “Clear on outta the rec room now. All you sweet little bitches get back to your shitters.” The officer glances at me, reddening, as though I wasn’t supposed to hear that. We come to a squat building, red brick, with barred and meshed windows. He opens the door with a key, steps aside. As I slip past him I smell the spearmint gum he’s chewing, a pondlike cologne. The room is dim. Green plaster walls, flaking. A dusty, old-papers smell. A soft drink machine rattles behind a scarred oak table. R.C., Orange Crush. Through yet another doorway we come to a long wooden counter rigged with a Plexiglas divider, about a foot high. Chairs on either side. Three other women are sitting on my side of the counter, speaking in low tones to men opposite them, fellows in orange jumpsuits with blocky black numbers stenciled on their breast pockets. Guards—I overhear one of the inmates call them COs—lurk in each corner of the room, leering openly at the women. I take a seat and cross my arms. The room hums faintly—from what, I can’t tell: an air-conditioning unit (though it’s hot in here), a generator under the floor.

“Jesus, baby,” says one of the inmates, “my lawyer thought DNA was an additive in food coloring.”

Soon, a CO leads a tall, shaved-headed, middle-aged man to a wobbly chair directly across the counter from me. He’s carrying a thick leather book, Black’s Law Dictionary, hugging it to his chest like a Bible. From time to time his mouth twitches as though he’s working an invisible toothpick. His eyes are yellow, his ears flat and fleshy like the leaves of a large, overwatered houseplant. Skin the color of an avocado’s woody heart. “So,” he says to me, a bass rasp. “Miss High Society come to see the ghost. Who are you, High Society? Can you help me?”

“My uncle, a man named Bitter, maybe you knew him as Ledbetter, did some carpentry work for you once. He said—”

He slams his hand on the book. “They rejected my last appeal. You know that, right? That why you here?”

“Giving me the needle next month. So what I need to know, Miss High Toes, is can you help me? You got any pull with the Big Juice? Tell me again. What’s your lookout?”

“Traipse in here, cleaner than the Board of Health … I’m some sort of freak show for you?”

He leans closer to the Plexiglas. “See, the thing is, I should’ve only did a nickel. But Mr. Charley, he won’t listen to me no more.”

I lean back and sigh. “Did you kill your wife?” I blurt, wondering if I can wrench a single straight answer out of this guy.

He waves his hand. “See, you want to know—that day? Let me tell you. That day I’s hanging out at the happy shop ‘cause the crumbcrushers at home, five and six year old, they driving me nuts all the time. You know how it is. So I’s feeling good when I get back. Fry us up a mess of chicken wings. She puts the critters to bed. I’m busting suds in the kitchen, next thing I know she’s having at me with the bread knife. The fucking bread knife. She’s all, ‘You drunk, irresponsible … leave me with the kids … never know …’ That shit. So of course, I’m gonna do what?”

“Now, your mayor, he can get with that, right? You tell him. I done my nickel. That oughtta be enough.”

“Jim Washington,” I say. “Did you know him? Can you tell me anything about him?”

“Fuck. You heard of Karla Faye Tucker, right? They send a sweet piece like her down to Hell—Little Miss, just like you, Jerry Falwell, God, and shit in her corner—what shot I got? You wasting my time.”

I try to imagine my daddy as someone like him: scared, belligerent, improvising moment to moment just to save his neck. I try to see this man sitting bravely at a lunch counter—a tabletop similar to the one separating us now?—carrying the banner of civil rights. Suddenly, in this sad, stale room, filled with curses and last-minute pleas, the world seems lost, jerry-rigged, hopeless. Does it matter that we “won our rights”? We’ll lose them again if we don’t keep fighting, and who has the strength to stick? Does it matter what my daddy was like? He’s gone. We’ll all soon be gone.

“Number of poor willies George W. murdered since moving into the governor’s mansion. Regular slaughterhouse. What you gonna do about it? Can you fucking help me?’

I rise. The chair scrape echoes dully off the walls. “I’m not going to do anything about it,” I say, turn, and nod at a grinning CO to let me out of the room.

On the outside path the red-haired guard and I pass a cluster of cons in blue T-shirts and sweatpants taking their exercise on the other side of the fence. One rushes forward—he looks no more than twenty—asks me, “Are you anywhere, know’m say’n? I’m jonesing, babe, swear to God. Anything, anything at all.” Another calls, “Hey mink! Hey bitch! I got it for you right here!” He clutches his crotch. “Ain’t a thang! Even got us some raincoats!” He pulls a package of condoms from his pants. Behind him, an armed CO yells, “Shaadap, girlie!”

Red-head mumbles, “OI’ Satan’s a silent partner in the ownership of some folks, eh?”

As I leave the admin building and head to my car I’m thinking Straight lines; Evil travels in straight lines. I’m cold despite the heat. My bones feel soft. I have to turn and go back. I’ve forgotten to ask for my purse.

Off-duty COs crowd the café tables. Sweat rings wilt their cotton shirts. White guards in one part of the room, blacks in the other. A young brother says, “One thing I learned about white dudes. You can hang with ‘em long as no ladies around. Soon as poon’s on the scene, the whole deal just freezes up.”

“—don’t want to work,” an ofay shouts at his buddies. “You’ve seen ‘em.”

Barbara hands me the sugar jar. I stir my coffee, brush my bottom lip with my pinky. “Dirt,” I whisper. She cleans herself. “Thank you,” she says.

Kwako sighs. “Hard to figger. Always seemed a reasonable man to me. Lockup must put you through some changes.”

“Oh, he changed before that,” Barbara says. “Or he wouldn’t be in lockup to begin with.”

I nod. “Thanks for coming with me.” The coffee fails to steady my nerves. The laughter, the flamboyant gestures of bragging men, the shifting, suspicious eyes in the room … we all ought to be locked up, protected from our own ugliness. The smell of pickles from Kwako’s half-eaten sandwich turns my stomach.

“What’s a six-letter word for ‘resistant’?” Barbara asks, tapping her pen on the table.

Driving through town, we pass the compound where Elias will receive a lethal injection a month from now: a dark, straight wall topped with razor wire. Behind it, peaked roofs and banks of curtained windows. At the base of the wall, scrappy flowers lie in wet clumps beside torn posterboards, remnants from a march against an earlier execution.

Back on the highway, Barbara and Kwako snooze. I pass the blueberry fields. A white-suited hoe squad chops weeds beneath the brambles, watched closely by armed, sunburned deputies. I doubt the land here has changed much in eighty years—the developers haven’t planted flags yet—nor has the treatment of prisoners. I imagine Cletus Hayes, feet shackled, stabbing the ground with a shovel. Behind him—behind me; I concentrate hard and on comes the mask; the hypnotic shuffling of chains, steady waves drawing me back, back—behind me, a fat guard in a Stetson brandishes a polished Springfield, just like the ones we use in the army. He yells, “Faster, boy! This rate, won’t be enough flavor in that sweet blueberry ice cream I’ll be licking later. Meantime, you’ll be drinking your piss in the brig!” My spine burns like kindling. Eyes itch. Whenever this asshole says “ice cream,” my mouth waters and I think of children eating, skipping, sailing kites—the kids Sarah Morgan has dreamed of with me. I think of her and the seed I’ve planted in her womb. I ponder generations, the world continuing without me. I can’t grasp the enormousness of it all. I look up at the mule-cart road, imagine it paved in the future, a sleek new jitney jingling by, ferrying—who? A light-skinned young woman, perhaps. My great-granddaughter, glancing out at the fields, trying to picture me here, her color—vanilla, with just a trace of berries if you look real close—her confusion, her advantages a consequence of my having been in the world, of having been a man in the world, for all this country’s attempts to tear me down. I lift my shovel—anh! anh!—and bust the earth’s dirty lip.

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