Imperial State Prison Farm was situated in the city of Sugar Land, Texas, home to Imperial Sugar. Sugar Land sat all the way down near Houston, or what we in Midland called the “armpit of Texas” on account of its humidity and its tendency to collect strange odors. The ride to Sugar Land was ten hours from Midland—the perfect distance to leave where I had come from without leaving who I was.
To my dismay, though, all that distance didn’t stop the love. As some kind of compromise, I kept writing to Rhodie. It made the days less lonely, having this pretend relationship that couldn’t hurt me, at least not directly.
A few months in, I wrote to her about Huddie, who’d I dared to call my friend.
Dear sweet Rhodie,
Greetings from Sugar Land! I miss you. I miss you every time I see the sun or the stars or the grass.
Other than that, things are going well here. In addition to Beauregard, who I told you about, I met the head cook—who is as frightening as Beauregard told me he was. Something evil in him. It scares me, but I try to put on a face.
I’m also working sometimes with one Huddie Ledbetter. I’m getting to know him pretty well, or as well as I can in an open kitchen with me being a white woman and him being a Negro—and him only here one or two days a month. I like Huddie. You probably would too, maybe.
I watch his eyes and can tell when he is finding something funny that he’s not supposed to find funny, or when he’s upset but can’t really show it for fear of being placed in the Box.
Huddie’s eyes have this dullness to them that I can tell he works hard to maintain. When I watch those eyes, I understand just a little of how it must have been to live a life being constantly watched, of being stopped on the street every day by people saying, “Where you going, boy?” “Look at me when I talk to you, you filthy animal.” “Your father still a lazy son of a bitch?” “You still stupid?” Every single day. Can you imagine?
When we was growing up, I remember people talking to Negroes that way, right in the middle of town or in a store, even outside church—as if colored people had been put there for white people to dump all their anger onto. And I thought nothing of it.
Well, today I thought about Huddie and all those terrible questions from people, and I realized that sometimes it’s the assumption of something that can create it. You hear these awful things about yourself and someday you’ll more than likely become some of these things, if for no other reason than to prove you did something right. Know what I mean?
I wonder if it would have been that way for us. I wonder if us hearing over and over that we were evil, and our kind of love is bad and wrong, might have turned us bad and wrong. So maybe it was best for us not to try—to leave it as the most perfect three weeks I’ll probably ever know. But I still love you and in my dreams we have one heck of a life together.
I signed the letter on the right-hand side at the bottom, and I lit up a cigarette. The way I missed her hurt, deeply. I didn’t know if it would ever go away. I wondered if the happiness of it would ever outweigh the sadness.
After pulling a few inhales, I held my cigarette up in front of me and put the letter above it until the heat set it on fire. The orange-and-black flame reminded me of a flickering pirate’s sail. When it got too close to my fingers, I dropped the letter into a coffee can filled with the gray ashes of all my other letters to Rhodie. Then I went to bed, secure that I’d put myself in the safest place for me to be: a men’s prison.