At every mealtime, I searched the cafeteria for Huddie. Folks say that after three days in the Box you start seeing things. If you are in for more than five days, they say a part of you dies in there—you leave some piece of your mind or your soul behind. It’d been eight days.
Sometimes, I’d look out when I was working, and I’d see the silhouettes of inmates who’d failed to reach their quota of cotton or sugarcane standing on a barrel right near the Box—two hours on and one hour off. If you lost your balance, your time started over. I hoped they talked to Huddie, but I doubted it, given their situation.
I wondered how he would recover from that long in the Box. Beyond that, I knew he’d be weakened by the time he’d be released, so how could he reach his quotas? And if he didn’t, how could he withstand the barrel or the whip—or God forbid, the bat—and be ready to get up and try again the next day?
On the seventeenth day, Huddie finally came into the cafeteria, this time at the very end of the line. His head was down, and he walked not so much with a swagger as with a limp. A kind of prison hush fell as he came in. Huddie gimped through the food procession.
When he got to me, I saw he had a fading shiner and a giant split on his lip that opened up like the skin on pudding. My eyes popped wide, but I didn’t say anything.
He whispered through the bars, “It’s gonna be fine” but I could see it was forced. His rage was just on the edges, making the egg whites of his eyes wiggle on hot grease. He looked crazy with it.
My chest burned for him, but I was trapped there, helpless to do anything to make him feel better. I looked down at my tin of dry cornbread, same thing they got each day. When I saw Huddie that way, I did the only thing I could do and snuck him an extra spoonful of margarine.