No news came from the governor for ten full months. The heckling kept up, but more and more folks moved on to some new prey in the prison. Huddie got back to playing his guitar and, most important, he didn’t kill anyone.
Then it happened. I picked up the newspaper that the new head cook always left for us to read after he’d finished with it, and there it was—the announcement that Huddie would be getting out early, and in only three days.
February 21, 1925. Clemency. Mercy. Parole.
Huddie was getting released. He’d done it. He’d gone a few years on a twenty-year sentence and got it cut back with a song.
When I told Beauregard he twisted his mustache and said, “Seems you’ll have to find a new best friend.”
I smiled. “Seems.”
He wiped his hands on a towel hanging out of his uniform pocket and followed me into the kitchen to start our day. “That’s the power of music for you. And he’s got it—that power all the way through his black bones. You know what they are calling him around here?”
“Lucky?” I said.
“They call him Lead Belly. That’s his singing name.”
“He never asked me to call him that.”
“He didn’t give it to himself. People insist on giving you a name when they know you’ve become someone beyond the name you were given.”
That day, I waited and waited for him through all the colored inmates in the breakfast line. No Huddie.
Later, while Beauregard and I were cleaning up he gave me the news: “I just heard. Huddie’s in the Box.”
“What for?”
“For getting early release would be my guess.”
“They putting him in for the full three days?” I asked, dumping a pot of water into the sink.
“Unless he reacts. He reacts, then Governor Neff will surely pull his pardon, and he’ll be in the Box for a long while more. Plus he’ll be back in here for his full sentence—and then some.”
Three other prisoners helped in the kitchen that day. As usual, they said nothing, but I noticed them giving looks back and forth. I wondered if they wanted Huddie to get out. How would I feel if someone got out on a song, literally, while I was in for my full term? Plus, now their music would be gone.
I said, “He can do it.”
Beauregard shrugged. “You sure are sunny side up on this one, Miss Dara.”
He didn’t know it, but I had something riding on Huddie’s release. If he could go against his urges and keep strong and go on with a normal life, then so could I.
“I know he can do it,” I said, though I honestly wasn’t too sure.
× × ×
Those three days dragged on and I prayed for Huddie every night, hoping that the angels would watch over and keep him strong. Every morning Beauregard reported back to me that nothing had happened. Huddie held tight.
At night in my shanty, my mind created imaginings of what he might be enduring and how he might fail. When these thoughts overwhelmed me, I ate a piece of lemon cake. Then I focused on the cake—the way it damn near dissolved in my mouth, it was that good.
On the third day, with me a few pounds heavier, I looked up in the breakfast line and there was Huddie, leading the colored inmates in their procession. He walked slow but head high and back strong. His skin looked powdery, and his eyes sank deep into his thin face.
The pride I felt nearly split me open, to be sure!
He stalled in front of me as he waited for his tray. “They shined the light on me,” he said. “I’s out. This is it.”
I smiled through the bars. “That’s what I hear.”
The inmates behind him gave him some time.
Huddie smiled, looking right into my eyes, and nodded. “Today then.”
Then Jackson butted in. “Move on down, nigga.”
“Jackson, you mind yours!” I said.
Jackson stood up a little straighter, that spineless monkey’s ass.
“Life is more than stewed tomatoes,” I said, and I turned back to Huddie. “I’m so happy for you.”
Huddie lowered his head, not wanting my emotional outbursts to get me—or him—in any trouble. He slid down. Soon as he grabbed his tray, he turned around and leaned over so I could see him. “Now you get to leaving yourself.”
I smiled and nodded, holding back the tears as Huddie walked out across the mass of gray uniforms with metal trays.
Later that evening, me wondering if they made Huddie wait all day on purpose, Beauregard ran into the kitchen as I was cleaning up. “Take out the garbage!”
“Now, Beauregard, you know this is your day.”
“Take it out!”
“Oh shoot!”
I ran out to the cans, grabbing the first one hard by its metal handle, and got to the edge of the gate just in time to see Huddie walk off into the pink Texas sunset.
× × ×
Of course, Huddie was back in prison again come 1930—another prison, this time for attempted homicide. I don’t say “of course” to mean that because he was a man or because he was a Negro that he was, of course, back in prison. What I mean to say is this: so let’s say you’re so blessed that you can sing your way out of prison—then what? Can you behave against the only way your muscles know how to move, the only life you know how to live?
The way I see it, Huddie reached inside and found his gift and he used it to make his life a lot better than it could have been. And given how strong the winds were pushing back, moving even a few feet is a miracle—any sailor will tell you that.