The Warden, that big-shirted man with no ass whatsoever, had recorded some of Huddie’s music before he was pardoned, when he’d played on Sundays. It was expensive to record, but the Warden said that anything priceless is.
After Huddie left, the Warden started to call me in a few afternoons a week after I’d packed the bag lunches, and we’d listen to Huddie’s music. Neither one of us ever called him Lead Belly. When I would sit there with the Warden, sharing cigarettes and listening to Huddie sing, I’d remember how I promised Huddie that I’d get out of this prison—not knowing then, of course, that it’d be with the Warden himself.
See, I’d become comfortable in those walls. Somewhere along the line, I’d decided I’d rather live unseen than live in fear. So, ignoring my promise to Huddie, I stayed.
Most days after work, I’d walk back to my shanty, feed Cucumber and Pickle, maybe write a little to Rhodie or Mama and Daddy, soak my feet, and go to bed under the picture Rhodie drew for me of those two black circles with love in between. Some days, though, the routine would switch up, and I’d stay at the prison so the Warden and I could play evening cards—with surprisingly decent liquor, considering Prohibition and all.
Every now and again, a guard or two would join us, and sometimes I’d even get relaxed enough to take off my hairnet and sport my neatly trimmed haircut. Be a tiny bit of myself.
That’s when one of the guards, a gorilla named Ken who said half his words as if they were sliding off a plate, said, “Whoa—now that is a hairstyle!” Telling me I’d be arrested if I weren’t already in jail for daring a man’s cut like that.
“It’s practical,” I said. “You work in the kitchen and tell me different. It’s practical!”
The Warden, always a lover of the practical, shushed him. “Ladies come in all shapes and sizes and deserve our respect, Ken.”
When he said that, it made it somehow all right for me to sit with my legs uncrossed. It made it OK that I didn’t carry a purse. It made it OK that makeup felt like a colorful lie on my face.
“All right then, let’s get out the bourbon and get to playing,” Ken said, trying to make it better with the Warden.
The Warden made a good attempt at a smile and pushed back from his desk. “I got the best bar in the city right here, as you all know.” He was trying to be funny, but his words were running slow and his skin looked gray.
“Warden, you all right?” I asked. “Warden?”
The Warden turned his back to Ken and me. In front of him, on the brown-paneled wall, was a huge, sun-bleached Confederate flag that he’d hung with four thumbtacks. He stared at it for a minute before opening his low cabinet and slowly mixing up our drinks.
We waited. Ken lit another cigarette in the already smoke-heavy room. He slouched across the wood table toward me, moving the ashtray with him.
“The Warden’s wife passed two weeks ago,” he whispered. “He didn’t want anyone to know, so he made the guards swear secrecy. That’s why he was off last week. It’s just him and those two young girls now.”
“I’m sorry, Warden,” I said, trying to catch his eye.
He cleared his throat. “She went fast, but we knew—best of both worlds. Now, what’s the wild card?”
“I call suicide Jacks,” Ken said as he bridged the deck, me thinking that we couldn’t stop death, but we sure could play cards.
The darkness outside the Warden’s window was dotted by the new, ultra-bright prison lights, making it look as if we were floating in outer space up here. Inside some kind of space bubble.
Ken dealt the cards. I gave the Warden a side look that told him I was sorry for his loss and for what must be a hardship, raising two little girls so close to Sugar Land Prison.
The Warden nodded back to me, then threw in a penny. “Come on, ante up if you’re in.”
“I’m in,” I said, chucking in a penny.
When that buffoon Ken leaned over to put a matchbook under the uneven leg of the table, the Warden smiled my way. “I’m OK, Miss Dara,” he said in a low voice. “Thank you.”
I looked past him and noticed a broom handle without a broom top, leaning up against the Warden’s wall near his extra work boots and the trashcan.
“What’s that there?”
“Oh, that’s a weapon was used the night before last.”
“Evidence?” I asked.
“If the man who used it weren’t already in for life, I suppose it would be.”
“That Concrete Bill’s?” Ken asked, braiding his nickel through his fingers, the way he always did when he was going to bluff.
“Yes, sir.”
“Who’s Concrete Bill?” I asked.
Ken leaned forward and took a big sip from his drink. “Concrete Bill is a convict who decided to give one of the female-males in here a lesson.” He smiled one of those greasy redneck smiles I always shied away from. “Fixed him up good.”
The Warden, sitting in a chair facing the window, looked back over the dark yard below, lit in huge white circles by the prison lights. “There’s no good that comes from assault.”
I took a drag of my cigarette, feeling a spinning metal fist flipping around in the space inside my ribcage. I hoped that they’d hit that poor convict with the broomstick, rather than anything else—but I doubted it. I nearly got sick to my stomach thinking about it. My head went dizzy, and I had to make sure to breathe quietly so it didn’t show.
“Status in the U-nited States goes like this,” Ken got to explaining. “White men are at the top, followed by white women, then coloreds, then men of any color that act like females.” He’d been moving his thick arm down in notches in the air, and when he got to the men that act like females, he flipped his wrist up and down in the international sign for sissy.
I swirled my caramel-colored drink around, watching the bobbing cherry in it. My ears flushed hot with anger and shame.
“What did Concrete Bill do exactly?” I asked after I’d gathered the courage.
The Warden raised his eyebrows, and Ken stared hard at me. No one said anything.
“Oh,” I said, thinking that the man must’ve made advances toward Concrete Bill and gotten a bad reply.
I knew of at least two boys in my lifetime who’d been beaten up for a similar offense. One of them got beat up so badly that his stomach ruptured. I was maybe thirteen when I overheard my daddy talking about it at the auto shop. I’ll never forget it. He said, “If it were me, I’d’ve gone a few steps further. Best to rid ourselves of these insects.”
Insects.
I asked Ken, “Where’s the man now?”
“The female-man?” he said, pleased with himself. “In the hospital. They have him on a suicide watch now too. Apparently the boys had been using him—much the way the cabin boys spent their long voyages with sailors—when he tried to stand up to them.”
“So let me get this correct,” I said. “These men were doing acts with him, and when he tried to stop them, they attacked him for being that kind of man?”
Ken rolled his nickel all the way down the line of his fingers, like a magician. “Yes, ma’am.” He said this with a strange certainty—with the conviction that this kind of logic made total sense to him.
“But they were being those kind of men, right? They were using him in that way, right?”
“Doesn’t count in prison.”
“Maybe that man isn’t even one of those type of people,” I said.
The oh-so-worldly Ken sat forward again. “Oh no, he is.”
I thought I’d done a good job defending that man by saying perhaps he wasn’t homosexual. But, in retrospect, when I said maybe he wasn’t “one of those kind of people,” I was implying that therefore he wasn’t deserving of this treatment—that he wasn’t an insect to be played with because he wasn’t really an insect, a homosexual. I used a line of defense that assumed, if he were homosexual, that he would be deserving—and, God dammit, I hadn’t even realized I’d done that.
The Warden cleared his throat and drummed his hand on the table. “Ken, tomorrow I want you to make a point of bringing Concrete Bill up from the Hole to see me.” The Hole—a new indoor room that had replaced the Box in order to satisfy some concerned citizens. “I’m going to explain how I am not doing anything with that broom since we are already knee-deep in paperwork, and it would only waste the court’s money on a man who is in here for life anyway. You wait outside on account of then I’m going to have you walk Concrete Bill through the cafeteria and back down to solitary for another few days. Force only understands force by the time you’re grown.”
“Yes, sir, Warden.”
“I’ll show them all that I don’t tolerate this kind of thing, especially since Two Foot Jake is going back into the population next week.”
Oh God, I thought, aching for what that man would have to endure. “How long is he in for?”
“Two Foot?” the Warden asked. “Six more years, I believe.”
The Warden filled Ken’s glass, and I dealt the next round, forcing myself not to look at the broom handle in the corner again. It was so thick.
Sitting there I asked myself—and not for the first time—what’s the difference between living in this jail, under the watchful eye of dangerous folks who are supposed to protect people in need, or living out there? Is the world just one big prison yard of varying sizes?