One autumn afternoon when he had no place to stay and no immediate prospects for work or whiskey money, he walked into an enlistment office and joined the United States Army. The Army would feed and clothe and house him. The Army would dictate the course of his days, and with a war on in Europe, it might bring them to some meaningful conclusion. Hez had no will he could identify or own. His existence had worn his sensors through. He was numb. Life had picked him clean. He desired no sensation. The Army might change everything or nothing.
He stood in his socks and underwear in a line of skittish young black men waiting for his physical. It was done. His fate was sealed. At that moment in a Nazi boot camp, a German recruit already carried the bullet that would spare him the trouble of making his own end. Dying was the single human experience in which Hez had any interest.
It would happen on a sunny day, maybe in an orchard near a small stone church. Death would be a German farm boy with empty blue eyes creeping out of Gethsemane on all fours over fetid corpses of dead soldiers and excrement. He’d be long and sinuous and he’d hold his rifle up on one elbow as he slithered forward, his body writhing, his whole being aroused by that savage lust for human quarry, that holy homo sapiens ardor for stalking his own species. Once his hunted was locked to his sight, the fervent killer Hans Jesus would reveal his presence in order to savor the consummate split-second ecstasy of this unique sport, his target’s total apprehension of his fate. He would be blond, his German executioner and savior, ash blond like the Lutheran Jesus. It would fall out from under his helmet and stick in dark sweaty wisps across his pink forehead. It would shine gold at the nape of his neck. His heart would leap with boundless joy when he realized that he had killed a nigger.
Whatever sensation dying was, it would be Hez’s own. No one else could alter, pervert, denigrate, steal or destroy his death. Peace would descend to him or he would ascend to peace.
The physical was over. He sat with the others on metal chairs listening to a stout red-haired sergeant with bloodshot eyes lecture on the Value of the Negro to the U.S. Army while slides of black men working as waiters in officers’ clubs, chauffeuring generals, or vacuuming the living rooms of deeply appreciative officers’ wives lit the wall behind him. When it was over, the sergeant flipped on the lights.
“Y’all got any questions?”
Hez’s hand shot up. “Does this mean you don’t want to send us overseas?”
“Overseas? Some of you.”
“How many of us?”
“How
many
? Keep bugging me with your lip, Mandingo, and I’ll personally send you overseas—all the way back to goddamned Africa.”
It wasn’t the cracker sergeant’s arrogant remark that kept his mind racing that night. It was the obeisant guffaws of several of his fellow recruits that kept him awake.
I
robbed Frank Taylor’s bowling alley and I got caught. I gave two hundred back right after they arrested me. Daddy came down to the jail and offered them the other forty-six dollars on the spot. That should have been the end of it; but I was too redneck to let it go. A redneck is a man who’ll insist to his own detriment that a bold-faced lie is the truth. A redneck will demand his day in court. Most of all a redneck will turn a dented fender into a train wreck trying to manufacture something honorable out of an open and shut case of petty theft. I stood up in front of a judge and jury and tried to convince them that what appeared to be a robbery was in fact a deed of the highest honor and morality. I made a complete jackass out of myself with a high toned explanation that I had spotted a fire inside the bowling alley, broken in to extinguish it and then taken the money to prevent its being burned up in case the fire wasn’t completely out.
Yes, that’s stupid. I’m a redneck. A redneck is made of his need to lie to himself and the world about his ignorance. A redneck will cheerfully sit down on a bed of hot coals to duck the eye contact of a man who can see he’s lying. We never see what the rest of the world sees when we look in a mirror. We’re all the time talking about our
blood
and our
rights
and trying to pass off our ignorance and laziness and poverty as the simple virtues of the rich in spirit.
That judge was so disgusted he sentenced me to six months in the state pen. Of course I immediately jumped up, spouting off how I’d appeal and see him thrown off his bench, and I did it with such convincing morality and honor he immediately doubled my sentence. I won myself four all expense paid seasons in a stinking cubicle in the Folsom Prison, named for that fine old redneck who once governed this sorry state.
The law is a wall you must never ever try to scale without the proper equipment. That includes an advanced—say a college—education, money, property and at least two or three highly placed friends or relatives. Without those things, you are better off lying down in front of a steamroller. It is also a great advantage to be innocent when you plead innocent to a charge. I fully intend to be innocent the next time I’m charged with any crime.
I carried sixteen tons of attitude into Folsom Prison. I figured I needed it to get me through. All it got me was trouble and the contempt of my fellow inmates. I realized too late that my attitude cost me the opportunity to know some fine people. You couldn’t know that about prisons unless you’d been in one. It’s a sad, hard fact. Sure, you’ve got some hopeless, depraved, mean and dangerous people in there. However, the vast majority just did something dumb and got caught. Or maybe they stood in the wrong person’s way. Shoot, the average Presbyterian minister has done something as bad or worse than what turned the average Folsom inmate into a convicted felon.
I alienated everybody. I was just as redneck inside Folsom as I was out here. I was infected with the plague of my inability to be honest with myself. I spouted off about my
rights
and the entitlement of my
blood
and nobody wanted much to do with me. We all need some companionship here on the outside. Without it in a place like that you have nothing but time in a smelly box. I soon felt like the unwanted runt of the litter stuck in a metal cage at the back of the pet shop. Eventually I got tired of my own voice. With no one else listening, I started to hear myself a little bit. I didn’t sound too good to me, so I shut up.
That was the most amazing thing I ever did. If you find yourself
locked up in a cage with no one to talk to and you keep still, a tremendous thing happens. You start to realize you have a brain. With nothing to react to, you’re forced to experience deliberation. I’ll stick by what I said about the virtual sameness of most people in and outside of prison. Yet I came to value my experience there. If the State of Alabama hadn’t locked me up in a cage, I doubt if I ever would’ve shut up long enough to discover the reward of thinking things through.
The first thing I learned was the incredible fact that I didn’t know everything. I didn’t even have to know everything. Gradually I understood how little I actually knew. Then I went on to lists of things I’d like to know about. It was too long, so I whittled it down to things I ought to know. That was still big enough to weigh me down, so I narrowed it down to one category I called “How to Live.” That’s what I’d been stumbling over for twenty-two years. I didn’t have a clue. I divided it into two parts, “Things I Already Have,” and “Things I Need.”
I had time. I had the present and the future. I began to consider my days on this earth as my basic fortune. I’d squandered a lot of it. I made up my mind not to waste any more of it starting right then and there. No, that’s not
total
rehabilitation. But it’s enough to let the world sleep safe or, if not the world, then any bowling alley owner who ever heard of me.
I offered myself back to the State of Alabama and the people of this earth as new and ransomed as a freshly baptized infant or a sprout of grass in the first warm March rain. I lay flat on my back on a bunk in a cold cell through a year of confinement in the Folsom Prison with nothing to warm me but the moist breath of the Living God. It was longer than forty years in the wilderness and deeper than death. I paid in full the debt I incurred.
At the beginning of my incarceration I clung to that nameless rage which had always defined me, but the shadows and the passing weeks eroded it. Time and darkness swallowed it. When it was gone I believed for a time I no longer existed. But the Breath of the Living God is a true and tender thing that sustains when there is nothing else.
I lived without dream or ambition or discernment of time in quiet dark forgetting the sound of my voice and my face and neither hoped nor feared and, as days crept, I remembered less and less. I passed through that silent, turning tunnel where everything and nothing merge. The State of Alabama erased me for a while. My mind dove headlong into blackness and swam, but there was no motion, no point of departure or place to arrive. Presently there was in that close, windowless room, a breath without source. I holed up inside it. It contained me. I gave it my rage. I hope that means I changed. It’s hard to remember how I was before.
I came back home one year later. Daddy was lying back in the same Naugahyde chair with the taped arms in his stocking feet cussing at the news. Mama was still slamming the back door making runs to the garden or to feed the dogs or, sometimes, to pray because Daddy won’t allow it in the house. I carry with me the memory of a breath in the dark. It changes nothing except me so deep within no one notices. I ponder its meaning. There was a breath without source when this Universe began. It enveloped me. I am begun. I go through my days hunting work. I mow Mama’s grass when her arthritis flares and she’s not up to it. I help a cousin paint his barn. I listen when Daddy gets onto his beer and his philosophizing of a Saturday night. Everything is precisely as it was before I went to prison.
Except me.
Now I’m searching for my time. I’m seeking an understanding of that Breath. I don’t mean I can know or name or understand God. I leave that kind of talk for the Baptist ministers. I believe that there is a thing to be done. When I find it, I’ll find myself and the rest of my life.
I wouldn’t mind finding a woman to share it either.
I
had tried to tell Glen that morning. I had tried to explain it. We just didn’t work. I needed air or a psychiatrist or a change of scene. I had tried, but the words had slipped out sharp and hateful and he’d gone off to work with his back arched and his lips pursed in that way he has of letting me know that my lack of gratitude is killing him. When he goes off like that I feel like the lowest common denominator: thankless, unworthy, miserable and selfish. Sometimes I cry and sometimes I pray, but the only thing that helps is activity; so I generally clean house whether it needs it or not. It was worse than usual that morning. I tried to wax the kitchen floor, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might kill him or myself or innocent people. I drove to the grocery store which was ridiculous because I’d been the night before. I tried every way I knew to pray. Over and over I kept begging God to make me thankful. Not even God could accomplish that.
It’s not that simple anyway. I don’t like to think about it because I’m alone with it, but Glen turns darker in certain moments than anyone else in the world will ever know. You’d have to be locked in our room in the pitch black dark between the sheets of our bed to know. He pretends he doesn’t mean to hurt me. Sometimes I almost think he intends to kill me someday. I tell myself I’m exaggerating. I hope I am.
Finally I slipped into my bathing suit and headed on out to the dock to bake my troubled brains for a couple hours. I lay there and read and looked at the sky for an hour or so. I kept thinking how I must look to a stranger passing in a boat on the lake. Here’s this woman sunbathing on her private dock behind this beautiful house with a landscaped yard. Inside her head sirens are blaring and cannons are firing. The stranger wouldn’t know any of that. It would all be a picture to him. On the other hand I might see a stranger passing in a boat and not have a clue what he was thinking. His doctor might have just told him he’s got six months to live. His girlfriend might be pregnant. Maybe he just lost his job. Maybe he’s planning a bank robbery or thinking about running for the United States Senate. It all boiled down to the fact that there’s a different reality playing itself out in living color inside every head on this earth. That brought me back around to the fact that if I live to be a hundred I’ll never have a clue what the world looks like to Glen. He’ll never see it through my eyes either. Then I wondered if someone was to make a movie of the two of us, and if Glen and I sat and watched it, would we finally get a clue as to what the other is trying to say?
I could see a man working out back up at Rosie’s. He had his shirt off. He didn’t appear to be much more than a kid. He was laying in squares of sod. He was going at his work like killing snakes in the midday sun, a nice looking boy.
In these parts, there’s two kinds of boys, hell-raisers and born-agains. I tried to study which he was just to take my mind off things.
I was seriously depressed that afternoon. It’s the same damned thing over and over—living with a man I don’t trust and never will. The woman in the silly book I was reading was being made love to by a prince in between an eight course meal. She was torn with guilt because her husband was upstairs bed-ridden. That book was as stale and useless as a piece of white bread that’s been in the sun all afternoon. I kept running my eyes up the other backyards to where the guy was sweating in the sun. Judging by the intensity with which he swung his pickax, I took him for saved. The saved
romanticize their backbreaking work. No matter how menial their task, they tell themselves they’re building God’s kingdom on earth. Their comforts wait in the next world—blah, blah, blah.