“Mel, I’m looking to find out what U.S. government installation was established at a Mississippi state prison in nineteen forty-three. For some reason, the Army came in and took the place over. Why’d they do that, when did they give it back and under what circumstances.”
“A state prison?”
“Actually, a penal farm. For colored. In the bayous of Thebes County, way up the Yaxahatchee River. No country for white men.”
“I’ll say,” said Mel. “I’ll have a kid in our office get back to you, Sam. You need this by—?”
Yesterday! Sam’s brain screamed.
“Well, sooner’d be better than later.”
“I’ll get this kid right on it.”
The kid, a pip-squeak voice that wore a name that didn’t register, wasn’t a fast worker, but he was at least thorough, and it was two days before he called back, two days, needless to say, of anguish for Sam.
After introductory preliminaries, the boy—Harold, that was the name!—got to the point.
“Yes, sir, I checked with the Department of the Army, and you’re right, an army unit did move in down there.”
Sam was all ears.
“It was actually Army Medical Corps. So I went over to Walter Reed and used the congressman’s name and met a guy in records, and it turned out it was something called the 2809th Tropical Disease Research Unit. They were looking at the jungle diseases and cures for them, so they had to go somewhere where there was jungle, I guess.”
“I see,” said Sam, writing it down. “Yes, that’s very good. Is there more?”
“Well, I couldn’t see the file. I just got this fellow to look at it.”
“Ah,” said Sam.
“Yeah. But I did learn something. This unit, the 2809th, it was commanded by a Major David Stone. That would be Major Stone, M.D.”
Sam wrote it down.
“But if you think you need a line on Stone, Mr. Vincent, you can forget all about it. I ran that through the Department of the Army, and I found out that this Stone died in nineteen forty-five. So it’s a dead end.”
“Died of what?”
“Sir, I don’t know. It didn’t say and nobody knew. You’d have to get the records themselves.”
18
A CRACK appeared in the darkness, and then spread to a blast of light, as someone pried the coffin lid open. Earl was too gone to notice or care.
“Whoa. Do he stank or what? No human man stank like that, no sir.”
“Give it to him.”
The next thing Earl knew, cold water hit him under great pressure, pushing him sideways as it smashed him. He withered under its force, which was in its own way a beating, for the power of the pressure tilted him sideways and mashed him against the rough concrete box. He felt the water going up and down him, then settling in his ass where he was filthiest, where it beat a steady hurting into him there, tearing at him where he was sorest and most delicate.
And the water was so cold it sent tremors raging through his body. He could make no sense of it for a second, of what was happening. It was like going for a sleepwalk and waking up from a dream when you stepped off that top step and started your long and horrifying tumble down the steps.
The water stopped. Rough hands got a grip on him and pulled him out, where they dumped him in the dust. He uncranked limbs that had been immobile for who knew how long, and felt those pains added, as muscles bent in shape were stretched for the first time. Yet he was so confused he could take no pleasure in it.
“Ain’t he a sorry sight though?”
“He is. Ain’t no white man let hisself git like that. He can’t be white.”
“He ain’t white. He’s another nigger, that’s all.”
“Hit ’em agin with that water, boys. Git his ass good, git that shit out of there so them flies don’t go crazy. Bigboy wants him clean and right proper for the doctor. This boy goin’ git his shots.”
The water blasted Earl along the ground, but soon the men pinned him flat on his belly and the hose man really squirted him out. Then they pulled him to his feet, and he could not stand, and went to one knee, at which time he was yanked up again.
“Boy, no one here goin’ carry you, that’s for sure. You can move as we direct, or I can shoot you behind the ear right here and we’ll let the hogs eat you.”
Earl couldn’t focus or speak. His lips were cracked, his muscles a-tremble. That he was naked before these uniformed men didn’t even occur to him, and he felt no shame, for he was not human enough for shame. He just felt some strange sensation that had to be something like the recognition that he was alive. But it was not pleasing nor elating; it simply was. They shoved him along, and his feet dragged in the dust as they led him into the Whipping House.
There, in Bigboy’s office, he was wrapped in a blanket.
He waited.
Then Bigboy arrived, with some others, bent to him, and lifted his chin in his big hands. Lights flashed in Earl’s eyes; he blinked and jerked, but Bigboy had him in control and yanked his head back.
Something cold and round pressed against his chest, and Earl fought through jangled memories for a name, and came up with the concept of stethoscope, which was attached to the concept of doctor, which led onward to medical examination.
“Well, his heartbeat’s remarkably strong. His pupils are all dilated, and they’ll stay that way for a day or so. He needs nourishment, bed rest, gradual exercise, penicillin for all of those bites, in case he’s infected. But he’ll be all right in a bit. Nothing a few shots won’t cure easily.”
“Well,” said Bigboy, “we don’t got a bit. We only have right now.”
But the doctor, if that’s what he was, stared at Earl in some kind of rapt curiosity. Earl tried not to stare back, for such a breach of rules would get him a rap in the back of the head and his eyes weren’t working very well. Some flashing seemed to cut through the room each time he blinked. But he eventually made out a man of surprising civility, neat, modest, hair perfect, eyes lit with probing curiosity, as he looked Earl up and down.
“He’s strong,” the doctor said. “You’re strong, aren’t you, friend?”
Earl was glum.
“He has fight in him still. You don’t see many Negro boys that strong. They tend to give it up and hand it over. This one has some spirit.”
“Can we do this, sir, and move on?”
“Of course. Secure him.”
Strong hands moored Earl to the table he sat on, and there was in them a threat of violence.
The doctor opened his case. Earl caught just a glimpse into it and made out tubes, many tubes. But then a tube came out, a paper sheathing was pulled away, and Earl saw a large hypodermic needle.
“Like shots, friend?”
Earl said nothing as the doctor drew some fluid into his syringe from a tiny bottle, then came around to him. He felt his arms slapped, felt the sting of powerful disinfectant, and then the steely prick of the needle. It felt about an inch wide as it slid in, and a numbness spread as its fluids were injected into his system.
Then came another needle in the other arm. Then he was bent forward, and took two shots in the ass.
“You’ll be sore for a while. Now you’ve got penicillin, a common booster, a blood coagulant, and some vitamins that should get you around.”
“Are you done, sir?” said Bigboy.
“I am. He’ll survive.”
He looked at Earl.
“Friend, I don’t know what you got yourself into, but I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”
He rose, closed his case, and left.
Earl was alone with Bigboy. His mind was full of strange sounds, and he was having some trouble making much sense of all this. He felt pain from the needles and could already see the bruising beginning.
But he felt Bigboy looking hard at him, as if trying to figure him out. Finally Bigboy said, “You know how long you were in there?”
Earl shook his head.
“Seven days,” said Bi
gboy. “Seven goddamn days. No one has lasted there more than four. You know, it backfired. You’re playing to be somebody named Jack Bogash, unemployed truck driver, but I’ll tell you what, nobody believes just any Arkansas Joe Truckdriver could get through what you got through. Only man who could get through that is some kind of hero, some police officer or Marine raider or agent or some other. You think you’re helping yourself, you’re only guaranteeing more rough treatment. So I’m now going to ask you again: Who are you? You tell me.”
“Bogash,” was all Earl could think to say after he finally found his tongue.
“Yeah, and my name’s Jesus Christ.”
He sat back, got out a cigar and lit it up, sucked in a big cloud of tobacco, let it sift from his mouth through a tiny channel in his lips.
“I told the warden this,” he said. “See, I know how these boys think. This one thinks he’s a hero. You beat him or drown him or make him think you’re going to kill him, that just makes him stronger. You know what the heart of a hero is?”
“No sir,” said Earl.
“You’re lying again. Even as stretched thin as you are now, you’re lying, playing dumb-and-stupid cracker who doesn’t know a thing. You think no matter what, we won’t kill you, not ’til we’ve figured out who you are, so that’s what’s keeping you alive. Yeah, I see that, nobody else does.”
It didn’t seem to require an answer.
“So, I’ll tell you what the heart of a hero is, even though you know it. I just want you to know how far ahead of you I am. The heart of a hero isn’t love or sacrifice or courage or anything fancy like that. That’s for the funny papers. No, I’ve seen through that in my adventures. Here’s what it is: it’s arrogance. Vanity. Love of self. You think you’re so special. Yes you do. And when we treat you special, when we do all this to you, it may hurt like hell but pain doesn’t mean a lot to a tough cracker like you, been blown up in the war, and shot a few times to boot. You can get through the pain. No sir. Now I’ll tell you what you can’t get through. Are you listening?”
Earl didn’t say a thing. He was concentrating on not passing out.
“Yes sir. What you can’t get through is this: to be nobody. Take away what’s special, make you nobody. Make you just another convict and you have the rest of your life down here among the lowest and crudest and most violent of the Negroes. This is just it, this place. No hope of escape or recognition, nothing at all special that’s going to happen to you. You’ll be anonymous, a face in the crowd, a nobody for ever and ever. Now how do you like that?”
Earl said nothing.
“You think about this. We’re going to give you a nice day or so in a private lock-up with some food and a toilet; you get a shower twice a day. You can play the radio. We get you some newspapers. I won’t even pretend to hide from you what I’m doing, because you’ll see through it. All that’s to make you think of the good stuff of life. Then it’s over, convict. Then you go to the Ape House.”
It makes a long, o time man, o feel bad
It makes a long, o time man, o feel bad
It makes a long, o time man, o feel bad
O my Lord, Lordy, when he can’t get a letter-a from home.
O Captain George, he was a hard a driving man
O Captain George, he was a hard, a driving man,
O my Lord, Lordy, out on the Gulf and Shelf Island Road
It wasn’t music, not really. It was a chant, deep and from the heart, pounding with rhythm as hoes flashed and bit into the earth in unison.
Earl could see them far away. They were in the broad fields, chopping weeds from gullies, and they seemed to be engulfed in mist, as if legendary; but it was dust that rose and the men just fought through it, their hoes rising and falling to the sound of their song, as guards rode around them on horseback with guns.
“You don’t look over there, convict,” said Earl’s escort. “You ain’t going over there. Over there, them’s got it easy. Where you’re going, it be hard.”
Earl walked along the dusty road, his wrists ensnared in chains, and his ankles too, so that the only steps he could take were mincing and pitiful. His arms still ached from the shots. Two men flanked his shuffle, and one was up front and one behind. The sun beat down, a Mississippi sun that seemed to have been put into the sky for one purpose alone and that was to fry the hell out of all men unfortunate to experience its blast full out.
He felt somewhat better now, at least in a physical sense. He’d had food and shots and was clean. His clothes were clean, if simple, cotton, striped as were all the convicts’, and boots that fit.
But in other ways, he didn’t feel better at all. Bigboy was right. Bigboy was smart. Bigboy had him figured out pretty good.
The two days of relative respite did more to hurt Earl than all the abuse that had been heaped upon him by Bigboy and the prison itself. He listened to the radio, he ate grits with butter in the morning, a ham sandwich in the afternoon and fried chicken in the evening, buttery biscuits and gravy. He saw now that his life didn’t have to be circumscribed and brutal. They had moved him, as expertly as they had beaten tattoos on him with their clubs, beyond simple survival toward contemplation. Thus his true enemy became his own thoughts: he remembered his son, that wary, observant boy who had a strange gift for stillness, and could just sit and watch for hours without saying a word, and then, when quizzed, spit back all and everything that had passed before his eyes, no matter how insignificant.
He thought of his wife, the most beautiful gal he’d ever seen in his life, and how he’d fallen crazy in love with her that first time he’d seen her at the USO in Cape Girardeau in 1944, after coming back from Saipan and going on that bond tour in his fancy uniform, a designated hero of America meant to inspire people.
That’s what came back the most to haunt him, and that’s when he hurt the most. It was easy to be a hero when you had nothing to look forward to, and the only thing you had to believe in was the United States Marine Corps. But then, in love, he had to go back to another terrible battle, and he remembered the leaden sorrow he had felt, because for the first time in his life, the world had seemed so full of possibility.
But he went back. He had to. It’s what he did, it’s who he was.
Well, Lord, I woke up this mornin’, man, I feelin’ bad.
Wah—babe, I was feelin’ bad,
I was thinkin’ ’bout the good times,
Lord, I once have had.
They were singing to beat the devil down, or to beat the hopelessness from their own spirits as they chopped and chopped.
They are singing for me, Earl thought.
The camp was surprisingly elaborate, like a government installation, a series of barracks behind a barbed-wire fence, and, inside it, another square of barbed wire, and inside that, a single barracks.
At each corner of the inner square, a two-story tower stood, and Earl could see the machine guns mounted in them. He saw how flexible they were: they commanded the entire compound, and with .30-caliber water-cooleds capable of sustained fire, and with the barracks beneath them simple jerry-built structures of wood, no place was safe from their wrath, given the physics of the ballistics. If it were necessary, the guns could hose down the compound in a matter of seconds, minutes at the most, and all inside the barracks would be dead. There was no cover from the guns; they controlled all.
They entered the first compound, and it was almost a community. Not all the men were at work, but some hung back, cleaning barracks, scrubbing floors, hanging laundry, doing all the administrative work that would keep such an institution going. In a separate shed, he could see women cooking at big vats, preparing food for the men, all of it under the eyes of guards, who patrolled under the drill instructor hats, watching intently for too much fraternization. Just beyond the wire there seemed something like a free community, or a trustee community, where in relative freedom a few older men lounged and chatted laughingly with each other. That had to be the famous ’ho-town. Yet they all stopped
to stare as this strange little convoy approached them: a white man in the stripes of a convict. Surely they’d heard rumors or knew of the white boy locked in the coffin, but hadn’t really believed it. Here he was at last, in the flesh, a white boy, chained and being led by the tough boys in the hats.
Then they reached the inner compound. Earl could see Bigboy in there, surrounded by his ass-lickers, watching him approach with something not quite glee but certainly smugness.
The gates were opened after an elaborate ritual with the locks, so that no gate was opened completely. They stepped in, it was locked behind them, then the last gate was opened.
“Welcome to the Ape House,” said Bigboy. “Jack, you’re going to like it here.”
Earl just saw another barracks building, with barred windows and a row of crude shitters outside, the wood all dilapidated and every which way, as if some invisible burden of woe had bent the place down over the years. Its roof was wood and it was painted the pale green of institutions everywhere.
“Let me tell you, Jack, who your new roomies are going to be. They are the worst of the worst. They aren’t just killers, they’re the crazy, wild Negroes, the angriest, the most violent. You have multiple murderers in there, you have all the riffraff in the state that everybody wanted to hang but couldn’t quite, because maybe they only killed another Negro and not a white man. But in there, Jack Bogash, in there there isn’t any hope and there is no future.”
Some laughter came from the guards around Bigboy.
“You won’t last a night in there. You’re going into a hell so deep no white man can come out alive, or maybe would even want to.”
Bigboy brought his dark-glassed eyes so close to Earl’s, Earl could see his own scraggly self reflected in them, big as life.
“You are the answer to their hopes and dreams, Jack Bogash, you are. There’s a blue-gum nigger in there named Moon, and he’s the meanest black bastard who ever walked the face of the earth, and they say he’s endowed like a horse. Tonight is the best night in Moon’s life. Moon is going to shine tonight, Jack. So Jack, what’s it going to be? Are you coming clean, Jack, you telling us your real name? Or you going into the Ape House?”