by Ravi Howard
Bunting covered every bit of courtroom wood and railing, upstairs and down. The judge had his picture on the wall, and his chest was poked out and swollen. Every lawyer in the courthouse had come home with a medal on him, it seemed. The colors that lined every street between Paris and home were meant to make us all feel victorious. I had carried that bit of pride, too, before they dressed me in jailhouse colors. They had taken my uniform from me before they snapped my picture, turned me sideways and snapped again. They lied to the world and acted like I had never fought, but Lord knows I had. And in those moments when I did my cold and heavy remembering, I was again in that place.
I had made it up Utah Beach with the Battery D boys of the 333rd. After Brittany I spent that last winter of the war in Bastogne. I saw Europe from a truck with our gun towed behind. We’d named ours Joe Louis, and if somebody asked why, we’d say, “Because he was quick to put a German on his ass.” I had eleven men in my crew, and we could get all six tons turned, loaded, and fired in five minutes flat. It was a dance we learned in Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, like that two-stepping the black folks did out west. We fought our way through France and into the Ardennes Forest, and in the winter of 1944, we took our place in that line of American guns, eighty-five miles’ worth.
Big-gun fighting was a different kind of war. From that far away, I heard the battle before I saw it. The boom of howitzers had become a sweet sound to me. Our guns talked back to Hitler, getting the last word in when we put our shells on a man’s head. It was a certain kind of screaming, outgoing fire, that told us that our lines were still holding.
But by December, so close to Christmas to have me thinking about home, the Germans had made it through the lines. “The Bulge” was what they called it. The Nazis had gathered a quarter million men in the woods. Coming at us that fast, the big guns couldn’t do much. Batteries A, B, and D were ordered to retreat and make a new line ten miles back. The four guns of Battery C stayed behind to cover us. When they followed, we planned to do the same and cover them. Each rumble of their guns was good news that told us they were still fighting. The quiet told us they’d been overrun.
People talk about peace and quiet like they’re kindred. The Ardennes Forest was the quietest place I’d ever known, and quiet was where the SS waited for us. Quiet was where those boys from Battery C ended up. I learned that quiet was not really quiet at all. It’s the sound of friends tortured and dying too far away for anybody to hear. I prayed for them the same thing I’d prayed for myself. I hoped to die quickly and that whatever cut through me came like lightning without enough time for me to shake my head.
But I knew better when we saw the bodies of the eleven men who died at Wereth. The townspeople said a family had hidden them in their barn, but a neighbor had told the SS. The eleven soldiers, not a gun among them, did what they were taught and gave themselves up for surrender. The Nazis marched them toward a field, and that was the last the people in Wereth saw of them.
When the spring came and the snow thawed, we saw the ugly show the Germans had made of the killing. The folk said it had just looked like another mound in the snow. A drift, or a gun position covered over by the winter. When we heard about the bodies, we drove as fast as we could. An army chaplain looked for tags so he would know what name to call the men when he prayed. When I saw the bodies, I couldn’t even close my eyes to pray on them, because I searched their faces, trying to recognize one friend from the other.
The Germans had taken their time, bayoneting them and cutting off fingers. Those spared the knife were beaten. Maybe the marks had come from rifle butts or boots, but whatever the weapon was, they’d struck them over and over. My mind filled up with that sickest kind of wondering, thinking about who had to be the first to feel it coming down. I wondered who was the last and had to see the rest die before he did.
I had been around my kin out in the country, and I had seen enough hog killing to know the propriety of such things. The particular way that we got quiet when the knife went in, because hog or not, it was still blood.
Two of the dead, George Davis and William Pritchett, came from Alabama. George talked about Montgomery like it was a country boy’s metropolis. I told them they ought to visit when we got home. George said, “If I go back.” At first I thought he was talking about dying, but he was talking about the opposite, living like a man who could go where he pleased. He thought about Detroit, New York maybe.
“Can’t say for sure,” he told me. “At least not yet, but somewhere.”
Standing in that field, I tried so hard to remember their voices, but all I could hear was that wartime quiet, how the world sounded to a dead man’s ears. My mind always went back to the worst of it. Victory had not been enough, and neither had the time that passed. They were resting beneath the crosses in the Henri Cemetery, but I still saw them in that mud.
So when I saw that man jump onto the Empire Theater’s stage, heard the weight of his pipe on that hardwood, and then saw him swing for Nat Cole’s skull, I thought of other friends ambushed by men who’d been hiding and waiting. The dead quiet that came over that room when Nat Cole stopped the music was enough to stop my heart. And then came the ruckus and the screaming and me right in the middle of it. All I did was stand between a friend and his trouble.
My lawyer wore an Air Medal on his chest and one of those Tuscaloosa bow ties worn by the courthouse crowd. Johnson was his name, and he called me Sergeant Weary. He looked at a man in the back of the room. Johnson had a look on his young face like he himself was scared of getting put on that prison jitney with me.
“Attorney general’s here, and, well—” he told me in a grave sort of whispering. “Seems like they want to make a show of it. They gave the other man three years.”
I figured I might get thirty days’ labor, but if the white boy got three years, then, Lord. When the months in my mind turned to years, the chain between my feet got twice as narrow, because balancing was all that I could manage. I put my knuckles on the corner of that table and tried to breathe and swallow. No wind wanted to come into me, and that jailhouse breakfast was about ready to come back up.
“How many they got in mind for me?”
“Like I said. Seems like they want to—”
He was being so careful with the bad news, which made it all the worse.
“The state’s attorney,” he said, nodding toward the man at the table across from us, a Bronze Star on his lapel, “he wants to give you ten years.”
He laid it out. Inciting a riot. Five years. Aggravated assault. Three years. Reckless endangerment. Two years. Consecutive terms that added up to ten. I had turned twenty-six years old in a field in Belgium, two weeks after V-E Day. I would turn thirty-six, if I made it, in Kilby Prison. The number got my head to shaking inside and out.
“I need to fight it, then,” I told him.
“Sergeant Weary, I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you in front of a Ripley Street jury. They’ll give you twenty years just as sure as I’m standing here.”
The lawyer said he couldn’t keep me out of Kilby, but he said he could save me some years if I took his advice. If the judge asked me a question, I should say “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” Don’t say a word unless His Honor invited me to. Invited. I had heard the story of a boy who had talked after the judge told him not to speak, and he got an extra year for every word. So I stood in the middle of all that quiet, waiting for His Honor to say how many years he was taking from me.
“Son,” the judge said. In the wrong man’s mouth, that word came at me like venom. “Son, you got anything to say for yourself?”
“No, sir.” Calling that man “sir” was one of the biggest lies I’ve ever told.
After he took those years, that judge kept on talking, about honor and service and whatnot. But my ears were filled with my wartime hearing, that ringing that came in the middle of everything I heard. Some days all I heard was that thin, sharp sound that was like something drilling a little deeper into my ear each
time. It was on account of my gun, six tons’ worth that I had learned to use like a razor. Some called that sound an affliction, but I had learned to love it, because that was the sound of me killing men, Germans, hell-bent on doing to me what that judge had done.
I didn’t know what came of that howitzer, but it was probably being dragged down a street somewhere on Armistice Day. I was unarmed when I jumped onto that stage. It was a fair fight with me standing between a friend and his trouble. When that judge took my years, all my hands could do was keep shaking, not from fear, but from all the fight that was still in me with nowhere to go.
Chapter 4
They didn’t waste any time. I was on a work gang the day after I got off the prison jitney. That first morning they put me on a crew with seven other men, opened the west gate, and marched us to a patch of woods near Gunter Air Base. I had heard somebody say we were going to pull weeds, kudzu. The prison quartermaster handed me a shovel with one edge sharpened for chopping. When he put it in my hands, I thought the same thing any man would. How many times could I hit the jailers around me—quartermaster, guards—before the rest of them got those shotguns around? It was all that I could do to just keep my head this side of right, so I calmed myself, took my shovel, and got in line.
The two trusties, Uly and Polk, wore vertical stripes, different from ours. Their leg guards, strips of tin bolted to rawhide, rattled when they walked, and that was the cadence we walked to. They carried their machetes on their shoulders, and we did the same with whatever we had, spades, saws, and knotted coils of rope. We marched, four by two, past a pair of mile markers to reach the field. Once we had hiked knee-deep into the kudzu, Uly and Polk staked off about ten square yards, and we cut the vine back to the crown and then got to work on the root.
A full-grown stalk is as thick as my arm, and strong enough to snap a spade handle. It took a sharp end on something heavy to get through the gristle of a full-grown vine. Kudzu doesn’t grow in the winter, and we had to get a head start before the vine started running after the spring rains. A new shoot could run a foot in a day. If a patch of Alabama got covered in kudzu, people who lived on it just moved on. It wasn’t worth the time or the money to clear the land. For us it was different. We were prisoners clearing government land; as far as time, I had ten years, and some of the men on my crew would die in Kilby.
Uly worked his machete like his old hands had never touched anything else. My job was to dig around the crown. Uly stood beside me, looking into the hole like it went somewhere.
“Don’t split that root, son. All it does is make two vines instead of one.” His words came through his chewing and spitting the juice of the kudzu leaves he kept in his jaw.
Once I got enough room underneath, I lifted and I’ll be damned if that root didn’t feel stone heavy. With enough of the crown lifted and that top bit of root showing, Polk looped a rope through the tangles, and all the men grabbed hold of a knot and worked their feet into a good hold on an open bit of ground or a net of weed thick enough for balance. Uly called out “Ready, ready,” and he waited for us to say the same. When we got the next call, we leaned our weight in one direction and pulled that rope, over and again, each tug pulling another inch of root, knowing more would sprout in the spring. Some of those roots were twice as long as any man. I pulled with everything in me, leaning so far back until I was damn near sideways, every bit of muscle praying that the root would give before I did.
My war gun was heavy but it sat on carriage wheels with a well-oiled axle. It was meant for moving, but kudzu was not. When I pulled on the worst of the crowns, I wondered if somebody was on the underside of the world tugging the other way. Maybe hell was somebody else’s Kilby, and the dead had their own fields for toiling where their devils smiled down on them just like the guards did on us.
The weed was too deep for running, so they left us unchained. Two guards watched the eight of us, with shotguns full of double-aught on their shoulders and .44s at their sides. A man might end his prison time with a bullet in his back if he tried to run or a shot to his chest if he squared up to fight. I had to stop thinking about doing either. Work was all I had to keep me from losing my right mind, so I put everything into the tangled-up vine in front of me.
“Hey, Showstopper, what the hell’s wrong with you?” Polk was bent next to me talking in that hard whisper, tapping his blade on the buckets nestled in the weed.
“You fill ten today, they’ll want twenty tomorrow. Ain’t no prize for pulling kudzu crown,” he said.
“Hell yes there is,” Uly said. “Prize for pulling crown is more crown.”
“Need something to put my mind on, that’s all.”
“What they give you, ten years? Well, hell, you want some backbone left when you get out.”
“Ten years?” Uly said. He looked at Polk then. “That’s all they give Showstopper? Need to call your ass Lucky.”
They spoke to me without straightening their backs. For a second I forgot where I was and stood up to talk. They gave me that headshake and moan that told me I had done wrong.
“Keep low when you talk,” Polk said. “Captain see you talk, he might think you don’t have enough work. Lord knows we got plenty.”
Polk told me he had come out of Chambers County and was kin to Joe Louis. But everybody I’d ever met from that corner of Alabama claimed to have some of that blood. Polk said he was raised in the boys’ camp at Mount Meigs, and he told me he was over there with Satchel Paige. It couldn’t have been true, because the years didn’t line up. That gray hair in Polk’s head had me thinking he was older than he was, closer to my father’s age than mine.
“Figure I’m thirty or roundabouts,” he said.
The hard living had pushed Polk’s face closer to the bone, and the work left the muscle thin and twisted. Since the place had no mirrors, it would be years until I saw my face again. I saw what the future looked like on the faces of the men all around.
Polk was half Uly’s age, but he was a trusty boss because he knew how the place worked. We didn’t say anything to the guards outside of yes, no, sir, and boss. He spoke for us all.
“Hey, boss. How ’bout this one? Got the boys pulling good and well today. Good and well.”
We had twenty yards of kudzu between us and the guards, so he yelled and held up a just-pulled root like it was a channel catfish. Polk worked that shine talk just like he worked that machete. He had learned to put on a show for the guards. Uly didn’t say much, just nodded mostly, like everything Polk said needed a second.
It hurt me to hear it, worse than the ringing in my ears that still came and went. Men did that “yes sir, boss” talk and loved it. Polk did it to make the work go faster, because the trusted men got the sharpest tools. Our bosses had all kinds of ways to shame a man. I would learn that in time. A man who stared too long, or spoke out of turn, or even looked like he was about to, got the worst of it. The quartermaster might hand him something made with splintered wood and twisted iron.
Polk said something to make them laugh, and before they finished, he had his back to them again, his smile dropped back to nothing. I looked up to watch the two guards, carrying on, warming themselves around the barrel where the burning root crackled.
“You need to stare, stare at that shovel,” Polk said.
My face showed too much. It always had. I was in a place where it might do me harm. Maybe the guards would know where my head was, swinging a shovel at them instead.
“I keep something on my mind when I’m out here. Something I saw back home. An undersheriff got kicked by a horse he wanted to ride in the parade. He the one threw me in jail that first time. That horse kicked his ass in front of everybody that side of Buckaloo Mountain. See, I think about something to bring a smile to my face, that way I don’t have to kill somebody, my own self included. You—you ought to think about them ten crackers you whipped with a bugle. That’s what it was, right?”
For a second I felt that microphone’s steel in my hand, b
ut I had nothing but the wood and knots on that handle. I figured I’d let my mind make something new.
“Trombone. That’s what it was.”
“Valve or slide?”
“Both. One in each hand.”
Uly looked over smiling then, letting a line of that kudzu spit fly.
“See there, Polk. Showstopper was switch-hitting like one of them Black Barons.”
Polk looked over at the guards, the fire too low in the barrel to see much flame. They’d be looking over again soon, barking this and that, calling us something worse than what they’d called us before, and that would start that burning inside me, a feeling worse than the aching that had spread from my back, everyplace except my hands and feet, too cold from that winter and thin clothes to feel anything but the shovel and the ground.
Folks were meant to feel a certain way on Friday evenings, when a week of working was behind them. But Fridays in Kilby mattered for the worst reason. That was execution day. As we marched along the roadside, cars rolled past with plates from the wiregrass, the foothills, and the delta. Some of the cars had the lights on top and others just a county seal, but they were district attorneys and sheriffs ready to watch their man take his turn in the electric chair. They called it Yellow Mama, but the prisoners did not, because the kind of man to name something like that was the kind who’d never have to take his turn in the seat.