One … two … three … four … five … turn. I wonder what time it is. It doesn’t matter, except knowing the time allows me to mark the progress of the night. Breakfast shouldn’t be too far off. Then lunch. Then supper. I look forward to mealtime. The food tastes awful, but I always try to eat it because I have to guard my health. Next to insanity, sickness is most to be feared in solitary, where medical help is hard to come by.
I stop at the bars, grind out my cigarette, look out the window. The rain is falling a little harder. There ought to be something I can do. Turning, I see my bunk. That’s it. I drop into it, lie down. The mattress makes little difference; I’m lying on steel. I close my eyes and let my mind roam freely in search of distraction. I reject thoughts and images of past experiences as they move across the screen of my mind. Good memories are excellent distractions from this grim reality, but I possess very few of them and can’t conjure one up tonight. Restless, I get back up, pace the floor for a while, then go to the steel rail that connects the two steel walls of the shower. I heft myself up, over and over, until I am in a sweat. Chin-ups have made my arms almost as strong as the steel bars that hold me. I move to the sink and push the button for some water.
As I drink, I see a black man peering at me from the polished-steel mirror over my sink. I put down my cup and carefully remove my handcrafted covering from the light fixture. The room is now flooded with light. I take a long, scrutinizing look at this fellow as he does the same to me. There’s a weary slump to his shoulders. Deep furrows are etched across the brown forehead, and small wrinkles accentuate the subtle desperation in his dark eyes. Suffering is what I see in his eyes. I don’t like that. If I can see it, others can also. On second thought, maybe they can’t. I care, so I’m looking for it; but they barely even see me, much less my suffering. No, they won’t see it. Satisfied, I replace the cover on the light fixture and throw the cell into twilight darkness again. It’s a twilight of my own choosing, fashioned with a razor blade and cardboard—a snug-fitting cover to keep the glare of reality at bay. “Mankind cannot stand too much reality,” as T. S. Eliot wrote.
I walk over to the bars, stick my arms through, lean upon them, look out the window. It’s still raining. My ears suddenly pick up the distant sound of a key being fitted into a door down the catwalk. The door clangs shut. Footsteps … approaching. It’s the Man, making his rounds. I instinctively pull my arms back into the cell. A man with his arms hanging outside the bars is vulnerable; they can easily be broken. Keys jangle loudly and another door, closer, creaks open. There are voices, movement; a door bangs shut. Men awakened down the line, outside solitary, shout curses into the night. It must be Old Asshole. The bastard. None of the others on this shift would slam doors like that. He does it deliberately, to wake me up if I am sleeping. I’m the only one back here now. Another of Old Asshole’s petty tricks. I mustn’t show my anger.
The trusty appears first, as usual, on the catwalk outside the bars. The trusty is the Man’s first line of defense in case of danger. He’s a faithful lapdog, this one, always eager to do his master’s bidding. He nods at me, his eyes searching my cell, hunting for something to tell his master about. I look through him. Old Asshole appears at his side. He looks at me, and I look right back at him, straight into his blue eyes. I don’t like him, and he knows it. He wants to be important, to feel superior, and the only way he can do it is to grind down the prisoners in his charge. He doesn’t like me because I won’t feed his ego.
“Still woke, huh, Rideau?”
I nod.
“How you gettin’ along? Doin’ all right?”
It’s a meaningless greeting the world over, even among free people. But here it’s stupid, too. What prisoner locked in a system designed to brutalize, crush, or destroy him has ever been “all right”?
“I’m doing just fine.”
“It’s pretty chilly back here. Want your window closed?”
“If you want to. It don’t really matter to me.”
“It’s turning cold. You’re gonna freeze your ass off with the window open.”
“Do whatever you want. It doesn’t make any difference.”
He turns to his lapdog and tells him to close the window. Relief flows through my body as my muscles, taut in their struggle against the cold, begin to relax. My face remains expressionless.
Old Asshole turns back to me. “They tell me your buddy cracked this morning. Tore up his cell. Went stone crazy.”
I nod.
“Guess he couldn’t take that cell no more.”
“Guess not.”
“How long had he been in solitary? About a year, huh?”
“About.”
Old Asshole shakes his head slowly like a snake charmer and tries to pin me with his gaze. “A long time. Course, that ain’t nothing compared to how long you been locked down. What is it now? Ten, twelve years?”
“Something like that.”
He turns his eyes away from mine, shaking his head. “I don’t see how you held up this long.”
I could tell him that he can’t understand it because he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be your own man. I could tell him that he’s never been a man and never will be, that he doesn’t have the strength.
Take away the social props that hold him up and he’d go down like a line of dominoes. Deep down he knows it, and he expects everyone to possess the same weakness. He can’t understand why I don’t, and it aggravates his fears about himself and his own sense of inferiority. I could tell him all this about himself, but I say nothing.
He looks at me. “Think you’ll end up like him?”
“Nope.”
A smile brushes his lips. He nods his head, like he knows something I don’t. I feel the urge to slap that smug look off his face.
“You think you’re tough, huh, Rideau?”
“No. Just competent.”
His eyes study my cell, then me. “Everybody else in this place gives, lets themselves go a little. Their cells, their appearance. I even let go sometimes, and I ain’t a prisoner. But you gotta be different. Your cell always gotta be neat and clean, everything in its place. You stay shaved, hair combed—always fixed up like you wait-in’ to go somewhere. You don’t ever bend, not even a little, do you?”
“What have you seen since you’ve been here?”
“Oh, I haven’t seen you do it, yet. But I will.”
“I wouldn’t count on it if I were you.”
“I can count on it. You’re not as tough as you want people to believe. And let me tell you something,” he says, tapping the bars with his keys. “No matter how tough you think you are, this steel is a whole lot tougher. You’ll bend.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
He turns to leave. “We’ll see.”
“No. You’ll see. I already know.”
A steel door slams down the walk, and I listen to the footsteps until they fade away. Alone again. Silence engulfs me. I reach for a cigarette, feel the smoke pouring into my lungs as I inhale deeply. I smoke too much. I know I should quit. This poison only contributes to my physical deterioration, compounds the lack of exercise and poor diet. My lungs must be shit. To hell with it. Smoking is the only luxury left to me.
One … two … three … four … five … turn. One … two … three … That idiot. Old Asshole actually expects to see me break. What he doesn’t know is that being broken requires my permission. I’m not about to surrender my manhood, my dignity, or my self-respect. They may have stripped me of everything else, but I will not permit myself to be reduced to a human dog. I’ll die first. Of course, insanity is always possible—no, probable. How in hell can a man live for years like this and remain sane? It’s impossi—
I halt my pacing in midstride: I could be insane now! I wouldn’t necessarily know it. I shiver. Suppress it, Wilbert. I start pacing again. One … two … three … four … five … turn. My eyes, searching for something to latch on to, scan the walls and find the rivets. The number of rivets
in here impresses me, as it has before. These walls are well held together. But, then, they’d have to be; otherwise I’d get out, wouldn’t I? And they don’t want that. I know the number of rivets because I’ve counted them before: 348 of them. Or was it 358? I frown, trying to remember. It’s important to get it right. I need to know exactly the number of rivets holding me in. I decide to count them again, to be sure. I start counting, and soon I’m on my hands and knees, counting the rivets under my bunk, when a picture of what I must look like flashes through my mind. I have to smile. If Old Asshole could only see me now. He’d laugh until he shit himself, figuring for sure I’d gone crazy. And it is crazy. Me, down on all fours, counting the rivets in a steel tomb. It looks like insanity, but my mind is intact. Old Asshole will have to wait a little longer. When I finish counting, it’s 358 rivets after all.
I crush out the cigarette, which has burned to a nub in the ashtray. I lie down, gaze up at the ceiling, walls. Aren’t we always struggling against walls? I ask myself. Not always of concrete and steel, but walls nonetheless—ignorance, poverty, indifference, oppression? Yes, yes, definitely oppression. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a prisoner. But who is ever really free? “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose;” that’s what Janis Joplin sang. I start humming “Me and Bobby McGee” until the thought of all that wasted talent, that gift, gets to me. Shooting shit in her arm. Goddamn! She fought her way out of this stinkhole. Port Arthur, her hometown, is right over the Texas line from Lake Charles. The girl escaped the grip of these crazy motherfuckers. She was free, whatever demons she had. A fucking shame, that was. But what the fuck do I know about freedom anyway?
Struggle is the only reality I’ve ever known. The world I was born into was sharply divided between black and white, good and evil, innocent and guilty. It was a world of absolutes. Whites ruled, I learned, because God demanded it. I was guilty the moment I was born. The guilty labored under the weight of poverty and misery. Locked in economic bondage, they were made servants of the innocents. The females were ravished, the males emasculated; they were insulted, humiliated, and brutalized as a matter of course. Being lynched with impunity at the pleasure of the mob was the just desert of the guilty, the wrong, the black.
I close my eyes and see a huge, ancient courtroom, built to be a temple. There is rich, dark wood that smells like lemon rind and gleaming brass everywhere. The ceiling rises several stories up into a dome, like a Byzantine church. The floors are marble, polished to a high shine. There is an altar up front where the judge sits; the choir box is off to his left, my right. To enter this temple of justice, you have to climb a mountain of marble steps to the white-columned portico that shields the front door. A huge old battle cannon squats off to the left of the steps as you approach. To the right, high atop a white pillar, a copper soldier has his left arm raised as in battle. The inscription on the topmost marble block of the base says THE SOUTH’S DEFENDERS. On the block below, 1861–1865, and beneath that, OUR HEROES. At the base of the statue, there are wreaths or flowers in a vase, with a Confederate battle flag propped alongside. I know this, even though I cannot see the statue from my seat in the courtroom. I know it because, for as long as I can remember, there have always been flowers and a Confederate battle flag there. I do not have to wonder what the city fathers meant to suggest about justice in their community when they erected a copper soldier leading the charge for the Old South on these courthouse grounds. Floodlights set in concrete ensure that every prosecutor, every lawyer, every plaintiff, every defendant, every witness, every victim, every judge, every juror, every deputy, every spectator, every reporter, every researcher, every visitor, every civil servant, every politician, and every black person who passes or enters, day or night, will see the patron saint of this temple.
Inside, a drama is taking place. A teenage boy, flanked by white lawyers, sits at a large table, a black-robed figure before him. Twelve white men, vested with the power of life and death, are seated over to the right, in the choir box. A clot of newspaper reporters sits off to the left. Behind the black boy is a sea of white faces. A carnival atmosphere prevails as characters parade to the witness stand and play their roles with unholy indifference to the significance of the drama. The performances are well received, the audience entertained.
The judge breaks for intermission and leaves the altar. The actors and members of the audience huddle in small groups, chattering gaily as if they were at a cocktail party instead of in church, completely indifferent to the shadow of death hovering nearby, awaiting the end of the play. The talk flows freely around the boy and is often about him, as though he were merely a gargoyle, an inanimate object of discussion devoid of intelligence or sensitivity.
The drama unfolding is to decide whether the boy will live or die. Curiously, the boy is relaxed and appears unconcerned, which some in the audience see as his lack of feeling. What they don’t know is that the drama holds no suspense for the boy. He knows he’s going to die. It doesn’t matter to him. He has long since grown tired of the cruelty and meaninglessness of his existence, though his fierce pride and iron spirit will not allow him to kill himself. Someone else will have to do that. So he watches with detached interest as the drama plays out to its fateful end where absolute good will triumph over absolute evil.
“We find the defendant guilty as charged.”
The jangle of keys knifes through my reverie. My eyes fly open, instantly alert. The hatch on the door of my cage swings back silently, leaving a hole in the metal the size of a shoe box. It’s the Man, but a friendly one. I roll off the bunk to my feet. He stuffs several packages and some books through the hole. I grab them and quickly toss them on the bunk.
He puts his face in the hatch. He looks like mashed potatoes and redeye gravy with his bad skin and birthmark. I wonder if that’s why he works here instead of in the outside world.
“They fixed some barbecue for us today. I figgered you might like some. When you finish, break the bones and flush ’em down the commode so nobody’ll know.”
I nod my head.
“The candy and books come from some of the prisoners down the line. They got a sex novel in the bunch. The boys swear by it—told me to tell you it’s guaranteed to raise your dick all night.”
Convict humor. I deadpan, “Yeah, I really need that.”
He smiles. “It’s supposed to be a joke. They just kiddin’ you.”
I nod. “I know. You want the book? My sex problem is bad enough without it.”
He shakes his head. “Naw. I ain’t got time to do no reading.”
A quiet settles between us. The unfamiliarity of human company—other than my mother, whose face pokes through the hole every Saturday afternoon, and Sister Benedict Shannon, an activist nun who sometimes stops to see me when she visits the jail—makes me nervous and self-conscious. After so much solitude and silence, small talk comes hard to me. My mind searches for a conversation piece.
“Old Asshole came by earlier. Shooting his shit, as usual,” I say.
“Yeah? Well, don’t let it get to you. He ain’t worth it. I don’t see why they ain’t got rid of that bastard a long time ago. He don’t do nothing but rile everybody up and cause a whole lotta trouble.”
“That’s the truth.”
“It’s just a question of time before somebody hurts him.” He moves away. “Look, I gotta go. Take it easy. I’ll check you tomorrow night.”
“All right.”
The hatch closes; silence returns. I scan the books and stash the sex novel under my mattress. There are three food packages, and I can tell by the feel and the smell what is in each of them, but I play the old Christmas Eve guessing game anyway. Is it barbecued chicken, pork ribs, or beef ribs? Is it white bread or corn bread? Are the potatoes pan-fried or French fried? After I tease myself a bit, I open the packages and wolf down every trace of one man’s human kindness. He could lose his job for bringing me this food. My eyes fall upon the candy the prisoners sent me—two
little treasures that, in other circumstances, could cost a man his life in this place. A Snickers and a Butter-Nut, contraband as hell and therefore worth their weight in blood, should one man try to steal them from another. In a world defined by deprivation, things that are trivial in the outside world are magnified to a significance far beyond their street value. This Butter-Nut bar, for example, cost someone real money, which is already in short supply among the inmates. There’s the cost of the candy itself, and the added value attached by every hand that facilitated its journey from the candy counter at Walgreens into the jail to the guys down the line, who sent it to me. Hell, they may even have had to grease the palm of the guard who passed it to me. Even more than the money, though, is the cost of getting caught: The guard could get demoted or fired, and an inmate could get thrown in the Dungeon for dealing in contraband.
It’s strange, even to me, that men who wouldn’t hesitate to rape or kill each other band together to help me, just because I’ve been locked down in solitary for so long. Most of them don’t even know me. But my tormentors have made me a living legend in this jail: the one they can’t break. The irony is not lost on me that it’s the professed Christians who are so cruel and unmerciful, while it’s the criminal misfits and social dregs who try to help me, usually without my even asking.
Wilbert Rideau Page 9