by Gary Sapp
gave him a hard measured look…and ripped the shirt from Xavier’s body. He had to see for himself if Julian Moore’s story were true.
Xavier Prince stood motionless in the middle of the library, lonely once again, except for his scars and the mark of A House of Chains to comfort him.
“32 strokes later, for each year that Sarah Woodward, Xavier Prince mother had lived, he finally did scream. Some neighbor residents have testified years later that they heard it. They say that this scream...this sheik that went on, what sounded like forever…sounded inhuman.”
Julian Moore stopped long enough to center his attention on Warden Bright. “This inhumanity hadn’t written its final chapter and verse just yet.” Julian stressed the just one last time. “The four local Klan’s men had planted a cross in an empty lot just off campus. However, Carter, the young brilliant mind that he was, had the men dig the cross up and alter its shape. After all, Xavier Prince was the son of the founder of A House in Chains. He deserved better than to have his wrist and ankles strapped to a cross like lesser Black men.
“A half an hour later the other men had reshaped the cross into an X…for Xavier, of course.” Julian suddenly stopped, choked back tears. Three other hostages, several inmates and one prison guard, who had a dash of salt and a pinch of pepper in his beard failed to hold back theirs. Xavier drunkard eyes only misted. “He was nude and beaten, so it took the strength of three men to rope his wrist and ankles to the X. Carter watched the entire scene with his own arms crossed…and a satisfied grin on his face.”
“Xavier was up against a wind. He hung there until an 11 year old white girl saw him while she was walking to the bus stop two days later. Neighbors say that she had unleashed quite an impressive scream out herself.”
Warden Donald Bright rubbed at his nose and mouth again and again until Xavier thought the man’s face would chafe. Rose Dixon never moved, and her pretty face showed little reaction.
Julian Moore finished the story by saying, “For a long time, Xavier Prince never revealed who did it. The Four local men went back their lives. James Carter suddenly got homesick, quit school, and went home to work in the family business.” Julian Moore said. “But the walk of death and life would not take Xavier Prince without a fight. He recovered from his wounds in a local hospital over the next several weeks, returned to Princeton…finished at the top of his class, and earned and graduated with a law degree.”
“And these men you are asking for that are in this prison?” Warden Donald Bright asked while the room still sat quietly, in a stunned silence. It was such a quiet moment that it felt it the Earth herself was holding still. “What do they specifically have to do with the disturbing story you just told us?”
“I have proof that these types of men can’t be rehabilitated. I have proof that that these types of men have the culture of hate for Men of Color imbedded in their hardened hearts.” Julian Moore scooped up Xavier’s shirt from the floor and handed it back to him. After he put it back on Julian said to the warden, while never taking his eyes off Xavier. “Most importantly, I have proof that James Carter had paid these men to kill Xavier Prince as he was originally scheduled to leave Calhoun Prison today.”
Serena
The FBI hoped to sneak her into the courthouse after midnight and under the cover of darkness.
Serena Tennyson estimated that at least a 1000 Atlanta resident had proven their logic flawed.
They had camped out in the parking lot across the street from the courthouse, in the bowels of the parking garage behind the building and had begun sitting on the curve beside the road. Most were baring picket signs, screaming obscenities, humming old Bible hymns and chanting. The boldest of them had flung eggs and pebbles and stones at her, before the APD identified the offenders and launched their selves into the mob to apprehend them.
Serena could barely breathe in the bullet proof vest that covered her from just below her neck to her shins. The FBI has stuck a helmet, something what a gladiator would dawn before entering the coliseum for battle. Special Agent Christopher Prince continued to keep his vice like grip on her already chained wrist with his left hand, while shoving the back of her hair and head as far down as her tall frame could manage. His partner, Agent Tabitha Blue, pushed her forward by the base of her spine. Serena had never felt so irritated and so…comforted by another human being’s touch.
“Make a hole people,” Agent Blue screamed at the mass of uniformed police and members of the press that had clogged the walkway that led to one the side entrances of the courthouse.
Serena felt nauseated…discombobulated…as if he were now floating and not walking. For a single moment in time she was transported back in time, back in place. This scene played out so very much like the way her marathon races would end when she was in her freshman year in high school. Reporters, teammates…and most importantly, her father, would be waiting for her as she led the field after a long race.
I want you to remember how you feel right now; he had told her after winning a particularly grueling contest. When life throws you its most tormenting curve, when mankind is at its ugliest, I want you to think of how you overcame it all to achieve this triumph. I want you to always treasure this moment right here, right now; and never forget the Dragon’s call: You’ll do fine, you will be good, and you can still fly.
A stone found the tiniest gap between the lid and the protective visor and stuck her near her left cheek.
“It came from over there,” Blue stopped long enough to tug at the shirt tail of one of the uniformed officers. “I want the person who threw that arrested right now.” Blue stood back to back with Serena, and wrapped her arms around the other woman’s hips killing any gap between them. “Stop this madness, now. I promise you that Justice will be served if you allow us to do our jobs.” She spun back around and quickly restarted where she left off shoving Serena forward. “Make a Goddamned hole, people.” Blue said. “Move it.”
The processing portion of her detention was an exercise in time consumption and humiliation. First, a butterball of a man drinking from a coffee mug, greeted Agent Prince, shook his hand, and told him that they would be assigning two female officers to stay with the prisoner at all times while they process her. Secondly, the two women joined the FBI ensemble, walked her to the area where they fingerprinted her, snapped several mug shots, and unlocked her wrist and ankle chains and made her shower. “It’s so cold in here.” She hugged herself, twisting around so the Dragon showcased its power and beauty to all the nonbelievers in the low lighting, until the two female officers protected her privacy by blocking anyone else’s line of vision with their own frames.
“Your processing will be concluded soon enough.” Agent Prince signed a form for one officer whose hair was a matted mess, and then entered his authorization code on a data pad for another one who had a grease stain on his chin. “They’re scheduling you for a very early arraignment in the morning—he looked at the digital clock on the wall—later this morning.”
“Thank you,” Serena said with her lip quivering, her body warming at a glacial pace. Agent Prince ignored her and had already taken steps toward the exit. “You have proven to be every bit the opponent that your brother has been.”
Agent Prince spun back around. “I’ll say this to you this one time, Serena,” He said. “Don’t talk to me, don’t ever talk to me.”
Serena lowered her head, letting the warming water wash over her red hair. “As you wish,” He turned back to exit again when Serena added: “But you and I will fellowship again before my end, before the Whirlwind begins. I have seen it in the flames.”
Serena’s words had halted the special agent’s progress in the middle of the doorway. You are a strong man, Christopher…stronger than your brother is in fact, but at the end of the day, if you do not turn from your nonbelieving ways and accept the Dragon…
And yet, Agent Prince did not accept the Dragon into his heart then and Serena doubted that he would anytime soon, as he walked out of th
e door without responding or looking back at her.
An hour later it was all over.
Serena lay on the hard tile of her jail cell. When Serena parents died weeks after she’d won that marathon, she’d lived the remainder of her adolescent years moving from border home to border home. The family’s changed. The rules and regulations changed. The rooms changed. The beds changed. The floors never changed. She had found a stability, familiarity and comfort in them that had stayed with her all the way through adulthood. Lying on this floor was no different than the one in her condominium in suburban Atlanta home and no different than luxurious hotel suite that Pilot had leased for her at The Bank of America Hotel where she was staying when she unleashed 411 on the city of Atlanta.
Agent Tabitha Blue and the two other female agents had long abandoned her for other duties. She knew, from research, that the courthouse and adjoining jail housed at least 50 female prisoners but they had isolated her from the other inmates. The room was too cool to her liking, the lighting low, and she was far from the Dragon’s flames…or its love.
They had assigned her three uniformed officers, one of them female, the other two males, all three People of Color on the other side of her bars. Serena was sure that there