Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Well, you sit down here and you start thinking how you are going to get loose.

Running is all he thinks about. He thought about it on the truck ride carrying him fully sentenced into the heart — no, the liver, no, the excremental bowels — of Dixie, and he thinks about it as the gray-suited guards walk them through the wire gantlet to the back of the Burning Mountain prison where there is a cleared space behind the big mess hall that stinks of stew beans and carbolic acid and march them up a flight of steel steps and in through a door above which is a sign that says WELCOME TO YOUR BURNING MOUNTAIN HOME and lock them inside where the concrete walls have sweated through and the place clangs and bellows with blows flung against metal and stone and they are welcomed by no one. And he thinks about it when they make them strip and place their hands against the wet stone wall and spread their legs and he feels the probe of a round-headed stick up his ass and then they make them shuffle into the dip pool where a mixture smelling of kerosene and sulfur and some other foul substance kills the lice and and all traces of civilized life so they come out burning with their new skin (that is still black) and are hustled to the showers where the water stings like acid — even then, among the piercing proofs of grief, he thinks of how to break free; and he thinks of jumping as he walks to the holding tank, where Butter gets in a fight with Rollie Gregory and almost chokes him to death; and later on that afternoon in his cell, which holds three men who are not happy to see him though they are curious and they touch and pat him and pump his muscles like stringy lions testing the new calf — they consider him a fool and causer of trouble for negroes in general because he raped those white women; and he thinks about it the first night as he crams the end of his wool blanket into his mouth to stifle his cries.

Every day in Burning Mountain prison he thinks of how to get out and joins a group that fashions shanks of sufficient quality and plans to perforate the guards — as Ricey Fleming put it — and flee from the cotton fields into Big Panther woods. He never has a shank in his hand but when the time comes he runs as hard as he can, a fleet boy with thin hard calves and narrow hips, and reaches the woods where he wanders around for four days before they find him hiding in an earth cave below a big chestnut tree blown down in a cyclone the year before. He is dirty and hungry and bitten by deerflies and after they keep him for a day and a half chained to an iron hoop jammed into the red dirt in front of the metal shop he is thrown into and left lying on his belly in the Wire Room which is a cage out in the exercise yard open to weather and to the gaze and taunts of the inmates. He remains there for a month like a half-habitated carcass under fall storms and drying spells swirled about with the rich alluvial dust of the fields and environs, crouched for a time like a cat waiting to spring away, then sprawling, attempting to tell himself stories that he half makes up about traveling into a strange country by boxcar train. The woods a distant slum of leaves , he says, untended quarter of loneliness and peril. He dreams of banditries worked on his close person and aches in the dreams for the touch of a woman whom he never knows, never can even see — she isn’t Celia — but one who speaks in the hollow, coughing voices of animals penned up for life. On the afternoon they come to get him again he is standing like a soldier facing the wire, seeing if he can with his mind lift himself to the other side of the prison wall. “Thought I’d go get a Orange Crush,” he says when somebody asks him about it.

They put him with the death row prisoners and he doesn’t get off his cellblock again for two years, except for the afternoon escape trial conducted at the prison where ten years are added to his life sentence, until he goes before a judge — a new one — for a new (same old rape) trial in which the witnesses are a little more shaky this time and the prosecutors just a little more tired.

Like leaves falling from the tree of knowledge, the group, the old KO Boys, sheds members. The years knead them, cuff them, crease their backs, spit into the open pit of their skulls, and let them go. Bonette and Butter Beecham are released — called too incapacious to perform the acts they were accused of. They weep with their faces on the table. When Butter raises his head, Delvin sees a man blind with joy and relief, and he thinks he will be sick from despair. The letter he gets from Butter (penned by his aunt in florid, looping script) thanking him for his care of him during their time together is like a trick that nearly drives him to kill himself. Placer Wilkes gives him a little triangular piece of glass in the exercise yard to do it with. The shard is cloudy green like runoff water and brings back the memory of Jim’s Gully in Chattanooga, the one separating the negro life of Red Row from the whites. The only private prisonwise place is his bed, and late in October he lies in the half light under the thin covers, drawing the glass across his throat. Humped under the blanket like a jackoff artist sunk in a dim wretchedness and ignorance, he feels like a fool. A shaky, choked, exasperated laugh catches in his mouth. He wants to explain himself. A fly has gotten in under the blanket with him. He can feel it crawling on his back. Explain? It’s a burning palsy , he says silently. He probes with the glass. Where does this instrument come from? From under the earth maybe, incised by an ocean turning and forgetting. He can smell the water in the stone walls. He can hear distant cries, men calling out under the weight of smothering dreams. He curls up tight and a little at a time lets himself go into tears, stopping and starting, catching himself each time just before falling over the brink. For a second he loses hold, grabs himself back, jabbing the point of the glass against his forehead. This scares him, but not badly, not enough to change how he thinks. There are tears on his face. He scrapes them off with the flat of the glass. Slowly he comes back around. The fly has crawled down to his waist and he tries to trap it there but it gets away.

The next day he returns the shard to Placer who loses it in a game of two punch to a man who breaks it against a bone in his hip trying to stab a vein. “He never meant to go tits up either,” Placer says, disgusted.

On a sunny morning in late September when the cattails in the road ditches are starting to fray Delvin and three of the leftover KO Boys are shipped to Uniball, a brick and wire stronghold out in the western part of the state, and there, a month later, Delvin is raped for the first time. The rapist, a metal worker from Missouri named Big Cordell Owlsley, decided Delvin was his kind of boy, and one afternoon in bleak weather he shoves him against a stack of wet lumber and holds him there while Delvin tries to knock his hand away and can’t. God save me, he silently says. They are in the shadows in back of the carpentry shop where nobody can see them except those who could spy on them from the slit windows of their cells. It is a show. The lumber has a sour smell. My stage, Delvin thinks, pitying himself and angry. Cordell spins him around and pins him against the raw boards and holds him until he stops squirming. The big man wants first to get across to him that Delvin is not strong or able and he does this. He pulls Delvin’s stripes down, and as he does so Delvin recalls somebody doing this years ago when he was a child in the foundling home and he feels now as he did then, helpless and brokenhearted. It is near dark, fall going on wintertime, and cold on his bare ass and the wood is wet against his thighs and he thinks I got to dry off and he says this like a prayer but the man pays no mind. Big C’s stiff wrinkled penis bangs against him, knocking on the door that he forces open, lifting as he does so. He’s smeared grease on himself that he got from a thick streak on the leg of his uniform. Searing pain skeets up into Delvin’s chest and down his legs and then, like a wave, slackens and he can feel it rolling back in a slow decline that becomes more fantastical and sustaining as it goes. He leans forward against the wood and the hardness and sourness of the logs do not bother him so much. A humid disgust rolls sloppily through him. Then he presses back hard against the man’s belly that he can feel jamming his spine and this is fantastical too, impossible to believe and somehow encouraging, and for a second he feels safe and without much to care about and then the humiliation and the shame build a putrid radiance and he knows himself hopeless and desolate like a child hurled down into muddy water, except more helpless and smaller than a child, and he wishes the man would go ahead and kill him.