We sat in the same position for hours. Before we knew it, it was morning. I had lain in the same place, with my arms still wrapped around her. I rose, removing my arms from her shoulders, causing her to awake as well.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“It’s almost seven o’clock.”
“Dang it! I’m gonna be late!”
“Late? For what?”
“Today is the last day for him to tell us where he put her. That son-of-a-bitch knows where she is.”
“Where who is?” I asked.
She pauses for a moment and looks at me with this glaring stare as if I should already known. Truth is, I had hoped it was all a bad dream.
“What are you talking about, Ma?”
“I’m talking about your sister. Your sister.”
During the ride, I couldn’t help but think how everything was going so fast. I don’t even remember being asked if I wanted to come along. Somehow, I just ended up there, in a car seated next to my mom and Mr. Gaines as she sobbed the entire drive. That, in turn, triggered me to do the same. To think of all those beautiful memories that have, for so long, lain dormant and unaccounted for.
How could I spend all those years not thinking of her wellbeing? How could I have let her grow so far from me that I didn’t once sense her hardship? She had taken care of me more than the woman I sat across from. Now, we both sat remorseful and guilty for being a thousand times more deserving than her. We were alive and well, full of sin and all its trappings. And she, she was pure as winter’s day. Yet, she was gone to a place from which she could never return.
Why have I not suffered a similar affliction? Why did He come for her life, and no one else’s? There was no one more undeserving than her. He took her without warning, devoid of any reason to keep our sanity at bay. This has all left me with lingering questions and concerns of how the world could be one big joke, played on us by something greater than our understanding. If it is, then I pray it be done with quickly, because God’s humor has long been viewed with antipathy.
I wonder sometimes, how He actually views the world that He’s said to have created. And if He truly did, surely this isn’t the only one. Why would it be? There must be many more, maybe even thousands of planets just like ours where long-suffering souls alike create legends, both true and not, to tell to future generations. Just as it is with this world, he will have done nothing to persuade them otherwise.
We finally entered the grounds of the prison. I couldn’t help but notice how that entire place caused a quiver inside of me that I could never fully explain. It was haunting. The prison itself was completely surrounded by the soiled waters of the Mississippi along with the mystic woods of Tunica Hills. All of this makes it a literal death trap for anyone who attempted escape.
Across its grasslands lay thousands of acres of crops, ripe for the picking as inmates bagged them while uniformed guards patrolled on horseback. In the sky, towers held men manned with sniper rifles, who probed back and forth, waiting for potential escapees.
Before we entered the facility, we were greeted by more guards who checked our persons, along with our pockets and shoes, for contraband.
As we entered the steel doors, the temperature moved from humid to sultry. There was no evidence of air, only the rays from the blazing Louisiana sun that seemed to target this place vindictively. Everyone—both prisoners and guards alike—carried sweat stains on their clothes causing the ghastly mixture of musk, coupled with urine and feces to plague this place. It was pure too, undiluted, as if no one had thought to mask the stench with some cheap perfume or glade. You could nearly taste it too. It crept up my tongue and down into my throat every time I inhaled.
“Welcome to the farm,” said one of the guards after he saw me cover my disgust.
“Why do you call it the farm?” I asked.
“That’s just the name. They ain’t never said why. It just is.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t remember going this way last time.” my mother said as we walked passed the visitors room.
“Yeah, you ain’t never been this way,” said the guard. “We had to move our boy to the red hat block. He attacked his celly. Anytime we have too many problems with a prisoner, we put ’em right here.”
“So there’s another room for visitors?”
“Nope. These fellas don’t get no visitors. It’s restricted. But given the circumstances of your case, the warden put a green light on this one. I gotta tell you, everybody here is praying for ya. Hopefully that monkey can at least let her get a good burial.”
The history of the red hat block is even more infamous than the men who occupied these cells. Just to think of all those lost souls who suffered here... This was not a place for humans. It was vile. As we entered, I noticed things were considerably different than the other side of the prison. The cells were extremely smaller than those in other sections of the prison. The smell was grander because there was no modern sewage system or even toilets, and no way for the smell to escape. Instead, the prisoners peed and defecated in buckets that were conveniently placed outside the cell when full for the guards to empty. Some even decided against the buckets, and used the floor. Others used their buckets as weapons against other inmates, with whom they had quarrels, leaving an array of filth and waste for us to step in. But as we were led closer to the prisoner’s cell, it became apparent that it was the silence that was most disturbing.
When we first walked through general pop, the main housing section of the prison where most of the inmates were housed, they were loud and vulgar, and indecent. They even yelled obscenities at us. But here, in the red hat section, they said nothing. They made no sound. Those men were all broken. It was if they feared what other hell they could be taken to.
As we finally reached the cell of my sister’s murderer, I remember thinking how much I wanted to see his face. I wanted to put an image to the animal that killed her.
He sat aimlessly in the cell, with his head slumped. He was huge and his body was riddled with muscles. I poked my head from side to side trying to see his face. But it was concealed by shadows as the sun only slightly illuminated a small square near the door.
“Come into the light,” the guard instructed.
As the man rose to his feet and as his face gradually leaped into the light, his identity became even more of a puzzle because I knew him. I did. How could I ever forget his face! I had seen him, years before. He was the same colored man who saved me from Mr. Bailey after we robbed his store. I remember because he called me Danny. Only people who know me call me Danny. I was lost for words. All I could do was stare as my mother questioned him as to the whereabouts of my sister’s body.
“Why don’t you let me give my baby a proper burial?”
He looked her square in the eyes, and said nothing.
“Why don’t you give us a chance to heal?”
Again, nothing.
His eyes seemed to be looking at her, but I knew he wasn’t. He was looking through her. I imagined he was thinking about some faraway place that was everything but here.
“Just say something! Anything!”
And then he answered. “I told you I don’t know nothing about your girl’s body.”
“I am begging you! You hear! Now tell me where you put her body you SON OF A BITCH!”
“Now, it don’t make no sense taking this to the grave, boy! Free yourself of this so you may be in God’s favor in the afterlife,” said Mr. Gains, the same old man who scolded us for throwing rocks at his house. He came along with us to the prison, at my mother’s request. After my father passed, she and him became very close. The inmate’s eyes teared as he spoke one final time. “I have said my piece, you hear me! Now y’all can go on and take me to Gruesome Gertie. I don’t fear it none, no way.”
My mom began to bawl. Mr. Gaines comforted her as he pulled her head into his chest. She latched on to his shirt, fervently, pulling and thrusting.
The prisoner looked at me for a brief
moment. His face seemed old and worn, so different from that day in New Orleans. I thought not to make eye contact. And surely I did, wincing at his coldness. He caught this and slowly backpedaled from the light to the dark side of the cell.
“Well, that’s it folks,” the guard said. “He won’t be giving anything up today.”
Just like that, it was over. For all the hours we drove, we came back with nothing. As for me, I came back with even more questions. Like, who was the stranger in the cell? And why did he save me years ago?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Be My Witnesses