“Ain’t fo’ no white man,” said Fish. “You gots to go to a special white place.”
“Where would that be?”
“I don’t know. The white peoples didn’t tell me!”
Everybody laughed.
Earl looked at the empty water can in its puddle of sodden dust. It seemed the saddest thing he’d ever seen. His throat felt cracked and dry, his lips wooden. He moved on to the bin with the biscuits but when he reached for one, old Fish handed him a special one. It was smeared with some kind of animal shit.
“This here be fo’ you, suh. This here be special. Go on, you eat that, boy, you tell me how you be likin’ it.”
“Just give me a biscuit.”
“Oh, you be de boss now. Suh,” he yelled back at the section boss, “is this here a new boss?”
“No, it ain’t, Fish. It’s just another nigger. You don’t owe him nothing, not the time of day or nothing.”
With a clatter, Fish kicked the tin of biscuits to the ground, where they bounced down the slope of the levee and settled in the thick, brackish ooze at its foot.
“There yo’ dinner, boy. Seconds, even, ’cause you be special, you hear? Ain’t no one else got seconds.”
Earl felt like snapping the little man’s neck. He could have done it, too, in less than a second, for he still had some strength left. But what was the point?
Earl pulled away, hungry and thirsty, but he would not beg, out of a mule-headedness that was not heroic in the least but only crazy. He went stoically to where the convict crew lay along the levee, all gobbling their biscuits, some lounging extravagantly, yammering among themselves. There was no place for him, nor did he expect one, but simply crouched at the edge, eyes fixed on nothing.
Whack!
A jolt of pain struck him in the small of the back, and he jackknifed up, his feet slid out from under him, and he tumbled down in a cloud of dust into the mud at the bottom of the levee.
“Whoo-eee, y’all see that white boy jump! Didn’t know them boys could jump like that!”
It was old Fish, scrawny and demonic, his face knitted up in a glee that only half hid his anger. It was the toe of his sharp boot, delivered with a great deal of springy force, that had just nailed Earl.
Earl almost cursed and called him the ugliest word for a black man that he knew and headed up the hill to beat on him for a while, but then caught himself. That’s what you’d do in the world if a man kicked you in the back. He wasn’t in the world; he was in Thebes. He looked and saw a bunch of convicts staring at him.
“You go git him, white boy! Yassuh, go git him, see what it gits you.”
Suddenly the section boss was next to Fish, on his horse, his tommy gun pointing at Earl.
“What’s going on, Fish?”
“This here man said you be a old bastard, boss,” lied Fish with a grin that showed only a few teeth behind his cracked old lips. “So I done fixed his ass good.”
He stared at Earl with malevolent yellowed eyes.
“That true, convict?” asked the section boss.
Earl shook his head.
Suddenly, the boss man fired his tommy gun. It was a ten-round burst, and it kicked into the mud next to Earl, a neat stitch of lead that popped ten geysers in a single second. The roar of the gun raced through the air, rebounded off the far trees where the river lay, and came back in rolling echo. All the Negro boys lounging on the levee flinched and cowered at the noise. The shots were meant to make Earl shiver and collapse in terror. But Earl had been shot at before, and so he simply winced at the noise, wiped the mud spatters off his face, and said, “You want me to show you how to run that gun, let me know. Otherwise, you might hurt somebody.”
The boss’s eyes flared with rage; clearly he had a petty vanity about his Thompson skills, and it was evidently part of his legend among the men, and a source of his power. He expected respect, admiration and fear from the men he commanded.
He reined his horse around, drew it steady, and, one-handed, fired another deafening burst, this time spattering up geysers on Earl’s other side.
But Earl stood still.
Then he said, “I don’t believe Bigboy wants me dead yet, so if you put one into me, he will whip on your ass for a month of Tuesdays. So as far as I am concerned, you are just wasting ammunition to no good point.”
“You must want a taste of the stick, boy!”
“You want to come down here and give it to me, you come ahead.”
“Your evil tongue will win you no favors here, boy. I swear on that.”
He reined his horse over a bit, and turned to the men.
“Since y’all find this so amusing, I’m going to cancel the water break at three, goddammit, and you c’n work straight through till dark. You got any problems, you tell it to the white boy. Now, go on, back to work!”
“Men down,” came the cry, and the men groaned as they rose and headed back down into the mud.
Earl headed back to the stump, and around him the black convicts sloshed and pushed along as well. At one point, someone bumped into him, and he went down briefly, but he rose, thinking it was going to be a fight or something. Instead, something was pressed into his hand by an unseen body, and he looked down and saw that it was a half-eaten biscuit. He stuffed it into his mouth, ground it with his teeth, and felt the pleasure of solid food.
Then it was back on the stump and back on the shovel.
Be my woman, gal, I be your man,
By my woman, gal, I be your man,
Every day is Sunday’s dollar in your hand,
In your hand, Lordy, in your hand,
Every day is Sunday’s dollar, in your hand.
That was Rosie. Rosie was their dream, their love, their inspiration. Rosie got them through the long afternoon hours, otherwise unmarked by time or incident.
A man killed a snake.
A guard hit a loafer with a stick, or maybe he wasn’t a loafer, maybe he was just sick.
The boss cursed out a lazy nigger.
The men just worked, that was all, without rest, without speeding up or slowing down, just abiding by the harsh rules imposed and finding instinctive ways beyond it, with the help of Rosie.
When she walks, she reels and rocks behind,
When she walks, she reels and rocks behind,
Ain’t that enough to worry a convict’s mind,
Ain’t that enough to worry a convict’s mind.
And they loved her for worrying their minds, for when they worried about Rosie, they didn’t think about the boss with his stick and gun, they didn’t think about the blue ticks hungering for their flesh, they didn’t worry about the strutting clown prince Fish, who sucked up to the guards and wore his petty gift of stature like a crown, and they didn’t think about the heat, the mud, the sun, the mosquitoes, they didn’t think about a tomorrow and a tomorrow and a tomorrow of that same hard thing without end.
Earl slipped twice in the mud, and once hit his knee on a rock hard enough to bruise. He felt his hands pulping up in pain, swelling, and glanced at his palms, which were seared raw with his own blood.
“You, white boy, you keep on a-shoveling, you don’t need to be looking at them purty hands, ’cause they ain’t so purty now,” the section boss called.
“You keep working, white boy,” a voice crooned to him, “or they beat you silly and then they beat us just fo’ the fun of it.”
Earl took the advice to heart, and gave himself to the shovel, and never again that whole afternoon did he take a break or look away; he just gave himself to the rhythm of the labor, and like the men around him, tried to close it out.
Only one oddness struck him; he looked up late in the afternoon for the glinting of light on a lens far off. Sometimes early in the war the Japs gave away their positions that way, and the brief flash would be answered with a long belt of .30-caliber machine gun fire or a mortar barrage. So he knew: someone was watching from far away, with binoculars, steadily and professionally.
&nb
sp; Section Boss worked them hard that day, as he would all days, and after dark they shuffled back to the Ape House. There were no showers or mercies or softnesses waiting for them there, either. They stripped and ran naked through hoses held by white guards, that was the shower, and then pulled the same foul clothes on. The food was cold grits, coffee, a biscuit, some beans ladled out in the cookhouse, on tin plates, gobbled quickly under the watch of men with guns. They ate with their hands, squatting in the yard, then went back to soak the tin plates in a cauldron of boiling water.
Then they went back to the Ape House, and the card players took up the game and the talkers started up reveries about ’ho-towns they’d visited, and the crazies and the sick ones retreated to their corner of hell to gibber irrationally, and Earl pulled his bunk against the corner and slept lightly.
The next morning at 4:00 it started all over again, the same thing, exactly, and on and on it went, the hot mornings, the jabbering torture of the monkey Fish, the baleful stares of Moon, the visits in song of Rosie and the escape she brought. On and on. Over and over. There was nothing else, except now and then he’d catch the flash of light off lenses. Whoever was watching from afar was making a consistent, scientific job of it. Meanwhile, he lost track of the time. A week, a month, a year? It felt the same.
And then one day as they were climbing from the pit, a weariness on their bones so powerful they could hardly speak of it, somebody brought himself close to Earl. It was a man who’d never acknowledged him, one of the card players, but he whispered something fierce, and then slid away, and nobody had seen him do it.
He whispered, “They gon’ cut you tonight, white boy. Moon and his fellas. Cut you to death.”
23
SAM stared at the photo. The man was extraordinarily handsome, and if one had the inclination to imbue beauty with more substantive virtues, he was possibly noble.
The late David Stone, M.D., Ph.D., Maj., United States Army Medical Corps, stared back at Sam from his formal studio setting, tinted vaguely sepia after the fashion of 1943, when the shot had been taken. He wore his uniform proudly, with the entwined staff and serpent of the medical corps glinting on his lapels next to a block of ribbons that testified to a career that mattered. He wore a pencil-thin moustache, and had pearly teeth, his hair pomaded back neatly. He looked like a philosopher prince of some sort.
“He was a very good man,” said the widow Stone, sitting across from him in her apartment, which overlooked a rolling splurge of meadow, pond and tree called Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, eight stories below.
She was a lovely woman, too. There was something aquiline in her facial features, and her eyes were darkness embodied, but lively, merry, so intelligent. They were eyes made for laughter, but not raucous yuks; rather, for the laughter of wit, of erudition, of the bon mot.
He could see them as a married couple, how they fit together, how well they set each other off, what a center to a set they’d be, with his dashing nobility, her brilliance and beauty. It seemed so Eastern somehow, something Sam had glimpsed in his time in New Jersey and New Haven, a brilliant world, but one sealed off; you couldn’t get into it without fabulous talent or fabulous success or fabulous family. Lacking all three, and moreover aware that he lacked something more—a capacity to dazzle seemed to be it—he knew he’d never move in such a society. He wanted to prosecute rapists and bank robbers in a little county in western Arkansas. No Eastern woman could understand such a thing, and he was hopeless when it came to articulating it. Only a Connie Longacre, stuck there in her tragic marriage, could understand, after much hard study.
“Harvard, as I understand it?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, second generation. David’s father was a doctor before him on New York’s Park Avenue. Society, that sort of thing, and with it all the expectations that David lived up to without even breaking a sweat. He had a moral investment in life, if I may say. So David did his undergraduate school at New Haven, then Harvard for medical school, just like his father. Then, after a few years of residency and a fellowship, he came here, to Baltimore, and got his advanced degree in public health at Johns Hopkins.”
“You’ll have to forgive me, ma’am, I’m just a humble country lawyer. It would seem he could have gone anywhere in the world with those credentials and had a very nice life. An opulent life. Even while doing good practicing medicine. Yet he went into public health, which, if I’m not mistaken, is not the most remunerative of fields. And if I’m not mistaken, he spent the early thirties in Africa and Asia.”
“That is correct, Mr. Vincent. David wasn’t interested in money. As I say, he was a moral man. He was in some way obsessed with goodness, with progress, with doing well for the world. The money was nothing. He’d grown up with it, he had a private income, a small one, so possibly he took it for granted, and simply earning money for the sake of earning money held no magic for him. I had some money, too, from my family. We wanted interesting and useful lives, not big houses. This apartment was fine for us. We never wanted a spread in the valley.”
It was a four-or five-bedroom apartment in what had to be the city’s best building, a castle overlooking a deer park. What Sam experienced was some sort of tabernacle to a life of the intellect, of stimulation of imagination and eye and mind: it was a book-lined warren, with eclectic furniture and a medical library as large as some small college’s, Sam guessed. But there was also literature and poetry on the shelves, and modern art on the walls, and crazed sculptures here and there, and a great many African and Asian artifacts and pieces, as well as a riot of textures and colors from various forms of textile art. The view of the park, Sam had noted, was magnificent.
“You must have been so happy,” Sam said.
“Yes. But it was hard. David was a man of work, of duty. He wanted to bring mercy into the world. He wanted to cure the great tropical diseases, yellow fever, malaria, rickets, all the terrible ulcerations and cataracts of the eye, the lack of nutrition and sanitation. He wanted to make all those faraway dark places light and clean and full of healthy babies and smiling mothers. I can’t say I was as idealistic as he was, and it cost us. It cost us a child, a family. After we lost the first one, I couldn’t have any more. Not that you asked, and not that I give up such information to any person that comes along. But you have to know how hard it can be to live with a saint.”
“I’m very sorry for your hardships, ma’am. I truly am.”
“Now, you wanted to talk about the war? That was your original line of questioning?”
“Yes, ma’am. I represent a client who is suing the State of Mississippi over the death of a Negro at a prison farm called Thebes in 1948. But Thebes was the site of the research station which the late Dr. Stone directed when he was a major in the—” he made a show of checking notes, though he knew it by heart—“the medical corps, in that unit, the 2809th Tropical Disease Research Unit.”
“Yes, that is what it was.”
“And as you might expect, the state of Mississippi isn’t being particularly helpful. It’s not much interested in being sued. So I’m hoping to uncover testimony that shows that the situation in Thebes under Army control was quite benign and it turned somewhat ugly when the prison reverted to state control, under a civilian warden, and such things could occur too often.”
“I would very much like to help. I’m a great believer, along with dear Mrs. Roosevelt, in the plight of the American Negro. It is a shame on the bosom of our country.”
“I agree, ma’am, and possibly the work I’m involved in”—Sam half-hated himself for the nobility he was pretending to, particularly in the presence of the widow of a man who was genuinely noble—“will help advance that cause.”
“You are a man of stern belief, Mr. Vincent.”
“No, ma’am. Your husband was a man of stern belief. I’m just a country lawyer, taking a deposition. May I ask, how did he die, if it’s not too indelicate a subject?”
“It was a disease. He wanted to destroy it; it destroyed h
im.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“No need to apologize. It was a mighty enemy, and he lost a noble battle. I think of Hector and Achilles. He was Hector. Heroic, but sadly human, at war with one of God’s most favored killing machines. He’d never been dipped in immortality. It ravaged him and he died, that’s all. Some bug stung him, some dying patient breathed on him, some germ crept into his water or food. It’s very tragic. He could have done so much more than he got to do. He wanted to help so much.”
“I take it the Department of the Army was very aggressive in setting up this project.”
“As you might imagine, tropical diseases weren’t of much interest in this country until the war came along. Then our boys started suffering from them in the Pacific. So of course it all changed, and David was suddenly very popular. He was commissioned directly, given a budget and an agenda. I’m not sure why Mississippi was chosen as opposed to Florida, the Everglades or something, which at least would have been close to a sophisticated city, Miami. But for some reason, he had to go to God’s Little Acre, Mississippi. I gather its impenetrability was part of its allure. The conditions were primitive in that part of the state. It was much like being in an African jungle. And you couldn’t fly there or drive there; just getting in was arduous enough. But he loved the work, and he was very optimistic about his research.”
“I’m sorry, but wasn’t there a road? I mean, couldn’t you have flown to New Orleans, traveled to Pascagoula, then driven up the road parallel to the river?”
“Well, there was, until the Army Engineers destroyed it.”
“They destroyed it?”
“They cut it off. I suppose it had to do with security. Possibly they were worried about German or Japanese spies, or inquiring newspaper men, or whatever. But they went to a great deal of trouble to isolate it.”