Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  “Imagine that,” I said.

  “There’s something driving his music, don’t you think? Like it has a mind and a soul all its own.”

  Not wanting to ruin the moment, I just nodded.

  “All right, I best be going,” the Warden said before he headed up to signal that Huddie could play two more songs.

  × × ×

  A few weeks passed without much changing except the length of the days and the treads on my work shoes. The new head cook, looking as nervous as he always did, walked out from his office in his clean white uniform and posted our monthly schedule on the door. Mine had been the same since I’d been there, so I didn’t bother looking.

  Beauregard whistled when he looked at the schedule, then strolled over to cut up chunks of bread. “How did you do it?” he asked me.

  I was busy measuring out twenty-eight cups of water to get boiling. “Hold on, I’m counting.”

  “Miss Dara, you got Sunday off!”

  “What?” I dropped the metal cup back into the deep sink with a loud clink and raced over to the long schedule sheet. Sure enough, there it was—Sunday off. “How the hell?”

  Beauregard asked, “You have something on the head cook?”

  Just when he said that, the head cook walked out from his office with his budget sheets. “Might be she has somethin’ on the Warden.”

  I ignored them. Sunday off!

  “Hot damn!”

  It took a will of mind to keep focused, but I went back to counting my twenty-eight cups and adding my special seasoning—two dozen shakes of garlic salt—to the water. I moved the pot to the stove and put a tray over the pot to get it to boil faster. In one hour or so, I could tell Huddie in line that I’d be able to see a full God damn show!

  One hour.

  Never in my decade at Imperial State Prison Farm did a pot of potatoes take so long to boil as it did that day. I pulled the tray off again to check.

  “Stop checking on it, woman!” Beauregard laughed.

  “I’m just adding some garlic salt.”

  “Why do you think garlic salt is going to fix every meal?”

  “Because it does.”

  I waited a minute before checking on the mashed potatoes again. They looked done enough, dammit, so I moved them off the heat to get the process going.

  The trick to making mashed potatoes at Sugar Land—on the rare time when we were allowed—was to dump the hot potatoes into the food prep sink and run water to cool them off, then pour on the milk before pressing them down. You wanted them cooled down before you added the milk, otherwise—as I found out in the early days—the lumpy starch takes over.

  I wheeled the cart over, slid the hot pot onto it, and dumped the potatoes into another metal pot in the sink with more splashing than usual.

  “Slow it down, Miss Dara, or you are going to be home Sunday healing from steam burns!” Beauregard yelled.

  I kept mashing. By that point, my right arm had grown larger than my left from all the pressing down at work. I felt masculine—all bulky, big, and sweaty—but it didn’t bother me because in the prison it gained me some respect and, as Beauregard told me on more than one occasion, it eased the minds of his lady friends when they came to pick him up. Clearly I was no competition.

  When the potatoes were mashed, I scooped them back into the original tin with a huge shovel of a spoon and wheeled them on to the line, where the hominy usually went—only we’d run out of lye so we scrounged extra potatoes.

  I stood in the serving line to the right of Jackson, who hadn’t had a fever since that last heat wave, quickly scooping potatoes for all the white men first. Jackson, meanwhile, scooped gravy as if this was his first day on the line.

  “Anyone love you, Jackson?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “You scooping as if you got no one at home who loves you. Like you want to stand here all day and scoop gravy!”

  Jackson looked at me with his wimpy brown eyes and stuck his bottom lip out. “You need me to hurry, you can just ask, rather than casting aspersions against my family.”

  “It was a valid dang question.”

  “You are peculiar,” he said—but he scooped faster.

  Finally, the colored inmates—and halfway through, Huddie. He took his time down the line, with that faraway look I had come to see as the look of an artist composing.

  “Those any good?” he asked of my mashed potatoes.

  “I’m afraid they might be a little tough, but listen to what I want to say. I have Sunday off!” I reminded myself to keep my voice down, with nosy Jackson eyeing me sideways. “I’ll be here to watch you play.”

  Huddie smiled the smile of a man who didn’t get himself excited about much. “Well then, maybe I’s playing two special songs that day.”

  “Who’s the other one for?” I asked, holding down my blush behind the bars.

  His wet eyes looked up, serious. “I’ve decided that the last song will be an ask for a pardon from Governor Neff.”

  I scooped into the next tray. “Governor Neff promised not to pardon prisoners when he was campaigning—though if anyone could get an exception, it’d be you.”

  “I surely will! And when I get out”—he turned to look me right in the eye—“you need to go, too.”

  Jackson interrupted. “Move on down, boy!”

  “Promise me.”

  “I’ll get out someday,” I said to Huddie, who stood there on the verge of trouble until I said, “I promise.” Only then did he move along, humming low and bobbing his head.

  THE GOV’NER

  On March 13, 1924, Huddie walked across the patted-down dirt of the yard and over to the gray picnic table where he always sat to perform. Two guards flanked him—one who hid his eyes under his cowboy hat and one who clearly ate too many donuts. When Huddie walked by, a few of the women looked away—there were always a few—as if the sight of a man in dirty prison stripes touched them too deeply to bear.

  Governor Neff sat at the center table, wearing a wrinkled mint-green suit. His genteel wife hung onto his sleeve, clearly feeling all the mercies of a woman who had it in her heart to believe that the good in every man will surface, if given the chance.

  It had taken me two hours looking through my clothes so I could be sure to seem casual when I went to see Huddie that Sunday. I wore a dress, of course. It would have been possible to wear trousers, I suppose—if I had lived in New York City or dated some man that bought art, but here at Imperial State Prison Farm—which everyone had started calling ‘Sugar Land’—I wore a loose dress just short enough not to drag in the dusty dirt.

  My dress had sleeves that went down almost to my elbows. It was pale yellow with a wide white collar and white polka dots. There were two buttons—one on each hip—that I could button in to give me some dimension beyond a big girl in a bag. I didn’t feel attractive or unattractive; I felt as if I would blend in.

  By the time I got to the creaky prison gate, I smelled like yeast and heated-up rose lotion. Huddie had just started tuning his guitar. I stepped over patches of gnarly grass struggling through the dirt like wire.

  The prisoners weren’t allowed to attend, of course, but we all knew they listened from the fields and inside the tanks. The guards loved working those Sundays, too.

  The yard stretched out about half an acre or so until it sectioned off into plantation rectangles. I stood along the back between the visitors and the kitchen building. I didn’t feel at home with the prison staff when I wasn’t working, but I didn’t feel at home with the visitors either. It was such a usual feeling, this lack of home and fitting in, that I hardly noticed it back then.

  There I was, in my yellow dress, smoking and fluffing out the back to dry a line of perspiration making its way down my well-insulated spine when the Warden came up—his black shoes shining and his tan pants extra crisp. Something about him said he did his own ironing. “Huddie already wore down a few spots on that fretboard, didn’t he?”

  I
nodded. Yes, yes he had. “Thank you for this day off.”

  “I got the idea to give him the guitar from you, so this is my way of thanking you—though my thank you can only be for the next two months.”

  “Two months!” I must have looked stupid being happy to have those Sundays off in order to come back to work.

  The Warden laughed so loudly that he had to cover it with a cough. “My wife couldn’t make it. She’s sick at home with the girls.” He shifted on his feet. “You got any family here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Call me Warden, Miss Dara.” The Warden took in a deep breath. “Yes, ma’am, I’m glad I gave Huddie that guitar to play. Speaking of which, I need to go shake hands with the governor and all the family he brought. Enjoy your day, Miss Dara.”

  “I certainly will, Warden.”

  I watched him walk off, in those perfectly creased tan pants, and I thought, he’s not so tough.

  Huddie played his first song, about a woman who worked on a farm and had to carry around her sick child with her. He was telling all these folks with their delicate hats that there were people out there who loved their children but needed money and were forced to make decisions surely more difficult than whether to dress them in knee-high socks or tights. Huddie knew the limits, though, so he eased up and moved to a strong, thumping song about a man whose wife really enjoyed dancing—though mostly without him, if you know what he meant.

  Huddie’s hand glided up and down the fretboard between each lazy chord strum, moving the melody like butter in a pan. There was no hate and killing in that glorious music that he sang out those long stretches of road past the white prison building that made him look so small. He sang loud, with his foot stomping.

  A group of five kids danced around in circles and most of the men clapped their hands on their thighs. I pulled a few pieces of tobacco from my tongue rather than spitting them out, waiting for the next song, the one Huddie told me he’d written for me.

  I looked at him, and his white eyes looked back. He strummed quietly now, so the words could be heard:

  Bars can brand a man, like cattle in the field—

  Wherever you go, they see those lines,

  And they always bring you back,

  Back to the fields where the animals are.

  That was what Huddie sang for me. With those words, he told me to get out of Sugar Land before I got branded as the woman who works in a prison, but he didn’t know about the brand I was really afraid of getting.

  Huddie didn’t know what I’d done in a different small Texas town a few years earlier. He didn’t know how I kissed Rhodie and moved my hands up the sides of her thin dress. The dress she said she wore for me, along with her butterfly scarf. He didn’t know how we waited until her parents and her brother went to New Mexico and then we spent the night together in her room—a night with thunderstorms and lightning that lit up our bodies in the dark. He didn’t know how grateful we were that the thunder covered the sounds we made that night from any folks walking by. That patch of freckles on the back of her knee.

  Sweat gathered at the inside of my thighs. I was developing a rash from them rubbing together so much in that damn dress. I lit another cigarette. The sun was almost down. Someone far away, outside the prison walls, set off what sounded like a firecracker—or maybe it was a gunshot, or the whip.

  I clapped as Huddie finished my song. He sang a few more while my mind drifted backwards—back to Midland and Rhodie.

  Half an hour later, Huddie plucked a few chords and called out, “The last one of the day!”

  Nervous, he cleared his throat more times than usual. He paused with his big hand resting on the part of the guitar shaped the same as the curve of a woman’s body. This was the one for the governor, and it was a big gamble since he could risk pushing too hard and angering the man.

  Huddie looked up, all deep creases and milky eyes. “This here is a song for you, Governor Neff.”

  The governor smiled one of those smiles that arrogant men with too much power smile. His wife snuggled up closer as Huddie started singing: “Please, Governor Neff . . .”

  From along the wall it was hard to see the Governor, but I could see his wife. I watched her lean over to her husband and whisper in his ear. I watched her sit back then—as if she’d done as much as she could do. The Governor put his arm around the back of her white lawn chair and I got the feeling that he had made up his mind about Huddie.

  × × ×

  But afterwards, months passed without any word from Governor Neff. The prisoners teased Huddie, quoting the song he’d sung while they knelt on one knee saying things like: “Gov’ner Gov’ner, please oh please most kind sir. I’m a’begging!” and “I’ll be a good nigger, you’ll see!”

  A few times this happened in the food line, and I felt his embarrassment that I was a witness—his embarrassment and his rage. Fighting it, Huddie shrugged and smiled his thin-lipped smile, going along with the God damn joke, making as if the mocking noises around him were nothing more than the buzzing of some thirsty mosquitoes.

  Some of the guards even got to calling him “The Gov’ner.” A pack of chickens pecking the weakest one to death.

  Usually Huddie had a boast or two to come back with when people got on him—or a reminder that he often held the whip in the fields, but in this case, he stood mute, responding only with that thin smile and the anger I saw boiling up in his eyes. More and more, he sat alone in the dining hall or came in last so he didn’t have time to sit down before the guards called everyone back. When he played his guitar in the yard, he stopped taking requests.

  One Wednesday, a few months after he’d sung for the governor, Huddie looked up at me and nodded in the breakfast line, letting me know we could meet by the Wood again. I clicked my tongue to confirm and plopped a thick wad of gravy on another tray, wondering if it was the lack of dietary changes that caused near half of Sugar Land to always be suffering from stomach troubles.

  For the rest of the day, I kept checking the clock, which moved slower than a snail on sand. Beauregard finally told me to “focus on being less obvious.”

  Doing my best to look innocent, I said, “What do you mean?”

  He walked over, carrying one of the longer knives he’d been sharpening. “What I mean is that when you volunteer to carry the Wednesday vegetables, I look out the window and can see Huddie faking a bladder emergency that needed tending to at the Wood. So be less obvious.”

  I gave him a sheepish look and said, “All right then,” before sneaking another look at the clock.

  Beauregard threw up his hands and gave me an exasperated, “Lord, woman!”

  At 3 p. m. on the dot, I took my secret, strange route around the scraggly plants to where Huddie was standing, hand out in front of his crotch, pretending to urinate.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “I know fighting will surely ruin my chances of getting out, if I have any.” He gritted his teeth. “I’s coming undone.” He looked down at me in the shade of the Wood, his forehead wrinkling up and bags like mudslides under his eyes. “One more Gov’ner joke and I just might take a life.”

  “Keep going just a little while longer.”

  “They all want me to crack. They pushin’ me to the edge.”

  “You know that anything you do is going to hurt you more than them.”

  Huddie shook off into the air, stood up, and got ready to go back out to the yard. “I’s trying.” He sighed and stared up at the sky, blue and clear.

  With a flick of his hand too fast to see, Huddie threw a small flat blade made of some discarded metal. It landed in front of me, causing the smallest cloud of dust to stir up. I grabbed the blade up and shoved it in my pocket.

  Huddie turned and nodded his thanks to me in the rectangular shadow of the Wood before straightening up and walking back out into that dustbowl of a yard.

  WHAT SAILORS KNOW

  No news came from the governor for ten full months. The he
ckling kept up, but more and more folks moved on to some new prey in the prison. Huddie got back to playing his guitar and, most important, he didn’t kill anyone.

  Then it happened. I picked up the newspaper that the new head cook always left for us to read after he’d finished with it, and there it was—the announcement that Huddie would be getting out early, and in only three days.

  February 21, 1925. Clemency. Mercy. Parole.

  Huddie was getting released. He’d done it. He’d gone a few years on a twenty-year sentence and got it cut back with a song.

  When I told Beauregard he twisted his mustache and said, “Seems you’ll have to find a new best friend.”

  I smiled. “Seems.”

  He wiped his hands on a towel hanging out of his uniform pocket and followed me into the kitchen to start our day. “That’s the power of music for you. And he’s got it—that power all the way through his black bones. You know what they are calling him around here?”

  “Lucky?” I said.

  “They call him Lead Belly. That’s his singing name.”

  “He never asked me to call him that.”

  “He didn’t give it to himself. People insist on giving you a name when they know you’ve become someone beyond the name you were given.”

  That day, I waited and waited for him through all the colored inmates in the breakfast line. No Huddie.

  Later, while Beauregard and I were cleaning up he gave me the news: “I just heard. Huddie’s in the Box.”

  “What for?”

  “For getting early release would be my guess.”

  “They putting him in for the full three days?” I asked, dumping a pot of water into the sink.

  “Unless he reacts. He reacts, then Governor Neff will surely pull his pardon, and he’ll be in the Box for a long while more. Plus he’ll be back in here for his full sentence—and then some.”

  Three other prisoners helped in the kitchen that day. As usual, they said nothing, but I noticed them giving looks back and forth. I wondered if they wanted Huddie to get out. How would I feel if someone got out on a song, literally, while I was in for my full term? Plus, now their music would be gone.