Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  “No, I mean how did he let things get out of hand?”

  Kwako scratches his beard. “That you’ll have to ask him.”

  “Is there … I don’t know how to put this.”

  “Say it.”

  “Is there something wrong with us? These men were heroes, right? H. Rap Brown? But now he’s just another black man with a gun. Another brother in jail …”

  “Yeah, and his old buddy John Lewis is an important U.S. congressman. Don’t go painting with a broad brush.”

  “You’re right, you’re right.”

  “Sometime I think the big shots of history just got lucky to be where they was. Circumstances a hair different, you know, they’d be sinners ‘stead of saints. Hotheads, all of ‘em—that’s why they’s out front when historyring its bell. Looka the Alamo—we call those fellas heroes, right? Hell, they’s a bunch of rough-and-tumble scalawags. If they’da died in a saloon fight, which was real possible in most their cases, we wouldn’t be saying their names.”

  We pass tupelos and sweet gums, a “Live Minnows” shop, old red-clay mule-cart roads winding off among dark pines, past gravestones sinking into weeds.

  “Still, there is a lot of black men in jail,” Kwako mumbles. “That’s a fact.”

  Barbara spots a fruit stand and asks if we can stop. I pull over by a series of pine crates stacked to form tables. Watermelons, apples, and pears. From my purse I grab a wad of bills. “On me,” I say. I hand her ten twenties. “And this is for your lovely quilt.”

  She smiles and tucks the money into her bright yellow skirt. “You like to learn piecework? I’ll show you sometime. Then you can be like your mama.”

  “I’d like that,” I say.

  She greets the big, hearty man behind the crates. He’s filbert-colored, gray-haired, and sweating. Horseflies swarm a row of cantaloupe. The air smells rancid and sweet: moist sugar, overheated auto brakes.

  “Hardwoods mostly gone from here,” Kwako says, glancing around at the pines. “Steam skidders dragged ‘em all away …” A wistful bemusement hovers just at the edge of his voice, reminding me of Bitter. It accounts, I’m sure, for my ease with him.

  “Did you finish sculpting your bears?”

  “Three oak cubs.” He grins. “And a brand new zebra made from Coke bottles and a suitcase.”

  Barbara asks the fruit seller to bag her up half a melon and a pair of Granny Smith apples. She leans close and whispers to him. He leads her to a box of Ziploc pouches next to some peanut sacks. The pouches are filled with fine white grains. Barbara smiles at me, embarrassed.

  “That’ll be two bucks for the fruit, dollar forty-eight for the kaolin.”

  It looks like chalk—fertilizer for houseplants or something. Barbara seems shamed by it so I don’t ask her, but as she turns from the fruit stand, she opens the pouch, pinches a bit of powder between her forefinger and thumb, and sucks it into her mouth.

  “Dirt,” Kwako tells me softly. “Fresh from the Georgia hills. She craves it like some folks crave popcorn or crackers.”

  Barbara’s shy now, but I give her a sympathetic smile. She admits, “I’d eat it for breakfast, lunch, and supper, with a little iced tea, if I could, but it’s bad for my system. Stops me up, you know, and leaves me tired.”

  “Forgive me. I’m curious,” I say. “How did you—?”

  “When I’s a girl, my mama’d give me fifteen cents and say, ‘Go get me some kaolin from Miz So-and-So.’ She ate it whenever she’s pregnant with my little brothers and sisters. Said it settled her tummy. Sure enough, when I’s carrying my firstborn and got sick in the mornings, I remembered what she’d said and hunted some down for myself. Been hooked ever since.”

  “There’s a big dirt trade from Georgia and all through the South, over here to the coast, even up to Chi-town, along the Delta,” Kwako tells me.

  Back in the car, as we’re heading through the woods, Barbara says, “You know the way the earth smells after a long dry spell, then a spit of rain hits it, stirring up old pebbles and leaves? That’s how kaolin tastes to me.” She chews a creamy pinch. “Doctor tells me, ‘Girl, this stuff is used in paint, ceramics, fiberglass, it’s used to make paper—it ain’t to be eaten!’ and I know he’s right, but Lord, my mama was right too. Calms me like nothing else.” I’m glad she trusts me enough to give me a glimpse of her life. Two kids, boys, she says, both grown—I wonder how old she is?—working in the Ship Channel, loading boats. “Hell-raisers, but they made good men. Married now. Responsible daddies. We’re right proud of ‘em.”

  Kwako says, “You done good, Mama.”

  “It’s ‘cause I had my dirt!”

  We pass the remaining miles listening to a Sonny Rollins tape Kwako has brought, foggy sax twisting around mushrooming drumbeats. As we approach Huntsville, I notice blueberry fields on either side of the road and remember passing through here as a girl, in Mama’s car, traveling from Houston to Dallas. I recall black men in ghostly white suits picking the berries and realize now they must have been prisoners working for the state. In high school, one of the persistent rumors was that Creole women, just out of jail, hung around “nigger” cemeteries near Huntsville. They’d “do” a boy for a six-pack of beer.

  On the town’s outskirts, sleek new housing crowds bulldozed fields; the unfinished homes are only about ten feet apart—a developer’s strategy to reduce the taxable land. Corporate campuses, white and bland. Condos. Hotels assembling ski lodges, made of hill-country limestone. Billboards say, DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS. In the town itself, new additions have been tacked to older homes, a sign of prosperous times in the prison industry. Satellite dishes, swimming pools. College boys swerve past us in freshly waxed sports cars; farmers rattle along in flatbeds.

  All I know about the Texas prison system, from reports in the mayor’s office, is that the state once fed inmates a powdered meat substitute called Vita Pro, whose nutritional value was nil—and there was some question about where the unused meat was going and who profited from its sale. In the early eighties, the prison director was forced from office under suspicion of corruption. But this town is thriving; building cranes, skeletal girders soak up the sun beneath buzzing black police helicopters.

  Downtown, in front of tobacco shops and clothing stores, men linger in shadows, wearing blue, short-sleeved shirts, khaki pants, wraparound shades. They light each other’s cigarettes, mill about uncertainly, clutching plastic bags, manila folders. Ex-cons, I figure, out on parole, sniffing the outside air, testing to see whether it’s poison to them now. Tattoos smear their arms.

  Near the vaguely Italian courthouse, narrow cafés serve Diet Cokes and Fritos, All You Can Eat Noon Specials, to men in cheap ties—middle-management types. We spy them through the windows. I spot only a few women on the street, mostly in front of a lumberyard converted into a county museum and on the steps of a Baptist church so large it appears to be swollen.

  I have twenty minutes to make my appointment. With Barbara’s help, I choose the nicest-looking café in the main square and drop her off with Kwako. “I won’t be long,” I say. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  “We’re fine, honey.” She slips the dirt inside her purse. “Kwako’ll read the paper, and I’ll do a crossword or two. Take all the time you need.”

  “It’s good to have a break.” Kwako pauses on the sidewalk, stretching his arms. He seems frail here, out of context. But the café looks reassuring, full of dark faces.

  Once I’ve seen them comfortably seated, I check my scribbled directions and make my way to a thin, tarry road surrounded by chain-link fences trimmed with barbed-wire. Every fifty feet or so, cinder-block guard towers shade my car. The guards grip cell phones. They look bored. I drive slowly, carefully. A sign in English and Spanish informs me that my presence here means I’ve automatically consented to a possible search. I come to a large sally port, but then I see a small VISITORS sign shunting me off to the left. I turn and immediately I’m stopped by a uniformed man with
a cell phone. “He’p you, ma’am?” I give him my name. He asks me to wait in my “vehicle.” Puny trees ring a pale brick admin building just up ahead; it looks like the tidy home of a college president. After ten minutes or so, the man returns—I didn’t see where he went—and directs me past the building to a nearly full parking lot. I lock the car and head toward a chain-link gate manned by two other sullen uniforms. They buzz me in and point me toward a boxy structure. Inside, on a warped corkboard nailed to the gray stone wall, handwritten notices announce TDC rules, the Employee of the Month, car and house rentals. A battered water fountain gurgles in the corner. A carrot-haired man smacking gum asks for picture ID, hands me a clipboard, orders me to sign in. In the “Reason for Visit” column I write “Dallas Mayor’s Off.” He squints at my words. “All righty. Follow me. Oh—you can’t take that purse. We’ll hold it for you here.” I hand it over; he stuffs it in a cabinet with other purses, paper sacks, even two or three Happy Birthday balloons, then leads me through a narrow doorway to an outside path lined with artificial flowers and tall Cyclone fences festooned with concertina wire. From somewhere in the distance a loudspeaker shouts, “Clear on outta the rec room now. All you sweet little bitches get back to your shitters.” The officer glances at me, reddening, as though I wasn’t supposed to hear that. We come to a squat building, red brick, with barred and meshed windows. He opens the door with a key, steps aside. As I slip past him I smell the spearmint gum he’s chewing, a pondlike cologne. The room is dim. Green plaster walls, flaking. A dusty, old-papers smell. A soft drink machine rattles behind a scarred oak table. R.C., Orange Crush. Through yet another doorway we come to a long wooden counter rigged with a Plexiglas divider, about a foot high. Chairs on either side. Three other women are sitting on my side of the counter, speaking in low tones to men opposite them, fellows in orange jumpsuits with blocky black numbers stenciled on their breast pockets. Guards—I overhear one of the inmates call them COs—lurk in each corner of the room, leering openly at the women. I take a seat and cross my arms. The room hums faintly—from what, I can’t tell: an air-conditioning unit (though it’s hot in here), a generator under the floor.

  “Jesus, baby,” says one of the inmates, “my lawyer thought DNA was an additive in food coloring.”

  Soon, a CO leads a tall, shaved-headed, middle-aged man to a wobbly chair directly across the counter from me. He’s carrying a thick leather book, Black’s Law Dictionary, hugging it to his chest like a Bible. From time to time his mouth twitches as though he’s working an invisible toothpick. His eyes are yellow, his ears flat and fleshy like the leaves of a large, overwatered houseplant. Skin the color of an avocado’s woody heart. “So,” he says to me, a bass rasp. “Miss High Society come to see the ghost. Who are you, High Society? Can you help me?”

  “Thank you for seeing me, first off.” My voice trembles.

  “Who are you? What you want with me?”

  “My uncle, a man named Bitter, maybe you knew him as Ledbetter, did some carpentry work for you once. He said—”

  He slams his hand on the book. “They rejected my last appeal. You know that, right? That why you here?”

  “No …”

  “Giving me the needle next month. So what I need to know, Miss High Toes, is can you help me? You got any pull with the Big Juice? Tell me again. What’s your lookout?”

  “Well I’m—”

  “Kind of a bull dagger, ain’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Traipse in here, cleaner than the Board of Health … I’m some sort of freak show for you?”

  “I think you knew my daddy.”

  “Hell, I probably fucked your daddy. When was he in?”

  “He wasn’t. He was—”

  “They told me you work for a mayor or something.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So can you raise me? You must have some pull.”

  “No. I’m afraid not.”

  He leans closer to the Plexiglas. “See, the thing is, I should’ve only did a nickel. But Mr. Charley, he won’t listen to me no more.”

  I lean back and sigh. “Did you kill your wife?” I blurt, wondering if I can wrench a single straight answer out of this guy.

  He waves his hand. “See, you want to know—that day? Let me tell you. That day I’s hanging out at the happy shop ‘cause the crumbcrushers at home, five and six year old, they driving me nuts all the time. You know how it is. So I’s feeling good when I get back. Fry us up a mess of chicken wings. She puts the critters to bed. I’m busting suds in the kitchen, next thing I know she’s having at me with the bread knife. The fucking bread knife. She’s all, ‘You drunk, irresponsible … leave me with the kids … never know …’ That shit. So of course, I’m gonna do what?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Now, your mayor, he can get with that, right? You tell him. I done my nickel. That oughtta be enough.”

  “Jim Washington,” I say. “Did you know him? Can you tell me anything about him?”

  “Fuck. You heard of Karla Faye Tucker, right? They send a sweet piece like her down to Hell—Little Miss, just like you, Jerry Falwell, God, and shit in her corner—what shot I got? You wasting my time.”

  I try to imagine my daddy as someone like him: scared, belligerent, improvising moment to moment just to save his neck. I try to see this man sitting bravely at a lunch counter—a tabletop similar to the one separating us now?—carrying the banner of civil rights. Suddenly, in this sad, stale room, filled with curses and last-minute pleas, the world seems lost, jerry-rigged, hopeless. Does it matter that we “won our rights”? We’ll lose them again if we don’t keep fighting, and who has the strength to stick? Does it matter what my daddy was like? He’s gone. We’ll all soon be gone.

  “Hunnert and twenty-seven,” Elias says.

  I shrug.

  “Hunnert and twenty-seven.”

  “What about it?”

  “Number of poor willies George W. murdered since moving into the governor’s mansion. Regular slaughterhouse. What you gonna do about it? Can you fucking help me?’

  I rise. The chair scrape echoes dully off the walls. “I’m not going to do anything about it,” I say, turn, and nod at a grinning CO to let me out of the room.

  On the outside path the red-haired guard and I pass a cluster of cons in blue T-shirts and sweatpants taking their exercise on the other side of the fence. One rushes forward—he looks no more than twenty—asks me, “Are you anywhere, know’m say’n? I’m jonesing, babe, swear to God. Anything, anything at all.” Another calls, “Hey mink! Hey bitch! I got it for you right here!” He clutches his crotch. “Ain’t a thang! Even got us some raincoats!” He pulls a package of condoms from his pants. Behind him, an armed CO yells, “Shaadap, girlie!”

  Red-head mumbles, “OI’ Satan’s a silent partner in the ownership of some folks, eh?”

  As I leave the admin building and head to my car I’m thinking Straight lines; Evil travels in straight lines. I’m cold despite the heat. My bones feel soft. I have to turn and go back. I’ve forgotten to ask for my purse.

  Off-duty COs crowd the café tables. Sweat rings wilt their cotton shirts. White guards in one part of the room, blacks in the other. A young brother says, “One thing I learned about white dudes. You can hang with ‘em long as no ladies around. Soon as poon’s on the scene, the whole deal just freezes up.”

  “—don’t want to work,” an ofay shouts at his buddies. “You’ve seen ‘em.”

  Barbara hands me the sugar jar. I stir my coffee, brush my bottom lip with my pinky. “Dirt,” I whisper. She cleans herself. “Thank you,” she says.

  Kwako sighs. “Hard to figger. Always seemed a reasonable man to me. Lockup must put you through some changes.”

  “Oh, he changed before that,” Barbara says. “Or he wouldn’t be in lockup to begin with.”

  “Anyways, I’m sorry you didn’t get what you needed.”

  I nod. “Thanks for coming with me.” Th
e coffee fails to steady my nerves. The laughter, the flamboyant gestures of bragging men, the shifting, suspicious eyes in the room … we all ought to be locked up, protected from our own ugliness. The smell of pickles from Kwako’s half-eaten sandwich turns my stomach.

  “What’s a six-letter word for ‘resistant’?” Barbara asks, tapping her pen on the table.

  Driving through town, we pass the compound where Elias will receive a lethal injection a month from now: a dark, straight wall topped with razor wire. Behind it, peaked roofs and banks of curtained windows. At the base of the wall, scrappy flowers lie in wet clumps beside torn posterboards, remnants from a march against an earlier execution.

  Back on the highway, Barbara and Kwako snooze. I pass the blueberry fields. A white-suited hoe squad chops weeds beneath the brambles, watched closely by armed, sunburned deputies. I doubt the land here has changed much in eighty years—the developers haven’t planted flags yet—nor has the treatment of prisoners. I imagine Cletus Hayes, feet shackled, stabbing the ground with a shovel. Behind him—behind me; I concentrate hard and on comes the mask; the hypnotic shuffling of chains, steady waves drawing me back, back—behind me, a fat guard in a Stetson brandishes a polished Springfield, just like the ones we use in the army. He yells, “Faster, boy! This rate, won’t be enough flavor in that sweet blueberry ice cream I’ll be licking later. Meantime, you’ll be drinking your piss in the brig!” My spine burns like kindling. Eyes itch. Whenever this asshole says “ice cream,” my mouth waters and I think of children eating, skipping, sailing kites—the kids Sarah Morgan has dreamed of with me. I think of her and the seed I’ve planted in her womb. I ponder generations, the world continuing without me. I can’t grasp the enormousness of it all. I look up at the mule-cart road, imagine it paved in the future, a sleek new jitney jingling by, ferrying—who? A light-skinned young woman, perhaps. My great-granddaughter, glancing out at the fields, trying to picture me here, her color—vanilla, with just a trace of berries if you look real close—her confusion, her advantages a consequence of my having been in the world, of having been a man in the world, for all this country’s attempts to tear me down. I lift my shovel—anh! anh!—and bust the earth’s dirty lip.