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“Eight to ten years for each count,” the judge announces. “Sentences to be served concurrently.”

Concurrently, not back to back. That’s a good thing. The only thing to hold on to in this whole mess. I close my eyes. I’m not relieved. Not even a little bit. Just resigned.

Shorty wails and collapses against the table. His mother reaches forward and tries to console him, but the bailiffs step in between them. Ella’s there, too, reaching out for me, but I don’t want to be touched. Can’t be.

Charlestown Prison, 1946

22843.

It’s stamped on my clothes. On my plate. On my bucket. It’s sprawled in giant type across every sheet of notes they write about me. I’m made to answer to it, when they call. Like a dog on a leash. Prisoner 22843.

They might as well have written it on my skin, like they did to the Jews in their camps during the war. The prison guards are no better than Nazis. No better than slaveholders. We are the hated people, too. Chained. Degraded. Dragged through the mud. Crushed beneath their boots. Spat upon.

I wish I had fought now. But not against the Nazi stain. Shorty was right, all that time, about where our fight was. How did I not see it sooner?

Shorty’s with me, but he hasn’t forgiven me for how we ended up here. I thought we were sewn together, Shorty and me, after all we’d been through. I was wrong. The watch got us caught, and the watch was my fault, plus I got him into the burglaries in the first place, which makes it all my fault, which makes him hate me in a deep, seam-tearing way. He keeps to himself at the other side of any room I happen to be in with him.

Everywhere, rows of black prisoners. I wonder what Mr. Ostrowski, from all those years ago, would think of me. I’m just a nigger for sure now, just as he said. Fallen all the way down. No prospects.

I pace the cell. Seven feet by nine feet. A prison.

I get it now. The word echoes in my head.
Prison. Prison.
All the other words don’t do it justice.
Big house. Upstate. Up the river. Behind bars.
You don’t feel it like you do in that one closed-in, ever-so-suffocating word.
Prison.

We have to eat with the stench of our own shit around us. I can’t even tell what kind of food we’re eating. The stink is stronger than anything. Once a day they empty the pots — once a day! And there’s no place to wash, which just adds to the horror.

Stinks
is a weak word to describe it. The full, gagging reek of a hundred shit buckets, each covered by a cloth that does nothing to stem the odor.

Prison.

The metal is a kind of cold I’d never felt before. A solid kind of cold. The bars don’t begin to warm under my grip, not like a subway handle or a railing. I knew from the first touch: they’re always going to be cold.

I was never meant to be held in a box. No matter who tried to put me in one: schoolmarms with their rulers, cops with their nightsticks. The prison guards now. Same difference. I don’t bend.

I throw my supper tray. “I don’t need this!” I shout. “I don’t need this!”

Rough hands grab me, hold me down. I buck against it. I will not be broken. I will not stand in a row with my head down.

Some guard’s knee pushes my cheek into the floor. All the grit of the jail digs into me from below. From above, I feel his joint creaking. Feels like I’m taking all of his weight on my face bones.

There’s weight on the rest of me as well. I can’t move a muscle anywhere. “Calm down,” a voice says, like I can control how calm I feel when I’m being hog-tied like an animal and caged in preparation for slaughter.

When I am trussed, immobile, they lever me to my feet. I can shuffle, inch by inch, down the corridor. I wouldn’t voluntarily walk anywhere they choose to lead me, but I have no choice, being tied like this. Two guards on either side, holding my arms. A guy in front with his hand on my chains, tugging me so that I have to either fall down or tiptoe hop. I choose to fall down, but they don’t carry me. They kick and nudge and beat me, then they stand me back up. It’s not a real choice. To fall is to ask them to beat me. To hop is to do their bidding, but it ultimately saves my skin.

They slide the food tray under the gap in my cell door. I pick it up and throw it back at them, watch the unidentifiable mush splash against the bars, messing the clean pressed uniform cloth and white ruddy cheeks.

“Two-two-eight-four-three,” they bark. “You are out of line. You are going in the hole.”

I am in the hole already. They imply a deeper hole, a deeper shame, but my shame cannot go any deeper. All that is left of me, beyond the shame, is fury.

I pound the bars. I kick. I scream. No one comes. No one cares.

Solitary.

They plunge me into darkness, someplace deep. I hear the creak of hinges, the rattle of my cage, but I can’t see beyond my eyes, though they are open.

The hunger that arcs through me is an epic, longing kind. Food cannot satisfy it, certainly not the slop they slide me, so I do not eat. I throw the paltry offering back in their faces, again and again, until I am desperate, diving for the soggy crusts of bread they have resorted to.

I’ve eaten crusts of bread before, but they were always served with love. They never tasted so miserable. I curl into a ball on the rock-cold floor and cry for Mom. The word doesn’t pass my lips, but it ricochets through me until I am rocked raw and split open.

I wake, my body like ice. Weep myself senseless.

No human should have to suffer in this place. In this lonely hellhole, there’s not even a chance to get warm.

Charlestown Prison, 1947

The guys who work in the kitchens sneak us matchbooks full of nutmeg. You can buy them for a penny. If you mix the nutmeg in your water glass and drink it, you get a bit of a blurry high. Like a touch of reefer, maybe. Enough to take the edge off.

It’s not the high I’m used to, it’s not the one I’m craving, but it’s the best there is.

The nutmeg helps keep me calm enough to go on living my life in this cage. It steadies me. It’s slightly less miserable now to be out of my cell, out of solitary, and talking to a few people from time to time.

They put me to work in the license-plate shop. My station is by the conveyor belt where the pressed plates go to be painted. It’s a fairly simple business. First some guys roll in these big tin sheets. Real thin but sturdy. They take them one by one and put them through the plate press, changing the numbers as they go. The big press’s lid comes down on a hinge like a steam iron. Its rounding metal blades slice the edges of the tin to the right size and shape, while the letter and number forms punch the license number into the center.

Then they flip the fresh plates onto our belt. They come sliding down toward us, one by one, all metallic and plain. We paint the whole surface green. Then they dry. A little ways down the line, other guys run a roller over the raised part, the letters and numbers, turning them white. In a small white strip at the top, we punch
MASS 47
to show the year of registration.

As I learn the ropes of the license-plate shop, I study the other guys, trying to see how and what they do. They chatter up and down the line, sometimes laughing and joking, sometimes spitting bitter debates. Politics. Religion. The plight of the black man in America.

We have Christians, Muslims, and atheists among us. For the Christians, everything is all about Jesus and the Bible. The Muslims have their own country, it sounds like. Something called the Nation of Islam. Their leader is a guy named Elijah Muhammad, a name that sounds familiar. “
The Honorable
Elijah Muhammad,” one of them is always correcting the others. The atheists try to shoot down everyone’s theories.

It amazes me how, despite their big talk, they all work through the system. Keep their heads down. Doing their part. Doing as they’re told. I can barely sit still for it, especially with all this religious talk. When the Christian guys talk, I recognize their stories from my childhood, though I try to close my ears. The Muslims also claim to have it all figured out. They wear their little beanies and call each other “brother.” They sound like my own brothers, though some of them speak another language; I don’t know what the heck they’re talking about.

Day after day, their words pound, too close. I know that I have to endure this. I know that I have no choice. But today I start to feel my edges fraying.

“Elijah Muhammad is no prophet,” says one of the Christian guys. “Jesus is the flesh-and-blood son of God.”

“
The Honorable
Elijah Muhammad,” says a Muslim guy. “Jesus was a prophet, but Allah is supreme.”

“Allah is supreme,” the Muslims echo.

Call him God, call him Allah; as far as I’m concerned, no deity is looking out for any of us. If he was, why would we be here?

I grab a license plate off the line. It’s wet with paint, but I don’t care. I pick it up, prepare to smash it into something. The conveyor belt. Other license plates. My own head. Someone else’s. I raise it high, knowing the target will find itself. Bembry, the older prisoner across the line from me, happens to catch my eye.

“Young brother,” he says, holding up his hand. “All you need is your words.”

I sit close to Bembry on the line after that. There’s a stillness, a calm, that he emanates. I like having it near me. He’s tall, like me. Light, like me. And he can talk about the world without saying
God
or
Allah
every other word.

And, boy, can he talk.

Hearing him, I remember that words are a weapon. I think of the fight I staved off on the Yankee Clipper that day, with the beefy, drunken solider I made strip. I think of the fervor in my father’s voice, channeled into sermons that shook the rafters. I remember being small and looking up, wondering if the rumble could unseat the heavens.

“How’d you learn to talk like that?” I ask Bembry, finally deciding that I want to know.

“Read a book,” he tells me. “You’ll find all the words you ever wanted.”

“What book?” I feel eager. Deep in my stomach, a kind of stirring. Something waking up in me.

Bembry looks me up and down. “Young brother, if I were you, I’d start with the dictionary.”

Bembry scores me a copy of the
Oxford English Dictionary.
It’s a thick, strange book and certainly full of words. Most strange is how familiar it seems. It has a different design on the cover, but it’s a book I’ve read from before.

When my siblings and I were little, Mom used to sit us down, making us read the dictionary from
A
to
Z
to learn vocabulary. I can almost hear her voice, over my shoulder. Almost. I push the book to the other side of the room. It lives there, closed, for days and days. Why don’t I just return it? Tell Bembry it isn’t for me?

But I don’t return it. I actually like seeing it there when I return to my cell each night.

I read the dictionary again with new understanding. Find words that I know. Words I couldn’t have guessed in a million years. Words that make me chuckle and blush. Words that make me remember.

“Good,” Bembry says. “Now you’ve read that, you can read anything that comes along.” And he puts in my hand a volume called
The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois.

Reading requires stillness. I’ve been running so fast, so hard, so long, it actually hurts to stand still. Everything behind me continues to move forward, while I am stuck here. I can’t outrun it now. The bars won’t let me. I jog in place, lifting my knees in a fierce rhythm that raises my breath and sets my heart pounding, but doesn’t quite drum out my rising thoughts.

The fierce mental churning. The quiet, solitary dark. There is nothing,
nothing,
to distract me. No reefer. No powder. No women. No drink. The nutmeg only carries me so far. It’s the most maddening kind of nothing, the everything of my head.

I write to Wilfred. To Philbert. To Hilda. To Reginald. The precious minutes I can write become a golden escape. There’s little I can say that’s different, because I’m stuck now, but they write to me about their lives. They’ve found a new God, they tell me. A God who looks out for black people: Allah.

They are happy to hear about the things I’ve been reading.
It’s what Papa would have wanted,
Hilda writes.

I reread their letters, and what I see, apart from this chorus about Allah and the Nation of Islam, is the same old story.

They are together, and I am alone.

They all come visiting. I don’t see why. I have given them nothing,
nothing,
that suggests I need anyone beyond myself. It’s been so long between us. They are echoes from the past that no longer attach to any actual sound. Ella. Wilfred. Hilda. Philbert. Reginald. They ride all this way, the long bus ride I took years back, to come visit me in my prison.

My brothers have grown slightly taller and thicker with age. Next to them I am a starved, scrawny prison rat. But in most ways we are the same as we were. They stand in line, facing me, while I flail about.

Philbert sits across from me on his visit, his usual buoyant energy rendered nervous and quiet by our surroundings. I’m pretty used to it now, but prison walls sure have a way of being intimidating. Especially when you know you don’t belong there.