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By Root 815 0

steel and dull, ungiving concrete, a few thin blue blankets. The grease ant has more color and variation than did our pod on the fourth floor. Everyone wore the same Day-Glo orange shirts and pants. Everyone ate the same food, and had the same space under the unrelenting sameness of the fluorescent lights. It was the small things I sometimes let myself mourn for: sunshine; shadow; the dark of a country night; the thick, hot air of summer. We could never get away from our own smell, or anyone else’s smell, or the noise of the television or the noise of angry talk. So that after a short time we began to hold like fury to ourselves, because our very distinctness seemed endangered. In that struggle some of us took ourselves to extremes; we became caricatures, shrill and distorted.

I had felt, from the first mention of Robbie Mackessy, that the mess was so much bigger than all of us put together. Not long after my arrest I woke up knowing that I couldn’t fight. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the strength. Howard, white with fear, tried to feed my anger, so that I’d be fighting mad. I couldn’t explain to him that it was beyond fighting, beyond requiring strength. He thought I had given up, but that wasn’t right. The die was cast; that’s what I knew. It wasn’t a matter of hoping or praying, or even deliberately working hard in order that justice could prevail, because already each of us, Howard and I, Emma and Claire, had lost so much. I came to know that Robbie would suffer most from the process. It was he more than anyone else who gave me the face of resignation. I did not want to lose the case, and yet winning would be a somber victory, no grounds for rejoicing. I told Rafferty that I thought the stocks were a good idea after all, that I wouldn’t have minded people coming and hurling things at me for a limited time. Howard, in many of his history lessons, had once told me that in the American colonies women used to be punished if they were considered “common scolds.” Surely that was my crime. I could have easily granted anyone who wanted a few pitches of a tomato, a rotten egg, a small pebble below the waist. Everyone would feel better and then we could go home.

“How did you spend your days?” Howard wanted to know. He asked me in letters, he asked me on our Sunday afternoon visits, and he asked me after I got out. In my blackest moods I might have told him that our mission in life is not to discover our fate as we go along, or even procreate, but rather to fill up the endless gray void that is time. “I didn’t do much,” I used to say. “Read. Take naps.” He thought I was responding like a petulant teenager. I couldn’t explain that I was in a way being honest and yet there was a—texture, I’d say it was, beyond activity, that preoccupied us even as we slept.

Our existence was pared down to three meals a day and a shower. And it wasn’t so much a question of what did we do all day, but how did we pass the night as well. Because there wasn’t much difference between the two. At 10 P.M. we were locked in our cells and the day-room lights were dimmed. But it was never dark and the fighting didn’t stop. I have heard enough racial insults to tide me over well into the next life, where I have no doubt the battle will wage on. The only thing I told Howard right off was the amusing dream I’d had my first night home, the waking dream that our pod had become a miracle of harmony, that I was like Anne Sullivan, heroic after all, giving the girls new words in their own hands.

When I was brought into the pod for the first time, the five or six women were milling around, looking at TV, playing cards; one was lying on the floor of her cell shaking uncontrollably. They stopped their games and even the sick girl raised her head. They stared at me with what seemed at the time to be identical expressions; the narrowed eyes, set in their faces, it seemed to me, for the sole purpose of expressing hate. They watched as I walked across the room. They were poised, perfectly still, as if they might spring when I made a false move. I was white, weaned on