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By Root 720 0

the stuff of Western Civilization, and to them old, someone they figured who would topple over if they as much as spit in my direction. My skin had turned from a healthy brown to a light shade of gray in the previous weeks and the pockets around my bloodshot eyes were sagging and mottled. I knew that people were raped, knifed, driven mad in jails. I tried to swallow, tried to choke down what I knew was the fully substantive thing called fear. While I was in my cell fussing with my bag of books they began to talk quietly among themselves, trying, I assumed, to think what to call someone as improbable as I was. I lay down on my mat and covered myself with my blanket. If I was going to be like the old hen in the yard, the bird that the others try to peck to death, then I was going to need some rest.

I wasn’t in the cell for more than fifteen minutes when one of them came in and stood before me. She thrust out her right hip and put her fisted hands to her waist. If I’d started reproducing at the onset of puberty she could have been my daughter. She was a slight girl with hundreds of braids coming from a middle part and falling to her shoulders, and skin that was naturally the burnished unreal color of a woman in a Coppertone ad.

“What’d you do?”

Dyshett had the uncanny ability to find out just what she wanted to know. I never did understand how or where she got her information, about forty percent of which was accurate, and I often imagined her reaching into the air and grabbing a handful, and then looking at it, at thin air, to learn the secrets. She was unlike so many of the girls who had no concept of life outside of their own neighborhood, who could not have said who the governor was, who assumed that everyone spent their lives living off welfare. Dyshett knew far more than the others, and furthermore she had a vocabulary to talk about what lay beyond her own horizon. When I didn’t answer her she smiled in a way that I nearly mistook as genuine. “How exactly do someone like you fuck a kid?” She smiled even wider. “I know about the birds and the bees but I just don’t get how someone like you do it. You got nothin’ to put in, far as I can see. What ch’you use, broom stick, flashlight, a big ole banana?”

I was surprised by her frankness. I tried to think quickly. I didn’t see much point in answering, but I knew that if I didn’t respond I’d be in trouble. Either way I guessed I was in trouble. “I’ve been accused of sexual abuse,” I said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Accused?” She nodded slowly as she studied me. “You nothin’ but a pervert.”

“Accused,” I repeated.

She reached out and twisted my braid around hard in one hand, so hard my eyes smarted. “You probably think I should be showing you some respec’, since you an old lady by now. But I don’t take too kind to people who mess wid others. You sit and wait, Granny,” she said, twisting harder. “You sit and wait for me.” She let go, sashaying into the day room, singing out in a rich, clear voice, a number about coming into the promised land.

I remember Howard wondering on the first visiting day, in a muttering way, how I could be so sanguine. My attitude was to become a source of irritation to him as the summer wore on. Surely he knew me by now, knew that I was someone who did not thrive on danger, who could not live happily on the edge, who did not seek out risk. I had married him for plenty of reasons, but not least because I thought he offered safety. “I’m not really sanguine,” I had said, feeling that any explanation was futile. I’m only trying to find the way, Howard, trying to figure out if I should shut down and play dead, or rise above, like a bony ascetic, waiting for grace.

At the beginning I spent most of my time in my cell with Debbie Clark, who at eighteen had had the misfortune to bear twins in her mother’s car and then accidentally do away with them. She whimpered for most of the thirteen weeks we lived together. It was helpful to me, to be cooped up with someone who was so extravagantly sorry for herself. Not that she didn’t have good reason. She had been