Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [80]
Until that moment, I had not given a thought to the mental state of members of the ever-growing army of Japanese nationals in this country, who had to make a financial go of all the properties their corporations had bought out from under us. And it really must have felt to most of them like a war overseas about Heaven knows what, and especially since, as was my case in Vietnam, they were color-coded in contrast with the majority of the native population.
ON THE SUBJECT of color-coding: You might have expected that a lot of black people would be shot after the prison break, even though they weren’t escaped convicts. The state of mind of Whites in this valley, certainly, was that any Black male had to be an escapee.
Shoot first, and ask questions afterward. I sure used to do that.
But the only person who wasn’t an escapee who got shot just for being black was a nephew of the Mayor of Troy. And he was only winged. He lost the use of his right hand, but that has since been repaired by the miracle of microsurgery.
He was left-handed anyway.
He was winged when he was where he wasn’t supposed to be, where nobody of any race was supposed to be. He was camping in the National Forest, which is against the law. He didn’t even know there had been a prison break.
And then: Bang!
AND HERE I am capitalizing “Black” and “White” sometimes, and then not capitalizing them, and not feeling right about how the words look either way. That could be because sometimes race seems to matter a tremendous lot, and other times race seems to matter a little less than that. And I keep wanting to say “so-called Black” or “so-called black.” My guess is that well over half the inmates at Athena, and now in this prison here, had white or White ancestors. Many appear to be mostly white, but they get no credit for that.
Imagine what that must feel like.
I myself have claimed a black ancestor, since this is a prison for Blacks only, and I don’t want to be transferred out of here. I need this library. You can imagine what sorts of libraries they must have on the aircraft carriers and missile cruisers which have been converted into prison ships.
THIS IS HOME.
MY LAWYER SAYS I am smart not to want to be transferred, but for other reasons. A transfer might put me back in the news again, and raise a popular clamor for my punishment.
As matters stand now, I am forgotten by the general public, and so, for that matter, is the prison break. The break was big news on TV for only about 10 days.
And then it was displaced as a headliner by a lone White girl. She was the daughter of a gun nut in rural northern California. She wiped out the Prom Committee of her high school with a Chinese handgrenade from World War II.
Her father had one of the World’s most complete collections of handgrenades.
NOW HIS COLLECTION isn’t as complete as it used to be, unless, of course, he had more than 1 Chinese handgrenade from the Finale Rack.
WARDEN MATSUMOTO BECAME chattier and chattier during my job interview. Before he was sent to Athena, he said, he ran a hospital-for-profit his corporation had bought in Louisville. He loved the Kentucky Derby. But he hated his job.
I told him I used to go to the horse races in Saigon every chance I got.
He said, “I only wish our Chairman of the Board back in Tokyo could have spent just one hour with me in our emergency room, turning away dying people because they could not afford our services.”
“YOU HAD A body count in Vietnam, I believe?” he said.
It was true. We were ordered to count how many people we killed so that higher headquarters, all the way back to Washington, D.C., could estimate how much closer, even if it was only a teeny-weeny bit closer, all our efforts were bringing us to victory. There wasn’t any other way to keep score.
“So now we count dollars the way you used to count bodies,” he said. “What does that bring us closer to? What does it mean? We should do with those dollars what you did with the bodies. Bury and forget them!