This is his fourth prison. He described (in earlier notebooks) the concrete floors at Burning Mountain, the red dirt floors at Uniball, the stone at Columbia, now the packed blue-clay floors at Acheron. Here when it rains, the floors became so slick you can hardly stand on them. In each prison he placed himself in this or that nook, in fields, under roof, walking across a dusty yard, standing under a graybeard tree looking out at rain pouring down in bright sunlight, squatting in a cotton field or tucked in his own deck address and darkest corner, and looked out at the world and wrote it down. They took the notebooks away, but he got more, bought more, that is, from whoever was selling them. He paid in whatever coin he could muster. Load-humping, errand work, decoying, the wealth accumulated at three cents a day from chopping cotton or picking vegetables, trade or capital turned over at the store. One of those, he would tell the clerk, one just like that one you’re scribbling into. The clerk each time had to be talked into it, sometimes paid extra or traded. But this was easy. No one can hold out against anything in prison, that is prison’s secret. No bit of information, no treasure secreted away, no practice, no escape plan or ruinous bit of felony behavior was secure. It is impossible to protect these safes and mental cashboxes. What held fast out in the world unraveled and fumed away in prison. Everybody walks around with fluxed, soggy insides. It’s okay. It is simply what you have to live with. No friend will protect you, no believer, no hard ass. They can’t even protect themselves. And it isn’t the various holes, pits, cabinets, closets, unheated tin sheds, Bake Houses and hotboxes the butchers stick reluctant or rowdy prisoners into. It isn’t beatings or starvation or forced labor in the killing sun. It is hopelessness. Delvin’s own sense of it, the crude stalled massing in his gut, comes back. This time not just in here. By now the disease has spread like a personal plague into all the corners of his mind. The world itself has in this way become infected. The long gray dirt road out there, slick as a gullet, running for miles through the sloppy, beat-down fields, the ragged (free) men they pass standing in ditches pushing gobs of clay into their mouths to quell hunger and for the minerals in it, the little boys shitting grease in the thin grass, the skinny, lacerated women not even turning to look at the truck passing. You see a griffe squinting into the sun and realize he isn’t seeing anything. One man has a goiter on his neck the size of a citron. He has to rip his shirts to be able to wear them. Country women humpbacked with rheumatism, children bowlegged with rickets and red-faced and slimy from pellagra, wasting from hookworm. Nobody has the money to fix anything that can make life endurable. Hammer toes and bunions and busted elbows and broken wrists and stomachaches that eventually turn out to be cancer except nobody learns that is the name for it because nobody calls the doctor and even if they did he would be the negro doctor just now dying himself of tuberculosis over in the little negro clinic in Sharpsburg; he’d be dead before they could piece together where it was you lived. In the whole prison no africano man who has ever lived on a street or a road that has a sign on it saying its name. Down these streets the drag-footed go.
