Soldier Murphy comes up beside him and the two of them shift to seats on the plank bench set against the wall and look out into the sunlight strained by screen wire. It is hard to look at the light. Escaper, he is picking his way across the big field and into the swamp where from an old deep pool he would raise the submerged bateau from where it lay on the bottom, weighted with chunks of hoarded limestone quarried from the big white hole over at Talcotville and hauled by mule to build the warden’s house. He left a stash of pea meal, matches and a length of coiled rope wrapped in oilcloth, stowed in a croakersack and buried under a pecan tree. He hoped the raccoons hadn’t dug it up. These provisions like a hunter’s hope in the books of his youth, like the boat now, long gone. But not the hope. Please contact Mr. Cornelius Oliver in Chattanooga Tennessee or Mr. Marcus Garvey in Harlem New York or Mr. Alexander Crumwell in Chicago Illinois or Mr. WEB Du Bois in Princeton New Jersey and ask one or all of them to help us. We are caught here in a net not of our own devising. And signed his name and given his address. That was the message he stuck in a syrup bottle plugged with a cob and threw in the river — stuck in several. No one wrote or came, and the captains won’t let him write common letters. What you doing claiming you can write? Well, sir, I can. He hardly knows what to call these people. It is as if they flew down from space and scooped up africanos and carried them back to this alien planet. He’d had only two or three conversations with a white man in his life before this happened, these space creatures, moon men.
