That point being, so Delvin knew, the one where you give up because you have to admit to yourself that every day is going to be like the one you just finished. It is why things around here like weather and holidays and births and deaths and the mysteries of religion are so important. Harmless fun. Constant pressure from the white folks until you got to bust out. So you rob a store or kill somebody and here you go down into the hole. Big Broadus back at Burning Mountain said he ought to just settle down and do his time. Well, that is what everybody with sense or asleep out here is doing too. In him is something scratchy and moving. Good or bad he doesn’t know. Something clucking at night or whispering to him or pleading. Maybe that is the way the gods have come back. The professor said conscience is as close as we get anymore to the gods. But in prison his conscience has become strained and elaborated with unusual amendments and declarations. He doesn’t know anymore what kind of voice speaks to him. He can hardly sit here now with this farm boy talking. He wants to leap up and run off, just keep running.
“I think I want to move around for my whole life.”
“I was in New Orleans once,” John Paul says, “but it knocked me down and trampled on me. I was lucky to get back here with any hide left on my body.”
“You didn’t uncover anything you liked?”
“Sholly I did. That’s what got me runned over.” He scratches his temple with the end of a twig. “I guess after you sit in the jailhouse for a while even a section of dirt road with nobody on it starts to look good.”
“I reckon.”
“I don’t want to get into no jailhouse.”
“No you don’t.”
