But then the road of your life forked and you were being dragged down the dark one. For the rest of my life I’m going to be trying to get out of something. Everybody had lied. The white boys, the women, the doctors, even two of the boys in his gang. It wasn’t a gang, but two of them, Bony and Little Buster, had begun to believe they had assaulted the women. On the stand, squirming in the big brown chair, they had said they might have broke in — Little Buster said it and Bony confirmed — on those two women.
Suddenly the whirlwind dips down, picks you up and throws you against the rocks. No wonder all those women cry out in church. Where do you turn then?
Well, you sit down here and you start thinking how you are going to get loose.
Running is all he thinks about. He thought about it on the truck ride carrying him fully sentenced into the heart — no, the liver, no, the excremental bowels — of Dixie, and he thinks about it as the gray-suited guards walk them through the wire gantlet to the back of the Burning Mountain prison where there is a cleared space behind the big mess hall that stinks of stew beans and carbolic acid and march them up a flight of steel steps and in through a door above which is a sign that says WELCOME TO YOUR BURNING MOUNTAIN HOME and lock them inside where the concrete walls have sweated through and the place clangs and bellows with blows flung against metal and stone and they are welcomed by no one. And he thinks about it when they make them strip and place their hands against the wet stone wall and spread their legs and he feels the probe of a round-headed stick up his ass and then they make them shuffle into the dip pool where a mixture smelling of kerosene and sulfur and some other foul substance kills the lice and and all traces of civilized life so they come out burning with their new skin (that is still black) and are hustled to the showers where the water stings like acid — even then, among the piercing proofs of grief, he thinks of how to break free; and he thinks of jumping as he walks to the holding tank, where Butter gets in a fight with Rollie Gregory and almost chokes him to death; and later on that afternoon in his cell, which holds three men who are not happy to see him though they are curious and they touch and pat him and pump his muscles like stringy lions testing the new calf — they consider him a fool and causer of trouble for negroes in general because he raped those white women; and he thinks about it the first night as he crams the end of his wool blanket into his mouth to stifle his cries.
Every day in Burning Mountain prison he thinks of how to get out and joins a group that fashions shanks of sufficient quality and plans to perforate the guards — as Ricey Fleming put it — and flee from the cotton fields into Big Panther woods. He never has a shank in his hand but when the time comes he runs as hard as he can, a fleet boy with thin hard calves and narrow hips, and reaches the woods where he wanders around for four days before they find him hiding in an earth cave below a big chestnut tree blown down in a cyclone the year before. He is dirty and hungry and bitten by deerflies and after they keep him for a day and a half chained to an iron hoop jammed into the red dirt in front of the metal shop he is thrown into and left lying on his belly in the Wire Room which is a cage out in the exercise yard open to weather and to the gaze and taunts of the inmates. He remains there for a month like a half-habitated carcass under fall storms and drying spells swirled about with the rich alluvial dust of the fields and environs, crouched for a time like a cat waiting to spring away, then sprawling, attempting to tell himself stories that he half makes up about traveling into a strange country by boxcar train.
They put him with the death row prisoners and he doesn’t get off his cellblock again for two years, except for the afternoon escape trial conducted at the prison where ten years are added to his life sentence, until he goes before a judge — a new one — for a new (same old rape) trial in which the witnesses are a little more shaky this time and the prosecutors just a little more tired.
