From the moment he was in the hands of the police Delvin experienced tides of nausea that rolled in carrying his expectation of discovery of his Tennessee crime and rolled out with any sort of courage he might have. He stayed by himself as best he could and thought distractedly of escape. He watched the fields of corn that stretched away from the central compound. He walked the fence line and gazed at the play of fat cumulus drifting across the blue sky. Trapped, he thought, I’m trapped. Each day, when any of the officers spoke to him or came near him or appeared around the deckle-braid corner of the barracks or hollered for the prisoners to truck it up and climb into the rickety dust-splattered bus that carried them out to work in the vegetable fields, a tension gripped him by the shoulders, stiffened his face and bent him down and robbed him of readiness to confront what he was sure was coming. The other prisoners noticed his state of mind. A couple tried to calm him, pointing out that his sentence was short and the work at the farm was not any harder than it would be on the outside. “You gets three squares and clean bedding every two weeks,” Sully John Baker, a short gray-headed man, told him. Delvin thanked him for the info and continued his distracted wandering around the compound. It would have been easy enough to escape (in the cornfields they were often out of sight of the guards), but he didn’t want to take the chance. And he didn’t want to get the professor into any further trouble. After a week he began to calm down. He began to believe that if they were going to discover him they would have done it by now. He relaxed enough to be able to sit in the little shed they used as a dining hall and eat a healthy portion of his cornbread and stew beans. It was at this point that twin brothers from the west side of the county, also in for fighting, decided to test Delvin along these lines. Delvin pointed out that he was not a fighter at all but simply a man who had been assaulted by white men (they were in the colored section of the county farm). The brothers did not consider this a sufficient disincentive and waylaid Delvin at the outdoor washing area and knocked him down. He slid half under the sidewalk-like boards before the washstands, cutting and twisting his ankle. This laid him up for five days in the farm hospital where he spent his time reading religious tracts. He considered himself lucky not to have had to suffer more of this material. The Bible had been always too bloodthirsty for his taste, a mix of self-glorification and sideshow magic that led only to feeling bad about yourself.
When the cut on his ankle healed a little and the swelling from the sprain went down Delvin was given light duty checking equipment in the work shed. He checked and handed out hoes and mattocks and the cane poles used to knock pecans out of the farm trees as well as the canvas picking sacks for the apple orchard. The work was not onerous and he had ample time to jot descriptions and compose letters to Celia into his notebook that the professor had brought him. He posted his letters in the wooden box nailed to a post by the camp store. He was nervous about them going out stamped with the return address of the work farm, but he figured Celia would understand his situation, which he explained in his second letter;
