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See, I’ve already done my time. Walpole, nine years. And I’m not saying Rita’s the only reason I went down, but I’m telling you, the time wouldn’t have been so hard if not for the white girl.
Cold turkey in a cage and I know Rita’s in a clinic, sipping methadone and orange juice. I’m on the floor, my whole body twisted, trying to strangle itself — bowels wrung like rags, squeezed dry, ribs clamped down on lungs so I can’t breathe, my heart a fist, beating itself. And I think I’m screaming; I must be screaming, and my skin’s on fire, but nobody comes, and nobody brings water, and I want to be dead and out of my skin.
Then I’m cold, shaking so hard I think my bones will break, and that’s when the rabbitman slips in between the bars. The rabbitman says, Once an axe flew off its handle, split an overseer’s skull, cleaved it clean, and I saw how easily the body opens, how gladly gives itself up; I saw how the coil of a man’s brains spills from his head — even as his mouth opens, even as he tries to speak. Then I saw a blue shadow of a man — people say he ran so fast he ran out of his own skin and they never found him, the rabbitman, but I tell you, they took my skin and I was still alive. Then the rabbitman whispered, I got news for you, little brother. I been talkin’ to the man and he told me, it ain’t time yet for this nigger to die.
So no, I don’t go chasing that girl in the street. I know she’ll be cold fast, but I think, Not my business — let one of her friends find her.
See, since Rita, I don’t have much sympathy for white girls. And I’m remembering what my mama told me, and I’m remembering the picture of that boy they pulled out of the Tallahatchie, sweet smiling boy like I was then, fourteen years old and a white girl’s picture in his wallet, so he don’t think nothing of being friendly with a white woman in a store. Then the other picture — skull crushed, eye gouged out, only the ring on his finger to tell his mama who he was, everything else that was his boy’s life gone: cocky grin, sleepy eyes, felt hat, his ski
I thought about that boy when I met Rita. He breathed on my neck and I laughed to make him stop. I didn’t go after her. It was nothing like that. It was just something that happened, like the white girl pounding at my door — I was watching it, then I was in it.
We were at Wally’s, me and Leo Stokes, listening to the music, jazz — we liked the music. Mostly I’m listening to the drummer, thinking he don’t got it right. He thinks he’s too important. He don’t know the drums are supposed to be the sound underneath the sound. That’s why I’m good, that’s why I want to play — I got a gift. I hear a sound below horn and piano, the one they need, like I did back in Virginia living in one room — Mama and Daddy, Bernice and Leroy and me, and there were lots of sounds all the time, but I’m always listening for the one sound, like at night when Mama and Daddy are fighting and her voice keeps climbing higher and higher like it’s go
Then later that night I’m looking at my own dark hand on her thin white neck and it scares me, the difference, the color of me, the size, and she says, What color is the inside of your mouth, the inside of your chest? She says, Open me — do I bleed, do my bones break? She says, Kiss me, we’re the same. And I do. And we are. When we’re alone, we are.
She came to see me once. Cried, said she was sorry, and I sat there looking like I had stones in my stomach, ashes in my chest, like I didn’t want to put my hands around her neck to touch that damp place under her hair. I told myself, She’s not so pretty anymore. She looked old. The way white women do. Too ski
I’m not saying she stuck the needle in my arm and turned me into a thief. I’m saying I wasn’t alone. Plenty of things I did I shouldn’t have. I paid for those. Three burglaries, nine years, you figure. So yeah, I paid for a dozen crimes they never slapped on me, a hundred petty thefts. But the man don’t mind about your grandfather’s gold pocket watch; he don’t worry when the ten-dollar bill flies out of your mama’s purse and floats into your hand. He don’t bother you much if he sees you shoving weed on your own street. But that was different. Back when I was peddling for Leo I had a purpose, doing what I had to do to get what I needed. Then things turned upside down with Rita, and I was robbing my own mama, stealing to buy the dope instead of selling it, smack instead of grass. Rita said, Just once — you won’t get hooked, and it’s fine, so fine, better than the music, because it’s inside. She was right — it was better than the music, and it was inside: it made me forget the sound and the need.