Page 23 of The Reformatory

“I think it’s too late now, Miss Anne. He’s sentenced.”

Miss Anne looked startled. She hadn’t thought of that. “Oh. That’s right.”

But the money had been offered. Gloria tried to think of other ways to spend it. “Maybe you could hire him a lawyer. Just to… ask him questions. Get some advice?”

Miss Anne considered it, frowned. “I can’t think of a lawyer in Gracetown who’d want to take up for…” She stopped, blushed. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. Not your kin. Not now.”

Gloria and Miss Anne rarely mentioned the charge against her father, and Gloria wanted to press past it quickly. “Could you write a letter to Judge Morris and ask to set him free? Or give him less time? Being as you’re Councilman Powell’s daughter?”

Miss Anne nodded, but not before Gloria saw her hesitation. Miss Anne sat down in the plush rolling chair at her father’s desk, something Gloria had never seen her do. The chair hissed beneath her weight. “Daddy retired eight years before he passed. His name… doesn’t have the same weight now. Not like Red McCormack. I’m nobody to them but a woman with an opinion, and that won’t go far.”

“But you can try.”

Miss Anne nodded again, but in a way Gloria thought still meant no. If Gloria were white, she thought, she’d try to walk on air just to see if she could. What was the point of white skin if you couldn’t do whatever you put your mind to?

“What about that letter you wrote your father?” Miss Anne said.

“I mailed it before I got here.” Miz Lottie kept stamps in her pocketbook, so Gloria had dropped her wrinkled letter in the mailbox downtown before coming to Miss Anne’s. “But… I don’t know what he can do from Chicago. He may not even get it.”

“Look at us, Gloria: two sad gals missing their daddies.”

They sat a moment in silence. Miss Anne never said a word about Papa’s troubles, except one time she’d reminded Gloria how lucky she was she’d hired her despite her Stephens name.

She’d never seemed to judge Papa, and Gloria was grateful. Miz Lottie said most whites in Gracetown couldn’t choose what to loathe about Papa more—that he’d been accused of rape or that he’d been trying to unionize Negroes at the mill and had nearly caused a strike.

“I’m gonna talk to Mister Red,” Gloria said finally.

“That’s foolish, Gloria. You stay far away from all those McCormacks. The way Lyle McCormack behaved was disgraceful. He had no right.”

Gloria didn’t answer, a part of her agreeing. She didn’t want to see the McCormacks either, but what choice did she have?

“I have a friend,” Miss Anne said finally. “My very good friend. She’s a woman law student, Channing Holt. She doesn’t let anything stop her. She’ll have ideas about what to do. She may have an idea for a lawyer to hire—someone who doesn’t care about the charges against your daddy and isn’t scared of the McCormacks.”

Gloria smiled, excited. She had never heard of a woman lawyer or law student. “Yes, ma’am. I would appreciate that so much.”

“She’s fishing with her parents out on their boat today. But I’ll talk to her tomorrow.” That simple promise gave Gloria her most hope since the deputy came.

9

Gracetown School for Boys

The giant metal steaming pots and stovepipes in the kitchen looked the way Robert pictured the engine room of a spaceship, or the galley of a warship in the Pacific like in the old World War II newsreels. This kitchen looked like machinery. It even spoke in its own language: a clanging of pot lids on boiling water, chopping knives, whirring electric blenders. Everything sharp leered like grinning teeth. The kitchen’s only air was steam.

“Every meal comes through this kitchen,” Boone said. “Workin’ the kitchen is a priv’lege. Don’t everybody git to work in here.” Boone walked quickly through the maze of metal counters, so Robert kept pace so he wouldn’t get lost.

Four Negro staff members were standing guard, but watchers didn’t see everything.

Robert sensed that boys had been stabbed in this kitchen, perhaps killed. More than one, maybe. The smell of death was still fresh to his senses from the fire, and that sour smell followed him to the kitchen too. Sometimes guards had taken bets over which boys would die. They were old deaths—not yesterday or even a year ago, but Robert felt the boys’ dying: sharp pricks to his abdomen, neck, throat. Then his back. He tried to rub away the stinging, swatting his skin like he was covered in bees. If not for the fire before, he would have been more frightened. Now he knew that, in time, the flickers of pain would go away.

So he listened to Boone’s instructions even while he felt the stinging. He kept his eyes free of tears. Instead, he stared at the tall, odd chef caps the oldest boys wore. Younger boys wore smaller paper hats like at a burger stand.

Boone’s thick neck bulged from raising his voice over the noise. “You do your job right, you stay in the kitchen—and nobody in the kitchen goes hungry. You mess up, you’re out of the kitchen an’ in the fields. Sun’s hot an’ hours is long out there, so yo’ belly’s gonna growl at night. That’s why you want to stay in the kitchen. But you steal food, you go to the Funhouse.”

“What’s the—”

Two boys’ eyes flurried to Robert, then quickly away. Don’t ask, the boys’ eyes seemed to say. From their eyes, the Funhouse carried the promise of bad news.

As Boone pointed out the hook with Robert’s apron and paper hat, Robert couldn’t help glancing at the two boys, who were about his age: they were two of the boys who had watched him with such bright eyes when he first walked into the classroom. One was openly staring at him, but the taller one was careful not to look his way, head low over the sink where he stood washing plates, but Robert saw his eyes tracking him too. The tall boy was high-toned, with reddish hair, and the other was darker and shorter than Robert, his head shaved nearly bald. He had midnight skin and white, white teeth.