Page 42 of The River Is Waiting

“Oh,” I said. “Mosley. Right.”

“There’s over a dozen Easy Rawlins stories. And he’s got other series, too.”

I’m more interested in what this guy looks like than what he’s saying. His dreads are more salt than pepper. Smooth caramel-colored skin, hands as big as catcher’s mitts. He’s big and broad-shouldered with a body gone to fat on prison food, but he must have had a fullback’s body when he was younger. I feel my right hand moving under the table as if I’m sketching him. When he stops talking and wheels himself over to the back window, I look at the other books on his side of the table: James Baldwin’sThe Fire Next Time, a biography of Satchel Paige,The New Jim Crow:Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Dude’s reading a lot more than detective fiction. When he wheels back to the table, I ask him whether he’s planning to read all of those. “Gonnareread Baldwin,” he says. “For the others, I got a system. Give everything the fifty-pages test. If I like what I’m reading, I keep going. If I don’t, I stop. What are you—in your thirties?” Thirty-five, I tell him. “Well, I ain’t got as much time left as you, so I’m choosy. What’s that you’re reading?”

When I hold up the book, he sayshecould’ve written that one—that he’s a walking history of this place. “Been here since nineteen hundred and eighty-two. Much better back then. They used to let us go fishing in the river, swim when the weather was hot, play softball. They supervised us, sure, and you had toearnthem privileges. They didn’t just hand ‘em to you. But back then, we was treated like more than just our crime. The warden? Warden Hayden Barnes? He used to put on a hot dog roast for us on the Fourth of July and him and his deputy would do the cooking.

“And get this. If you didn’t have no tickets for a year, you could enter a drawing to win an overnight in the trailer with your missus so that you and her could have some private time. Enjoy some marital relations, know what I’m saying? The time I won, January of ‘84, my wife, Mary, brought in some home cooking in a picnic basket. We have four kids and the youngest one got made in the trailer that night after my belly was full up with baked Virginia ham, sweet potato pie, and peach cobbler.”

“Nineteen eighty-four? That’s the year I was two.”

“That right?” As in, so what? “You got kids?” he asks.

“Two,” I say, then catch myself. “Well, one, actually. A daughter.” I feel my face flush as he stares at me, puzzled. Luckily, Mrs. Millman comes toward us, rescuing me with her plate of cookies.

“Corby, I see you’ve met one of our favorite patrons,” she says. “Lester, how about a cookie or two?” I note that in her domain, we’re patrons, not offenders.

“How ‘bout a half dozen?” Lester says, laughing at his own joke.

“Well, three, maybe. You don’t want to ruin your boyish figure.” They both chuckle. “How about you, Corby? Another cookie?” I thank her but say no. “Well, come up to the desk if you change your mind.”

After she walks away, Lester keeps looking at me as he eats his cookie. “First you said you had two kids and then you said one. The other one die?”

I take a deep breath and say, “Yes, our little boy. He and his sister were twins.”

“That right? Terrible thing for a parent, huh? What’d he die from?”

I wish Lester hadn’t just asked me, but something about him makes me feel I can risk being vulnerable. “DUI accident,” I said. “It’s why I’m in here.” Not wanting to watch his reaction as he takes in what I just said, I look away, groping for a change of subject. “So when you first got here, Yates had softball games and conjugal visits? Why is it so different now? What happened?”

I watch as his face shifts gears from sadness to anger. “Crack happened,” he says. “Crack and the politics that went with it. Instead of the War on Drugs, they might as well have called it what it was: a war on the ‘hood. Population at this place almost doubled, and a lot of the new arrivals was young Black boys eighteen, nineteen who were going to have to do the rest of their growing up in here.”

He shakes his head. “It got so overcrowded that they turned the gym in A Block into a dormitory with them plastic sleigh beds all over the floor. One toilet and one shower for fifty young men? Pfft. After DOC started getting complaints about the conditions, they’d stack them sleigh beds and roll ‘em out of sight when the inspectors were coming. Load the dormitory guys onto buses and drive ‘em around the compound until after the inspection was over. Went from bad to worse after Johnston got elected governor. That was when the hammer really came down. They started training the new COs like they was military—and like we was the enemy. The officers carried sticks before, but you almost never saw them use ‘em until Johnston’s goons showed up. They gave ‘em pepper spray, too. Brought in the dogs for riot training.”

“Was that when they built the newer cell blocks?” I ask. “After the place got so overcrowded?”

“Uh-huh. Those things got slapped together on the cheap by Fusaro Construction. And it was no coincidence that they got the contract because Johnston and Nick Fusaro were brothers-in-law and sailing buddies. Fusaro cashed in big-time for those concrete-and-cinder-block pieces of shit, and now everyone who lives there has to put up with leaky roofs, shitty plumbing, and black mold. You know why people driving by out frontdon’t see them newer buildings? Because the state don’twantthe public to see ‘em, know what I’m saying?”

I nod. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

Before I lost my job at Creative Strategies, Yates was just a place I’d drive past on my way to work. Morning traffic along the four-lane Woodruff Parkway usually moved along slowly, so I’d get more than just a passing glimpse of the fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence wrapped around the massive Greek Revival fortress and the two four-story cell blocks on either side. It seemed as imposing a structure as you’dhopedangerous criminals would be locked away in. The manicured lawn and landscaping on the law abiders’ side of the fence implied that the facility was orderly and well managed. Unless you were paying close attention—and I wasn’t—you wouldn’t even know those other, newer blocks existed. Or that they’d been a legacy of the crack epidemic and the Johnston administration, and that they were falling apart.

“Mind if I ask you something?” Lester says. “How much time they give you for doing what you did?” When I say three years, a shadow creeps across his face. He goes back to reading his book. Not wanting our conversation to end, I nod toward his copy ofMaybe I’ll Pitch Foreverand tell him I read someplace that DiMaggio said Satchel Paige was the best pitcher he ever went up against.

No response. Okay, I get the message. He’s done chatting; he wants to read.

When it’s almost time to head back to our block, I go up to the desk to check outConnecticut’s Carceral HistoryandDevil in a Blue Dress.Javier’s reading something, too. Shaking his head, he slaps his book down and says, “It pisses me off, you know? What those fuckers did when they came over here and took charge?” I pick up the book and read the title:Native American Genocide: The U.S. Government’s Systematic Efforts to Eradicate Indigenous Populations.

Javier tells me he’s half Nipmuc on his mother’s side and a quarter Wequonnoc on his father’s. “You Indian?” he asks me.

“Just a fraction, I guess. My mom had her DNA analyzed a while back and it said her people mostly came from the British Isles but that she was six percent Native on her father’s side.”

“Yeah? Which tribe?”

“I don’t think it was that specific. Northeastern Indigenous, I think it said.”

“Probably Algonquin or Mohawk then. Maybe even Wequonnoc. Book says that back in the sixteen hundreds, the Colonists tried to wipe out the Wequonnoc in a land grab.”

“Really? I grew up around here, but we never learnedthatin school.”

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