"He don't like it here and he ain't no swinging dick."
Fifteen minutes later I was in the pickup truck on the road to Lafayette, headed towards the northbound four-lane, while the arching limbs of oak trees swept by overhead.
The country began to change as I drove north of the Red River. The sugarcane and rice fields were behind me now. The black earth and flooded cypress and oak trees were replaced by pastureland and piney woods, lumber mills and cotton acreage, sandy red roads that cut through limitless pecan orchards, Negro towns of paintless shacks and clapboard beer joints and old brick warehouses built along railroad spurs. The French and Spanish names were gone from the mailboxes and the fronts of general stores, too. I was back into the Anglo-Saxon South, where the streets were empty on Sunday and the Baptist churches were full and Negroes baptized in the river bottoms. It was peckerwood country, where Klansmen still burned crosses on rural roads at night and rednecks had coon-on-a-log contests in which a raccoon was chained by his foot to a log in a pond while people sicked their hunting dogs on him.
But history had had its joke with some of those northern parishes. Since the 1960s, Louisiana Negroes had become registered voters in large numbers, and in those parishes and towns where whites were a minority, the mayors' offices and the sheriffs' departments and the police juries had become filled with black people. Or at least that was what had happened in the town upriver from Natchez where Jerry Falgout was being held in the old brick jail behind a courthouse that Yankee soldiers had tried to burn during the Civil War.
It was a poor town, with brick streets and wooden colonnades built over the dilapidated storefronts. On the town square were a bail-bond office, a café, a dime store, and a barber college with a Confederate flag, now flaked and peeling, painted above the door. The elevated sidewalks were cracked and sagging, and the iron tethering rings set in the concrete bled rusty streaks into the gutters. The courthouse building and lawn and the Confederate cannon and the World War I monument were covered in deep shadow by the oak trees that towered above the second story. I walked up the courthouse sidewalk past the scrolled-iron benches where groups of elderly Negro men, in overalls or seersucker slacks, sat and stared out of the shade at the shimmering blaze of light on the street.
A black deputy walked me out the back door of the courthouse into the visiting room of the jail. The bars on the windows and the grid of iron strips on the main door were layered with both white and yellow paint. The room wasn't air-conditioned, and it was hot and close inside and smelled of the oil on the wood floors and tobacco juice that someone had been spitting in a box of sawdust in one corner. A white trusty in jail denims brought Jerry Falgout down a spiral metal stairs at the back of a dark hall and walked him into the visiting area.
His bottom lip was purple and swollen, and there was a crust of blood in one of his nostrils. He kept widening his nostril and sniffing as though he were trying to open a blocked nasal passage. At the corner of one eye was a long, red, scraped area, like a smear of dirty rouge. The trusty went back upstairs, and the deputy locked us in. Jerry sat across from me, his hands limp on top of the wooden table, his eyes sullen and pained as they looked into mine. I could smell the sour reek of his dried sweat.
"What's going on up there?" I said.
"It's a nigger jail. What do you think?"
"Were these black people you've been robbing?"
"I didn't rob nobody man. I was up here visiting m
y relatives."
"Cut the dogshit, Jerry."
"Come on, man. You think I'm gonna rob somebody, I'm gonna rob niggers in a welfare project? Some old lady got thrown down a stairs or something. She was already senile, now she's got a fractured skull, and she says I done it. The night screw is her nephew. So guess what he tells all the boons upstairs?"
"Sounds like a bad situation, all right."
"Yeah, you're all heart."
I looked at him a moment before I spoke again.
"You haven't hit the shower in a while, Jerry."
He turned his face away from me, and a small circle of color formed in one cheek.
"They got you made for stuff, partner?" I said.
"Look, man, I tried to get along. It didn't matter to me if they were colored or not. I tried to make a stinger, you know, a hot plate for these guys so we could warm up the macaroni in the evening. Then this big black bastard walks dripping wet out of the shower and picks up the pot, with his bare feet on the concrete floor. It popped him so hard he looked like somebody shoved a cattle prod up his butt. So he blames me for it. First, he starts throwing shit at me—macaroni and plates and tin cups. Then he starts grinning and tells me his cock is all charged up now. He says he's gonna take a white boy's cherry the next time I come into the shower. And then the other boons are gonna get seconds."
His face was flushed now, his eyes narrow and glistening.
I walked over to a rust-streaked sink against one wall and filled a paper cup from the tap. I set the water in front of him and sat back down.
"Is your mother going to go bond?" I said.
"She's gotta put up ten grand for the bondsman. She ain't got that kind of gelt, man."
"How about a property bond?"
"She ain't got it. I told you." His eyes avoided mine.
"I see."
"Look, man, I did five years in Angola. I did it with guys that'd cut your face up with a razor for twenty dollars. I seen a snitch burned up in his cell with a Molotov cocktail. I seen a kid drowned in a toilet because he wouldn't suck some guy off. I'm not gonna get broke by a nigger jail in some backwater shithole."
"You want out of here?"