“‘Eyes white as moonlight,

Up Richmond Way,

Hair black as night,

Blowing soft on a summer day;

Pearly teeth white as right,

Welcoming Her Colonel to—’”

The loud ‘co-rack!’ of Marshal Talbot’s coal-black hand knocked the rest of that line into next week as Whiff staggered under the blow but kept his feet—thank you very much!

The many white men gathered in The Place of Death, where the monstrous Yankee truck yet sat, idle now, not chugging menacingly as it had when he stood half-lynched upon it’s gate, had grown silent with the thunderous slap. Marshal Talbot, though a pure African agent of the CSA—and oft time intimidator of white lawmen—was stricken with the Confederate negro’s natural dread of the attention of a mass of armed white men: militia, deputies, and strangely enough, a detachment of CSAA Grays from Fort Howard.

The Marshal righted Whiff by the shoulder with his massive left hand and walked him over, to his ridiculously small Richmond Motors Police Coup. He was now being dragged on tiptoe to the passenger side—and that was it! Whiff had had enough, thank you very much.

He had been an ace fielder as a short stop for the Virginia Beach Fins, and he put that balance—the balance that had saved his ass on the back of that devil truck—to good use and dug in his heels, causing Marshal Talbot to over step, a might off balance and somewhat foolish looking in front of all of those white men.

The Marshal snarled under his breath, “You done it now fool.”

Whiff turned to the assembled white men, nodded to the devil truck under the roped tree limb, and used his best carney stage voice, “Lynch me for being too dark? I get that, I truly do.”

He then nodded to Marshal Talbot, “Curse, beat and charge me for being too light of skin, I get that, I truly do.”

He then indicated the tiny piece of Japanese-designed Confederate-slapped-together vehicular irony, and declared, “But stuff my fat ass in this Jap-man tin-can? I don’t think so. He then looked Marshal Talbot—fuming in a mighty silent rage—right in the eye, “Boy, you must be straight up out of Africa to let them Richmond boys put you in that!”

The laughter of the men buoyed his showman’s spirit and he turned to look at them as he continued, “What we have here my good men, is a failure to cognate!”

The roar of laughter was extinguished by the thunderbolt that crashed into his already sore jaw…

“Don’t whoop me no more Big Daddy, please—if it please you that is!”

“You promise not to dance under Miss Moore’s bigass drawers no more boy?”

“Yes I do Daddy, yes I do!”

“I am not your daddy fool!” came the roar from the front of the creaking coup, into which Whiff’s fat ass had somehow been jammed in something of a fetal position, his hands aching terribly behind him.

Marshal Talbot continued to speak in his rumbling baritone as he raced across the winding roads with his Stars and Bars strobe whirling and the loudspeaker whistling Dixie. The Law minded its own speed limits, and no one fooled with the NBA, except for The President, and apparently smart-assed too-big-for-their-britches Negro carnival operators who had just been hung.

“Listen fool, I might not like your fat pecan-colored ass for the product of blatant miscegenation it is, nor your wheeling-dealing daddy’s ghost that still inhabits your unrepentant soul. But! But!! You will get fair treatment under the Law. The Law boy, is all we Negros have, and I am its protector in these parts. The Law—particularly the Acts of Segregation—which your greedy ass do bend at every opportunity—is all that keeps us—our kind, us boy—from the ultimate noose. You might not believe me, but the Southern Negro has it better than the Northern.”

His jaw hurt terribly as they drove on along the bumpy roads at a speed obviously calculated to get them to the Baltimore County Detention Center before the Sheriff or the Captain, in their Atlanta Motors Interceptors. He refused to mumble though, and raised his head, “What is to happen to me Sir?”

“I am not a white man fool. Do not call me Sir. Call me Marshal.”

“What is to happen to me Marshal?”

“You will be remanded into the custody of Notary Council, where you shall be deposed, charged, and then transferred to the general population as per your means.”

“What? You are throwing me in with the whites?”

The coup soared on over the narrow Texas rubber roads as Marshal Talbot continued to speak without emotion, “As per the Negro Bond Act, Amendment Thirteen, ‘Any Negro of means is to be spared the chain gang and placed in the workhouse of whichever prison or jail is to be his lawful residence until the resolution of his case.’”

“This is wrong and you know it you black so-in-so!”

Talbot gunned the engine on a straightaway and grinned with his giant white teeth in the rearview mirror, “It’s The Law boy!”

“You know darn well that my assets are held by white front men, me being technically an advisor in their business interests. I can make a motion—”

“Yes you can Mister Gleason! Yes you can, as you sit in the Work House with ninety-nine pieces of reprehensible white trash!”

“You could hold me apart you know. This must be personal.”

“Naw boy, this is justice. What was personal was your Big Daddy Gleason winning the cash that my daddy had set aside for my mamma’s wedding ring! That were personal. This shit hea’ is nottin’ but JUSTICE!”

Marshal Talbot seemed disappointed that Whiff was now not arguing and fussing, and nudged him with words as he roared on to Whiff’s terrible destination in that tiny beast of a Jap-man’s racing dream, “What, nottin’ ta say for yer pecan ass boy?”

Whiff cleared his throat and sat upright with much effort so that he could face the fearful institution to which he was bound, as a man, not as a trussed up pig. Having accomplished that with a mighty heave he cleared his throat and spoke as clearly as he might through his swollen jaw, “I liked you better as the brutal, and articulate statute-quoting black face of the CSA. You had some dignity back there. Now, your vengeance at hand, let us just say your degenerating diction and the regression of your moral stature is unseemly. If I must be crushed under the heel of a Negro enemy I would prefer he do so with some decorum, not as the laughing-stock errand boy of The Old Boy.”

Marshal Talbot ground his teeth audibly and swerved to the shoulder at 90 miles per an hour, just to hit a lethargic possum, which splattered unfortunately across the fender and down Whiff’s side of the car. No more words were exchanged for the final few minutes of their drive.

The looming hulk of the Baltimore County Detention Center reared it’s soot-stained concrete battlements—decorative of course, but Marylanders were notorious purveyors of combative architecture—as their coup zoomed up off the back road that Marshal Talbot had taken to insure he got his prisoner to its destination before the Sheriff would be able to bring up Judge Able. Contrary to any fantasy of rescue Whiff might have harbored, Jude Able was not standing there besides the Sheriff with his fedora in hand.

There was, however, a greeting party: The Captain and Sheriff Tomlin both stood before their interceptors, standing aside in an attitude that suggested they were simply witnessing the incarceration. Also, on the otherwise barren parking lot—this being a Sunday morning after all—was a suited colonel, obviously the Warden, and a guard. The chain-link fence that enclosed the day grounds before the concrete walls was milling with inmates out on break, being watched from above by the guards in two brick towers, one to the east, one to the west. A prison yard was never aligned from north to south. The yard was segregated by the fenced access way into an eastern ‘negro’ yard and a western ‘white’ yard.

All this Whiff took in as Marshal Talbot helped him—like gelatin pulled from a mould—out of the car and onto his feet. The marshal stood and saluted the CSA Flag, then the Maryland Flag, each on a pole before the access way, and then saluted the Warden. He then placed his right hand on Whiff’s back and guided him ahead of him to his right, to the west, symbolizing to all that watched that he was to be incarcerated with the whites. A general hiss rose from the yards. Sheriff Tomlin took off his hat in mute sympathy, and Whiff Gleason began his Prison Walk—hopefully toward a brief stay.

He heard only the distant murmurs from the yard and the crunch of Marshal Talbot’s military style boots on the gravel lot. Then there was the rumble of an old rattling, working pickup truck—the kind with a rounded cab and maybe a bright yellow carnival truck paint job—as it bottomed out and skidded onto the lot.

Every eye now turned from short fat Whiff and the towering black Marshal to the truck, and the big broad-handed man—a man with a boxer’s bent nose and easy way—who emerged from the truck, straw Sunday hat in hand. It was Jordy, Whiff’s own body guard, prized boxer, chauffer, and only friend.

Whiff looked at Jordy, craning his head past his escort’s broad chest, and shook his head ‘no’, even as Marshal Talbot stopped his stride and turned his face toward Jordy, his expression unseen by Whiff.

Despite his dread of what might happen to his best friend his spine did thrill with a measure—indeed a flood—of pride, as Jordy’s easy voice, so much smoother and less filled with malice than the Marshal’s, echoed like thunder across the yard, “Negro!”

To be continued with “Negro!” Hurt Stoker: Chapter 5, Segregate Me Please, Bookmark 4

Negro Duties 4.1

Desegregation of any incarcerated Negro ward of the CSA may not take place without the signed and notarized authorization of a Marshal of the Negro Bond Association, within his assigned jurisdiction.