1, 1862
Louisa:
If there were any way, I would come back. Not that I would have a welcome when I got there, but just to be somewhere that I know. But there is no way I can, especially the shape I am in.
I will not say any more about our difficulties until I can see all of you, by then with Jerem’s son.
I only wish I had known you could not accept what I—what we—have done. We could have talked more about it while I was there.
Not that it matters, to our future, how you think. I am sorry if that sounds hard.
I have written and told him where I am. Surely the letter will find him, even though you have not told me where to send it. Mrs. Davis says she believes it will.
I think he will come here first, when he can. I will let you know what word I hear from him, whether he is well, as soon as I get his letter, any day.
Until then,
Mrs. Jerem Talbot
When they caught me in my marijuana patch and shipped me off to Kilby Prison, Momma and them was terrible tore up. It wasn’t like I was the first one in the family to go to prison. They’d been plenty of them, Uncle Matt and Uncle Buster, just to name two. Theirs was both for killing somebody in a fight, though, which makes it a little more understandable.
What Momma kept harping and wailing about was how I was Granddaddy’s last hope to get the old farm going again. We all knowed by heart how he’d begged on his death bed for some of us young’uns to take it over.
And how, except for my late daddy they’d been a unbroken line of Milbys who’d farmed the same ground since way back before the War Between the States. But we was all too little to do anything at the time Granddaddy died. Except talk about how it was going to be someday, with me and my brother Carlton doing the farming and our sister Kathleen there to cook and see after us.
But Kathleen ended up a erotic dancer at a nightclub in Florida just two miles from Disney World, and Carlton is a lawyer for the government. I was the only one that didn’t go bad, and was trying besides to keep my hand in farming. You see where it got me.
Speaking of Momma, though, the only thing that finally give her the least bit of comfort was that somebody told her that Kilby is where they make all the license plates. She perked up at that. She said well, at least I’d be learning a useful trade. And when you got to thinking about it, she said, making something that they send out all over the whole state is kind of like a artist getting his work distributed, in a way.
I was set to tell her that there’s no demand I know of for car-tag makers unless you’re trying to get in a better class of prison somewhere. And moreover it ain’t like being an artist, either, because nobody knows who made their car tag. Nor gives the least fraction of a rat’s hind end, in any event. But when I saw how much the idea consoled her I just nodded and agreed with her and got on in the car with the deputy.
Actually prison has not been near as bad as you would think. I guess they’ve improved them some since Buster and Matt was in. Not that it’s anyplace you would want to go for a weekend and kick up your heels. But it’s livable, if you don’t let your mind dwell on the outside too much. They have got a saying here that the guards and the other workers say when somebody complains about the way something is. They just say, “Why do you think they call it prison?” Which is sure one way to look at it, I guess.
The main thing I was worried about was these tales you hear. Fellers that carries a jar of Vaseline in their hip pocket and so on, and if they catch you in the shower maybe bent down to fetch your soap, that’s all she wrote. But I ain’t seen nor heard none of that till yet.
It’s true they’s a couple of old boys wears that pomade stuff on their hair and walks a little funny and announces all their words just right. And one of them has got a gold earring, which in itself I realize don’t mean nothing because hell, so does Willie Nelson. Times change, and I ain’t one to judge. In any case the two old boys I’m talking about don’t make a issue out of the way they are, which most leads me to believe that anybody gets their goods messed with, involuntary, has got to more or less be asking for it.
Not to judge.
In a lot of respects prison is like the Army was. You’re more at the mercy of events than you would be on the outside. Like when I got drafted was right at the tail end of the war and they wasn’t drafting many. They got the rest to sign up by promising them stuff, like education and traveling and all. So there we was on the first day of basic training, dreading it terrible, and this one old boy from New York City was telling us he sure was glad he didn’t have to go through all that stuff like we would, because he had signed up to learn computers instead. And the next day he was right there marching and getting hollered at like the rest of us. They wasn’t a computer within a hundred miles of that place.
When I got to Kilby I expected to see like a big factory for car tags, but it’s not so. I had to ask two or three people before anybody knowed exactly where they made them. Or maybe they was just funning with me, playing like they didn’t know.
Anyway it’s just a old cement block building that looks like a garage. A car-fixing garage, I mean, not the kind you’d have on your house. Turns out not more than a dozen folks works there, out of the whole place, which kind of surprised me.
The first week I was there I volunteered for it, and told them how disappointed Momma would be if I didn’t get in. Which must have cut some ice, because first they’d told me there was a long waiting list of people wanting to get on at the tag place, and then just a couple of weeks later there was a vacancy because somebody stuck their hand where they shouldn’t have in one of the machines and got a tag number stamped clean through it, and they said I was next on the list. I wrote and told Momma but not the part about the feller’s hand because she’s bad to worry.
The tag building is not a bad place to work. It’s a whole lot like any other business. They fuss at you some and hurry you up, and the bosses will change their mind about something and then try to play like that’s what they said in the first place, to make it your fault. But at least we don’t have to wear a tie.
Anyway, the tag place is where I got to know Fesser. He’s not one of our bosses exactly, but he has got kind of a high position in the thing. Or at least did, before he had his trouble.
Fesser is short for Professor. He’s all the time reading books and wears these thick glasses and is losing his hair on top, so he could pass for a professor easy, even though he’s not one. When he thinks about something he really grinds down on it with his mind, don’t just give it a lick and a promise like most of us calls thinking. Which is why they picked him to do what he does with the car tags.
(The reason Fesser is in prison, if you’re wondering, is that he come in and caught his wife in bed with a good friend of his, not once but twice. And that second time they was so involved in what they was doing they didn’t notice him getting his pistol out of the chest-of-drawers. He was able to get such clean aim and breathe so steady that he put both of them away with one shot. Even the policemen that come and picked him up agreed that if a-body’s got to go to prison, that was sure the most satisfying way they’d ever heard tell of.)
At the car tag place, I guess you would say that Fesser’s job was as a censure. You know. Somebody that gets the dirty parts out
