He was sixty-one years old when he went in this last time, Avon. He is sixty-two now, having celebrated the date of his birth in a Miami-Dade County holding facility, lying on a mattress so thin it felt like the cheese on a cheeseburger. Food, it turned out, was the main topic of conversation in Miami-Dade County lockup. Each prison has its own particular voice. In Tallahassee, prisoners talked mainly about cars—cars they’d owned, cars they planned on owning, cars that got them laid, the laser-cut speed machines from Fast & Furious 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. In McCreary—where Avon had done eighteen months for passing bad checks in the nineties—the primary subject of conversation was blowjobs. It was there that Avon met Fat Eddy, who was six foot two and weighed a hundred and forty pounds and who swore that he’d gotten head once from Miss America herself, when she was a flat-chested, fifteen-year-old roller skate waitress at the Hula Hut in Boca Raton. He described it as serviceable, due mainly to her youth and inexperience, but also to the full set of braces she’d had put on just a few weeks earlier.
It was Fat Eddy who introduced Avon to the idea of sovereignty. Which is a bit like saying it was Jesus who introduced the world to the idea of Christianity. That’s the scale of impact the words had on Avon DeWitt, born to Marsha and Dylan DeWitt (sixteen and eighteen respectively) on the Georgia/Florida border in the back of a broken-down Chevy in December 1958. Dylan was driving his fiancée to Jacksonville to take a job on his uncle Dale’s car lot, so as to give his firstborn son a stable home and three squares a day. Dale had offered them the use of a trailer on the back forty of a piece of property he owned behind the Tastee Freez. The trailer was where Avon ate his first solid food, took his first steps, and blew off his left pinkie finger with a blackjack firecracker on the fifth of July, 1966.
Sovereignty, Fat Eddy explained to Avon one afternoon while they were standing with their faces to the bars of their cell, waiting for the guards to finish rifling through their shit, is the natural state of all free-born men. “We are all,” he told Avon, “creatures of autonomy, masters of our own domain. That’s in the Declaration of Independence.” The first paragraph of which Fat Eddy had had tattooed on his back by a Oaxacan woman in Phoenix, Arizona, on a cross-country motorcycle trip in 2001. After the cell search came the cavity search, and while they were pulling up their prison trou, Fat Eddy laid out in minute detail the truth of our enslavement.
“The Founding Fathers of American government,” he said, “believed that the sole purpose of government was for the benefit of protecting the rights of the citizens, not the right of the rulers. They also believed that the doctrine of the divine right of kings was an oppressive, moral transgression against humanity and that no government, man—or woman, for that matter—had the right to rule over his fellow man without their consent.”
Avon was only half listening as he bent to clean his personal items from the floor and reconstruct his tiny corner of human identity.
“How old ye be?” Eddy asked him. He had a way of communicating that was rooted in bygone times.
“Forty-one,” said Avon, slipping some nude postcards back between the pages of a Tom Clancy paperback.
“Well, what if I told you the federal government of the United States, Incorporated, owed you half a million bucks?”
This stopped Avon. He laid the potboiler on the sink and turned around. “For real?”
“I shit you negative. See, you’re a slave, my friend, and you don’t even know it.”
And then Eddy proceeded to lay out how at one time there was an American utopia governed by English common law. A paradise in which every citizen was a sovereign. Back then there were no taxes, no regulations or court orders. In this perfect union, a man was a citizen of the Republic of Ohio or Pennsylvania, or whatever state he claimed as home.
“There was no such thing as a US Citizen,” Fat Eddy told him. “But then a conspiracy of bankers introduced the Fourteenth Amendment, purportedly to create citizenship for the freed negro. Listen to the fast one they pulled, hidden right there in plain sight. Quote: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.’”
Fat Eddy looked at Avon over his readers. He was in his midfifties, still with the metabolism of a seventeen-year-old boy.
“You see what they did there?”
Avon shrugged.
“They used the goddamn slave amendment to define all Americans.”
“Okay, but—”
“Keep listening. See, before the Fourteenth we had what you call de jure common law. A man was subject to the rule of nature, the bonds of common sense. But then, a year after the Fourteenth Amendment, these sons a bitches cook up an obscure fucking passage in the United States Code—purportedly to govern the goddamn District of Columbia—that contains the following sentence: For the purposes of this Code, the phrase ‘United States’ means a Federal Corporation.”
He pauses for effect.
“And just like that, Uncle Sam replaces common law and subjects all free-born men of the goddamn American experiment to commercial law.”
He paused for effect, taking a pinch of chaw from a tin and tucking it between his lip and gum. Avon offered how maybe Eddy should get to the fucking point on how the government owed him so much dough, because Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was about to start. Fat Eddy took off his readers and rubbed his temples.
“Cut to 1933. America decides—out of the fucking blue—to go off the gold standard. Right? Before that every US greenback was guaranteed by a certain weight of precious metal. But then these bankers decide to end all that. Why? And also, if we don’t have gold backing our currency anymore, then what the fuck is? See what I’m saying? Otherwise, that shit’s just a piece of paper. And what else do we know about 1933? It’s the middle of the goddamn Depression, right? The United States of America is going fucking bankrupt. They need money—fast. And how do they get it? They sell us out.”
“Us.”
“You, me, everybody. See, Uncle Sam goes off the gold standard because he realizes he’s got something more valuable than gold. People. So he goes out to all these foreign bigwigs—Jew bankers, et cetera—and he says, You’re gonna give me a loan. And in return, I’m gonna sign over to you the future earnings of all my citizens—which, whaddya know, that’s us. You know what collateral is?”
Avon nods. He says, “Like how when I refinanced my house to put on a new roof, they made me put up my car. It’s like a guarantee.”
“Abso-fucking-lutely. Except now the collateral is us. You, me, everybody. You follow?”
Avon is beginning to have an itchy feeling at the back of his neck. Like how all the water on the beach goes out first before the tidal wave comes.
“I think so. But how does that get me half a million bucks?”
“Because, my friend, what happens when you’re born?”