“The part about Deputy Fortaine letting you drive off with just a warning. Why didn’t you tell me he helped you?”
Joe squished his lips together and scratched at his knee through a hole in his trousers. “He didn’t help me. He still ended up blabbing about what he saw to Sheriff Rink. The sheriff came marching up to my holding cell the next morning and called me a . . .” He winced as though the sheriff had just struck him. “He called me every vicious word he knew. And he talked the judge into raising my bail. I couldn’t go home before my trial because of them. I just sat there in that cell with local drunks and thieves who liked to run their fingers through my hair.”
I sank against the wall and remembered what Mildred had said about telling the sheriff about Joe and the boy from the party. I even opened my mouth to say it wasn’t the deputy who’d blabbed, but I soon closed it, not wanting any more hate passing between people.
Joe tilted his face toward the ceiling, his jaw tight. His outstretched throat looked vulnerable and pale in the light of the flame, and I experienced the terrible image of a knife slicing across it.
“People hurt you, didn’t they?” I asked. “You’ve got those scars above your eye and on your lip . . . and those bruises on your ribs.”
“I haven’t been touched by kind hands since I was with that boy on Christmas Eve 1921—let’s put it that way.” He lowered his eyelids. “I’m just glad they let me out on good behavior before anyone in that prison got wise to how I am.”
“Did you know anyone who went through the”—I softened my voice—“procedure?”
Joe nodded. “A fellow not as young as me, but still pretty young for a prisoner. A college student. They put him in jail specifically because he got caught with another man in a Portland hotel.” Joe opened his eyes and blinked in the direction of the ceiling. “The guards and a doctor took him out of his cell one day. They promised to relieve him of his urges. They spoke of eugenics saving the country from all its problems. ‘Sterilization for the good of all,’ they said. ‘The purification of America.’” Joe rubbed a knuckle against the inner corner of his right eye. “Then they brought him back in pain . . . all the life in him, gone. Just”—he shook his head—“gone.”
I slid my hand across the dusty floorboards that divided us. “I’m sorry.”
Joe cleared his throat and pushed himself up higher against the wall. “That’s when I straightened up and made sure I didn’t make a peep of complaint or get pushed into any fights. People beat on me and humiliated me, but I just let them—I just took it—because I wanted to get the hell out of that place before anyone took a scalpel to me.”
“And then you came home to your father calling you terrible words . . . and me, shooting a bullet past your ear.”
“I probably would have shot at me, too, if I were in your shoes.” He turned his face toward mine. “We’ve got to be very, very careful about putting you in situations like that, though—ones that could get you arrested. They’re operating on women, too, and the fact that your skin is dark will only make them want to stop you from having children all the more.”
I drew my knees to my chest and sank my chin against my right wrist. “People are really doing that sort of thing? Stopping other races from procreating?”
“There’s rumors that’s a major part of eugenics. Cleansing the country of anyone who isn’t white, middle-or upper-class, and fit enough to perpetuate the ‘master race.’”
“Are you sure?”
His voice dropped to a frightened whisper. “Yes. I’m sorry, but . . . yes.”
I tucked my chin against my chest and shivered. “I don’t want my life to end in tragedy, Joe.”
“I don’t want it to end that way for you, either.”
“And I don’t think it should.”
“No, it shouldn’t.”
“What’s wrong with people out there,” I asked, “deciding who gets to have children and who has to be stopped from living the type of life that feels right to them? What’s wrong with them?”
“Hanalee . . .”
I glanced his way when he didn’t continue, realizing he wanted me to look him in the eye. “What?”
“Have you ever gotten the chance to love someone?”
My face warmed, and my hair burned white-hot again, despite its shorn length. “H-h-how do you mean?”
“Have you had the chance to experience what it’s like, despite all the obstacles against you?”
I squirmed and felt my mouth go dry, but I didn’t avert my face from his.
“I don’t know.” My voice sounded small and naked in that empty horse stall. “A boy and I used to kiss when we were younger. A white boy, of course. I’ve never even seen a black boy my own age in Elston.”
“Who’d you kiss?”
I turned away.
He snickered. “Oh, come on—tell me. You’re not going to find me running out and gossiping.”