“These strong hands belong to you…”
They sang—we sang—with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell’s, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn’t understand. This, though—this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.
Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether.
There were no women. The women were somewhere else. Where were the women? Things were coming loose in me, being down here with all these men. Things were coming loose. I felt like I might fall down, but I could not do that—none of these men was wavering. They stood completely still, staring straight ahead, only singing.
What I did was, I focused on the room. Focused on noticing things. I was in a subway station, a platform, a kind of place familiar to me from New York, from Washington, DC, from a hundred different hunts. A cavernous room lit dimly by overhead fixtures hanging from a high domed roof. A concrete floor ending like a cliff edge above the sunken well of the tracks. I focused on the room and the sound of my own voice, singing along. “These strong hands…”
I kept it in, I kept it all in, I had to keep it in, so I kept it in, made my face like their faces, expressionless, only the mouth moving. But I was too close, too close to their faces. For my whole career under Bridge I had always dreaded the page of the file that showed the photograph, the real human face of the man I was seeking, and now here I was among them—none of this peeb shit, none of this “Persons Bound,” no slaves down here, all that abstraction torn away like skin coming off a body, and these were people—human fucking beings, each with the one life he was given, and this was the life they had.
The music stopped in the middle of a line—“and back and spir”—and we stopped singing.
“Arms out.” A voice came through from on high, burred and flattened by the intercom. “Hands up.”
Everybody did as instructed: extended their arms, raised their hands. I did it, too. This was it. My rushing emotion was subsumed in a sudden heat of panic. Newell had untied himself somehow, stumbled, screaming, into the carpeted hallway. Or it was Martha—they’d stopped her in the lobby. They’d stopped her in the car. She was in no shape…
“Heads back.”
We tilted back our heads. Stared at the ceiling. The men around me followed the instructions dully, robotically. This seemed to be an everyday occurrence. This was protocol.
On my left hand was the green wristband the guard had fitted me for. In my right hand was a piece of paper that Newell had filled out and stamped under my command. Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate. Permission slip. Travel papers. Some of the men around me, I noticed, carried similar passes; others had none. Some wore, along with the green band, other bands of different colors in various places up and down their arms. A whole world of systems, of rules and regulations.
The intercom voice again: “Hold pose.” A frozen moment. A room cramped with shirtless men, all of us with heads tilted back, arms up and out. People like trees.
“Forty-five and under, hands down.”
Most of the men lowered their arms to their sides. I did, too. The older men kept their arms up.
There was a man moving through the platform. The slaves parted to let him through. He was black, as we were, but wearing a shirt and boots. He came within a few feet of me but did not look in my direction, did not see me, the infiltrator, where I stood with my eyes lowered like everybody else. The train was coming—I felt the familiar stale breeze being pushed forward along the tunnel—but nobody moved.
This guard or trusty, whatever he was, moved from man to man, all those with their hands still up, checking for something in their mouths. Push his index finger between their lips, force open their teeth, then worm his finger around, upper palate, lower palate, then out. His face was set; mean; like Harbor, the hard boy who’d haunted my childhood at Bell’s. Thinking of Harbor, I thought of Castle, and I felt a dizzy sense of the world collapsing, of my lifetimes flattening together into one plane—and meanwhile this overseer type appeared to have found who he was looking for among the forty-five-plus men. He took his finger from the man’s mouth, had him bend over, and began to pat down the length of his body.
The train pulled into the station, and its doors pulsed open. Nobody moved.