Free Fanon by John Edgar Wideman Page B

privileges. Remember, the prison says, the state says, it could get a lot worse. For instance, as bad as the prison yard or those cells full of dangerous animals. So shut up. Mind your own business. Who the fuck do you think you are anyway. I'd heard it all before, the very clear message the prison, the state beam to citizens who ask questions. That stalled day a bulky woman,
heavyset,
my mom would say, sat on a bench catty-corner to mine, her small feet in white sneakers planted wide apart on the stone floor. She hadn't raised her eyes when I joined her in the bullpen and we hadn't spoken during nearly an hour of waiting. She probably resented my presence just as I resented hers, shared misery bad company for us both. She had fidgeted at first, a wedge of dark flesh stuffed into a baby-blue jogging suit at the periphery of my vision, conducting a busy, silent conversation with her hands before she went still. Dozing off, perhaps. I was surprised how quickly she stood, how light on her feet after the guard barked an inmate's name and she stepped toward the opening in the black fence. At the threshold of the visiting area proper she hesitated, scanning back over her shoulder as if she'd forgotten something in the bullpen. When she started up again, she took her
own sweet time. Well, not sweet exactly—steps dripping with attitude, the reluctant steps of a balky child nudged on by an adult. Noncommittal, random little up and back and sideways shuffles, then a full stop, hands on mountains of hips, her body telling anyone who cared to watch that she was tired of this shit, of dealing with a half-assed, good-for-nothing black man got hisself jammed up in this sorry slam. Bosom thrust out, shoulders swaggering, head wagging, sighing audibly, she took minutes to cross a few yards of floor between the bench where she'd been slumped and the inmate standing beside the guard who'd hollered his name. When she's almost close enough for the inmate to touch, she jerks back, poses again, hip cocked, daring him to cross the last couple feet separating them. The man stares at her as she mumbles, cuts her eyes, jabs her fingers at him. He leans away, letting her shit fly past, then steps toward her, soft-talking, copping a plea, his body bent and swaying
Baby, baby,
reaching out while she bobs and weaves, agile as a boxer avoiding his hands. The man stops, retreats one large soap-opera step. Hisses loud enough to be heard in the far corner of the visiting area,
Fuck you, bitch,
before spinning sharply on his heel and pimp-strutting without a backward glance to the door beside the guard's platform, waiting there to be buzzed out as he'd been buzzed in a few minutes before.
    I resist the urge to flick my finger against my brother's naked head. Instead rest my hand on his shoulder, lightly, so he doesn't think I'm demanding his attention. When he finishes speaking to Mom, I'll tell him how I let him slide. Didn't take my big brother's prerogative to pop him upside his noggin. He'll probably cut his eyes at me:
Watch out now. I don't play that dumb old shit no more,
smiling cold gangster menace from back in the good old bad days, the days I bet he's sharing with our mother right now so I don't want to distract him, pop him or lay my hand too heavily on the orange jumpsuit pumped up
by the bulk of his weightlifter's shoulders. Would the chalky color come off on my fingers. The cotton cloth smells freshly laundered, soft to the touch, and I wonder if jumpsuits are personal property—as much as anything can be personal in prison—or if the men dirty them and toss them into a massive, funky pile to be washed, dried, folded, and stacked, distributed the next week willy-nilly.
    Rob twenty-four years old, twenty-eight years ago when the cops picked him up and never let him go. When Mom and Rob get together, sooner or later they go back to this beginning, or end you might say, almost thirty years ago, when they last lived in the same house, Robby just