Free Dark and Bloody Ground by Darcy O'Brien Page A

were a pale blue, baby blue she guessed, and she thought that she detected in them a pent-up anger that she understood. He had a soft-looking Fu Manchu mustache that she liked. His only flaw that she could see was that his chin was maybe a little weak and gave him a baby face—not that she minded; it made him seem sweet. But she thought he might look even better and stronger with a beard. Sherry was crazy about beards.
    Sometimes his eyes looked sad, then they would go cold. She bet that he could be ruthless when somebody crossed him, yet he looked as if he needed love and could accept tenderness, the poor guy, who must have known precious little love in his sad life.
    She learned that Hodge had been at Brushy for five years and was serving the ninth of a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Nine years! He was only twenty-nine, seven months younger than herself; they had been born in the same year. He had had no life to speak of. If there was something in him that made him mean sometimes—there must have been, or he would not have received such a stiff sentence— it wasn’t God-given. He must have been hurt. She could sense his goodness and bet that she could bring it out if she got the chance.
    The authorities helped to set Hodge apart, permitting him greater freedom than most of the other prisoners. He slept in what was called the White Building, at the front of the prison complex with only a wire fence between it and the road, set up like a dormitory with beds in rows and no barred cells. He had discovered a talent for cooking while in jail and lately had been appointed chief cook for the staffs commissary. Sherry found herself going back for seconds of his chili and cornbread.
    None of the other prisoners bothered Hodge or challenged his status. Everyone said that he was strong enough to snap a neck with one hand. He had built himself up and kept in shape by lifting weights.
    The social strata at Brushy were clearly defined. Authorities and prisoners alike made a distinction between two kinds of prisoners: convicts and just plain inmates. An inmate was someone who was merely doing time and had neither allegiance to nor power over his fellow prisoners; nor was he trusted by them. Convicts, by contrast, were tightly knit, organized within their own society and its hierarchies, arranged informally but like the military into ranks. The more physical strength, aggressiveness, and cunning you had, and the more cigarettes, marijuana, and other dope you controlled, the higher up you were in the convict pecking order. Those at the highest level even had “green money” (actual currency) hidden in one place or another. Once you understood it, Sherry decided, the organization of life within the prison was a mirror of life on the outside, minus hypocrisy.
    The convict-inmate split did not cut across racial lines. At Brushy the ratio of whites to blacks was a fairly steady sixty-forty. Both groups divided into convict-inmate segments; blacks and whites, as on college and university campuses, mixed hardly at all, eating and socializing separately, but on the basis of spontaneous mutual aversion, rather than distinct and formal gangs. (Tennessee prison populations, to this day, have never organized themselves into the gangs—Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Black Guerillas—that dominate West and, to a lesser extent, East Coast prison life. Random drug testing and the segregation of violent and sexually aggressive prisoners have, since the mid-eighties, altered prison hierarchies somewhat. Prison officials continue to observe the convict-inmate division, but it is less of a factor than before. As in the outside world, loyalties have come to count for less than individual interests. Violence toward certain kinds of offenders, particularly “baby rapers” or child molesters, continues, but with far less frequency. The prevailing prison ethos is a fashionable moral relativism.) The threat of racial conflict was constant. A few