Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South by RICHARD RUBIN

Author:RICHARD RUBIN [RUBIN, RICHARD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: State & Local, Sociology, Social Science, General, United States, SOC035000, Rural, Discrimination & Race Relations, History
ISBN: 9780671036669
Google: LwhsQ9dZitsC
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2002-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lee Jones had advised me to be at the sheriff’s office at ten that Saturday morning. By ten-thirty, he still hadn’t shown up, and I was becoming impatient. At a quarter to eleven, I spotted Sheriff Ricky Banks coming out of his office. I asked him if he’d seen Lee Jones that morning.

“No,” he said. “But he already told me you were coming by to see Handy Campbell today.”

“He’s not coming in?”

Sheriff Banks shrugged. “I reckon not.”

The sheriff had a deputy escort me up to the jail, through two iron doors, and into a whitewashed hallway pocked with solid iron doors, each having only one little square opening, near the top, ruled with thick black bars. I was only there for a minute or two, but I took the opportunity to peer through one of these openings and into what I would later learn was Handy Campbell’s cell: ten feet square of concrete, with three bunkbeds, a payphone, a television, five cellmates—all of them black, all of them charged with robbery, theft, aggravated assault, or some combination of the three—and another barred window, somewhat larger, through which I could see Lee Jones’s law office, and, behind it, a small swatch of the Yazoo.

The deputy quickly steered me away from the cells and toward what I initially mistook for a storage closet. It was a tiny triangular room, its windowless walls covered with cheap wood paneling. Stacked up from the floor were some thirty-odd boxes of coffee; there were two ladders, a couple of chairs, a broken television set, and a gray metal desk, old and dented, on top of which sat a large piece of scientific equipment that looked like it came from the set of Lost in Space. It was labeled: THE INTOXILIZER .

This, my escort informed me, was the jail’s “Lawyer Room.” He excused himself and closed the door.

He knocked a few minutes later and pushed the door open again. Handy Campbell shuffled inside. He was wearing his “street clothes”: a black visor emblazoned with a red Nike swoosh, a red t-shirt with a crest on the pocket, blue-and-white-striped shorts, white socks, black and white Nike hightops with velcro ties. I had plenty of time to write all of this down: Handy moved very slowly. His ankles were linked together by a shiny metal chain perhaps six inches long.

He looked, at once, larger and smaller than I had remembered him. I’d forgotten just how big Handy Campbell was; my memories were mostly of his speed and grace and humility, and, in fusing those with my knowledge of his squalid childhood and adolescence, I had retained a somewhat distorted image of a lanky kid about my height. In truth, Handy Campbell had stood six foot four inches tall in high school (six inches taller than me), and weighed 190 pounds. If anything, the passing years had only served to fill him out a little more. And in this room, with its cramped walls and low ceiling, he appeared even larger.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.