No Beast So Fierce Read Free

staying.
    Aaron Billings, the person I really wanted to see, failed to appear. He was black and would avoid a group of whites, just as I would avoid a group of blacks. The races had become totally polarized during recent years. Because of this I’d talked with Aaron less and less, but our friendship remained. He’d stopped me at the dentist’s office yesterday (he worked there) and mentioned that he might be transferred to camp and wanted me to help him escape. There’d been no time to talk, and he was going to meet me this morning.
    I excused myself from my friends, for whom life in prison would continue unchanged by my absence, and began searching through the crowd. I was more conscious of my surroundings than I had been in several years. Two thousand voices collected into a roar as powerful as wind from the sea. The roar moved up the cell house walls toward the sky, failed the ascent and echoed back into the pit. To someone seeing the yard for the first time it would remind them of a teeming anthill, each man identical with every other.
    A voice cut through the uproar: “Clear the way! Dead man coming!”
    In seconds there was a path ten feet wide. Moses couldn’t have parted the Red Sea any more cleanly. First came a guard, whose voice was calling out. Six feet behind him came the condemned man, a tall young Negro. He was followed by a second guard. Overhead, a rifleman covered them.
    It was early for a Death Row procession. This one seemed to be going toward the inside administration building. The doomed men always wore new denim and soft slippers without laces. The man’s slippers were still new, indicating that he’d just arrived. He was probably going for fingerprinting and a mug photo. He was a dozen feet away and I studied his face, seeking (as everyone did) an answer to the great mystery: as if someone sentenced to die at a specific hour by cyanide gas knows more—or is more doomed. The black face gave no message. I didn’t know who he was or why he’d been sentenced to die. Eighty men were waiting on the row. A handful had made headlines; the others were anonymous. Several I knew personally. Sometimes a condemned man had been on the prison main line and waved to friends when he was brought through. Not the black. His eyes remained ahead, except for an occasional glance at the sky. Another detail that told me he’d just arrived was that he was thin; after a few months everyone on Death Row got fat from the special menu. Each time I saw one of them with swollen belly I thought of hogs being fattened for the slaughter.
    The procession disappeared. The crowd closed in its wake. The work whistle sliced the air. The gate slid open and in minutes the yard had only a scattering of convicts.
    Aaron was near the east cell house wall; he was alone, as usual. His brown head, shaved and oiled, glistened in a vagrant sliver of sunlight. Tucked under his arm were three thick books, all on higher mathematics. His faint smile on seeing me was the equal of a gush of affection from most persons. His ambition was to face life with precise, scientific detachment, with as little emotion as possible. The only decoration in his cell was a charcoal sketch of Albert Einstein.
    We shook hands. In prison, the gesture was more than empty ritual. It was the clasp of friendship.
    â€œHow do you feel?” he asked.
    â€œUp tight.”
    â€œAre you ready?”
    â€œI’m jack-ready for some freedom. How ready I am for a parole officer is another question.”
    â€œAfter eight years you’re ready as you’ll ever be.”
    â€œYeah, if I’m not ready now I’ll never be ready. I know I hope I’m ready.”
    â€œLet’s walk a few minutes. I told the doc I’d be late for work.”
    We began to pace the now-empty yard. Though we were the same height—six feet—he outweighed me by thirty pounds, all of it in shoulder, chest, and arm. Years