Life is a long time. The prison sentence sometimes allows for the possibility of parole, but the life of the average man, about seventy years, is a significant amount of time. Dae was already in his late twenties when he was sentenced to life in prison, so he did the math in his head to feel better about the situation. At least he’d had twenty three good, free years of doing what he pleased and getting his way. And there was solace in knowing that he’d only have to serve about fifty years, rather than the seventy years he’d be serving if by some crazy chance he had been convicted of a crime before birth that warranted a life sentence. Which is absurd, but Dae is a black man in America where Donald Trump is president for Christ’s sake; stranger things have happened.
Let’s not get distracted by the idea of the incarcerated fetus, though if you want to take a moment to muse on the numbers of black men in prison in America, I will allow you that.
Dae is a political prisoner. He did some stuff at his university that got way out of hand as things are apt to do on college campuses, and since the day the judge banged his gavel at the courtroom in Manhattan where he heard his fate, he has been paying penance for that stuff. He is OK with it all. He knows that he deserves it. He made peace with the fact that he would probably never have sex with a woman again because he would be unwilling to do the hard work it would take to convince a female guard to have sex with him, or to correspond with a woman and arrange visits. He’d just have to settle for anus, though when he looked at himself in the mirror before his trial, he realized that the only gratification his penis would know in prison would have to be self administered. Dae was a slight man, he’d always been slightly tall and very thin. There was no way he would be able to avoid being raped, and because he was so damn good at everything he did, he knew that his rapist would come back for more, and regularly. He knew he was in for in a bleak time, but he had made his choices and he had no choice but to face his consequences.
Dae is not wrong about his sexual plight in prison, but he is relatively lucky. His cellmate is a big man who punches him at night until he agrees to do whatever degrading sexual act will satisfy him enough to fall asleep. It was hard at first, but after the first year, he was glad that he had no reason to join a gang for protection. His cellmate, a quiet man who is called Truck, doesn’t have gang affiliation, but he has the respect of black gang members who treat him like one of their own. And they all ignore Dae’s voice when he stands behind Truck like an obedient servant. Not that Dae speaks very much at all, but when he does try to chime in on conversations at meals or during leisure time, he is treated like the bitch that he is happy to be as long as it means that he can enjoy a measure of protection.
The prison is in a rural town in VA, and Dae sees the whole situation as his comeuppance. He had worked very hard in his youth to escape the south and to gain prominence, but he had pushed his luck too far and angered the wrong gods. In prison, Dae is forced to understand the culture and motivations of the very people he had rejected in his youth. He didn’t have particular disdain for the black community, he’d had enough disdain for everyone he felt was stupid and useless, but having been born in a black community and reared there in his early life, he had purposefully avoided the very same type of men with whom he shared meals and showers with now. Men who Dae had felt were rightly in prison because of choices that they had made for themselves that deemed them unfit for society. He never thought that he would be among them, one of the unfit.
When he can, Dae hides out in the library. It can be hard for him to get away, Truck is very possessive and doesn’t want Dae to be anywhere he can’t protect him. There is comfort in that. Dae feels that after all the time Truck had been spraying his DNA at him, he must have grown some emotional connection, but Dae wouldn’t dare talk to him about it.
In the the library, Dae is able to maintain a sense of the man he was before he landed in prison. But he isn’t that same man. He has learned too much about the impact his actions have on others to be the man that he was before prison. In the year that he has been in prison, Dae has come to terms with this reality that he can’t be the man he was, and he has been trying to rebuild himself. He knows that his new self can get used to anything and he will do anything to stay alive. And he knows that he needs a new goal for his existence. He could never be the first fully black president of these United States.
He always does the same thing when he sits down in the library. He reminds himself where he is.
He writes the same thing on a new sheet of paper each time: Independence, VA, USA.
Lately he’s been thinking about things bigger than himself. Not bigger like Truck, but in a metaphysical sense. Maybe his new self could be useful to something far away that he could not see.
Today, he finds his way to the library early and he writes: Independence, VA, USA, Earth, Milky Way Galaxy.
Looking at it, it doesn’t give him any new sense of himself.
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