See, I’ve already done my time. Walpole, nine years. And I’m not saying Rita’s the only reason I went down, but I’m telling you, the time wouldn’t have been so hard if not for the white girl.

Cold turkey in a cage and I know Rita’s in a clinic, sipping methadone and orange juice. I’m on the floor, my whole body twisted, trying to strangle itself — bowels wrung like rags, squeezed dry, ribs clamped down on lungs so I can’t breathe, my heart a fist, beating itself. And I think I’m screaming; I must be screaming, and my skin’s on fire, but nobody comes, and nobody brings water, and I want to be dead and out of my skin.

Then I’m cold, shaking so hard I think my bones will break, and that’s when the rabbitman slips in between the bars. The rabbitman says, Once an axe flew off its handle, split an overseer’s skull, cleaved it clean, and I saw how easily the body opens, how gladly gives itself up; I saw how the coil of a man’s brains spills from his head — even as his mouth opens, even as he tries to speak. Then I saw a blue shadow of a man — people say he ran so fast he ran out of his own skin and they never found him, the rabbitman, but I tell you, they took my skin and I was still alive. Then the rabbitman whispered, I got news for you, little brother. I been talkin’ to the man and he told me, it ain’t time yet for this nigger to die.

So no, I don’t go chasing that girl in the street. I know she’ll be cold fast, but I think, Not my business — let one of her friends find her.

See, since Rita, I don’t have much sympathy for white girls. And I’m remembering what my mama told me, and I’m remembering the picture of that boy they pulled out of the Tallahatchie, sweet smiling boy like I was then, fourteen years old and a white girl’s picture in his wallet, so he don’t think nothing of being friendly with a white woman in a store. Then the other picture — skull crushed, eye gouged out, only the ring on his finger to tell his mama who he was, everything else that was his boy’s life gone: cocky grin, sleepy eyes, felt hat, his skinny-hipped way of walking, all that gone, dragged to the bottom of the river by a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. Mama said she wasn’t trying to turn me mean but she wanted me to see — for my own good, because she loved me, which is why she did everything, because she’d die if anything happened to me — and I thought even then something was bound to happen sooner or later, the fact of living in my black skin a crime I couldn’t possibly escape. I only had to look once for one second to carry him around with me the rest of my life, like a photograph in my back pocket that didn’t crack or fade, that just got sharper instead, clear as glass and just as dangerous till I pulled it out one day and realized I’d been staring at myself all those years.

I thought about that boy when I met Rita. He breathed on my neck and I laughed to make him stop. I didn’t go after her. It was nothing like that. It was just something that happened, like the white girl pounding at my door — I was watching it, then I was in it.

We were at Wally’s, me and Leo Stokes, listening to the music, jazz — we liked the music. Mostly I’m listening to the drummer, thinking he don’t got it right. He thinks he’s too important. He don’t know the drums are supposed to be the sound underneath the sound. That’s why I’m good, that’s why I want to play — I got a gift. I hear a sound below horn and piano, the one they need, like I did back in Virginia living in one room — Mama and Daddy, Bernice and Leroy and me, and there were lots of sounds all the time, but I’m always listening for the one sound, like at night when Mama and Daddy are fighting and her voice keeps climbing higher and higher like it’s gonna break, and his is low and hard and slow, and then they’re tangled together and the words don’t make sense, but I’m not scared, no matter how bad it gets, because I’m listening. I hear a whippoorwill or grasshoppers, the wings of cicadas in July, a frenzy of wings rubbing, trying to wear themselves down, and I know what they want — I know what we all want — and it’s like that sound is holding everything else together, so even if Mama starts crying, and even if Daddy leaves and don’t come back till afternoon the next day, and even if they stop arguing and the other sounds start, even if Daddy has to put his hand over Mama’s mouth and say, Hush now, the children, even if they get so quiet I can’t hear their breathing, I know everything’s okay and I’m safe, because the cicadas are out there, and they’ve been there all along, even when I didn’t know I was hearing them — that one sound’s been steady, that one sound’s been holding everything tight. So I’m listening to the music, thinking, This drummer don’t know his place. He thinks he’s got to get on top of things. And I hear Leo say, Luck or trouble, little brother, heading this way, and then she’s there, standing too close, standing above me. She’s saying, Spare a cigarette? She’s whispering, Got a light? And then she’s sitting down with us and she’s got her hand on my hand while I light her cigarette and I’m thinking she’s pretty — in a way, in this light — and she’s older, so I think she knows things — and I ask myself what’s the harm of letting her sit here, and that’s when I laugh to make the boy’s breath and my mama’s voice go away.

Then later that night I’m looking at my own dark hand on her thin white neck and it scares me, the difference, the color of me, the size, and she says, What color is the inside of your mouth, the inside of your chest? She says, Open me — do I bleed, do my bones break? She says, Kiss me, we’re the same. And I do. And we are. When we’re alone, we are.

She came to see me once. Cried, said she was sorry, and I sat there looking like I had stones in my stomach, ashes in my chest, like I didn’t want to put my hands around her neck to touch that damp place under her hair. I told myself, She’s not so pretty anymore. She looked old. The way white women do. Too skinny. Cigarettes and sun making her skin crack. Purple marks dark as bruises under her green eyes. I said, Look, baby, I’m tired, you get on home. I’m acting like I can’t wait to get back to my cell, like I’m looking forward to the next three thousand nights smelling nothing but my own rotten self, like I’ve got some desire to spend nine years looking at the bodies of men, like I haven’t already wondered how long it’s gonna be before I want them. She says she didn’t know, she didn’t mean to make it worse for me, and I say, Where you been living, girl? What country? She’s not crying then, she’s pissed. She says, You know what they did to me when I came in here? You know where they touched me? And I say, One day. One friggin’ hour of your life. I live here, baby. They touch me all the time. Whenever they want. Wherever.

I’m not saying she stuck the needle in my arm and turned me into a thief. I’m saying I wasn’t alone. Plenty of things I did I shouldn’t have. I paid for those. Three burglaries, nine years, you figure. So yeah, I paid for a dozen crimes they never slapped on me, a hundred petty thefts. But the man don’t mind about your grandfather’s gold pocket watch; he don’t worry when the ten-dollar bill flies out of your mama’s purse and floats into your hand. He don’t bother you much if he sees you shoving weed on your own street. But that was different. Back when I was peddling for Leo I had a purpose, doing what I had to do to get what I needed. Then things turned upside down with Rita, and I was robbing my own mama, stealing to buy the dope instead of selling it, smack instead of grass. Rita said, Just once — you won’t get hooked, and it’s fine, so fine, better than the music, because it’s inside. She was right — it was better than the music, and it was inside: it made me forget the sound and the need.