CHAPTER TWELVE
They were brought to Sugarloaf in roaring airborne beasts, chained to the floors and chained to each other. Eye-masks and earmuffs severed them from their surroundings. Through their pores the captives took in what little information there was to be had about the thing that carried them—a vast metal cavity, scorching hot as it sat for hours on the tarmac of some clandestine airfield and, soon after the plane ascended, bitterly cold. When the mouths opened to beg for water or relief from the chains, the skin felt other things—the hardness of a rifle butt, the steel-backed tip of a boot. The mouths closed. The bodies flew, dumb as idols, over the Florida Sea.
Only the very crest of the hill remained above water, the last vestige of the peninsular state. Upon it was built an artificial island of stone and concrete, rounded and circled with high razor-wire fencing. A jut of unused land, about fifty feet in length, extended beyond the fence to the shore. Here, but for a strip cleared to build a dock, the grass ran wild and the ground was thick with weeds.
The grass camouflaged the island. When the storm clouds cleared and the residents of the southern Georgia coast were able to look far into the Florida Sea, they sometimes mistook Sugarloaf for a trick of the eye—a tropical sea-dwelling mirage.
The women were kept in cages while the camps were reordered and their male captives segregated. The cages were small and the taller detainees could not stand without crouching.
Guards in black masks patrolled the cages. The masks hid their faces but their youth was evident in the skin around their eyes. The guards called the women in the cages by the last two digits of their detainee numbers, and called each other by their initials. As such, whenever the senior officers ordered the guards to move the women to other cages or to the Non-Compliance Area, the instructions sounded like moves in a game of chess.
But sometimes the guards accidentally used their real names. This was how the women, who had little to do but sit and listen, learned the identities of the soldiers who walked hourly among them. The tall one with the blue eyes was Lillyman; the kind one with the accent, who used to smuggle water bottles through the fencing and was soon removed from duty, was named Izzy. The one with the thick neck—the cruel one—was Bud Baker.
In time the women learned other things too: the names of the guards’ hometowns, of their children and their pets. They learned a feeble geography of the camps, and of the officers’ suburb, which lay on the other end of the island. And although none of these things were useful to them in their squat, vacant pens, the women committed all the information to memory, held the things they learned close like yet-unsharpened shanks.
Sometimes the women complained about the blinding heat or about the size of their cages or the smell of their unwashed jumpsuits. When any woman did this too frequently or too loudly, a small team of armed guards would rush the cage and drag the captive to the Non-Compliance Area. A day later a woman so taken would return to her cage, and would not complain anymore. Soon, all the prisoners stopped complaining.
SARAT CHESTNUT’S CAGE faced what she believed to be the sea. She heard the waves breaking against the shore, just beyond the guard towers and a forest of leaning reeds. In storm season, when the sky overhead thickened and lit up, the waves rose high and crashed into the stone beaches. Other times the waves were calm, and made a sound like a dog slowly lapping from a bowl. Chained and unable to stand upright in her tiny cage, she strained to glimpse the water, but the sea lay beyond reach.
In the first weeks of her captivity she did not speak, neither to the guards who watched her nor to the women nearby. The guards took her silence as a passive defiance, and often threatened to take her to the Non-Compliance Area. The women, put off by her refusal to talk, began to suspect her as some kind of foreigner—perhaps a spy, or a Blue banished to this place for treason.
Instead she listened to the sea. She nursed a broken rib suffered during the night the soldiers came to take her in Lincolnton. In time the pain in her chest dulled and breathing became less difficult, but the weeks she spent crouching and sitting in the cage began to inflame her knees and her back. To remedy this she knelt into a child’s pose, which she held until Bud or one of the other guards came and ordered her to get up.
She waited on death. She had no doubt that soon the troop of masked guards would come to take her—not to the Non-Compliance Area, but to some courtroom in the heart of the Blue.
She imagined being led in, shackled, before rows and rafters full of indignant, jeering Northerners. She imagined standing before the firing squad, a line of young soldiers no different from the ones who once hovered in Templestowe’s eye. She imagined facing their softly trembling hands and smiling. Because no matter what they did with her afterward—in which unmarked grave they buried her or wherever they scattered her incinerated remains—she would find her way to the river. She would find her way to her sister. She waited in her cage and thoughts of death sustained her.
At the end of the third month, the women were moved into the camps. The ones who had put up no resistance were issued white uniforms and taken to Camp Thursday, where they were allowed the privileges of communal living. Others were dressed in blue, and taken to solitary cells in Camp Friday or Camp Saturday.
Some of the women spoke of another place, Camp Sunday. The stories they told of that place struck Sarat as the stuff of depraved medieval fantasy, and at first she didn’t believe the camp existed.
After three days in Camp Thursday, they took her to her first Visitation. She was led to a small complex of prefabricated offices, unmarked save for cameras hanging from the ceiling. The walls were plain and reinforced to keep the sound from traveling.
She was ordered to sit on a small metal chair next to a metal table. Her arms were chained to the arms of the chair and her ankles to shackles in the floor. Soon the guards were gone and the room was quiet.
She sat alone for three hours. A fire began to grow along her spine. She tried to shift her position but the chair was bolted in place, and no movement of her neck could keep her muscles from seizing.
The door opened. A short woman about ten years Sarat’s senior came in. She was dressed like the women who worked for the government in Atlanta. She folded her suit jacket and placed it gently on the table. She sat down.
“We know exactly what you did, Sara Chestnut,” she said.
It was only then that Sarat realized her captors had no idea what she did—not only because the woman had called her by her old first name, the one she’d abandoned so many years ago, but also because if the Blues had known about her crimes, there would be no need for an interrogation, no need to extract any confession. They knew nothing; perhaps they’d apprehended her on some vague suspicion, after seeing her visit the United Rebels’ compound. Perhaps she was simply a part of some random sweep, a fishing expedition.
“If you talk now—if you tell us everything and give us the names of the people you worked with—I might still be able to help you,” said the woman. She leaned slightly forward. “There’s still time, Sara. There’s still a chance for you to leave this place, to go back to Simon and to Dana. To do the right thing. All you have to do is be honest with me. Can you be honest with me, Sara?”
“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat.
The woman closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. “Sara,” she said, “I know you think I’m your enemy, but I’m here to help you. My bosses in Columbus, they want to lock you up forever, they want to keep you from ever seeing your home again. They look at you and this is all they see…”
From her briefcase the woman produced a set of glossy photographs. She fanned them on the table. The photographs were of wreckage, the charred husk of a car torn apart. For a moment Sarat thought the pictures were of her sister’s death. But that couldn’t be—the scenery was different, and the woman didn’t even seem to know Dana was dead. She saw gutted sandbags strewn about, the remains of a checkpoint. In one of the pictures, the fortified center of the Northern capital hovered in the distance.
The confusion on Sarat’s face must have been evident, because the woman quickly put the photos away.
“Of course I know you didn’t do this, Sara, but this is what my bosses see,” she said. “But I told them, Just give me a chance; I can talk to her. I read your file, Sara. I know you’ve been through some terrible tragedy. And I know you wouldn’t want innocent people—in the South or the North—to go through the same thing.”
The woman looked over her shoulder, as though to check that no one was within earshot. “You know my grandparents come from Alabama,” she said. “I guess you can say I’ve got the South in my blood. I know these values mean something to you, Sara—protecting the weak, telling the truth, doing what’s right. What’s right. I want to go back to my bosses in Columbus, Sara, and I want to be able to tell them what I know to be true: that you’re not a bad person, that you don’t have the blood of innocent people on your hands. And if I tell them that, they’ll listen to me, and they’ll send you home, and you can be with Dana and with Simon again in Lincolnton. I can help you, Sara, but I need you to help me.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat.
Some of the softness dissipated from the woman’s face. Her voice, once soothing, hardened.
“You know some of the people you’re protecting, we already caught them,” she said. “They’re right here, in this place, and they’ve already told us about you. They’ve already turned on you to save themselves. Do you really want to see them go free while you spend the rest of your life in a cell?”
“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat.
“Albert Gaines told us about you,” the woman said. The mention of the name caused an involuntary twitch in Sarat, but she said nothing.
“That’s right,” the woman continued. “Albert Gaines gave you up. He told us you’re an insurrectionist. Do you want us to believe him, Sara? Do you want us to treat you the way we treat insurrectionists?”
“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat.
The woman shook her head once more and rose from her seat. “This can be easy, Sara, or this can be hard. The choice is yours.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat.
The woman left the room. Soon a masked guard appeared. Even before he removed his mask, Sarat recognized him by his frame and by the thickness of his neck. Some of the guards were always careful never to show their faces to the detainees, but this one did not seem to care. He drew close and looked at her with hollow, contemptuous eyes.
Before she could turn her head, he slapped her across the face. Her head snapped but the rest of the body, chained in place, did not move.
“You dumb Red dyke,” said Bud. “We’re going to make you sing.”
The soldier called a pack of four others into the room. They wore blue gloves and had covered faces and were made larger by the shells of their armor.
“Take her to the Light Room,” said Bud.
She was transferred to a room in the basement of another building. The room was made of concrete and was empty save for two anchors bolted to the ground. A set of large white floodlights covered the entirety of the wall opposite the anchors.
The guards chained Sarat’s ankles to her wrists, and both to the anchors in the floor, such that she was forced into a deep and immobilizing squat. The guards left the room, and for a moment nothing happened. Then the floodlights came alive with a loud electric pop, and the room was drowned in eviscerating whiteness.
Sarat closed her eyes. The white light now turned a hot red against her eyelids. She lowered her head and for a while the onslaught was bearable. But soon the room began to grow warmer. Sweat dripped from her skin, her knees burned with the weight of her body.
On the third day, the door opened. A masked guard stepped forward and dropped a bowl of food and another of water on the ground where Sarat was shackled. The bowls were made of a soft rubber and half their contents spilled on the floor where they landed. The guard left and the door swung closed.
One bowl contained a thin brown gruel speckled with white flakes. Unable to move her arms, Sarat struggled to get at the food. She grasped at it with her fingers and leaned as far forward as she was able. Feebly, she tossed it toward her mouth. The gruel tasted sulfuric, rotten. But she wolfed it down, deranged with hunger. Soon her jumpsuit and the ground surrounding her were splattered with remnants of the meal. Under the heat of the floodlights, the gruel began to decompose. Every other day, the guard returned and dropped two bowls on the ground.
By the tenth day, the throbbing in her head and her knees consumed her. The room filled with her shrieking, and the small red darkness she lived in while her eyes were closed now seemed to exist even when her eyes were open. On the twentieth day, the guards removed her.
In the Visitation room, the woman in the neatly pressed suit asked Sarat if she’d had a change of heart.
“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat, slumped in her shackling chair.
The woman stood and left the room. Soon Bud returned. In the fog of her damaged vision he seemed to move in place, blurry as a half-remembered dream. He grabbed her by the fuzz of hair that had grown back on her skull during her time in captivity.
“How do you think this is going to end?” asked the guard, his breath hot on the side of her face. “Do you think this ends with you winning? With us giving up? You’re going to sing, I promise you.”
He let her go and called the guards back in. “Take her to the Sound Room,” he said.
IN THE MONTHS BETWEEN VISITATIONS, Sarat lived in a cell in Camp Saturday. The cell was square, and standing in its middle with her arms outstretched, Sarat could brush all four walls with her fingers. The walls were of concrete and were painted the color of margarine. A metal cot and a metal toilet bowl occupied opposite ends of the cell, otherwise it was bare. An overhead light shone at all hours of the day and night, erasing the difference between them. Deprived of the cycle of the day (and, in time, the seasons), the mind made do with the only indicator of passing time available to it: the footsteps of the guards outside.
The guards walked up and down the corridors of Camp Saturday at all hours. Every three minutes, the slit in Sarat’s cell door would open, and a pair of eyes would inspect the room, and then the slit would close again. In time the sound of metal slits opening and closing all along the corridor became a kind of metronome, against which Sarat measured the dawn and death of the day. Eventually she came to know the peering eyes by heart, and gave their owners names of her own invention.
Sometimes she heard screams from the nearby cells. Sometimes the women waited on a guard to open the slit in the door and then tried to throw cupped handfuls of shit and piss in their eyes. A few minutes later a small troop of masked guards would rush the agitator’s cell, and the woman would be carried kicking and screaming to the Non-Compliance Area. In a week or two she would return, and no more noises would come from her cell.
The woman in the cell next to Sarat’s was named Elena. She was from Mississippi, and had lost her mind. Softly she spoke to Sarat through the concrete, in a voice that passed so clearly through the wall that for months Sarat believed it to be a fabrication of her own torture-fevered brain.
Elena said she had been born in this place, caged here from birth because the Blues knew her to be a terrorist from the day she entered the world. She said Sugarloaf had once rested on a vast outcropping of land and was free of cages and free of fences. She sang songs about alligators and swamps and talking rodents.
Amidst the shuffling of the guards’ feet and the rambling screams of the women, Sarat listened to her neighbor’s voice the same way she listened to her own breathing—passively, without thought. But at other times it was the only thing she could hear, a reminder she was still alive.
Sometimes Sarat talked back to the voice sliding softly through the walls, and in these times she lied. When Elena asked her where she came from, she said South Carolina, and invented an elaborate lie about her escape from the illness unleashed upon that state. She enjoyed lying to her faceless neighbor, and enjoyed that the neighbor seemed to believe it. During the worst of her Visitations, when after weeks of mistreatment she returned to her cell hallucinating with pain, it provided some small comfort to retreat into a wholly fabricated existence.
Still, she resisted. The Visitations came in waves—sometimes the woman in the neatly pressed suit didn’t come to see her for months at a time, until Sarat allowed herself to believe that perhaps the interrogations had finally come to an end. Sometimes, the woman seemed a permanent resident of the island, and would call on Sarat almost daily. Weeks alone in the rooms of Sound and Light dulled her senses, until the world beyond arm’s reach became a muddled nimbus she could no longer decipher. The positions in which they shackled her slowly wore the cartilage from her knees and warped her back into a curving column of pain. Still, she resisted.
IN HER THIRD YEAR on the island, Sarat participated in a hunger strike. Elena said women from every camp were taking part, refusing to eat or drink anything but water. She said some women had already been doing it for weeks. She said one had even died from it—a suicide of sorts, something the guards called “Going asymmetric.”
She said the women had a list of demands, chief among them freedom. Failing that, they wanted their loved ones flown in to visit; lawyers from the Red to represent them; and the right to something whose name sounded foreign to Sarat’s ears (she assumed it to be a drug or a religious text). The women in the solitary cells demanded time in the communal yard, a chance to see the sun.
Sarat made no demands. She could no more imagine negotiating better treatment from her captors than negotiating the stinger away from a scorpion. Her silence was the one weapon they could not pry from her; to hand it to them in the form of hopeless appeals seemed to her an act of high cowardice, a tacit admission that the brutal kinetics of Sugarloaf obeyed some kind of law. For the same reason she refused to meet the ones they called humanitarian envoys, who swooped in on Sugarloaf every few months with looks of stern disapproval plastered on their faces, for the same reason she spat in the face of the woman with the neatly pressed suit, for the same reason she tore the pages of the one book they allowed her and glued them with smeared shit to the slit of her cell door—for the same reason, Sarat made no demands.
Instead she simply refused to eat. In starvation she took the levers of torture out of her torturers’ hands and placed them in her own. In starvation she found agency, control.
A week into her strike and concussed with hunger, she was taken by the guards to the medical facility.
She was led into a room with high white ceilings. Black sheets covered the windows and muted the sunlight. The room smelled familiar to Sarat—it was the smell of rubbing alcohol. She remembered the last time she saw her sister.
A single cot, raised to the incline of a dentist’s chair, stood in the center of the room. Laid out on a steel table nearby were a set of hypodermic needles, a coiled rubber tube, a box of disposable gloves, and two bags of clear fluid.
The guards lifted her onto the bed. She felt straps tighten around her wrists and around her ankles and around her chest. Viselike restraints locked her gaze to the white empty ceiling.
At the edge of her periphery she saw one of the soldiers standing at the table. He wore a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck but she knew he was a soldier. He uncoiled the rubber tube and affixed it to one of the fluid bags, which he then attached to a metal stand. She watched out the corner of her eye as he began applying a glistening, mucuslike substance to the end of the rubber tube, before Bud the guard stopped him.
“No need for that,” Bud said. “She’s a big, strong girl.”
Amidst the convulsions that followed, they fed her. The white ceiling to which her eyes were locked began to fill with brilliant stars. The cot shook; she felt the hands of the guards holding her in place. The acidic aftertaste of the feeding fluid crawled up her throat and leaked out her slack mouth. It tasted of her insides.
Midway through the feeding, a gust of wind sheared the black sheet from one of the windows. A beam of sunlight entered the room. Sarat closed her eyes and felt the warmth that grazed the very ends of her toes. Faintly, very far away, she heard the sound of children playing.
FOR THREE DAYS in January a storm rattled the island. The rain made a sound like the patter of huge insects crawling on the prison walls. The women huddled and screamed in their solitary cells.
The storm spared Sarat her daily feeding. Hunger returned this time as mercy. On the fourth day, her cell door opened, and Bud came inside. He arrived with the usual entourage of guards but he made them wait outside. He closed the cell door behind him.
She knew it was him before he appeared, the meter of his steps down the hallway a fingerprint. It amazed her sometimes, how much she knew about a man she was supposed to know nothing about—the way his cheeks reddened when he cursed her, as though the sound of his own voice infuriated him; the way his upper lip drew closer to his nostrils in a feigned expression of disgust whenever he told a lie. She knew him the way animals know the weather, and from some indefinable thing living in the very presence of him, she’d learned to divine the severity of impending storms.
But today she could not read him. There was a calmness about his hollow eyes; the veins of his neck untensed. She detected in his stocky face the expression of a child on the eve of Christmas, impatient and electric with anticipation.
He sat at the foot of the bed. Instinctively, Sarat recoiled. She smelled the mess tent breakfast on him, the smell of fryer oil. He looked at the place by the bed where Sarat’s last trickle of vomit had dried into a sand-colored crust. He chuckled.
“Tell me, do you believe in any of that Hindu shit?” he said. “They got a book about it in the library here; got so bored one night I started reading it. You believe any of that stuff about coming back as a toad or an ant or something if you were real bad in your last life? I mean, I saw what you did with that Bible we gave you; I know you’re no Christian, so maybe you believe in that stuff.”
Sarat said nothing. Bud cracked his knuckles. She waited for the cheeks to redden, the vein to emerge, and she readied her mind to take her to a faraway place.
“I’ve been thinking about that for a while now,” Bud said. “Because I got to thinking I must have done some real terrible shit in my last life—burned down an orphanage or something. That’s got to be why I ended up here, stuck playing babysitter to a cageful of goddamned animals.”
The slit in the doorway opened. A guard looked inside. Bud waved him away. In that moment Sarat imagined lunging at his sweat-glistened neck, digging into the skin with her teeth. But what her mind imagined, her body no longer had the strength to do, and when again he turned to her and put his hand on her knee, she spat in his direction but what came out was spittle.
“But see, then I got to thinking I couldn’t have done anything too bad, right?” said Bud. “I couldn’t have done anything too bad, because then I would have come back as you.”
He patted her softly on the knee and then he stood.
“Remember when you first got here?” he asked. “Remember how you used to press your face against the cage like a dog, trying to get a look at the water? Well, guess what, Sara Chestnut? We’re going to take you to the water.”
SHE WAS MOVED by the guards to a different place, a small building she had never seen before. The building was white and unmarked; it stood at the edge of a fenced and barricaded complex that resembled Camp Saturday but was much smaller. The complex lay near the edge of the island; as the guards led her inside, Sarat could hear the distant crashing of waves.
They took her to a windowless room, lit harshly by the halo of an old, prewar incandescent. The bulb hung on a string from a low white ceiling.
Just as in the place where they fed her, a cot stood in the center of the room. The same people were present: soldiers in guard uniforms and soldiers in white coats. But this time the ones in the guard uniforms stood near the cot, and the soldiers in the white uniforms stood in the periphery of the room; when Sarat looked at them they looked away.
Once again she was strapped in place, and although she caught no sight of the usual implements on the bedside table, she closed her eyes and waited to be fed. But instead she felt a sheet of soft cloth laid upon her face, and then she heard the voice of the woman in the neatly pressed suit.
“If you want this to stop, Sara,” the voice whispered, “you’ll cooperate.”
The voice went away. The room turned silent. And then Sarat was drowning.
The water moved, endless. She entered and exited death, her body no longer hers. Spasms of light and heat encased her; the mind seized with fear and panic. She drowned yet death would not come. It was in this way her captors finally broke her.
To end the drownings she admitted to all the crimes with which they charged her—complicity in all manner of insurrectionist violence, things she’d never heard of before. She admitted her role in the killing of three Blue informants in the New Fourth Ward and in a car bombing on the outskirts of Columbus. When asked about insurgents she knew, she said all she knew; when asked about those she didn’t, she made up plausible lies. The woman in the neatly pressed suit presented to her reams of written confessions and she signed every page. There was no lie too big that her fear of drowning couldn’t make it true.
THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED brought relief. Slowly she was allowed the small precious things previously denied her—packets of soap and shampoo; books other than the Bible; black shades to block the overhead lights; spider-venom painkillers to dull the screaming of her knees and her back. For an hour a day she was led into the recreation yard, where she lay on the warm concrete at the foot of the fence and took in the sunlight, content as a house cat. They brought her food and she ate it all, voracious. The food was fatty and bland; soon she began to gain weight, because there was little to do but sit in her cell and eat. But she ate every bite, and they never had to force-feed her again.
Every other Friday, when the guards came to cut her nails and trim her hair, she sat still and let them. And on the Thursdays before they came, when her nails were longest, she dug them deep into the skin of her inner thighs until she felt the warm trickle of blood. The guards who looked in on her every few minutes must have thought she was masturbating; they let her be.
The following summer, the guards rotated, and Bud Baker left for good—but it didn’t matter one way or the other to Sarat when Elena whispered the news through the cell block walls, because the girl whose soul the thick-necked guard had slowly strangled was also gone. The day assimilated the dark, the dark assimilated the day. Years passed.
ONE DAY, long after her last Visitation, two guards came to Sarat’s cell and took her back to the old building in which she had confessed. As she was led down the hallway, she recognized the place, but it felt dilapidated, unused. There was now a fine layer of dust on the chairs and on the table. An old, handwritten sign on one of the walls read, “Clean Up After Yourself.”
Once again they sat her down, but this time the guards did not shackle the prisoner to the bolts in the ground. The soldiers left and soon a woman Sarat had never seen before entered the room. The woman was young and dressed in a formal blouse and skirt.
Sarat was gripped with a cold, crippling fear at the sight of her new visitor. She stared mute and motionless at the woman, and quietly she resolved to herself that if they tried to take her once more to that small white room, she would claw her own throat out before she let them strap her again to the drowning chair.
The woman sat down and set a plain folder on the table.
“Sara T. Chestnut?”
Sarat said nothing.
“Are you Sara Chestnut?” the woman asked again. “That’s your name, yes?”
Sarat nodded. The woman removed from the folder three small stacks of stapled sheets.
“Sara, my name is Gabrielle,” said the woman. “I’m a repatriation specialist with the Peace Office in Columbus. I want you to listen carefully—are you listening?—to what I’m going to tell you, because this is important. All right?”
Sarat nodded. The woman had a singsong voice, a cadence fit for explaining things to children.
“I’m going to ask you to read and sign these three forms,” Gabrielle said. As soon as she said it, Sarat began signing the papers.
“Hold on, hold on, let me tell you what they are,” said the woman. “Now pay attention: the first one is a declaration from the Peace Office. It states that the government of the United States, in capturing and temporarily detaining you as a suspected insurrectionist, was acting in good faith on information from a source the government now believes was not credible. It further states that, upon review, your status has been changed to No Longer Combatant. The second form is an agreement of indemnity, covering all branches and arms of the United States government in perpetuity. The third form is a solemn declaration that you will not engage in any action, nor counsel any action, against any branch or arm of the United States government, nor any of its members or representatives.”
Sarat looked from the woman to the forms and back. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
The woman leaned across the table. She took Sarat’s hands in her own. The sensation of a stranger’s bare skin on hers felt alien to Sarat. The sensation of proximity without violence felt alien.
“Sara, the war is over,” said Gabrielle. “You’re going home.”
She heard the words, but they failed to register in her mind. Three times the woman repeated herself, until finally Sarat pushed her hands off and retreated from her chair to the corner of the room. There she knelt into a fetal ball and would not look at the woman or listen to anything else she had to say. Soon Gabrielle, exasperated, left the room, and the guards came in and dragged Sarat back to her cell.
A few days later they returned and took her again. But this time it was not to one of the Visitation buildings, but to the airstrip. There she was made to board a small plane alongside a group of fourteen women. The women looked haggard and disoriented in the glare of the early morning sun, and said nothing to one another as they boarded the plane.
Soon they were flying. From her small porthole window, Sarat peered out at the vast expanse of glittering blue surrounding the place that had been her prison. Her eyes badly damaged, she had trouble making out the geography over which the small plane flew. But she knew exactly what it was: the lapping Florida Sea, its bed thick with carpets of sea grass and schools of blind lionfish. It was real even though she could not see it clearly, and would remain real even if every last pair of eyes in the world went blind.
The plane crossed the sea and descended upon the mainland. Sarat was coming home.
Excerpted from: FOUND CAUSE: DIARY OF A FORMER SOUTHERN RECRUITER
Some of the other ones would try all kinds of silliness. I knew one who would take them out to the middle of nowhere in the dead of the night and have them lie in open graves. He’d tell them, “This is where you’re going to end up, trapped forever in a black hole in the ground, unless you fight for the cause of your people. The Lord takes good care of those who fight for the cause of their people.” And that sort of thing was just fine if you were trying to get some burnout from the southern coast to put on a farmer’s suit, but a lot of the smarter ones saw right through it.
What I found worked best was a lie slipped in with the truth. What I’d do is tell them about all sorts of terrible things the Blues had done—show them pictures of the victims from the firebombing of Burleson, the massacre at Patience, things like that. But along with those things, I’d tell them about the slaughter at Pleasant Ridge. Now the funny thing is, not once, in all my years working for the rebel South, did any recruit bother to find out if there had ever been a slaughter at Pleasant Ridge. They just assumed it to be true. The Blues had done so much to our people, why couldn’t they have done that too? After a while, even I couldn’t remember if there had been a slaughter at Pleasant Ridge.
That’s what made it so easy to lie later on too, when the Blue surge came and they rounded us all up for interrogation. They wanted names and crimes and we gave them both in droves. One guy I knew just listed off everyone who worked on his old block. A week later the incursion force went and rounded up a bunch of accountants and butchers and grocery store clerks.
Eventually, it got to be that the Blues had so much unreliable information on their hands, they had to let all those people go. But it was like a snake eating its own tail—by the time they got around to emptying those detention camps, they’d already turned most of the people there into exactly what they’d needed them to be in the first place. I always said the camps at Sugarloaf were the best recruiters the South ever had.