Now Your True Life Begins
By Claudia Wair
It’s dark early morning when they take you out of your cell at the county jail. They lead you to a waiting bus, full of other prisoners. The detainees are all Black, like you. Everyone here has been charged with the same crime: taking a white man’s job.
The people on the bus are quiet. Some sleep, others stare with frightened eyes out the windows. Your destination is the State Re-education Camp.
At your trial, you argued that your job as a writer was unique. No white man could write the same words. But the judge laughed and said, Your words don’t matter. Then he banned your books, made you watch as they burned.
It’s late morning when you arrive at the camp and the sun is already hot on your skin. The guards separate the women from the men. You join the line of women and are led to a bunkhouse that smells of old sweat. When the guards leave, everyone introduces themselves: doctors, lawyers, college professors. You feel insignificant with your master’s degree in English literature. When it’s your turn, you say I’m a writer. They burned my books, scrubbed me from the internet. The women shake their heads, suck their teeth in sympathy.
Silence descends when your Instructor enters, a white woman with a cruel sneer. Forget your past lives, she says. Now, your true lives begin. The lives you should have always led.
You’re told that here you will learn to be subservient to white people. That you will learn to love serving them. You know this isn’t true.
During the months of your incarceration, you endure beatings, forced labor, sleep deprivation. You survive it all. Not everyone does.
They humiliate you. They try to make you believe you are less.
They fail.
One day, without explanation, they release you to a halfway house in a strange city. You vow to never lift a finger to serve them. This will lead to prison—or worse—so you run.
You pass yourself off as an Unemployable. You sleep in a hard-to-find corner of an abandoned building, get donations of food and supplies from church basements. You trade secondhand clothes for basic survival gear. You buy information with fresh fruit. Then you set off for the mountains.
You’re chasing whispers and rumors. You follow hand-drawn maps. You stop at secret safehouses, get help from unlikely sources.
By some miracle, you evade the Race Police and the Nazi militias. A Black truck driver stops along the highway and gives you a ride out of the state. You could both go to prison for this. He accepts the risk and muses about following you one day.
After weeks of hiking in the mountains alone, you find the Free People. Your joy at seeing healthy Black and brown faces nearly breaks you. After you recover from your journey, you join the others growing food on the community’s farm. You teach the children using banned literature and history books.
Soon, you are almost yourself again.
The Free People remember your writing. They give you pen and paper and ask you to tell your story. You tell your story. You tell all the stories. One day, you swear, the world will read them.
The community is growing. White allies bring supplies when they can. Clothes, tools, guns.
You learn how to defend your new home. Cradling your rifle, you scan the shadowy forest for intruders. You wonder how you’d acquit yourself if faced with the people who deny your humanity. The people who tried to break you. The people who took your old life away.
A grim smile crosses your face. Because you know what you’ve lost. Because you know what the world has lost.
Your jaw tightens, your blood burns, and part of you aches for the chance to make someone pay. You are fueled by rage and sorrow and just enough hope to keep going. Enough to aim the rifle and pull the trigger.
Claudia Wair is a Black writer living in Virginia. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Astrolabe, Writers Resist, JMWW, and elsewhere. She can be found at claudiawair.com or on Bluesky @CWTellsTales.bsky.social.
Mural by Ashley Cathey, at Hartford Hall, Jefferson Technical and Community College, Louisville, Kentucky.
Photo credit: Don Sniegowski via a Creative Commons license.
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