I had amazed cons and guards alike, I had survived it. I was getting out in twenty-four hours. I was almost forty-three sitting in a cell.
I thought, “I have been in a deadly trap. Have I really escaped it? Does fate have grimmer traps set? Can I learn to be proud of my black skin? Can I adjust to the stark reality that black people in my lifetime had little chance to escape the barbed-wire stockade in the white man’s world?”
Only time and the imponderables inside me would answer the questions.
I had no one except Mama. They dressed me out. My clothes flopped around on my skeletal frame. I still hadn’t told them how I had escaped. Cons cheered me as I shuffled toward freedom. They knew how I had suffered and what the awful odds had been that I wouldn’t have made it.
A friend of Mama’s had sent me my fare. As the plane flew over the sea of neon, I looked down at the city where I had come so many years ago in search of an empty lonesome dream.
I thought of Henry and the sound of that pressing machine. Of Mama when she was young and pretty. How wonderful it had been back there in Rockford. She would come into my room at bedtime, a tender ghost, and tuck me in warmly and kiss me goodnight. It seemed a long time before I finally got to her.
When I walked into her room, death was there in her tiny gray face. Her eyes brightened and flashed a mother’s deathless love. Her embrace was firm and sure. My coming to her had been like a miracle. It was the magic that gave her strength.
She clutched life for an added six months. I never left the house for those six months. We would lie side by side on twin beds and talk far into the night. She made me promise that I would use the rest of my life in a good way. She told me I should get married and have children.
I tried hard to make up for all those years I had neglected her. It’s hard to square an emotional debt. That last sad day she looked up into my eyes from the hospital bed.
In a voice I could scarcely hear through her parched lips, she whispered, “Forgive me Son, forgive me. Mama didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
I stood there watching her last tears rolling down her dead cheeks from the blank eyes. I crushed her to me.
I tried to get my final plea past death’s grim shield, “Oh Mama, nothing has been your fault, believe me, nothing. If you are foolish enough to think so, then I forgive you.”
I staggered blindly from the hospital. I went to the parking lot. I fell across the car hood and cried my heart out. I stopped crying. I thought Mama had really gotten in the last word this time.
These stinking whores would have gotten a huge charge if they could have seen old Iceberg out there wailing like a sucker because his old lady was dead.