Page 7 of The Reformatory

Robert’s lip shook. “No, sir,” he said. His voice sounded smaller.

“Your mama and daddy both dead?”

“No, sir. My daddy’s in Chicago.”

Blood stalled in Gloria’s veins. How could Robert have forgotten never to say where their father was?

“What’s his address in Chicago?”

Robert shrugged—shrugged! Mama had forever told him never to shrug at an adult; it was disrespectful, she’d said, a flaunting of indifference. Had the judge seen it? Of course he had, staring down at Robert from his perch of gleaming wood.

“You don’t know your own father’s address?”

Don’t say anything else! As if he’d heard her, Robert’s head jerked as if to look back at her, but he fought the impulse to turn. Robert had always been a baby, quick to cry: she’d never seen him more restrained in his fear. He had listened to Mama’s stories. He had heeded Papa.

Now, if only he would remember—

“No, sir,” Robert said. “I don’t know the street or nothin’.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a thing: a man goes to Chicago and leaves his son to go wild.”

Robert looked up, facing the judge’s eyes. “No, sir. My sister’s ’bout grown.”

Gloria rose to her feet, as if she’d been called. She purposely brushed back against the bench to make the wooden leg squeal against the floor. The shiny bald patch on the judge’s head winked as he looked up at her.

“I’m Gloria Stephens, Your Honor,” she said loudly, as she had rehearsed in her head all morning. “We’re both in the care of Miss Lottie Mae Powell, who is a deaconess at Holy Redeemer Baptist Church. I promise you, Robert is not ‘running wild.’ ”

Gloria’s fear left her as she spoke. She was ready to enunciate clearly when she answered his questions. She would quiver her voice when she told him all about Mama’s terrible cancer and how she was raising Robert to know the Lord. She would say nothing about her father.

The judge looked away from her. He closed a sheath of papers and pushed it aside. “You’ll go to the Gracetown School for Boys for six months,” the judge said to Robert. “A nigger who won’t learn respect and a trade won’t live to see thirteen. I see you in front of me again, you’ll go on a work crew to Raiford like a grown man. Hear me?”

And he rang that terrible gavel again.

The Reformatory! Six months? Even nigger, which she’d heard her whole life, cut deeper from a judge’s lips in this church-like chamber. If she had known those words were coming, she would have screamed and begged all this time instead of sitting in her good-girl silence. But even wishing to object with every part of herself, she couldn’t make a sound.

His sermon finished, the judge beamed at Robert as if he expected to be thanked. After all, it wasn’t a year at Raiford or a work gang in the tobacco fields, turpentine farms, or phosphate mines. The Reformatory was called a school.

But for the first time since the deputy had come, Robert wailed with childish tears. By the time Gloria rushed back down the flight of narrow stairs in hopes of talking to Robert, hugging him, she could only peek through the forbidden double doors to see a flash of his shirt as the deputy led him through a doorway on the opposite end of the courtroom, across a vast wooden floor her feet were not permitted to touch. Gloria let out a pained rush of air when the door shut closed. The empty courtroom had stolen her brother.

In the hall outside, Gloria’s worry for Robert twisted her stomach, but her mouth would not obey to make demands. Her feet would not move toward the window boxes without COLORED signs. She was dizzy and ill with it: How could a court of law have no provisions for a child to be given comfort by family? Had Robbie been formally charged and convicted? If so, why had there been no jury? Why had she been punished with such faceless formality—wrested from her only family, given no chance even to say goodbye?

And what, oh, what would she say to Papa?

The idea of Papa’s anguish jolted Gloria from her stupor. She would have no time to learn the ways of the courthouse, which was the biggest building on Main Street, full of warrens and long hallways.

Instead, she must find her way to the Reformatory.

Gloria ran mostly uphill from Main Street to Miz Lottie’s seawater-colored house at the end of 14620 Fillmore Street on Lower Spruce, just past the railroad tracks and wooden trestle at the border of Negro Town. She ran so fast and hard that she could only spit up her empty stomach by the time she waded through the untended crabgrass to Miz Lottie’s front porch. Her body shook with sobs as she bent beside the porch railing over a patch of mud by Miz Lottie’s cabbage and collards. Miz Lottie opened her screen door to see who was there, and Gloria wasted precious seconds with a clogged throat. Finally, she heaved out her story.

“Robbie’s been arrested!” she began, and told all the rest.

Miz Lottie held her in a way no one had since Mama died. Her bosom smelled like her steaming kitchen. “I’d like to give one o’ them McCormacks a swift kick myself,” Miz Lottie said, and Gloria’s laugh came as a tiny sob instead. Miz Lottie rested her hand on Gloria’s head, heavy and earth-sweet from her gardening glove. “I know, pumpkin. I know. But you dry those tears. We gotta get Ole Suzy warmed up. Might be we can get there ahead of ’em.”

Ole Suzy was Miz Lottie’s red 1939 Ford truck at the end of the driveway, and Gloria trembled with the promise of it: What if she could be there waiting for Robert? The happy prospect burned so brightly that Gloria swallowed her tears.

“You’ve got enough gas to go and back?” Gloria said. The drive was at least ten miles, at the far west side of the county, near the peanut mill. Papa had driven her out that way once to collect money he was owed, and he’d pointed out the Reformatory as they passed the sprawling, regal green lawn behind mighty spiked fences.

Gloria remembered, as if for the first time, exactly what Papa had said as they passed the grounds: “That’s the first place they start killing us.” And for the first time she had noticed the barbed wire. The memory clapped her with such force that it carried the scent of her father’s pipe. This was where her brother was being sent. A killing place. Papa had said so.