Red Zone Son

Chapter 27

What are you in for?

What’d they get you for?

All the prisoners wanted to know. That was the question they asked every newcomer. But Solomon didn’t say anything when they asked him. He didn’t say anything ever unless Wilson told him to. Was he going insane? He was afraid he might be. Wilson seemed to be afraid he was too. “Keep it together, keep it together,” Wilson kept telling him. “The hard labor camps are worse, this is only a transit prison, they don’t even make you do anything here, just re-education.”

Solomon believed him. But it only made him feel even more on edge, his heart pounding in his chest in an uneasy rhythm that wouldn’t slow. Each minute that passed felt like a ticking bomb, the pressure inside him building up as the chances increased of them figuring out Solomon was not a blue zone civilian caught up in one of their purges but the real thing, the enemy, a red zone soldier. The blue zoners might live in constant fear that their sentences would be prolonged for what they said in their confessions, but detection was what Solomon feared, and that fear was overwhelming him.

It kept pushing him into the fog.

Why did the cafeteria room have posters with children on them? Children of all races, smiling next to speech bubbles about the benefits of exercise. The table was rectangular, with attached benches. That was where he was sitting. On the bench. Next to Wilson. Across from him was a prisoner who Solomon thought was also in their confession circle, a Black guy younger even than he was. The Black guy and Wilson and some other prisoners, including a White-looking woman who seemed to be in her mid-thirties, were talking over their trays of cornmeal mush. Talking quietly. They stopped whenever a counselor came near.

The cafeteria was the only place other than the baseball field that Solomon actually saw the other prisoners in his confession circle. During the lectures they were segregated by race, gender, sexuality, etc. he didn’t know what else. All he knew was that he had to sit away from Wilson. It was supposed to help prisoners of color feel more comfortable or something like that, he couldn’t remember.

“What did they get you for?” the woman asked the teenager.

“Carjacking,” he responded. “It went wrong. I was just trying to take the car, but someone got killed. So I ended up here.”

Someone else at the table smirked. “Regret it, huh?”

“Yeah. The gangs here are pretty bad,” the teenager replied. “I try to stay away from them but they run all the apartment towers. So I sleep outside. The gangs charge you too much to sleep inside anyway.”

“You got it right,” Wilson told him. “Don’t catch the criminals’ attention. In a place like this, you either skate under the surface, or you get up every day ready to prove that you’re not somebody worth the trouble to mess with, and the one day you fail to prove that, is the day you stop calling your life your own.”

“Didn’t he just say that he was here because he killed someone?” the woman interjected. “What do you mean, don’t catch the criminals’ attention? How is he not a criminal too?”

“There’s criminals, and then there are sick, power-hungry crazies,” Wilson shot back. “We’re all here in the same place. Which one are you? What did they get you for?”

She shrugged. “I wrote an article comparing the modern totalitarianism of the blue zone to the historical totalitarianism of Jim Crow.”

The other prisoners sitting on the attached benches of the table jeered. “What makes you think someone like you could write –”

The noise stopped short. Solomon felt the hair rising on the back of his neck. There was a counselor nearby. He was walking back and forth between the short ends of the tables. Solomon was on the end, the edge, next to the aisle where the counselor was walking. Walking, walking, getting closer, closer, and overhead the cracked bulb diffuser was mixing with the late summer sunlight streaming through the window in the wall, turning the floor into a shine that grew and grew and grew –

No, that was wrong, that was wrong, that wasn’t real, it was happening again, right before he went into the fog something he knew wasn’t real started to become real.

Solomon forced himself to look at the cornmeal mush on his tray. That was real. It was about a cup, 8 ounces, 250 milliliters, but no, wait, that was only if it was liquid, which this mush wasn’t, but actually, kind of? Whatever it was, it was more than what Wilson got. Unlike Solomon, the barcode Wilson had stolen on the truck had been from an Asian woman, and rations in the re-education camp were apportioned out by race, gender, and sexuality. They had to scan their wristbands to pick up a tray, and then up popped on the screen of the robotic server the amount that should be ladled onto that tray.

Solomon thought Wilson had said the apartment towers were also divided up the same way. The ones with better facilities were reserved for what they called BIPOC prisoners, Black and Indigenous only. Solomon wasn’t sure if he counted or not according to their rules. He also wasn’t sure whether the gangs that ran the apartment towers were very strict about using the barcode scanners to keep everyone segregated correctly. Hadn’t Wilson said if you paid them enough they let you go wherever?

“First, as an Indigenous woman, I’m personally very aware that America has always been totalitarian,” Solomon heard the woman say. “The current camp system in both zones is just the latest manifestation of it. And I’m not talking just about Jim Crow. The reservation system for Indigenous people, the Chinese exclusion act, the Palmer Raids, the Japanese internment camps during World War II, COINTELPRO, the Red Scare and McCarthyism of the 1950s, the War on Drugs targeting Black communities, post 9/11 policies which greatly expanded the government’s surveillance powers, the Family Separation Policy implemented at the Mexican border, any number of anti-LGBTQ+ laws… our history is literally pockmarked by government targeting of the powerless.”

Solomon grabbed onto her words. He pulled himself away from the pool of light lapping at his feet. He tried to think about what she was saying. Dad had said something like that to him once, hadn’t he? About how America had defined itself for a long time as anti-Black, and then it had started to try to define itself as anti-racist.

Maybe this lady is right. Maybe the tools we used to define ourselves as a nation always sucked, no matter what the definition is that we settled on. Maybe I’ve been stupid to long for the old America my whole life.

“The woke response was a correct one to historical grievances, but they’ve become the monster they hunted. Don’t get me wrong,” she added very quickly. “I believe in the movement. I always have. I believe we’ll find our way out of America’s historical patterns of repression and control. I heard from a very reliable source that the blue zones have a plan to shut down all the hard labor camps within the decade.”

“We’re not counselors, you don’t have to reassure us,” another prisoner, a White man, replied sarcastically. “Unless you mean it, in which case you’re an idiot. If they shut down the hard labor camps in ten years, it’ll be because they’re losing money on them, and not for any other reason. And what does it matter, anyway? Everyone here is still going to go on to hard labor within the decade.” He paused, and studied the woman for a moment. “Unless you got a re-education-only tag on your file. Because of some political connection.”

The woman looked away. Solomon could feel the anger coming off the other prisoners at the table, he could feel it jumping like a beast up into their faces and throats and fists. Even Wilson, next to him, his beast was snapping. Solomon heard the other prisoner, the White man, snarl, “Your life is the definition of privilege. To me, coming here is a death sentence, but for you it’s like a camping trip. I bet your family sends you nice, fat packages every week so you don’t even care when they cut back on rations. I bet you got an arrangement with the gangs to let you stay in whatever apartment tower you want in exchange for a high bribe that your family pays for you. I bet after your release you go right back to a cushy life.”

“Why do you think I write?” she snapped back. “Anyone else, the price is too high to risk it. Since I can pay the price, because it’s lower for me, I do.”

“So this is how you fill up the hole in your life? Going to re-education camp every few years? You like listening to lectures and confessing your privilege?”

“What else am I supposed to do? Put on my visor and thumbs-up all the right comments above other people’s heads and amplify all the right voices in my feed? Keep my head down, don’t let myself think a single wrong thought?”

“Nobody read your article anyway,” Wilson sneered. “Nobody was allowed to.”

She shrugged again. “The censor board did.” Then a small smile touched her lips. And just like that, the beast in everyone’s faces and throats and fists suddenly relaxed. Another prisoner, the teenager maybe, even laughed. Then a chime went off and breakfast was over. Or maybe it was dinner. Solomon didn’t know. If it was breakfast then now it was time for the lecture, if it was dinner then now it was time for the confession circle.

“Still,” Wilson said, even as they were getting up to go, legs pulling out over the too-short too-small bench. “You know your experience here is different from everybody else’s. Especially the other women. The ones who don’t have money and political connections like you. The ones who have no idea what they’ve gotten themselves into by self-reporting for re-education. You know who I’m talking about, the kind of White women who are obviously women but who walk around with name tags that say she/her.”

“I know.”

But Wilson wasn’t done. “Everyone is always told re-education is only going to be for a few days and by the time these women find out it’s not, and that their new role is to be used as currency by the gangs, too bad, it’s too late for them.”

“That’s what happens when you don’t gender segregate in a carceral system,” she replied quietly.

Wilson snorted. “Yeah, saying shit like that, no wonder you’re in here.”