Chain Gang All Stars

Inside, I have no say.[*1]

“I know you hear me, Eight Two Two,” morning guard says.

He throws words around like he don’t care for the treasure he has. I lie back in my cot. And by not moving I make him speak again.

“Eight Two Two, let’s go,” morning guard says. Voilà, look at this power I have.

“C’mon now.” I look at him on the other side of the iron. I wave my arm and see his eyes follow it. We are here together, but not. A starving man knows the price of food best. A glutton spills his portion to the floor. He is in uniform, dark green on the bottom and gentler green on the shirt, and he has a gun on his waist, and a hot spray on his waist, and a baton on his waist, and an Influencer that can throw pain into your bones, make you crumble and cry and shit yourself because your body belongs to the pain and not to you.

Only some of the guards carry the Influencer, and those guards you only see when you done fucked up something serious. Besides all the hurt on morning guard’s waist, he got a callbox to talk to other guards. They all got that. I look at my wrists. I look at the blue line sitting at the vein. Blue line means, you speak, you get the pain. Speak and get a good shock. Use your voice and feel the hard lightning. Blue line means shut the fuck up as long as it’s there, which is forever. Blue line means here we are, still. In here it’s always a blue line on our wrists.

I nod at morning guard, who moves on past my lonely cage to rustle the next man. I dress. And before too many moments I’m sitting sporking gray eggs into my mouth. It sounds like chews and scoopcarves and sometimes a crunch. Not a voice in the chow hall. I look around and see the men around me scooping, carving, just the way I do. Men at long gray tables with gray seats.

I am like them and they are like me. Our wrists. Our hands. Our eyes. Our skin. The horn sings and we all move from chow to the Square. We get dressed in a white jumpsuit to put over our gray jumpsuit. Over that we wear orange or green aprons. They give us clear goggles for the eyes. Nets for the hair. Gloves to handle the slaughtered.

The Square what it sound like. A big room. Warehouse more. Four long sides. Meat hanging from hooks comes slowly through a space in the east wall. Carcasses of soon burger and steak. There’s vertical saws on my side of the Square. Or better, our side. Our job: split the animals in half. We pull down, lower the meat to the cutter. Saws, three rising out of the conveyor belt in front of us. After we split them the meat floats to the next table, where the men with knives trim the bodies further. Men with green aprons have knives and men with orange work the saws and the conveyor. A square of men all cutting. All we do is tear flesh. Imagine that, prison full of men holding and handling blades. They control so good they don’t worry. That’s the Square. That’s the job. That’s the day. We prepare meat.

There’s blood all on the floor and also on us. In the Square, our wrists is blue plus one red line so we stuck in place.

Above us, the guards, watching.

Wrists look purple from a distance.

We work. My work is my life. I pray for work. I hate my work. I need my work. I pull/push meat for the buzzing saws.

I halve the body.

The saw eats gladly.

Two halves a body.

I have a body.

I halve a body.

I do the same. I do the same.

The saw goes like God told it not to stop. All us on the line work like this. The saw is strong and hot.

Do the job. Do it right.

Man beside me today. He cuts and pushes good. Man beside him, he don’t. We work. Just four feet between us. Blue lines on all of us mean there is no say. It’s always blue lines.

We cut and across from us they slice and push. Saw sings a whirr when it’s air and a scree when it’s meat and a crrrr when it’s bone. The saw sings solo. On year five of twenty-nine. Five years I ain’t heard my voice for more than a moment. But this I deserve. No excuse.

Press and hold so the saw eats the meat and not the hands. Blood is the same color. Lose half a hand and not realize till you try to make the peace sign and don’t have the digits. Only a meaty L. Solo. The saw don’t care what’s in front of it.

Man beside me been beside me for not too long. A year, maybe two. Man beside him old now. We could be folk. Generations of Black plus Black plus Black. Man beside the man beside me, he old and wobbly. Can’t cut right. He mess up, we all get the pain.

We cut in the morning, then chow.

Gray-water rice and who knows. The sound is slurp-chew and there’s the smell of blood on my hands and every other thing in this place. Then back to the Square. It’s tired work. I look at the man beside me and the man beside him and see myself, then myself even farther. Last man got gray hair and glasses and shakes when he tries to be still.

It ain’t no happy place.

Late in the day we all tired, and late in the day last man is especially tired. Worse than tired. Wobbly and crooked. We work for nothing. We work and work for no money. We did wrong so now we slaves.[*2] Work for nothing on the inside for people on the outside. Yes. Slaves in a mean box. That’s all.

Last man been a slave. He wobbly now. Too wobbly. A thin branch in a silent wind song. I knock the man beside me with my elbow so he might knock the man beside him. Nudge him awake ’cause third man don’t look right. I have to lean on one leg to reach him, but I do. I knock him so he can do the same to last man so last man don’t kill his old self. Man next to me don’t do nothing. Only thing I can do is I knock him again. Push my elbow into his shoulder. We all locked to where we stand. I look at him and tell him with my eyes to look at the old man next to him. Man beside me look at me with a mean face like I was the one that magnet-chained him to this line so he could cut meat forever. His eyes say, Fuck you. Then he look over at the last man in our line wobbling on his feet and man next to me shakes his head and doesn’t do nothing else. I nudge him one more time ’cause all he got to do is nudge old last man awake. Last man’s cuts discombobulated now. Meat gonna get trashed. We’ll all feel the pain. He looking sick, like he might topple back to the floor, knock his head on a rail probably, or forward and split his whole self wide open. Man beside me looks over at the last man, struggling, looking crazy, then looks back at me and grins like this the part of the movie he been waiting to see.

I try for steps. Sometimes they don’t set the magnet clutch hard enough. Not usually, but I always check and see. We can move inside an invisible box so we can cut our meat and nothing else, usually. I try to take a step back. I can. I try to take another and it’s like a hand stronger than any man pulling me back in place. The invisible chain locks us all to the meat line. All we do is cut meat.

Last man letting his slabs run by uncut. He teetering. I clap my hands once. I clap again. Guard up top looks down at me. He doesn’t see anything but some slaves so he looks back at whatever. I nudge that man beside me one more time. Hard in the ribs because last man isn’t all right and won’t be up much longer. Man beside me hits me back in the shoulder, not to tell me nothing ’cept if I mess with him one more time he gonna do more than nudge. I clap and look. I halve a body. I see the man over there, the man who been a slave for years, teetering back, then forward. Maybe he need to fall. Sometimes I think the same. Maybe we had enough. Maybe this a way out. I see him and look around at the meat getting cut and all the men wearing blue lines on their wrists, which mean they are work and nothing else.

I remember how to say. I remember and breathe deep because the blue line on my wrists mean there is no say except that which is pulled through hurt.

“Hey!” I say with my own voice. I haven’t heard it in a long, sad time. It sounds stretched out and dried, like roadkill, but it’s mine and I love it. Everybody is looking at me. Young, onstage, and then the electricity wrecks me up. It’s a clench that squeezes all the muscles at once. I scream more and that’s my voice letting them know they still have me and also they don’t.

I fall to the floor. Farther than I should be able to. The shock gives some slack. The cuffs can only do so much at once.

“Hey,” I say again from the floor, and again I feel the lightning bolt stab me up. But I can move some. I struggle from the ground. Crawl through the shallow seas of blood on the floor. Feeling possessed by the pain and a different kinda pull that can’t be ignored. “Hey!” I scream again, and my body writhes so hard my tongue pokes out my mouth and stamps the bloodstained floor. If I taste anything I don’t know. Pain is what I see, hear, taste, and feel. I press my knees on the bloody floor. I push and crawl. I move toward my last man as boots come stomping toward me.

Then I hear more voices, voices like mine, stomped on but there, still.

“Lionel!” somebody up top screams.

“Mary, I miss yo—”

A small riot, the kind that happens when they know ain’t too much can be done about the chaos.

“Fuck them!” somebody screams, then he screams different when the shock come.

“Twenty-two years tomorrow and—”

More and more of them go. A slave chorus. Each note snuffed short by electric, but a chorus still. They’ll take the shock just to hear themselves. Just to say something at least. Them like me keep screaming their names and whatever else they think of. In here your own voice is a kind of wish. A shooting star. You don’t waste it on nothing. It’s a magic show of quick voices, then hard grunts, screams. They get wrecked up, then stand back up, ready to cut.

I crawl ’cause it’s hard. I crawl past the man who was beside me. I breathe heavy and I grab myself up at the last man and pull the old slave back and sit him down on the hard, bloody floor so he don’t fall and split himself all the way open.

I get up. Stand on my feet.

And look down at last man, who don’t look so good but is at least not cut open, and I feel my wrists pulling me and I’m almost moonwalking back to where I was. And then a body in green legs and a less green shirt swings a baton at my face and blows me back toward the sound of whirring.

It’s a long John,

He’s a long gone,

“How you know that song, son?” he asking me, and he want me to speak back. I keep on singing.

Like a turkey through the corn,

Through the long corn.

“If you sign these papers here, you understand what your life in CAPE will be like, Mr. Young? It’s important that you understand.” He a man in a suit talking like I can’t read or think. I’m in a bed that’s soft, so I’m singing. I’m in a bed. I’m eating food I can taste, food with color on it, so I’m singing. On my wrist is green, a color I ain’t seen on them in a long, long time. So I sing.

Well, my John said,

In the chap ten,

“If a man die,

He will live again.”

I left my arm in the factory, so I’m singing. I’m singing because even with some of me cut from the body, I am whole once more, listening to myself. It’s hard and soft at the same damn time, my voice is, like a tree with tender meat under bark.

“You already had the Arc cuff installation procedure when you entered this facility, so that’s one less thing you’ll have to do now, in this transition. No new surgery will be needed except that which has already happened regarding your recent”—he pause like he don’t know how to say you got your arm sawed off—“accident.”

Well, they crucified Jesus

And they nailed him to the cross;

Sister Mary cried,

“My child is lost!”

“If this is your request can you please sign here indicating that this decision was made under your own will and power and that no one at the New Auburn facility has ever coerced you in any way to seek the CAPE program?”

Well, long John,

He’s long gone,

He’s long gone.

He talking ’bout Auburn now. Place I won’t ever get back to. I’m singing a song that just fills me up. I sign his papers and he smiles and frowns at me and turns away, and I’m in the bed waiting to get healed enough to see the world outside if she’ll have me.

*1 New Auburn Re-experimental Facility, modeled after the Auburn System created in the nineteenth century. The Auburn System required that prisoners live silently. This was designed to strip prisoners of a sense of self, which was thought to help them perform their day-to-day tasks—building products and doing other work to be sold commercially—more efficiently.

*2 Ratified on December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (emphasis added).