Page 103 of The Reformatory

Robbie shrugged, a kind of lie. He knew full well and didn’t want to say. Gloria tried to make herself know everything, but Robbie felt like a wall. She only knew he was surrounded by danger, with no room for mistakes.

“Be sure you don’t act up or sass back,” Gloria said.

“I didn’t do nothing wrong,” Robbie said, his voice rising with anger. The watcher in the doorway glanced up from his reading.

“Course not, pumpkin,” Miz Lottie said.

“I know,” Gloria said. “I’m sorry. None of this is your fault, Robbie. Okay?”

“Two minutes!” the guard called out. Gloria panicked until she realized he was talking to the mother in the other corner, and her son wailed more loudly. Gloria hated to feel glad for someone else’s sorrow, but the clock said she still had ten more minutes with Robbie and she would wade through a river of tears for every second of her time with him.

Gloria glanced back at the distracted guard again and whispered, “I talked to Papa.”

Robbie’s eyes grew wide. His smile beamed. “He knows?”

“Yes. And I got money to find a lawyer. So don’t you worry. This will be over soon.”

No need to smother his smile by telling him about John Dorsey and the courthouse and Miz Lottie’s broken window, or that his baseball mitt had burned up. No need to tell him that she was on the run from the sheriff herself and was sleeping on a cot in Miss Anne’s basement, where even her brother didn’t know she was there.

But she had to tell him the rest. And they didn’t have much time.

Gloria looked at Miz Lottie and nodded, their signal. Miz Lottie moved her Bible from her lap to the tabletop, one hand planted firmly on top. With her other hand, she pulled out the small jar of petroleum jelly Uncle June had told them to give Robbie.

“So your legs don’t get ashy in here,” Gloria explained, sliding the jar next to him. “And Miz Lottie wants to sing you some church songs and pray.”

“I just came from church,” Robbie said. “They got one here… kind of.” He wanted to speak of it so badly that Gloria could almost see a man kneeling at an altar, a shadow. Almost see… something that seemed nothing like church.

Gloria stared at Miz Lottie to make sure they were ready. Miz Lottie’s eyes glittered with encouragement, eyes young and defiant inside her folds of wrinkled skin. Gloria glanced back at the guard, who was staring at his watch, counting down the seconds before he would separate the weeping boy from his mother.

Gloria slid the Bible from beneath Miz Lottie’s hand and slowly fanned open the pages. Miz Lottie brought this black leather-bound Bible with her to church every Sunday, although she could barely read it. Gloria saw the small crease she had made in the pages, but it wasn’t time for that yet. She jumped instead to the book of John, to the passage she had underlined.

“That’s time!” The guard stood up to come inside the visiting room. Gloria’s heart whaled in her breastbone. She wanted to fling the Bible closed, feeling exposed, but what was wrong with reading a Bible?

The boy did not take the news well. His sobbing turned to shrieking. His mother told him he would be all right, but the guard was annoyed and pulled on him sharply.

“Lord have mercy…,” Miz Lottie muttered, appalled at the boy’s treatment.

Gloria wanted to jump up and help his cowed mother defend him and tell the guard to take his hands off that child, but she could only think about the Bible in her hands and the things she needed to say.

“Can you listen to me, Robbie? Every word?”

Robbie nodded. Like her, he ignored the sobbing beside them.

Gloria leaned close to him and read the passage she had chosen for their mission. “ ‘The Father hath not left me alone,’ ” she read, and Robbie blinked, both of them already fighting tears, “ ‘for I do always those things that please him. As he spake these words, many believed on him…’ ” She skipped a sentence and took a breath to speak the important passage as fiercely as she dared. “ ‘… And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ ”

Free. The word was breath and light. Together, they drank the word. Basked in it.

Robert understood. Robbie looked ready to tell her everything he had withheld, his wall tumbled down. Near them, the child was shrieking in terror and his mother was begging for mercy on him, but the world felt emptied except for her brother.

“Free,” Robert murmured, tasting the word.

Hand still shaking, Gloria flipped ahead a few pages until she found the crease—and the onionskin-thin paper she and Miz Lottie had hidden there. She moved the Bible to show Robbie the hidden paper and its pencil markings: a series of drawings a young child might have made. A house. A tree. An ear of corn. A river. A train car.

Robbie knew then: a map! He was so startled that he jumped. On cue, Miz Lottie began to sing, her voice uneven but sure. “Waaaaade in the water… Wade in the water, children… Waaaaade in the water… God’s gonna trouble the waaaater…”

Mama and Papa had taught them how slaves who planned to escape hid their plans in their songs. Did Robbie remember that “Wade in the Water” was a spiritual about running away? They had sung the song together in the children’s sketch at their church on Founders’ Day, pretending to cross the river with knapsacks across their shoulders when Mama still conducted the children’s choir. Oh, she hoped Robbie remembered.

He did. He smiled only a little, but his face glowed. He bounced in his seat. Gloria shook her head, and his bouncing turned to gentle rocking.