Chapter 1
One
There was no undoing the crime of my pertinacious heredity.
I remained a Blue.
Imprisoned, the legacy collared with a weighted neck chain.
After spending nearly a month locked inside the infirmary, stripped of all clothing and even my necessaries, I was finally given back the penitentiary garb and assigned a permanent cot in the general population. But not before they’d taken everything.
Daily, I’d suffered the doctors’ brutal, invasive examinations and their crippling drugs to rid me of the color that they felt had cursed me. That had vexed the Commonwealth.
A color that instilled fear because of a mere medical condition that me and my kin had inherited.
Since I’d arrived, my normal soft robin’s-egg-blue skin remained darkened to cobalt, a telltale sign that would betray the slightest emotion—fear, anger, grief, and even an unexpected burst of happiness.
My husband, Jackson, had pressed for us to move north, far away from the hills of ol’ Kaintuck. The home I loved, the puzzle I could never quite fit into. But I had refused to give up my ancestors’ homestead, instead hoping one day minds would change—that one day I would be enough to change them.
The guard called out to me, drawing me from my troubling thoughts. “Lovett, hurry it up and grab your stuff.” He jangled his keys against the metal crash gate, turning the lock.
I picked up the pillowcase with the prison belongings, my flesh sweaty and itching under the cast the medical staff had placed over the splintered bones after the lawman broke my arm during the arrest.
“Move, Lovett,” the impatient guard ordered.
I followed him out of the infirmary as he led me down darkened corridors, the scents of disinfectants, disappointments, and sorrows draping the musty Kentucky institution.
While he fumbled with the lock at another massive, barred crash gate, I stared at the thin shadows shivering across a homemade calendar’s bold, penciled-in dates. Someone had scrawled April 1st 1953 across the top of a Big Chief school tablet page and taped it onto the grimy prison wall.
April.
The promise of spring had finally arrived, but the institution stayed perennially frozen in its own merciless dead winter.
We passed through more doors and by locked cages full of hemmed-in women milling about, the guard’s heavy footsteps echoing atop their murmurs.
When we approached the next wing, tormented howling and weeping rivered against cemented walls. I looked ahead at the sign and shivered.
The officer stopped in front of the Forensic Ward to speak to a fellow guard, and I gripped the sack of meager belongings to my chest as the terror pummeled inside me. From the row of locked cells, a swell of guttural cries climbed from the hidden women, tearing at my very being.
I’d seen some of the women come through the infirmary. The ward was for inmates afflicted with bizarre and sometimes explosive behaviors, while others were plagued by the hysterics—and many of the torments and malaises that stumped doctors.
“Hi, Frank. The circus freaks are louder than usual. What’s got ’em riled up now?” the escorting officer asked.
“Nurse is late with her nightly medication rounds, and there was another suicide,” Frank said nonchalantly, picking at his teeth with a ragged fingernail. “Is that the Blue from the infirmary?”
“Yeah.”
“You must be April foolin’ me. Didn’t get notice she’d been assigned to me.”
I tugged at the collar, fear tightening my throat.
“I’m taking her to wing B, though if she doesn’t stop scaring the women”—he dipped his head and scowled at me—“Warden will be sending her your way. Crazy blue witch has everyone skittish.”
“I wonder if her blood’s blue? Heard it wasn’t like ours.” Frank cocked his head at me, staring as if it would spew any minute.
It weren’t. Instead, the old mountain doc had explained methemoglobinemia caused it to be a chocolate brown because there’s less oxygen in me and my kin’s blood.
Frank snapped his fingers. “She reminds me of that one I had in my ward a few years back…” He snapped again. “I ’member now, it was Faye. Yeah, Faye Nash—”
“The Melungeon,” the other officer answered.
“The mongrel.” Frank snorted. “Always claiming she was white.”
“Ol’ Faye failed more than the one-drop rule,” the corrections officer clucked. “Girl had herself a bucket of mixed-mutt blood, if not a bathtub full.” He leaned in to Frank and murmured something while I backed against the wall and tried to make myself small.
The officer studied me out of the corner of his eye and whispered again to Frank.
They drew their eyes to my breasts, then dropped gazes downward. The men suddenly laughed.
I tucked my chin in tighter and stared down at my feet.
“Say, real sorry to hear about you and Ginny’s loss,” the guard said to Frank.
Frank shifted uncomfortably. “We’d been hoping this one would be the one to make it, but the baby…” He rubbed his brow and turned his back to me. “Well, after losing three, it don’t appear we’ll ever—” His voice dipped lower.
The men talked in hushed tones until the guard suddenly barked at me.
I cocked my head, trying to make out what he’d said.
I was muddled in one ear, and sometimes my hearing didn’t pick up words in my good one.
The muddled came and went ever since my first husband had ruptured my eardrum.
Especially when the fear pounded from my ticker and reached up beyond the lobes, drowning out everything.
I looked at him quizzically.
“Said, follow me.”
Relieved, my legs nearly collapsing, I moved away from the weeping women inside.
Another corridor led us past the Geriatric Ward, with about a dozen inmates inside the barred wing.
A graveyard of reed-thin ghosts moaned in beds while some of the elderly women were folded into tatty wheelchairs, eyes blank, weighted in agony, others with lids shut tight as if the horrors would cease if they couldn’t see them.
A putrid soup of feces and urine overpowered the disinfectants hovering in the halls.
The guard coughed, and I buried my nose against my bag of belongings, but it weren’t no match for the odor.
I gagged as the smells slithered down my throat, knotting my innards.
When we turned into a dimly lit hall and passed a metal door with faded, red-blocked letters that read DEATH ROW, I stood stock-still, gawking at the sign.
“Lucky for you, that’s not your stop. Today.” He gestured ahead.
Finally, he paused in front of wing B and reached for his keys. “In here.” He shoved me over the threshold into the dormitory. Voices quieted, and all eyes fell on me.
Waiting for his next order, I studied the nearly two dozen inmates and double rows of cots lining opposite walls.
“You’re there,” he said, stretching an arm toward the woman lying on a mattress with her back turned. “She’s the only one who didn’t bellyache about your color and volunteered the empty bed beside her.”
I couldn’t help but wonder why. The others they’d tried to put me with claimed my disorder had given them nightmares, and after their screams awakened the dormitory wing, the corrections officer believed them and spirited me back to the infirmary.
The guard knocked the toe of his boot against the woman’s metal bed frame.
“Waldeen Parker, your new bedfellow’s here.
” Then to me: “You’d do well to sleep with one eye open with this ’un, Lovett.
” The guard kicked her bed again. She ignored him.
“Parker, she’s been assigned kitchen duty. Have her there at four sharp.”
When he left, I set my pillowcase on the narrow mattress, stealing peeks at the woman.
I’d heard slips of prison prattles from the nurses about Waldeen Parker, the inmate in charge of the kitchen.
The old woman had been in the Kentucky State Reformatory far longer than anyone could remember, serving time for shooting a man.
Occasionally, she’d brought trays to the infirmary.
More than once, I’d caught her staring at me with questioning eyes.
I arranged my clothes, toiletries, and the assigned Bible inside the wooden footlocker at the end of the bed.
The woman shifted her bones, keeping her face locked from my sight. “Call me Waldeen. What are ya in for, kid?”
I looked down at my cast, rubbed it alongside the stitching on the mattress, then tucked in the sheet and thin blanket. “Cussy Lovett. I’m in here for marrying.”
“No crime in that unless ya killed him.” Waldeen laughed.
I winced. I’d done just that to my first husband.
Unlike during my second marriage, we’d stood before a yawning officiant and his suspicious-looking wife on a cold winter’s eve in ’36.
During the ceremony, when he’d asked if anyone objected, not his woman nor the sleeping rabbit dog in the corner of his cramped kitchen, nor the field mouse scurrying behind the woodstove, nor anyone in all of Kaintuck raised a whispered protest.
Yet the objection had rang loud in my knotted throat.
Our arranged union ended as abruptly as it began when the old man, Frazier, turned dog-pecker pink while beating and raping me in our marriage bed.
Then he’d collapsed, and soon a veil of spoiled bologna-gray spread across his anguished face.
Doc said his ticker done broke, but it always felt more like I’d willed it to.
It was only after I married again that the sheriff forbid it.
Waldeen turned over partway to study me, her fair cheeks gaunt, hollowing with age.
A broke ticker that had done ticked its last thieving tick. I rested the unspoken truth. “For miscegenation. I’m a Blue, but the man I married isn’t.”
Jackson sat in a cold cell in the men’s penitentiary down the road.
She swung her feet over the side of the cot, pulling herself up. “You in here for long? I’m sixty-two, a lifer, and it’ll be twelve more years before I come up for parole.”
“I’m thirty-six. I’ll be here for eighteen months.”