Misfit

Saturday, August 22, 1953

This place gives me the creeps. Everywhere I look, I'm trapped like a rat in a cage. Why it's just like when I was back in the penitentiary. And just like I remember I told that old lady "Turn to the right, it was a wall [...] Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor" (O'Connor 11). Day after day. Week after week. As all these meaningless marks on the calendar flow together into an endless stream of nothingness, it almost gets to the point where I plum forget what I done.

They say the head-doctor will be here midweek to re-evaluate my situation. If I play real nice like, I bet I can convince him to lemme' loose.

Wednesday, August 26, 1953

The head-doctor came through today to make note of what he called my progress. They say his name is Freeman. And folks treat him like he's some sort of bona-fide movie star, rolling up here in some fancy station wagon he calls the Lobotomobile. Bobby Lee tells me that Freeman worked some sort of miracle cure on Hiram last month, but I ain't so sure. Hiram never did say much, come to think of it. But these days, he's just setting around all glass-eyed, looking like he's waiting for somebody to tell him what next he's supposed to be doing. Not a care in the world. But no pleasure in it neither.

Freeman tells me what I had done was kill my daddy, but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself (O'Connor 11). But to turn around and say that I done it? Well them's fightin' words, I'll tell you. And next time that high-fallutin' so-and-so comes at me with liable like that, he might not be so lucky as to walk away without something to remember me by. College boy thinks he can tell me where the sun shines, does he? Well I've got a nice surprise for him...