"All right you jerkoffs," shouts a newly assigned prison guard from the parade ground between the inmate tents. "Line up and state your name!"
"Patrick," begins the first guy in line, a bean pole of a man with a lean face and a wandering eye squinting into the low January sun.
"Whole name, asshole!" the guard growls, waving a clipboard and stabbing a pencil toward the now slouching prisoner.
"Loy Patrick."
"That's more like it. Next!"
"OL Beatty."
"What's next, Vinegar?" the guard chuckles, appreciating Oil's responding laugh as he checks the name off the list.
The Kentucky State Reformatory at Frankfort had been as strict and as segregated as they come. A guard would have known the name and face of every inmate on their assigned block of single-bunk cells. Black and white prisoners were housed in separate buildings and would never have been allowed to fraternize, but the chaos following the unprecedented flooding, riot, and evacuation had not yet restored order to the makeshift prison camp.
Oil had seen this census coming and done all he could to make his bunk mate appear more white. He traded Waters' relatively new khakis to another inmate for an older and browner set. He plucked about half of the dark hairs to lighten up the eyebrows. He instructed the young Black man on pulling his shirt collar up and hat brim down for less face exposure. He even coached Waters on posture to assume a more upright carriage. It helped that Waters was from a lighter skinned family.
"Robert Waters, sir."
"Hmm, I don't see you on the list," he ponders, leafing to the next sheet. "That spelled like the flooding kind?"
"Yes sir."
"Well looky here, there you is on the colored rolls. Hmm."
"That's a mistake," Oil states as calmly as he can. "Waters been on my cell block for a year now."
"Righteo," the harried jailer resumes, writing in the name on the checklist of white prisoners. "Next!"
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